Wild Gardening Manifesto
When the sun shines these days it feels glorious. With a lot rain in Colorado in the last month—including torrential downpours, lighting, hail the last nights—the contrast of rain and shine feels particularly strong. The ones who seem to appreciate the dry, bright days the most are the bees. I have a hive in my backyard and went to visit them this morning. There is a very particular smell to a beehive, a little like honey, a little musky, a bit like warmth, hard to describe but very distinctive. The bees are very happy, entering and leaving the hive so quickly that to follow the trail of one single bee is almost impossible. It is almost like trying to watch the drops of water in a waterfall—not easy, and not really the essence of a waterfall. The bees, like the waterfall, seem to live in a process of continual movement; the shifting, but continuous activity most important.
Sensing Like the Heart
Feel your heart. Stop, pause for a moment and see if you can sense the rhythmic beating of your heart. It is an amazing organ because it is in constant movement, so flexible and mobile that the moment you say “there, now it is contracting” it has actually already started expanding, and by the time you say it is relaxing it has again started squeezing. The heart creates an tremendous organic activity—it is not so much a pump as a physiologic archetype of balance—faithfully and continuously working through our whole lifetime, steady, steady, steady (can you imagine carrying out the same activity for 70, 80, 90 years?), yet simultaneously so dynamic that it never really rests. Because of these dueling activities it is hard to capture the essence of the heart in a single work or image; there are too many aspects.
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. …
Is it ever good to get sick?
This is a very challenging question, because even daring to ask the question can seem immoral, crass, or uncaring, especially when it arises out of medical work. But at some point it becomes essential to ask this question when we strive to understand illness in the context of broader patterns of human growth and development.
The usual, reflexive answer to asking “is it ever good to get sick?” is “No.” We perceive illness as painful, dysfunctional, and representing a failure, a breaking down of the machine of the body. Sometimes this failure comes through an invader (like a viral or bacterial infection), sometimes it comes from mistreatment (poor diet, alcohol, drugs), overuse of our body, or overexposure to toxic agents….
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.
Avoiding Surgery for Big Tonsils, Gallstones or Fibroids
We get sick in stages: there is a waterfall relationship between the immediate impressions of a situation; to what with time becomes a more chronic, physiologic imbalance; to what eventually becomes a true pathological (illness causing) change. An example: if I have an sudden shock or scare, then heart rate, blood pressure and muscle tone will naturally all go up, but they should all gradually relax and return to normal over the course of a few hours. That would likely change if a shock or scare began to happen every day, then soon the body's steady state changes, it gets reset—perhaps to a place where there are persistent challenges with falling asleep, or painful tight muscles that become the norm. And if my “reset” physiology stays imbalanced long enough we meet irreversibly illness, like a heart attack, a tumor, or high blood pressure that cannot be brought down. Most medical interventions happen in this third stage,though obviously working to change the process earlier (upstream) is a more ideal, and potent place to work.
Something Spiritual—What to do when Nothing seems to be Happening
Some new year's thoughts: one of the best, and also the hardest parts of life is that things are continually shifting. If we are too busy we wish for some down time. If we are bored or under-utilized we wish for something more to happen. Amazingly, there are even times when we wish for things to slowdown (usually in one arena of life) and speed up at the same time (in another area). Wow, being a self-conscious human being is complicated, because not only do we get to feel this way but we also get to observe ourselves feeling this way and then be unsettled by it. There are also times when we don't feel like anything is happening, even if we are overly busy and our time is fully occupied. Or, we get so used to things going fast all of the time—because there is a pervasive expectation that we need to be productive all the time, especially if you have things like family, and work, and social groups, and even things that you do for fun outside of those other things—that it can be really hard to relax into quiet or stillness. Quiet might make us feel disoriented, and most of us don't like to feel disoriented. What's common to all of these?—We feel like our activity or inactivity isn't leading anywhere and we have lost our traction. What do I do if my life feels like it has stopped leading to something new?
Plastic Surgery for Food? The GMO Question. Living an Authentic Life, part 4
Is there such a thing as living food? If so, does that mean that there is dead food? Why should it make a difference, if the most important thing about nutrition is the calories, fats, protein and vitamin content of a food? Let's explore this a little: certainly fresh food tastes better, and fruit that has ripened on the tree or vine has a whole different quality than fruit that was picked green and shipped around the world. It also seems increasingly clear, from all kinds of different perspectives, that highly processed food is not good for us. Processed food is not the same. Like formula for babies, which even if it chemically is as close as we can possibly make it to breast milk, it is not an equivalent. That is at least in part due to the fact that the nutritive substance in breast milk has already been enlivened by the mother's body. It can easily be digested and taken up into the body. The substance of the milk is living—it loses some of that when it is frozen or stored for too long, but it is still an amazingly living nutrition. We can think about general food nutrition in the same way—that the closer the food we eat is to its original growing state, the better we can make use of it. We meet it in a different way and can incorporate it into our own living physiology in a better way. Therefore, we can say (though someone who relies solely on laboratory analysis will often argue this) that the Vitamin A, K, and B vitamins in spinach are more living and healthier than if we eat those same vitamins in a concentrated pill form….
