Everything is medicine

Thank you everyone for your kind wishes, prayers, and offers of support. The outpouring of Love is the best Medicine. It has played no small part in my recovery. I am well, stronger in many respects than before I got sick. I feel blessed by support both inside and outside me: a strong immune system, a loving partner, an amazing community, my loving children and my children’s father caring for them while I am in quarantine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Advil, food medicines lovingly prepared by my friend, prayer, shelter, technology, nature, music, my two affectionate dogs and so much more. My recovery belongs to everyone and everything. Thank you.

When I read your responses, I realized that my illness and message touched something deep in our community. Now that the person you go to when you are sick is sick with Covid, there feels like a collective sense of vulnerability. Perhaps it’s akin to when a parent gets sick and you realize that they are not invulnerable. To be vulnerable is, actually, to be human. And to be human means that at some point, we will fall sick and at some point, we will die. All of us. As a society, we are woefully inadequate at looking at and contemplating our mortality. We like to think that we are invulnerable and we don’t like to entertain any notions otherwise. Strong, confident, ambitious, in control, on top, capable—that’s America. But for anyone who is paying the least bit of attention, that facade is quickly crumbling. And what is revealed behind the facade scares many of us. For that very reason, we must look. It’s the first step to understanding the problem. Covid-19 has revealed our collective vulnerability and fears, our inadequacies, our weaknesses, our lack of control, our lack of knowledge. In a sense, Covid-19 is not the problem, it is a symptom of the deeper problem.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), we seek to trace a symptom back to the roots. If the root of a problem isn’t understood or addressed, then the problem is likely to come back either in the same way or in other ways. For example, in modern medicine, a headache may stem from local constriction of blood vessels or local stimulation of nerves in the head and the treatment is painkillers to get rid of the pain. In TCM, we ask, where in the head is the pain, what energetic pathways is it connected to, what organs may that be connected to, what has caused the constriction or stagnation in the body, what living conditions is the body subjected to, what relationships are exasperating the problem? We not only give treatment taking into consideration all those relationships inside the body, but we also offer the patients lifestyle guidance that sometimes encompass more than just diet and exercise. The web that causes the headache extends beyond the physical. The TCM doctors of ancient times were not just skilled in administering herbs and acupuncture to rebalance the physical body, they were wise people whose counsel were taken for all kinds of issues affecting a person’s life. They understood the interconnectedness of all things and can identify misaligned areas that can use adjustment for a more harmonious outcome. While modern TCM doctors continue to trace the interrelationships of disease within the body—like connecting a headache to an imbalance of the Liver—few are actively tracing it to the interrelationships outside the body, the headache to stress in relationships, to societal pressures, to economic and social inequities to capitalism, to patriarchy, etc… Perhaps in modern thought, it feels useless, that the further “out” we trace it, the less control we have. The prevailing thought is, we have no control over certain relationships, over society, over the environment. We can only try our best to protect ourselves from those things that harm us. I invite another understanding, one that doesn’t set us apart from the things that we feel threatened by, but one that puts us in a relationship so intimate that discernment between out there and in here is difficult.

We are society, we are our environment, we are Nature, we are our relationships. These things shape us and in turn we shape them. It is an ongoing, inseparable, symbiotic, intricate, organic and wholly natural relationship. If we approach our relationships in a defensive / aggressive way, then we close ourselves off to the things that make us who we are. In essence, we are fighting ourselves. But if we approach our relationships with reverence and respect, then that symbiosis leads to mutual benefit, healthy growth, innate security and peace. We get to experience ourselves wholly human and that still means at some point we become sick and die, but our life experience will not be one of fear and resistance. Our life will be one of fullness, curiosity, gratitude, Love, respect, abundance and awe.

Why then, do we continue to behave in self-destructive and other-destructive ways? I think we simply don’t consciously know better, don’t know that there’s a different way to be. When the white settlers came to this land, they approached the Native people with defensiveness and aggression and forcefully and violently stole the land and tried to exterminate the Indigenous peoples. How would it have been different had they approached with humility and respect and asked for help? If they were open to learning Indigenous ways of living and being that at its core revere nature, honor relationships, respect all of life? Rather the white settlers violated all that is sacred and among other horrific things, intentionally spread smallpox as biological warfare. We are the beneficiaries of this brutal and inhumane legacy and we unconsciously (or consciously) repeat this approach to things we feel threaten us, not having learned or remembered a different way. This disconnected way of being is the bedrock of our society and motivates our reactions to any threat to our well-being.

