Different Ways for Thinking About “Building Immunity”
Let’s flip our usual thinking for a moment: maybe this whole time of the corona virus is about getting stronger, not sicker? What if this time is truthfully a deeply needed push, urging us make changes that would otherwise be inconvenient or ignored? Most of the news we hear centers around masks, quarantines, social distancing and vaccine development. Those are all outside factors, which will only influence our health from outside. What about inside factors—can they make a difference? How does our soul state influence our health and our immunity?
Not Getting Tied in a Pandemic Knot
This has proved to be a strange season. We are all a little bit frozen in our soul (this is true whether you are experiencing summer in the Northern hemisphere or winter in the Southern hemisphere). The release of summer here in the States, which everyone longed for and hoped for during March, April and May, has never really arrived. As a collective group our summer exhale never fully “blossomed” or expanded or released. The natural world kept its rhythm, but that has not been true for many of the peoples of the earth. Usually when Springtime ends, school finishes, and the weather warms, everyone relaxes and softens. People go outside, go on trips, get out of the house. New ideas and new initiatives are appropriately postponed. They are forgotten for a time. It’s the part of the year when, as a medical doctor, I can usually take some vacation and people hardly notice.
The Unique Anxieties of the Nine-year Change
Do you remember when you were nine? Many people have vivid memories about particularly events or experiences at that age. Some people reflect back and become aware of how their connection with the world changed, how they began to notice new things, ask different questions. If you dig a little, a whole set of people report that this was the age when they actually got a first glimmer of their later life’s work.
What is most consistent, however, is that people remember feeling anxious. This age stands as a developmental eye of the needle, a passage, through which we first become aware of ourselves as true individuals and which naturally brings some anxiety with it.
It is vitally important to know about this threshold time of nine-years because it is now being misinterpreted. Children are too often now being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder at age nine, when we should actually view this period as an essential time of developmental transformation. We can do this if we know the context. There are good ways to help a child move successfully through this transition.
Pain, Sleep, Seizures: Windows to Healthy, and Imbalanced, Wakefulness
The beginning of August offered a powerful experience for me when a wide-ranging group of anthroposophic doctors, nurses and therapists gathered for a conference about “Transforming Chronic Pain–a Spiritual Task for Our Time.” The meeting included very inspiring presentations from several doctors in Europe, especially one with deep experience in palliative care and another with very poor and challenged patients in central London. After coming back to practice in Denver, I’ve been struck by the many different variations of pain and how it represents an imbalance, or a kind of distortion, of normal wakeful consciousness and of waking and sleeping processes. This has happened to me before: I go to a meeting and learn about special topic, then I come back and find a whole group of people who are struggling with just that kind of illness or injury and need this knowledge.
Why Trying Harder Doesn’t Make Anxiety Better
In many areas of life if you try harder, focus more, consciously push further, then performance and success improve. It is tempting to extend that logic to all areas of life, but medically that principle does not always work. In truth, only specific portions of our body’s activities are open to conscious guidance, while many other realms function below the level of daily awareness. They are “sleeping” functions. What are these? One, quite literally, is sleep; but other related “sleeping” processes include recuperation, regeneration, digestion, and metabolism. These don’t necessarily get better by trying harder. Just ask yourself: “When I am having trouble sleeping, does trying harder to fall asleep make it better?” or “If I have a stomach ache, does concentrating on the pain make it go away faster?” The answer is usually no.
Building Strength for the Future, from present adversity
Health and illness follows certain foundational laws of cause and effect. Falling from some height (like a tree) risks breaking a bone; smoking increases rates of cancer. Those are fairly straight forward links that are easy to understand. We could say, the horse is clearly pulling the cart.
But there are other situations where two results seem to come parallel to each other, like the “horse” is walking just in front of, or just behind the “cart.” But there are other situations where two results seem to come parallel to each other, like the “horse” is walking just in front of, or just behind the “cart.” For example, it has been demonstrated that having heart disease puts you at higher risk of depression, and that having depression puts you at higher risk of heart disease. Also, that depression puts you at higher risk of developing diabetes, and diabetes puts you at higher risk of depression. Hmmm—which is now the proverbial horse and which is now the cart?
