I am watching closely now what is happening in the world when it comes to our health. This includes Big Tech becoming the doctor of the future, vaccine passports, mandatory medicine, the censoring of alternative approaches and more. We are living in times where we run the risk of bypassing our humanity in a quest for the supposed infallibility of the technologies and of those slated to make billions in profits off of our increasingly sick population.

We also run perhaps the biggest risk of all by believing the fantasy that something outside of us will guarantee health, wellness and happiness. With not much effort, by the way, on our part. Instead, a kind of passive approach to our health and well-being that does not require much; other than to extend an arm, take a pill or schedule a tele-doc appointment. All while being told, “This is what you must do.”

How can we be expected to know how to care for these bodies of ours? After all, we’re not experts. We couldn’t possibly know what to do.

While there are many, many layers to how it is that we will be caring for ourselves over the coming years, I would like to propose that at the very heart of any authentic and humane discussion of what happens with our bodies be the irrefutable requisite that sovereignty is at the center of any discussion, policy enacted or delivery of care we engage with. A definition of this word recently offered to me by a wise woman sums it all up:

Sovereignty is rulership over oneself.

My god, can you imagine it? Can you imagine, as the dictionary writes, “freedom from external control?” In other words, a lifelong path of claiming total rulership over your body and its health as the core of what we do individually and collectively. With this as the starting point, we cannot go astray. We cannot be confused by mixed agendas or glitzy new technologies. We cannot get spell-casted by the marketing arm of pharmaceutical companies. We cannot be strong-armed by hospital insurance codes or public health fear tactics trying to scare us into action.

But. And there is a big but here. To have this level of sovereignty at the center of our lives is to recognize the current paradigm that tells you, “You are a child who needs a parent/expert to tell you what to do. You do not possess the authority to decide for yourself.” This is not something that is easy to see in yourself, but it can be gotten to by paying attention to how you talk about your body and who decides what happens with it.

Listen for statements like, “My doctor put me on…” or “I didn’t think I really needed it, but he said…” Pay attention to how often you have a sense of something happening in your body that gets silenced in the presence of your doctor. Be on alert when you don’t say something for fear of irritating or angering your doctor. And then, learn to be honest with yourself when you catch yourself being relieved by not having to be the one to make the decision because it feels like it’s so much safer and more of a sure bet to just do what they tell you to do.

Sovereignty and freedom go hand in hand. There is no freedom without rulership over your own health choices. And there is no rulership without a felt sense of your right to be free of external authority governing the very territory of your own body.

This is what is before us now and has little to do with a healthcare plan and everything to do with each one of us growing up enough to become the one who claims the leadership role in matters of our own health and well-being. This does not mean that we go it alone. But it does mean that we partner with those who place our sovereign human nature above all else because that is what is so at the deepest and most fundamental levels of what is real and what is true for a human being.

And because that is what we have decided we are worth.