We can observe this reaction to what is happening with the current pandemic. To deal with our fears and maintain a sense of control, we’ve become exclusively vigilant against the scary virus that is out there, identifying and isolating carriers and possible sources for carriers. We are desperately trying to protect ourselves from any and all possible sources of the virus, including by extension, the unvaccinated folks, Trump supporters or Asian people. The vitriolic attacks against certain groups as being the problem harks back to the underlying sentiments of the worst crimes against humanity. Perhaps it feels like an exaggeration, but it is hard to see what is happening when we are in the midst of it. All of history was once the present.

What if the real thing to be vigilant of isn’t outside us, but inside us? What if disconnection and the resultant fear is the mother of all viruses? And what if this unexamined root is the cause of the chaos we see out there? Could this be the reason that despite all our efforts, nothing seems to get better for any amount of time: our environment continues to get worse, the virus continues to evade us, racial injustice takes on different forms, economic disparity grows, there is an upsurge in violence and crime. Institutional policies and mandates point to a strategy of trying desperately to suppress and control symptoms without understanding the root of the problem. If the root is disconnection from our inherent interconnectedness then how do we re-connect to understand our response-ability?

Re-connecting doesn’t begin with a thing to do in the future. It begins with reassessing where we are in the present. Right now. It begins with taking the time to look inwards at where we are coming from. Are we now responding from a place of defensiveness, separate-ness and fear? Are our actions motivated by desperately trying to prevent death or are we affirming life by courageously opening our hearts to all that we are inseparably connected to and being guided by that? This root assessment is indispensable towards understanding the manifestations outside us. And if we assess that we are coming from a place of fear, how do we change that? The assessment and acknowledgment in and of itself is already the most important part of change. We are pulling it out by the roots and examining it. Shedding light on it is a powerful interruption. When we can see where we are coming from and have a sincere desire for healing, then we can choose differently and channel our energies towards individual and collective healing.

In regards to Covid-19, we can choose to explore what healing and wholeness actually is, rather than just focusing on the fight against disease. What if we learn how to support our body’s innate strengths and care for our body’s vulnerabilities. What if we honor the messages that our bodies ceaselessly offer us for self-care through our emotions, pain, pleasure, desire for rest and good food, touch and joy. What if we shared resources, knowledge, wisdom and medicines for self-care when our need is beyond our individual capacity? What if the predominant conversation around the virus isn’t scary or coercive, isn’t only about who to blame and how to protect oneself from the worst horror stories? What if the conversation includes how to care for oneself and each other through both prevention and treatment if we get sick be it from the virus or the vaccine. What if we shared with one another our choices and fears with the trust and security that in sharing we are strengthening. If these become our conversations, we may start to feel an enormous gratitude for all that sustains us, the innate resilience, wisdom and strength of our bodies, the support of nature and our community and the gift of dis-ease. Our individual and collective immunity may grow stronger and stronger.

My Covid experience gave me an opportunity to meet it with respect and to learn. The pain and discomfort that I experienced from this brief period feels so small compared to the learning and the opportunities that it invited me towards. My Covid experience wasn’t just inside my body, it affected all my relationships and gave me a chance to confront my fears and meet them in a healing way and to bring this very important message forth. There is no greater force of Healing or Love than One that orchestrates and architects everything for our learning, for our growth, for our strength. Everything is Medicine. Everything is a gift. Give thanks to Everything.

In Community,

An urgent plea: Healing with respect & love

I’ve been in quarantine for a week, having tested positive for Covid 19. It’s been a week of being with this virus inside me, experiencing the many symptoms that I’ve only read about and witnessed in others and experiencing my immune system wrestle with this monster of a virus. There have been days when I was too exhausted to even rest my eyes upon a screen for entertainment and nights when it felt like a comfortable position didn’t exist inside me and I was flopping all night long like a fish out of water. There have been textbook symptoms like cough, fever, loss of taste and then symptoms that I’ve never experienced in my life, like hypersensitive skin along my spine and a type of deafening electroshock feeling that made me want to crawl out of my skull. There were a few days where it felt like I turned a corner and the worst was behind me, only to feel a regression the following day. It’s been a roller coaster for sure, well, more precisely less like a roller coaster as there haven’t been moments of elation but more like one of those scramble rides that goes unpredictably fast and jerky makes you nauseous and you’re screaming for the operator to stop the ride and just when it seems like it might stop, it kicks up again.

