Ok so this is a mash up of many inter-spiraling thoughts/research/imagery!
I want to share with you a little back-drop to the research I’m exploring in the neurodiversity world, how this applies to my body and experience… and the vis-a-vis edginess of my experience in the health world, how this is evolving.
I’d like to afore mention: much of this is beyond words, statements; it is like an undergirdle. It is a felt experience seeded from old systems of oppression, still lurking in corners of aspects of our society, including online community. This means it can often be subconscious, unintentional, and can become ‘part of the water we don’t know we’re swimming in’, as the saying goes. I am exploring the hidden, the what hangs out in the recesses of our (collective) minds, how this is influencing us today, how we can unpeel the layers gradually, and might ease ourselves out of tight nooks and crannies… I hope this illustrates a little of where I am coming from.
The narrative I’d like to explore today goes something like this: “we must heal ourselves, and take whatever protocol necessary or that is physically possible, for us to be in our ultimate selves”.
That, to me, has increasingly become visible as just this: someone running away from their current context, and trying to become a form of themselves that is unrealistic, maybe not possible (depending on how the journey develops), and maybe not actually who you truly are.
But: our authentic selves are buried beneath and within our current real, lived, now experience in this moment.
What does that mean for us?
Can we breath a long ex h a l e .
Some of this is controversial, edgy.
I have spent years chasing an ideal version of my health, such as; better energy levels, resolving IBS and food sensitivity, healing my thyroid, restoring my menstrual cycles, easing sciatica, improving my metabolism, supporting my fertility.
Underneath all of this, is a sense of ‘allergy’ to the system and environment around me.
I also struggle with high sensory awareness, overwhelming bouts of low mood, emotional meltdowns or freeze states, confusion with how to express my opinion or what it is, extreme openness/lack of boundaries, otherworldly experiences, moments of high need to release energy/move or shut out the world around me, confusing thoughts that don’t seem like my own, stress regards to transitioning from one thing to the next, panic when interrupted by someone, and anxiety around how something is meant to be done (if doing something on someone else’s behalf), the list goes on…
I have been told I am too controlling, too sensitive, obsessed.
Because of this extreme frustration, and a feeling of not getting anywhere, I have tried endless dietary plans (food is a special area of fascination for me), wellness protocols (eg yoga sequences, devotions etc), and practiced remediation in varied ways (such as focusing on my astrology and its keys for areas of healing – which is a long-term journey, as is all ‘healing’ in my opinion). But the question is: what actually is healing?
Is it something we do to try to escape our uncomfortable, sometimes painful, reality? Of being in this human body, and navigating on this plane of existence?
I have experienced healing, as suggested by a large section of the health & healing industry (which also subconconsciously infultrates into the most well-meaning scenarios I believe), to mean: fixing a problem.
I have a problem. Or: I am a problem. Which is something I’ve been wrestling with more consciously recently.
Before that, it was generally orientated around; my gut’s problem, my thyroid’s under/over activity etc – these were problems I ‘had to’ fix.
Which is more acceptable.
I needed to fix them so that I can function well in society and live my life’s full potential.
What I would like to critique about that, is this:
There is a gem of truth in ‘living my life’s full potential’, of course there is. But it is often packaged in a sense, or underlying feeling, of needing to be the most efficient, effective, or productive that one can be.
I always felt measured as not enough, not succeeding in my work well enough, or not writing my blog enough, or not doing enough here, there, and everywhere.
And so, healing my gut, my thyroid, etc. (Or, replace these with: doing this Yoga practice enough, this diet, those courses…) these were going to help propel me into effective life calling, to truly rise to life and succeed.
And believe me, in a certain way, I want this!
But, I don’t want it in the way I have been programmed to want it.
I don’t want to improve/soothe symptoms (I prefer these words to ‘heal’ due to the connotations it brings up for me of ‘hard work’ and relentless detoxing) so that I can work harder – a sneaky harmful narrative.
Yes, I would like to be able to put more effort into my life, my work, my relationships etc. I’d love to have boundless energy, and less sensory sensitivity sometimes!
Yet, how I ‘get there’ is a big part of the picture. In fact, in my opinion, it is everything. And it also deeply needs to include this: maybe I won’t achieve these states, of what I have rosey-tinted perceived to be states of bliss. Maybe this ‘bliss’ doesn’t exclusively reside in these end-point achieved states at all.
Perhaps the ‘bliss’ (insert comforting word/sensation) I find underneath, if I drop down into my rugged reality, is a deep source of nourishment. (Note: Of course, some situations may not be able to offer much comfort. I am referring to when we have relative safety, capacity to rest).
