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processed cheese slice with yellow dye #5
or
raw-milk artisanal cheese from a small farm?
canteloupe melons tasting like cardboard
or
freshly plucked cherry tomatoes bursting with sun-ripened flavor?
cornfed-antibiotic-supplemented-growth-hormone-infested beef from a feedlot cow with red dye #3 to make it look fresh
or perhaps
no meat at all?
artisanal cheese
this or that?
It irks me when someone walks directly ahead of me into a store or a building and lets the door slam right into my face. It annoys me when someone persistently, - and fairly slowly, mind you, - hunkers down in the left lane. It bothers me when someone yawns with their mouth wide open, displaying all their beautiful, or not so beautiful, teeth. Yes, I do care that people care.
Being aware not only that my freedom ends where your's begins, but also extending basic manners, like holding the door open for the person right behind me, are courtesies that smoothen the rough edges and make living together more pleasant. When I'm done passing in the left lane I return to the right lane to leave the left lane free for others who drive faster and want to get past me. When yawning I hold my hand in front of my mouth to spare people sights into the insides of my mouth.
Walking around with earphones even worsens incapsulation into a me-world that lacks consideration for others, or simply demonstrates obliviousness. By being a tiny bit more aware of our surroundings, by caring a tiny bit more about the people around us and acknowledging them, we can make the world a tiny bit of a better place.
According to our current cultural thinking if I want to win I have to take it away from you. Our economic culture of lack has conditioned us to think that there is not enough, that you have to have less if I want to have more. This thinking brought forth the survival of the fittest misnomer of how nature supposedly works - although nature is really a lot more complex and cooperative than that. This belief system - and that's all it is! - has also brought forth a host of competitive games and sports that always create one loser and one winner. Imagine if we could all win? Imagine if no one had to lose? We wouldn't have to explain away our crummy feelings when we are losing with "being a good loser." Losing makes you feel crummy. No one likes to lose! Don't kid yourself or your kids.
The better way is called cooperation over competition, working out solutions that work for you and me, not just for me. It may require a concession, it may require my coming a bit your way or vice versa. But what's so bad about that if we can both win?
When we sold our house last year we had a price in mind we wanted to get. But the market said otherwise. We could have insisted, and sat on our house some more, and waited for that illusory "winning" sale. Instead, we went with the flow. We sold for a bit less, we sold exactly when we needed to, we sold to the one buyer who really wanted our house - in the end we all won.
The Supreme Court ruled today on the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Nationwide that is; in every state, conservative or not. This is huge! It is a monumental cultural shift and signals ever more fluidity in family and partnership arrangements, which is likely to sweep across the world, west to east.
The ruling seals a development that has been ongoing for thirty or so years. Ever more families live in non-traditional arrangements, whether two moms with kids, or two dads with kids, sons with single dads, kids with single moms, but also family patterns that are being rearranged, unravelled and rewoven through divorce and remarriage. Living arrangements are on the move and morphing, allowing more flexibility and more creativity than ever before. In turn, we are becoming more open to non-traditional arrangements as they make their way into the mainstream - see a previous post on the subject - social arrangements on the move.
I find it refreshing that we are no longer stuck in what we considered a societal norm of mom and dad with kids, but that everyone can be whoever they wish to be and can express that in whatever way pleases them. Yay for opening our hearts and minds to greater tolerance and possibilities.
Is the Paleo Diet another one of those diet fads like the Atkins Diet or the South Beach Diet? Come to think of it, there may be a bit more to it, indeed. The so called Western Diet, which is now traveling east and infecting Europe, India and China, is full of sugar and starches. Given that starches in the form of grains, and transformed into bread, pasta, pizza and cereals - our new daily staples, have only been in our diet since the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, they seem to throw our million-and-some year old digestive systems for a loop. Add to the starches the addicting amounts of sugar we seem powerless to control because big food puts them into everything from pickles (why?) and mustard, mayonnaise (serious?) and bread (what's it doing in there?), to pasta sauce, breakfast cereals, soft drinks, and whatever else they can find, you may be in for a health mess unless you cook everything from scratch. And it (the health mess) shows - Celiac disease, diabetes 1 and 2, rheumatoid arthritis, gluten sensitivity in general, perhaps even cancer, too - all seem to point to the same evil - sugar and grains, and are on a drastic rise. I admit that I used to boast that my digestive system could handle all that grain, and what was it with all those gluten intolerant people. After all, I grew up in the land of baguette and croissants, and was born in the land of the crusty breads. Yet a recent diagnosis of Diabetes Type 1 in a close relative hit home and made me think again.
The Paleo Diet cuts those two culprits out - no refined sugar, no grains. Instead, meat and fish in small quantities, no or limited dairy (my homeopathic MD recently said dryly "dairy is overrated and usually adulterated" - unless you go raw), lots of vegetables (and preferably not the starchy kind - keep it green), some fruits, as well as nuts. Stories abound of healing diabetes 1 and 2 (yes, both), Celiac and various inflammatory and auto-immune conditions by going gluten-free or following the Paleo Diet. I'm trying it.
My daughter is in bed today after an afternoon and a night of feeling nauseous and being sick. Today she has a headache and is resting. Lots of fluids, nothing to eat, rest and love and comfort. You may say that it's a virus, or a stomach bug, something is going around, or suspect that she ate something bad. Maybe yes, maybe no.