Being a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), this period of having Covid is fascinating to me. It is allowing me to sink deeper than a conceptual framework of diagnosis and prognosis into the heart of TCM which has roots in Nature and Spirit wisdom. The themes of Nature and interconnection that I've spoken of for years are being profoundly revealed to me and want to be communicated for our collective survival and well-being.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is based on relationships. In TCM, our inseparable interconnectedness is a given. Everything affects everything else, both inside and outside of us and because of that, the aim of Medicine is to find harmony and balance inside an apparent system of interconnection. The primary teacher of that balance and harmony in TCM is Nature. This in contrast to modern medicine that assumes separate-ness with the man being center stage, a separate entity from Nature. The aim of modern medicine is one of  self-protection from perceived attacks and threats on the human body. In this system, the ruling authority over our protection is the MD. I have emphasized that traditional or modern is not based on the tools being used, but depends upon the approach to dis-ease—a lens of separate-ness or one of interconnectedness. In modern culture, we are born into a lens of separate-ness that we assume as reality. All of our institutions—educational, medical, legal, information are built upon this unquestioned foundation and reinforce this experience. Depending upon which lens one assumes, life experiences and approach are very different.

In a worldview of separate-ness, we identify “good” and “bad” and then we align ourselves with what we consider “good” and try to eliminate what is “bad”. We do this in Medicine when we identify, isolate and attack the offending disease. We also do this with people. We try to exterminate people in the same ways we try to exterminate bacteria and viruses. America’s racial history attests to this. But this type of thing doesn’t restrict itself along racial lines, we do it politically, socially and now as people are separating themselves into camps of vaccinated and unvaccinated people, we are doing it social-medically.

In this era of deadly viruses, racial injustice, environmental degradation, growing homelessness, increasing violence, economic instability and isolation, our sense of separate-ness and fear is as acute as ever. And many of us are digging our heels deeper in an attempt to protect ourselves. There’s hypervigilance in identifying the offending agent (be it a virus, a person or a situation) and protecting oneself against it. In essence what’s happening is that we are becoming more isolated, divisive and fearful in face of all this. And collectively, that equates to becoming weaker. 

But we can choose a different way. A lens of inseparable inter-connectedness leads to an experience of trust, strength, compassion and understanding. If we feel that our well-being is tied to the forces, people and events around us, then we seek for harmony and balance with these forces that we cannot separate from. We cannot truly eliminate anything, we must learn how to be with it as best as we can. Additionally, if we are intimately connected to the forces around us then we are abundantly resourced. We are not alone. We can receive the information and resources from all the forces and people and events around us. When we open up to this possibility, we have eyes to see and ears to hear. Our naturally connected apparatus, our body, will respond in intelligent ways. We will have an organic sense of response-ability. 

The most difficult and perhaps the most threatening thing to people in response to the worldview of inseparable interconnectedness is the notion that we are not only connected to the things that we prefer to be connected to—rainbows, good times, nice people, easy living—but that we are also connected to the not so fun things—viruses, mean people, death, lack of resources. It’s what the yin/yang symbol represents, an inseparable connection of opposing forces. So, does that mean we just become complacent and succumb to doom? Let all the bad things and people proliferate?

Radical Acceptance or Love or Respect is not complacent. It is the most powerful force in the Universe. It is Healing. It asks everything of us. In face of the scariest of our fears, it asks us to not run away but to confront, to trust, to allow, to understand and respect everything’s place in Nature and to learn. Not running away or attacking does not mean to be complacent and let a thing have its way with you. It means being in relationship with the totality of a thing (not just what you deem bad or good about it) so that an organic and intelligent response-ability arises. It asks us to be informed by our constellation of connections, not our disconnections. Actions stemming from that type of relationship strengthens.

 This past week, while being with this Virus inside me, a deep respect grew as I became humbled to the power of the virus. Not only in its strength and the ways it was wreaking havoc inside a body I generally consider healthy, but in the way it has shook up everything in this entire world. And as my deep respect grew for this virus, as did my deep respect for my immune system that was responding to the presence of the virus inside me. There was a conversation (sometimes an argument) between these two forces of Nature inside me and it brought up life and death of not only my separate body, but of all things and people and events that are inseparable to me. Including you. 

