Monthly Archives: January 2021

Belonging

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We have gotten very, very confused about what it means to belong. About what we are to, and for, each other. And it shows.

We look to how many followers we have, and how many likes we can get off of one another to tell us who we are and what it takes now to belong. We cover our cars with bumper stickers displaying for all to see what our interests, proclivities, politics, and proud parent moments are. We wear clothing, advertising as billboards do, our party affiliations, ideologies, and sports team preferences. We self-righteously declare where we belong based on the news we watch, the podcasts we follow, and the music we listen to.

We use the causes we care about, and the movements we back as proof that we are good and honorable people. And now, we cover our faces, high-handedly taking “hero” selfies post-vaccine at Gillette Stadium, as we isolate ourselves in our own homes. Making sure everyone knows what we are doing; engaging in these acts in superior and self-congratulatory ways as the ultimate gestures of proof that we belong on the “right” side of things.

Instead of lifting ourselves up, by being lifted up by others, we now use one of our most basic and essential human needs as a weapon against those not in the fold. Instead of resting in, and being supported by, each other, we use what we are aligned with as justification of not only who and what we are, but of who and what others are not. Thereby rendering them worthy of our disdain, judgment, and sanctioning.

Have humans, in some way or another, always done this? Likely. Especially when we moved beyond a survival-focused existence. But now, with all of our technologies, our ways of communicating, and our seemingly endless affiliations, something that is quite basic, natural, and innate has gotten very distorted. Even, at times, dangerously so. We saw this recently at our Capital, we see it daily in the anxiety and depression brought on by people’s social media obsession, and now we are seeing it in how we approach our very own health and healing.

The pull to belong is great. The need to belong is undeniable. The question is, how will we be with this now? Will we take one of the potentially sweetest and most essential needs and make it cruel, inhuman, and coercive? Legislating that others do as we do? Or will we pause and reconsider the costs of deriving our sense of community and right to belong based on something we post, wear, or inject into ourselves.

To know any of this is to know to whom and to what you most fundamentally belong. It is to know that before we can truly belong to anyone or anything else, we must first belong to ourselves. We must first know down into our bones that belonging stems from a timeless and unconditional right to exist. Meaning, there is absolutely nothing we need to do. Or not do. This transcends the dictates, mandates, and expectations of the times with its limited and too often small-minded agendas.

To really understand this is to look beyond what any human being has said or created, and to set your sights on something worthy of the preciousness of your own Life. Something that makes our modern day preoccupations and blindspots right-sized. Something that opens our eyes to what we have been agreeing to fit in with, that would be best never agreed to.

If you want to know what it really means to belong, look to the heavens. Look into the eyes of a child. Look into newly fallen snow, and the full moon casting its light. Look to the animals who sense beyond words, slogans, PR campaigns, governmental messaging, and media headlines. The ones who respond directly from an undeniable and never distorted existential belonging.

Underneath that, look to know the places to understand the “why” of what you are doing. The places beyond what others expect of you. The places where you do what you do not because it actually feels right or life-giving, but because you are too afraid to stick out. To be kicked out. To be shamed, labelled, and denied. And in this place, begin to know your own mind as the source of your most balanced and sacred belonging.

 

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Self-Care

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When I was in my late twenties, after years of trying different diets, I made a commitment  to stop attacking myself over this thing called being overweight. My first act? Getting rid of the judge and jury I submitted to every day. Better known, as the bathroom scale. My second act was to begin the lifelong process of looking more deeply inside for why I was using food the way I was. Decades later I understand a lot more about where that initial impulse to change came from.

It wasn’t about measuring up to some external, or even internal, standard. It wasn’t about getting something, or becoming something that I wasn’t already.

It was about remembering. About turning towards, and putting back together, an inherent Truth that was already built into me. My ability to care for myself came with me at birth. It is hardwired in. It comes with me everywhere I go; remaining throughout my life as an essential aspect of my ability to not only survive, but to thrive.

Has it been derailed? Yes. Forgotten? Absolutely. Misled? For sure. Lost for good? Never.

We are mammals. We all instinctively know what works for us, and what doesn’t. As humans though, we have to contend with our own growing up where real human needs were not always honored, recognized, and met. Leaving us too often believing the wrong things about what we need, how to take care of ourselves, and where to look when we are hurting and confused. We also have to contend with the fact that we live in a culture that actively works against us taking better care of ourselves. Except of course where self-care is being increasingly monetized in the form of the big business that is growing up around our doubt and confusion around who we are and what we need. Selling us not only lots of stuff, but worst of all, the belief that we don’t know what we are doing.

One more place in our life where we aren’t doing it right. Aren’t doing enough. Need something outside of us to be the truth of who we are.

Where to begin then in the midst of this? We begin from within, and we begin with what is most simple. But in order to get to what is basic and built in, we must first bypass all of the erroneous conditioning and unsound advice around self-care. We can do that with a simple question. Not one that needs to be answered right away, but instead, one that is contemplated, considered, and referred to.

What needs to go in your life? What punitive and critical “scale” do you use with yourself that not only beats you up, but keeps you from being with yourself in a real and deep way?

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Magic Bullets

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Not long ago, a friend was frustrated that she was just learning now from mainstream media about the healthful impact Vitamin D has on overall immune functioning. Specifically when it comes to the virus of the moment. At first, I felt uplifted with the knowledge that other effective approaches of being with our current situation are making their way into mass consciousness. Something for which I am profoundly grateful.

