Monthly Archives: February 2023

You at the Center

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This week one of my practitioners told me about a bold and daring leap he just made. After thirty years of working with the insurer, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, when this year’s contract came up for renewal, he said no. No to signing up for another year of being a cog in a machine that does not care about him, the work he does, or the patients he sees. No to losing money each year to pay them their split, while being hamstrung by their inhumane policies. No to their suggestion that if he wanted to make a profit, he should just double the amount of patients he sees; effectively turning his practice into a treadmill of poor care and hurried practitioner-patient connection.

No to being a slave in a system that has outlived itself. That has become more invested in its financial gain than the welfare of others.

This is a hard, hard reality to catch up to as so many of us have long believed that the institutions charged with our health are here to support us, to get us what we need, to bridge the gap for us when we are not well. And even if we have known that we are not getting what we need, it feels too scary, too impossible, to step outside of what appears to be the only game in town.

I mean, what would happen if we didn’t have the large medical conglomerates and institutions as a backstop? Well, we are about to find out as more and more of us are waking up to the fact, that not only is there another way, we have to find that way ourselves. We, are in fact, creating that way right now out of the rubble of what no longer serves.

And it can’t come soon enough when you fully recognize that what’s passing for “healthcare” is not only not working, it’s hurting.

I know this one well. When I took that first step out of the conventional medical system almost 30 years ago, I was simultaneously hit by some of the deepest fears I have ever known, right alongside an almost giddy sense of possibility of connecting to something that might just include all of me in the equation. That might just offer me more than a prescription or perhaps, “there’s nothing wrong/nothing I can do for you,” after a seven minute office visit.

That might actually get to the very root of what was happening, while offering me a map for how to step forward.

That first step for me meant tuning into the feeling that I wasn’t at the center of my care. A faceless, nameless system was. This hurt. It felt like a betrayal. Another step took me in the direction of starting to open up and be curious about what else was out there in terms of health and healing. This felt exciting as I began to learn about ancient traditions and how it was that my body worked.

But perhaps the biggest step of all has been learning, experience by experience, to claim full responsibility for my health and healing. No matter what kind of medicine I choose to use, or who I choose to work with, it always boils down to the same thing: The onus is on me. There is no abdication to an expert. There is no one who will do this for me. Because this is, after all, my body.

I can’t tell you what to do or how it will turn out for you. I can’t give you a clearcut map to follow. What I can give you, should you begin to consider whether or not you are getting what you need out of your current “health” care options, whether or not the institutions that are serving you, are actually serving you, is a beginning place.

And that beginning place starts when you begin to wonder. Wonder if you are at the very center of the care you receive. Wonder whether what is happening in the systems all around you… from the cost, to the procedures recommended, to the maze you must travel to get what you need, to the fact that you must keep a job you hate to be covered, to the imbalanced focus on treatment as opposed to prevention, to the way your practitioner types away while you are talking to them, to the rushed sense you have when you finally get in to see someone, to the teller-like atmosphere in the office when you check in…is in fact, in your best interest.

This is a very big and necessary thing we are doing here together and “the only” thing it asks of you is to begin to shift your perspective from “Someone else is in charge of my health,” to “I am in charge of my health.”

 

 

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Alchemy

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A Tarot reader I work with and love introduced me to the concept of Alchemy. She described it as the resolution of opposites and the birth of Something New being the essence of this ancient and esoteric practice. Historically, alchemists used something called an athanor; an oven that heats at a high and even temperature to transmute substances.

The discipline of alchemy has gotten me thinking this past year of how it is that we put seemingly unrelated things together, and then “heat” them up until they merge into a Holy Union.

I’ve been thinking about this not from the perspective of physical substances, as in turning lead into gold, but instead, in relation to the process of doing one’s own deep, and often difficult, psychological, emotional and spiritual work in the service of creating a new substance.

In other words, how do we take what we have been given and become the Alchemist in our own lives?

I believe this would require being willing to pay very, very close attention to ourselves. Not in the anxious, fear-based, judgmental ways that seems to be currently in vogue. But from the perspective of someone being deeply interested in themselves. As in, what makes me tick? Why do I do what I do? Why do I believe what I believe? Why do I say what I say?

This is about a close examination of one’s self and the life you are living. Not as justification to find fault, penalize or fall into victimhood, but as a daring and courageous attempt to go for the gold!

This requires allowing yourself and your life to be the athanor; the strong, steady and heat-resistant container for changing one thing into another. But instead of gold, the coveted prize is to Know Thyself. Something of this nature requires a willingness on your part to look, to spend time with yourself, to wonder about how it is you are living. It demands diligence, courage and patience to undertake such a lofty endeavor. For there will always be many, many reasons to quit the work of the Alchemist. Many voices, distractions, fears and dead-ends to undermine your commitment, that must be combatted.