And so I emerge from this period of quarantine with a message. An urgent plea. We don’t have much time left in this life. Don’t let this be a time of further division and weakening. We are inseparably connected to one another, to Nature, to history, to all the things that make us who we are—the good and the bad. Let this not go down in history as one of those dark periods where people turned on one another. There are no boogey men out there to point fingers at. It’s not important to locate your fears in people and situations outside of you. Reach for your capacity to be with everything and your trust in a goodness that need not have an opposite. Resource yourself from what you are naturally connected to. Affirm what is good and strong inside you, the kind that can embrace grief and fear and anger and vulnerability and mistakes without attack. Respect one another, respect the Covid virus, respect the fear virus, respect your immune system, respect your life, respect your capacity for Love, respect death, respect your mistakes and respect your knowing, respect what little time we have left and live fully. It is urgent that we learn to respect all of life without exception, and to Honor what we have while we still have it.

In Healing and Community,

What is being born through you?

It’s been about 9 months now that our collective and individual lives have been shaken by the Covid virus. 9 months that we’ve had to reorganize work, school, play to care for ourselves and one another. 9 months of retreat. During those 9 months, we were also confronted with wildfires, political upheaval, the continual evidence of the terror of white supremacy on Black lives and an increase in domestic violence and murder. As I write this, the cases of coronavirus are higher than they’ve ever been and we are facing another intense period of Shelter in Place. 

9 months. How are you feeling? What has your gestation period been like? What might you be getting ready to birth?

I have given birth to three beautiful children. All of them at home, the last one “unassisted”, which medically means that there was no midwife or doctor present. It is interesting that whether a birth is considered assisted or not is based on whether a professional is in attendance. It was unassisted despite the assistance of my then husband, my two children, my friend who made himself available for the younger children, myself and all the invisible forces of ancestors and Nature that were necessarily present to usher Max into the world. My intention to birth my children in this fashion was my way of putting my trust in forces not recognized, with any degree of seriousness, in our modern culture. These forces include the unprofessional people that actually assisted me with their presence and help; the innate knowledge my body has to birth; my ancestors without whom neither I nor my child could be. It also includes things, like the soft twinkle lights that we had put up because Christmas was coming, and the safety of a familiar surrounding. Most importantly, my trust was in the intelligence of the sacred Source which is present in everything and from which everything emerges that I refer to at times as God, at times as Love, at times as Life. By the time I conceived Max, I was acutely uncomfortable with the disconnected and reductionist ways we live our modern life, often devoid of sacred connection. My deep yearning for a more connected and meaningful way of being led me to make choices like having my birth “unassisted.” 

It was not easy. There is a phase right before birth that is called the transitional phase. It is the most painful part of labor as it is the time right before the baby emerges. With all three of my children—and most acutely with my youngest,  Max—this is the phase that I quite literally and metaphorically lose my shit. For me, it is the phase where anything and everything that I thought I knew, had faith in or had control over goes out the window. It is the time where I scream to whoever is there: please call 911, what was I thinking, who’s stupid idea was this, where’s the epidural or morphine or someone just shoot me in the head. I can’t do this. I…can’t do this. It’s actually true. I, myself, can’t grow or birth a baby. The miracle of life and birth is a profound and collective unfolding of an uncountable number of converging elements and phenomena. It is silly to think that I, myself, am doing anything and sillier yet to think that a doctor or any assistant is responsible for the miracle that emerges. Transition lasts for some minutes but it feels like an eternity. Then, right at the moment that I surrender to death because I actually think I will die, the baby comes. My body relaxes, I am bliss and there is a miracle in my arms. 

Are we in the transition stage yet? It’s been a long run. I am tired. It feels close. Maybe we are still trying to hold on to some semblance of control. Perhaps even trying to exert more control over the situation, ourselves and others. Maybe we want to hand it over to the professionals—take some comfort in the vaccine that is coming. Maybe we are waiting for the solutions that will bring us back to the way things were before the virus. Do we really want to go back to all that? The controlled, reductionist life of the unfulfilled modern material world. Or are we ready to look deeper and let go of some fundamental ideas. Let go of our ideas of how we think we need things to be. Ideas of what we thought we needed to feel ok. Ideas of what we need to achieve, how we need to look and be, what we need to have to be loved and to be safe. Maybe if we can begin to let go of those ideas, we can begin to see what is already here. Maybe we can begin to feel our deep connection to one another, to Nature and all forces—seen and unseen. Then maybe we can hold everything sacred and preserve and revere what we already have. 

To birth a different life, a different world, we must go through a transitional phase of letting go. It will probably, but not necessarily, be hard and painful. Doubt will descend. And still I am ready. Because I am not alone. How can I have ever even thought that I was doing anything alone. That I was unassisted?! I am ready to birth this new world. I am ready to be birthed into this new world.

In Community,