In our search for a new direction, we must take time to heal the wounds created by ecological damage, psychological affects and the physical trauma that has been perpetrated by both toxic, mutagenic and carcinogenic compounds and the physical assaults of all the non-food products that we ingest routinely.
Healers know that when true healing takes place it heals the practitioner as well as our clients. When wounds take place not only in our physical body, but in out hearts, minds and souls, the approaches that we need to use to start the healing process may look funny to outside observers.
In one of the major healing events of my own life, the situation entailed not wanting to let go of things I had learned in childhood. I was allowing a child, still alive inside my mind to dictate how the adult that I had become how to live. Many had tried to talk sense to me, many had tried to comfort me, but the thing that really allowed me to grow out of a bad state of health was someone allowing me to realize that the death of that headstrong child was in my best interest. No gentle suggestion, no coddling, that would certainly not have worked. Instead he said that allowing this misguided child inside to die was also an option.
I am not saying that to be good for us, medicine should taste (or feel) bad, but occasionally the trauma required to make sure we do not go down that rosy path to ill health again is not only necessary, but good for us, our families and community. It has been said that looking back at the start of a journey can be a bad omen, but in this context, all we have to go on is past experiences. We cannot say what the future will bring, but I can say without a doubt, great healing will be required. Who among us has found a stress free lifestyle? The most common effect that stress has on our bodies is to require more anti-oxidant food, more vitamin A,C &E and having a good B complex source as well can help deal with the oxidative effects of stress.
If you have been paying attention, you may have noticed that every few years a "new" source of anti-oxidants comes to the marketplace. In the old days, my maternal grandmother made elderberry wine. It was thick and sweet and loaded with anti-oxidants. Blueberries too are a great source. Acai, mangosteen, aronia, these all have many times the concentration of citrus and can reduce the damage caused by what science calls oxidative stress. It seems that every time a method for commercially producing a product based on a new "superfood" comes along, you can hardly swing a cat without hitting a few multi-level-marketers for it. The fact of the matter is that virtually every part of the planet has anti-oxidant rich plants or berries that can be eaten as part of our regular diet. I have always preferred elderberries but some like blueberries better. Both grow abundantly around here. Research what plants are available in your area that contain high levels of anti-oxidants and try them, see if you like any of them and get more of them in your diet.
Remember that shipping things in from far off lands has an ecological cost as well as an energetic cost that must be borne by the planet as a whole. If you can grow a plant or two in your own yard, it will allow you to have an important source of healing food close at hand. From the elderberry that grows in our yard, we have eaten the berries fresh, frozen, as juice, jam and we have even made wine from them like Grandma used to.
How we heal our hearts and minds gets a little tricky. Much of what ails us is the result of prior abuse or neglect and in our culture we are told that we have to respect, if not revere, our parents who, at times, had to ignore us or who may have hurt us in subtle or overt ways. Learning to forgive sounds extremely simple, but for most of us it is not as easy as it sounds. One thing that has helped me immeasurably has been to accept that each of us does the best we can with what we have. The vast majority of us do not have all of our needs met and this lack can have profound inter-generational effects. Adults in my life taught me since childhood that violence and abuse were not only justifiable, but necessary. Luckily, I was able to see the fallout in their own lives of living according to that belief and see through the sham of violence that they said was necessary.
I never knew how much hurt they had unleashed on me, until I began to raise my own children. My own violent outbursts were but a reflection of the lies that had been taught me as a child. In time I learned to grow and adapt my behaviors, but not before modelling some pretty bed behavior for my own children. Just because no one got hurt physically, I'm sure that some scars were created by cutting remarks and my own mal-adaptive behaviors.some people claim that without a bit of hurt and pain no growth can occur, but to use this as justification for hurting others is to miss the point. We are under such pervasive assault and our injuries are so vast, that we need to both take our own healing seriously and work to heal the damaged culture that we exist within. An African proverb states that it takes a village to raise a child, but when the village gets sick it takes all of us to heal it as well.
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