Working with Fear
There sure are a lot of things to be afraid of in the world right now. Part of that seems related to these being turbulent times, but part of it is probably because we are connected to so many things and people and places. How many pieces of news can you really digest in a day, even if it is all good news? How many pieces of news can you digest if most of them are bad? Certainly the worrisome and scary events in the world seem to get the most press so that sometimes it can feel like everything is collapsing. That makes it hard to find places to safely orient ourselves. …
The Integrated Care Package
There are currently places in the world where large hospitals, medical clinics and retreat centers are able to offer multi-disciplinary anthroposophic care (Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden), but the current medical model and insurance programs in the U.S. do not make this possible. This is a challenging moral quandary, as participation in insurance plans immediately creates oversight and rigid expectations around the kind of medical care that is being provided. Services must meet the “standard of care,” or practitioners face severe scrutiny, as well as potential punitive limits on medical practice and monetary fines. For these reasons we continue to make the decision that it is better to remain outside of the insurance system, recognizing that it is limiting access but it also allows us to provide a fully individualized, holistic approach to the healing process.
We would like to try to take one step towards healing that conflict.
Biographical Rhythm and Crisis: Getting Unstuck: Part 4
Change catches us off guard all the time, but it doesn't always sneak up on us from the outside. Some of the biggest impulses for change surprise us by coming from the inside. That can be hard to make sense of because we are so used to constantly needing to respond to the events, expectations and relationships of our lives—but it is true! External events, outer changes make sense in a certain way because they adhere to the laws of cause and effect. If we suffer a loss or are experiencing a lot of anxiety related to an upcoming event we could place our feelings into that context and gain some consolation. In other words we learn to say: I feel this way because that happened. We know that significant loss brings grief and disorientation. We also know that the anxiety of anticipation can easily exhaust us as we try to make sure that everything has been properly considered and prepared. Those are painful experiences but they can be rationally understood. What happens when a life change starts inside of us and therefore doesn't necessarily match any of the outer circumstances around us? It can leave us frightened and confused because there is no immediate reason for feelings of grief or anxiety that seemingly well up out of nowhere. But those experiences are much less random than we might think.
Finding Gratitude
It is a normal part of the passing of the year to look forward to the coming year and what it will bring. That is probably best done, however, by building on the gratitude of what has come before. In looking back we need to realize that we are all gifted, all blessed. Though perhaps this past year helped you experience that our “blessings” are not always the good, easy, and pleasurable experiences. Of course, we all wish for as large a helping of those as we can get, but sometimes the most potent growth comes from wisdom born out of challenge.
Where does Anxiety come from?
Feeling anxious? Then you probably need to reconnect your thinking with your feet. Why is that true? Well, anxiety, in all its different forms usually means that we are thinking, watching, waiting, and can't quite let go of that activity. Sometimes exaggerated sensing activity is healthy and appropriate—for example, if a dog jumped out and bit your leg, then you should be extra watchful and guarded if you have to walk by that dog's house again. But if you became so worried that you never went for a walk, or find that when you do go for a walk you are still worrying about the dog long after you have arrived home, closed the door, even gotten into bed in your pajamas, then that watchfulness is no longer healthy. In a way, our nervous system gets stuck in the “on” position and doesn't switch off (another term for this could be hyper-vigilance).
Sigh, From Expansion to Duty—The End of Summer Journey into Fall
At the beginning of June we all experienced how at the beginning of summer it is hard to stay focused and responsible. This is because the whole natural world is breathing out. That expansion went a long way, and hopefully you had some opportunities to branch out, explore, and melt a little. That felt good, but just now, in the last few days, it is beginning to shift. Did you feel it? There are outer changes accompanying it—the days are getting noticeably shorter now, and if you look, the plant life has stopped growing up and out—so the whole gesture of the season is subtly different. For the plants, this cessation of growth does not mean that their activity has stopped, but it is now related more to refining the quality of what is already there. This is a time for ripening: grapes are starting to soften and sweeten, pears find a blush of color.