The Etheric Body: Foundation of a Dynamic Clinical Lens
There is a great modern hope to find the kernel of good health in a check-list. As medical costs are ballooning and rates of chronic illness climb, one oft-espoused solution is to get more precise about what we as healthcare providers are doing, creating broad practice guidelines and working to universally apply them. There is the hope that if we define the basic parameters of physical health and work towards them, we will all be healthier. Body-mass index, cholesterol, blood pressure, cancer screening, vaccinations and smoking cessation become our measures of good health, and if those are within their proper parameters we can all feel good that we are keeping people healthy….
How do I find more Peace?–through the Life Sense. Living & Authentic Life, part 3
“How are you?” That's a common greeting, which is usually answered more out of politeness than honesty. Most of the time we answer casually, so that when someone does answer in a truthful way it is a little bit shocking—either because it is so negative (“Lousy!” which we probably would rather not know) or surprisingly good (“Fantastic!” which can seem a little Pollyanna, because nobody could really be walking around doing that well…). But it is a good question to ask, especially of ourselves: “How am I?” Maybe we don't routinely ask it because we already know that we are over-extended, or simply because there are so many things demanding our time and attention outside of ourselves so that there is little energy left for self-contemplation. We get very good at training ourselves to ignore—actually override—any sense of how we are doing inwardly. Instead, we use a little caffeine to rev us up when we are tired, a little wine or sugar to help us mellow out, some TV to distract us so that we find some escape from all the things we constantly find to occupy our attention. Those are all well-known “emergency measures” but they are not a good way to stay in touch with how we are.
Why email can’t possibly meet our full humanity (and yes, I’m sending you an email): Living an Authentic Life, part 2
One part of leading an authentic life is about being conscientious with our body, and trying not to repetitively deceive our own physiology (see last month's post about artificial sweeteners, as well as a little update at the bottom*). But that is not the only place where we are being numbed into disconnection. A lot of our human authenticity is threatened by the way we connect to the outside world around us, especially the people we know and love. How do you communicate with them? How often do you feel that you have made a real connection? It's easy these days to do a lot of communicating, but not very much connecting.There is an important distinction between them—we can speak, write, or text a lot, but that doesn't mean that a real connection is being built. Other times—miraculously—we may not need to say very much, but feel that there is really good understanding and that a deeper connection develops. Those latter experiences are more rare, but also more valuable. So how do we create a space where we can really connect?
Artificial Sweeteners and What They Do to Our Humanity: Living an Authentic Life, part 1
Are you living a life of deprivation? Might seem like a strange question, as most people today are living in a world of such tremendous material abundance that it has no real historical precedent. People have never lived such complicated lives with so much stuff. There are, of course, scary times and hard situations when people do not have enough to eat or do not have a safe place to live, and unfortunately there are many places in the world right now where people are experiencing just this kind of desperation and loss. If you think about their lives very much, it is overwhelming. And sadly (but perhaps not so shockingly), it is very possible for most of us to go about daily life without giving it too much thought or too much worry. It becomes something we are aware of as a factual aspect of the news—one additional piece of information. It all becomes kind of abstract. How does that happen, that we can be connected to so much of the world and disconnected from it at the same time? What has been lost? Doesn't our loss of that capacity for real connection speak to another kind of inner, moral deprivation?
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.
Does our body influence how we think? Getting unstuck, Part 3
There is another aspect to getting unstuck, which relates directly to the connection between our physical/physiologic life and our emotional/spiritual life. It is actually a connection that goes both ways, meaning that our emotional and spiritual life impact how our body feels and how our body works, and vice versa. We all experience this. When we are stressed it affects our sleep, our energy, even our digestion, whereas when we are relaxed and contented many of the little aches and pains fall away. Going the other way (the functioning of our body up to emotional and spiritual well-being), imbalances in the body's physiology (like electrolyte levels, blood sugar and organ function) influence the way we feel and even lend an “imprint” into our thought life. Bodily function lends a continuous coloring to our experiences and perceptions, though this is usually fleeting and remains mostly unconscious. A bigger injury or imbalance—like falling and breaking your arm exaggerates that influence. The acute pain of that injury clearly distracts and disrupts our emotional and cognitive functioning. But this pathway is there all the time and it functions in both directions.