I am also of a mixed mind.

On the one hand, that viable, effective, studied approaches with long histories of helping are starting to make their way into the mind of the western medical system is, though long over due, a great blessing. On the other hand, we are running the risk of doing what we in the West tend to do. Look for the quick fix. The magic bullet. The one thing that we can do, and do fast. An action we can take, without much effort on our part, to bring an end to our suffering. So very human to want expediency without too much expenditure of energy. And yet, that very same want has brought us to our knees when it comes to our health and well-being.

Why? Because the demand for quick fixes is based in avoidance, and with it, a fatal lack of understanding of how health and the body actually works. None of which will bring us to necessary truths or needed perspectives. None of which will reveal to us that what sits at the heart of our current health care crisis, what ails us most, is avoidable. But only if we are willing to understand ourselves and our health as inseparable from what we do, think, and feel. As inseparable from our environments, our beliefs, the company we keep, how we grow our food, and how are with ourselves on the daily.

Without including all of ourselves and all that we come in contact with, we run the risk of leaving our vitality up to something separate from how we are living. A fatal flaw actually in its denial of what it takes to keep any living thing alive and well. An unfortunate perspective that has separated us from the fabric of Life itself. It is far more difficult to look in this way. Not because it is unnatural, but because we have been conditioned to believe otherwise. We have been trained to look at the root causes of an illness, a pain or an imbalance in the body as being something we need to make go away.

As opposed to understanding its presence in our lives.

This is the proverbial band-aid approach. I cover up the symptom. I gain a little relief.  I go on. Never addressing that whatever is underneath that band-aid, remains. Untended. Ignored. Denied. So no matter how much vitamin D I take, if I am not getting the sleep I need, am endlessly propped up by caffeine, and staying too busy to notice how out of my mind I am, my immune system will still be flagging. No matter what I put into it.

As we open ourselves up to new perspectives around health and healing, it is essential to remember that magic bullets can come in any form. They can come from conventional medicine or alternative medicine. The most important aspect here being how we use them. What our mind set is. For at its best, it is not about substituting one bullet for another. It is to stop looking for bullets all together. It is to create a way of being that honors the fullness and the totality of who you are and what you need to be healthy.

It is a perspective that asks the question “What do I need to feel well?”

What supports that in you? What undermines it? Though we are inclined to make this question beyond the lay person’s ability to know, that is just not true. I recently heard a physician say that if you listen long enough, all good doctors know, that the patient will not only tell you what the problem is, they will tell you what caused it. What enormous power and possibility lies in that perspective. To go from looking for a magic bullet that someone else shoots at you, to understanding that nothing within needs to be annihilated.

Try it. Carve out some time when you can be alone with yourself. Put your hands on whatever is hurting, and listen. Just listen.

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Waiting

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As that old song goes, “The waiting is the hardest part.” I feel that right now. You? I feel it in myself and I feel it in the world. It’s not like I want to get back to the way things were. That’s never made sense to me. But boy am I ready for what I believe things could be. And therein lies the rub.

How do you be with what is here, now? While still standing, waiting, believing, eagerly, openly and excitedly even, in something else? For me that something else always has to do with how we are living as a people. How we are treating ourselves, one another, and the planet. On that level it is both so simple and so straightforward, while at the same time being so complex and so challenging.

If there was one question I could ask when I am no longer here, it would be, Why is it so hard to be who we really are? Why do we fight and avoid our truest nature? Why do we hurt ourselves and one another? Why is it so easy, sought after even, to get sidetracked from what matters most? Sure, I know some would say it is because of our past. Or maybe because that is just how the world is. Some would say it is how we learn. But is this the only way we can learn? If so, we must be really off track to require such extreme lessons to be coming our way.

What would it be like though to change out of love? Out of possibility? Out of the belief that we deserve better? I know it’s possible because these were all of the reasons that allowed me to make such dramatic internal shifts in myself as a young mother. My reasons were not for me, they were for another. But my god did it end up being for me as that orientation grew and stretched me in ways I never could have imagined at the start of it all.

So is that the key? To do it for more than ourselves? What would that even look like? If this was the answer, or at least a part of it, I know for sure doing for others has got nothing to do with following external mandates. It’s not even got to do with whether or not another thinks you are a good person. This can be hard to hear. If doing for others cannot be measured in that way, what’s the criteria then? How will we know when we are in healthy alignment, and when it is that we are following the wrong things?

All I can say about this comes from my experiences as a mother. There was a lot of waiting there. A lot of input with no guarantee. A lot of blind faith. But mostly,  a lot of self–reflection. A lot of being with why it was that I was doing what I was doing that had nothing to do with the specifics of what I was doing. This is what brought me to myself.  And to the understanding of how it is that doing for another brings us back to the Truth of who we are and what we most need. Interesting, how in the end, it is the focus on the other that actually brings us back to our very best Selves.

It is potent and transformational medicine to serve others, to act on behalf of another, to gesture to the world that you care about more than yourself. It is a seriously sacred duty. One that should never be taken lightly. Nor allowed to be misdirected or misguided by the wrong sentiments.For to do so would be the equivalent of allowing children to tell you how you should be in relationship to them to demonstrate your caring. If this were true, it would mean you could never draw a line. Or let them know that what they were wanting or believing was harmful. You could never make a choice, or take an action that they might not understand. But that you did.

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