As I write the above, I feel tingly. I know this is real to me. I feel free and liberated. I do not have to ‘heal’ anything about me.
I very much would like to learn about techniques to support gradual rebalancing of areas of my body, and to support the needs that I have, but notice the difference in energy there: between ‘this must be healed’, and ‘applying gentle ongoing care’.
Everyday is a new opportunity to receive new insight. Often my ideas and curiosity are sparked by a random thought that comes out of seemingly nowhere. The other week I had a realisation that the hypothalamus axis is important in thyroid wellbeing. It came to me, so I casually looked into it, and will continue to. But I’m not in any rush.
Even if we are in a state of physical emergency, if we tear around in a manic state, that doesn’t help anyone.
When it’s safe to (i.e it’s not time to call an ambulance etc): we must rest, we must stop.
We are invited to accept ourselves and our dear bodies as they are.
We are surrounded by dying toxic elements of society (the old empire one, not the nourishing one you might be part of building). This is partly making us sick.
Most of our illnesses nowadays are a result of harmful systems, and the degradation/pollution of the environment (see the book entitled ‘Inflamed’ by Dr R.Marya who explains this very well).
It doesn’t do us any good to blame ourselves, nor tear ourselves apart.
We might be suffering intolerably, we may be experiencing a mental health crisis, a total life-crisis or major change… but there is nothing innately wrong with us, that must be fixed. Our symptoms/experience need(s) relief. But give yourself the integrity by inspecting the environment & society we find ourselves in, the way external abuse has worked its way into our cells, inherited trauma factors…
We are not alone. We are not seperate from life around us.
This can be scary to consider and muse on. But it is also relieving, because we begin to unpack our own personal physiology as part of a wider reality/ecosystem.
Autism, to bring it onto this subject, is a genetic variability, and a response to the environment (including to trauma), as is being suggested. It can also be seen in brain scans (see Temple Grandin’s book on Autism). It is not a ‘problem’. It can cause problems, in the context of how society has been set up, in the one family system, limited support network… especially if a child has autism and cannot speak/function well, and has an intellectual disability, or another disability.
It is very problematic within a fast-paced, profit-driven, western, northern hemisphere space we make home in. As are many disabilities/divergencies/chronic health issues…
But what if these are part of our shared, very long-term, human-plant-cosmic evolution?
A paradoxical, upside-down, reality: where the marginalised, out of the system/box carry a wisdom that cannot be made inside ‘the box’.
Not that any of the listed challenges/realities above are super-powers, or something like that. But, realistically, the experience forms a unique experience, as an outsider perspective, that develops in the ‘lack of’, in the liminal space of our established society…in the gaps, in the margins…
Let me bring this to Astrology.
Saturn.
Let me also mention, the life of Jesus. Or the life of any (spiritual or not) outcast, nomadic otherworldly, ‘weird’, individual.
Two perhaps random conjunctions there. But very interwoven for me personally.
Saturn represents the edge of the system, the threshold between tangible and intangible reality, between the embodied and the mystic.
The ancient symbology of the planet speaks of the oppressed/oppressor, marginalised/marginalisation, abuser/abusee, the hermit, outlier, and it goes on.
Jesus, as an example, framed what it looked like in that context, of his day and age, to question the empire, to commune with outcasts, and so become one. You could also extend this to figures like Ghandi for example, to endless mystics through the ages, to radical feminists, marginalised communities speaking out, native indiginous cultures resisting back…
What does the oppressed have to say? What deep wisdom is contained in their experience?
What have they seen in the underbelly of a toxic machine?
What does the oppressed part of us/our body/our mind/emotions or spirit have to share?
I am not someone in those aforementioned communities: I am a white female person, in the northern hemisphere, in Europe (UK). Capital of the (former) commonwealth. So, I cannot speak to the lived experience of a person of colour from the southern hemisphere living on colonised land…
But, I speak from my experience, my own relative experience, of knowing the limits to the outdated models around and within us. It’s dying because that is the only possible outcome. Natural cycles will consume that which isn’t in the order of nature and harmony, in service of love, life, common shared long-lasting existence.
Whether that includes humans or not is irrelevant. We are so much more than human, made of bilions of organisms, we are truly an internal ecosystem. If/when the human race (as we know it) dies out one day, our material forms will continue on living, in new and varied life forms…
Life is incredible. And we are apart of it!
Thank you for joining me for this exploration.