“. . . loneliness is ‘as harmful to physical health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.’ While no consensus emerged on an optimal number, Catherine Pearson (NYTimes) did find that more isn’t always better: “Spending time with friends you feel ambivalent about — because they’re unreliable, critical, competitive or any of the many reasons people get under our skin — can be bad for your health.”
What struck me about this quote was that it isn’t just just loneliness that can adversely affect our health but controversy and self-imposed isolation because our environment is energetically unhealthy. And I think that is just the tip of the iceberg of what many of us (Americans) are dealing with day after day, decade after decade.
This made me reflect back over the last few years of watching the United States devolve into nastiness and stalemate and sterile argumentation that has seeped into communities, social circles and friendships. I quit smoking when I was 22 (almost 50 years ago) but I never quit controversy. I never found any good reason to, but I never really stopped to think that all the times that I lost an argument or debate I was stuffing or internalizing the fight for survival! And I never considered that controversy might be addictive and that it might be slowly killing me.
What I’ve learned about health (because of Covid) over the last few years has reinforced what I knew intuitively for decades, that we get the kind of government and leadership, and even the kind of society and friendships we deserve. If we are fighting inside ourselves, at war internally, then how can we dream of manifesting a better world where we aren’t seeing everything in terms of dealing with enemies and engaging in battles – for health, for a better environment, for a just, fair and equitable society, even for peace.
I’ll get back to the opening quote, but first I want to share how, over the last few years, thanks to listening to certain health experts, my dimmer switch has been gradually, but steadily, turning clockwise. I’m going to stick my neck out and propose that what we all yearn for is some kind of awakening. Many of us are close but something always pulls us back when we are about to crawl out of our cocoon. Just when we’re about to unplug , like Neo, from the Matrix, something we read, or something someone says, or even something we eat returns us to the mother-program.
Several years ago I traveled to Peru with a small group, to a remote retreat in the rainforest to work with Ayahuasca. A few weeks prior to leaving Vermont, we were advised to ween ourselves off of technology, sugar, sex, caffeine and prescription drugs (if feasible). Once at the retreat we were put on a special diet of rice, plantain, and Native fish, and eventually a juice and water fast. We underwent ritual purges and sequestered ourselves from any extraverted activities. Only then were we administered certain herbal medicines, all leading up to our first of four ayahuasca ceremonies, which followed for the next week, each two days apart.
Before partaking of ayahuasca, we had one consultation with the master shaman. when we were supposed to tell him (via a translator) what was wrong, what we were hoping to heal. We were advised, rather than citing a specific problem, to say that we wanted to heal our core. Much of the preparation (the purges, the fasts, the special diet and the acclimation, even the long journey there) had to do with an energetic / emotional / you might even say, a karmic, detox.
I now see how, in order to heal our core, it behooved us to unplug from the Matrix-like program that we are all caught up in, in this part of the world. The more successful we were at doing that before inviting ayahuasca into our system, the easier it would be for ayahuasca to help us. We had to “unplug” just like Neo does in the movie. Through the shaman’s eyes we were toxic, walking time-bombs! . . . which is why many people who work with ayahuasca say that the first few sessions are equivalent to years of analysis / therapy.
But how many of us are going to journey to the rainforest to work with ayahuasca. Aren’t there other ways to unplug? Of course there are. They are just less dramatic and they are not concentrated into 12 days!
We can seed our lives with practices that are geared to awakening that slumbering or programmed part of us that might respond to a Tai Chi class or Tai Kwon Do, or a beginning yoga class that also teaches meditation. We can avoid friends who pull us into fruitless, bitter debate.
But what I recently discovered, just when the memory of my rainforest immersion with ayahuasca was becoming, well, just a memory, is that diet can also get us there — eliminating sugar, wheat, cutting back on dairy, eliminating red meat, eating organic, wild and fermented foods. Building up our microbiome changes us for the better. Our microbiome is our inner rainforest. In a healthy rainforest, all the creatures and life forms that exist there are not living by Darwin’s precept of survival of the fittest. The rainforest is about interdependent communities that thrive through coexistence. I realized that when I was down there. No one had to tell me. I sensed it. It was as plain as the nose on my face, that this was much more like paradise than Darwin’s war zone.
The same is true of a healthy gut. In a healthy gut hundreds of bacteria and micro-organisms get along just fine. When the gut is down to a few (10-20) bacteria, they compete and battle for supremacy, just like Darwin saw nature. When our gut is like that (dumbed-down), there is a ripple effect of tension, that ripples through our body, and we experience the world the same way — dog eat dog. Diversify your gut and you have your own internal rainforest.
Getting back to the opening quote. So, one way to unplug from the Matrix is first choose who we interact with. Avoid fruitless debate and controversy. It’s that paradigm that is wearing out our welcome on the living planet! Take charge of what you eat, start a practice that is geared to awakening the part of us that longs for a different kind of world. And good luck.
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A brief exchange with my brother, Dave Lindorff:
Dave: Pete Seeger lived to be 96 and never stopped fighting against war and social injustice. He was splitting wood for his wood stove the year before he died, using he old sledge and wedge system. Amazing. I believe the answer is to never lose hope if you can’t win an argument with an idiot. I believe if you have hope, you can keep on plugging and engaging in controversy in the name of a better world. Brother Dave
Me: I agree there are some people who can handle controversy, without losing their cool, but they might tend to be people who have a lot of other things going for them, and aren’t all about grinding the ax. When I think of Pete Seeger, since he is your example, I think of someone who is a force of nature, writing and singing songs that changed people’s minds and hearts. I would never see him as argumentative, but as someone who just knew what he believed and didn’t get caught up in trivial debate.
Gary Lindorff - Nine Waves 