Inflammation as Transformation: How to Get Unstuck? Part 2
One of the truest definitions of health that continues to prove itself over and over again is that when we get sick, our immune system can work thoroughly and efficiently so that the illness comes to a full resolution. In other words, being healthy does not mean that we never get sick (which would assume that at baseline we have some kind of perfection of physiology, and illness is always a deviation from it). That makes for a clean model, but is a very static view. We are more dynamic beings than that. At important times an illness process can actually open the door for us to transform and rebalance. Small children are particularly good at this. When they get stressed or worn down, they quickly show the world that they don't feel well (adults are not quite so honest, and we can hold out a lot longer with supports like caffeine, deadlines, duty, and yes, the fear of finally letting down…). But sick children do what their bodies need: they slow down, they lose their appetite, get a fever, whine and cling, and discharge what they don't need (with a drippy nose, loose stools, a red rash, etc). That process needs a few days, but usually children swiftly turn the corner and build back to a good appetite and full activity–often better balanced than they were before. So an essential part of health is that our body has the flexibility to loosen and shift and change to a new state as needed.
Getting Unstuck, Part 1: How a Homeopathic Remedy Can Help
Been stuck recently? Seems to be going around. It’s not necessarily bad as long as it doesn’t become a way of life, though it usually does last longer than we feel comfortable with. But it has its place. Take breathing as an example. There is that place in your breathing, where you have taken in a full breath, but not yet started to release the air. Do you know that place? And it feels like nothing is happening, but there is something happening—a change in activity is coming (from in-breathing to out-breathing). And while the natural world around us these days is bursting into new activity, the human process for change seems to lag behind this time of year. Why? Well, when the winter comes and brings cold temperatures and long nights, we all naturally breathe in. It feels really good to breathe in at that time. Fall, the winter holidays, and the changing of the year bring an inwardness that feels really good. It's nice to be cozy inside, light candles in the darkness, and devote time to our family life, our community life, and our inner life. It is in fact true that the deepest winter nights are a potent time to come into a purer relationship to our inner intentions and our spirituality. We can connect better to our higher self and find inspiration for the coming year during that time….
Can you have a tumor in your feeling life?
There is a very unusual description of a tumor in anthroposophic medicine. It comes from some comments made by Rudolf Steiner, who helped to found anthroposophic medicine with a group of physicians about 100 years ago. It says that a tumor is a “sense organ”—like an eye or an ear—in the “wrong place.” That sounds very bizarre, until you start to spend some time thinking about the process, the activity of a sense organ, which is create a space where the outside world can penetrate into us, undisturbed. Our eye, or our ear, should accurately convey our surroundings without altering them. That is not the only way the outside world comes in: we breathe air, but warm and humidify it, and what we breathe in is different than what we breathe out; we take in food, but it is (necessarily) radically transformed through our digestion. Our sense impressions, however, really should come in without disruption or distortion. So our eyes, and our ears and our smell, can truly be thought of as little “harbors” where the outside world comes into us.
Gallstones and Your Mood
When I was doing my medical training, there was a pretty simple rule about the gallbladder: if you find that there are gallstones, and someone is having symptoms (pain on the right side, up under the ribs, especially after eating fatty foods) then the gallbladder needs be taken out! If there are gallstones, but no symptoms, in most cases leave it alone (diabetes was an exception). It was, and is, a very mechanical view of the liver and gallbladder, sort of like swapping out parts on a car engine. If it is causing problems take it out, if it is not, leave it be. And it is true that a primary activity of the gallbladder is to function as a storage sack for the gall and wait until the right kinds of foods are eaten, then send a bunch of gall down into the small intestine. But the gallbladder is more important than that. For the active excretion of the bile through the gallbladder is an essential activity of the liver, and for digestion in general.
Why Warmth is so Important
It is really important to nurture and protect your warmth. Warmth deserves more attention than it usually gets. Warmth holds a very special place in the life of both the developing child and the adult, because it works throughout the entire spectrum of human experience. There is physical warmth, emotional warmth—the warmth of love, of generosity, of true morality—and all of these “warmths” pour over and merge with each other. Perhaps most importantly, warmth is the essential ingredient in transformative work. Without warmth we cannot change, and our life is full of processes of growth and adaptation. Warmth helps us be healthy human beings on many different levels.
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.