But if you are up for it, begin to consider this: What in my life needs alchemizing? What feels impossible, but in need of transmuting? Begin your experiment there. And then, What happens if I try this? Or how about that? What if I turn it around and look at it like this? Or that?

Be willing to let go of the demands of how things are supposed to look, or even turn out. (This one shift alone is perhaps the greatest game changer. Or deal breaker if not tended to.) Instead, open yourself to the preciousness of your own life, and what is just begging to be transmuted. This requires learning to see that every unwanted piece of lead or scrap metal in your life is, in fact, gold in disguise. Just waiting to happen.

*Vici Williams is the Tarot reader I work with and she is not to be missed. Be in touch with me for her contact number at susan@rememberingwhatmattersmost.com

 

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Caring in The Modern Age

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As someone who is here to be of service (actually true of all of us), I am regularly wondering what that really means. Regularly coming up against all the ways that how I serve, how I care, is fundamentally flawed; whether in my motivation, or my execution. I don’t blame myself for this because I don’t know if it’s actually possible to be completely clear on how it is that we offer care.

It’s not easy to really care about others without our own blindspots, traumas, fears and needs getting mixed up in what it is we believe we are doing for others. That is why I am a firm believer in continuously checking in with what we are doing when it comes to helping others. Otherwise, we can get really derailed in what we believe passes for care. Can convince ourselves, and others, that we are doing something for them, when in fact, we are doing it for ourselves.

To keep from feeling alone, afraid, out of control, you name it.

There’s never a problem with doing something for ourselves in the service of aiding another. Where the problem comes in is when we convince ourselves, and everyone around us, that we are purely in it for the greater good of others. That our words and actions are only about helping others.

Caring in The Modern Age has gotten very, very complicated, confusing and rife with mixed agendas. I would even go so far as to say, hijacked. By guilt. By the need to be publically virtuous. By the need to be right. By the need to control. By the need to manufacture a kind of safety that does not exist.

And sadly of late, by a kind of legislation around what it looks like and what must be done to care.

Not to mention that there are so many things to care about. Too many, if we are being honest. More than any one human being could possibly do. But given our access to everyone and everything around the world via the technologies, we have come to believe that we must be tuned into suffering everywhere, while suffering ourselves as confirmation that we really care.

But the Truth is, caring is an intimate act and can only be offered to just so many. It is an orientation to ourselves and to the world that has nothing to do with guilt, coercion, sympathy or demand. It is not offered as a badge of honor. Nor can it be enforced.

And it does not grow in magnitude based on how sad and overwhelmed you feel by the world’s suffering. Which by the way, whether you know it or not, you use as a way to indicate to everyone around you just what a caring person you are.

To care is to be concerned. It is to provide what is needed by way of sustenance. A kind of tending to that can take many, many forms and expressions. To offer and to receive care is to be human. It is wired into us and needs not to be forced or distorted into happening. It only needs our connection to Self, Source and Other to pour forth, naturally.

But in order to get to what is innate within each and everyone of us, we must run the gauntlet of the times; finding ways to shed and steer clear of what has been falsely constructed when it comes to what it looks like to care.

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Waiting

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In a recent personal exploration, I came in contact with what I will simply call here, “Waiting.” That part of me that gets put on hold, that stops breathing fully, that gets frozen, that even, on some level, ceases to live.

All while I wait for something to happen.

For that email, that phone call, that person to change. For the permission to be myself. For the madness to be over. For the guarantee that something will or will not happen.

Contrast that to the part of me that could not wait to get out onto the trail this morning. The part that didn’t let a standing temperature of eight degrees with a wind chill of well below zero cause her to wait for another time. The part that actually reveled in the gale force winds causing the trees to talk and sand tornados to appear out of nowhere.

We are a world of waiting. For the next text, the next like, the next, next, next…

These recent years have found us all in a waiting game. Waiting for a test result to tell us what’s going on and how we must proceed. Waiting for the permission to go outside. Waiting to be told when we could be with loved ones again. Waiting to be given the okay to take our masks off, go back to work, gather. Waiting for something to go away. Waiting for something to save us.

We wait for our boss or spouse to change. We wait for vacations, the weekend and retirement. We wait for the next package to arrive from Amazon. We wait for the diagnosis to tell us how we’re doing, or for the weight to finally come off. We wait for ourselves to change. For things to be somehow, somewhere different. We wait to die.

We wait and we wait and we wait.

Waiting is child’s play. It is a mentality that says my life is not in my hands. It is a mindset that says my freedom, my health, my wellbeing, my very life is not up to me. That there are forces out there that will decide how free and alive I can be. Where I can go, how I can live, and what is possible.

But the Truth is, Life does not wait. Our lives do not wait. They go on, with us or without us. So just as the wind did not wait for me to go on a run before it unleashed its full force, I ask you, as I ask myself: Are you waiting or are you living? 

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