Coming from a spiritual approach to healing it helps me to associate the symptom with what may be going on in the mind, as I do believe that mind and body inform each other. In homeopathy, for that matter, afflictions are not named, only symptoms defined and treated. The most common childhood ailments have got to be tummy aches (that's where the solar plexus is, through which all kinds of energies get sucked in to us), headaches ("too much stuff right now for my little head"), and earaches ("I don't want to hear it"). Along those lines of thinking the body's inability to digest food properly might be linked to an inability to deal with/digest something that is going on in the mind. And the headache may be a result of information overload or issues the child is going through. Some more traditionally and some more spiritually oriented pediatricians have observed that children go through a noticeable maturation process when they work through a major illness.
In our busy world the needed rest to pause and digest properly, in mind and in body, especially for children, may only be possible by spending a day or two in bed. Also revisit an earlier related post: "the difference between cause and effect in healing."
"If you want money because you're a good doctor, that's good. But if you are a doctor because you want money, that will kill a lot of persons," the filmmaker, author and all-round artist Alejandro Jodorowsky said in a recent Chronogram interview. They say that the money will come if you follow your passion. But many of us are in job situations we don't care about, are indifferent about, even hate. Many others, and I am one of them, hold two jobs - the money making one (which I actually quite like), and the creative passionate one (which I like even more and would love to do more of). Those of us in creative fields such as writing, making music, painting or acting have a bit of a harder time earning an honest living in a culture that is lopsidedly in favor of the money making and business aspect of occupations. But where would we be without art and creativity? It's the soul of life.
As an employer I realize how important proper casting is. It is just as much my responsibility to correctly interpret a candidate's abilities, character and knack for the job they are applying for, as it should be the candidate's responsibility to be as open and honest as possible about themselves. If an employee compromises his/her values or passion for money (ahh, it's just a job, I can pursue my passion on the week-end), it comes out in broad daylight very quickly.
When week-end is all you are dreaming about all week long, maybe it's time to realign with your true self and figure out a way to do more of what you love to do.
I just started to read biologist, author and international speaker Rupert Sheldrake's 2012 book Science Set Free, or as it is called in the UK The Science Delusion, the better title in my mind. To me it is always refreshing when scientists begin to see the light, err ...spirit, in things. Sheldrake's bone to pick is that many scientists believe that science knows already everything there is to know and that only the details need to be filled in. This limiting belief leaves no room for true inquiry, instead defining upfront what may or may not be researched. His main criticism of science is that it operates within a dogmatic self-perpetuating system that accepts results within the expected belief norms, but ignores or explains away results that are out of the norm, and will not entertain research into areas our culture currently tags as "non-scientific." True science, he says, should be able to forge ahead with an open mind and consider all options.
In this case, the whole crux of the debate is of course whether nature is intelligent or not, or whether clinging to the atheist thought system that reduces us all to robotic machines is really all there is. Cell biologist Bruce Lipton is another one who risked his reputation in 2005 when he published his Biology of Belief. He, too, has become a wildly popular international speaker on the inherent intelligence of all life and the fabulous implications that recognition brings with it.
Both books are great mind openers from great scientists to set us free from our stale materialistic dogma.
When I play, which I don't do often enough (although I consider some of my cooking time play time), I am truly in the moment. Young children play all the time. That's what they do. It's their job. They learn by osmosis, through playful imitation of the adult world. Playing leaves the left side of the brain, the rational-analytical side, out of the equation, and stays in right-brain mode. Play is creativity and spontaneity, not calculated analysis. Games like chess or poker or truly competitive sports are not play because they are about left brain strategy, which involves thinking in words.
What makes play play is its state of mindfulness, which is absent of words. The younger children are, the more they exist in this state, not thinking about what they ate for breakfast or what they will play this afternoon. Martha Beck wrote in Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: "the way to cope with the increasing complexity of the wild new world is to play more." Her enlightened advice for dropping into the mindful world of play is to leave the words out - by the way, that's exactly where meditation is headed. "Words are the language of the mind, emotions are the language of the heart," a fellow grad schooler said to me in that regard. Drop the words, drop your beingness down down down - until you reach your heart. Here words don't exist. Words separate, words tag, they have their role, but we spend most of our time in word land and not enough in heart land.
Let's go on a journey to heart land and play.
What if it weren't necessarily the microorganism that made us sick, but that healing depended instead on the condition and resilience of our own immune system, our constitution, our circumstances and how our body handles strains to our wellbeing? Liise-Anne Pirofski, infectious disease specialist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, clarifies that a particular microorganism can harm one person and leave another unharmed. Too often, Dr. Pirofski says, we simply try to combat a certain microorganism with antibiotics or vaccines. Yet, we have not found vaccines against tuberculosis, malaria, herpes or fungal diseases. Instead, Dr. Pirofski suggests, as reported in the German news magazine Der Spiegel, researching how to strengthen the host. In essence, Dr. Pirofski proposes a radical paradigm change, away from the pathogen-as-culprit and towards understanding instead how to strengthen and heal the person. This goes against the grain of the Western medical paradigm that treats the perceived pathogen, and is more in line with the thinking of CAM, complementary and alternative medicine, that treats the whole person.
Ask not what makes you sick but how you can heal.