Surrender.
This is your number one spiritual practice.
It’s inherent in the practice of “breathe and come back to awareness.”
Awareness is always surrendered.
It’s only from awareness where you can truly receive life.
It’s from surrendered awareness that you can receive today’s blog post.
Because I am very confident that 9 out of 10 of you will be deeply triggered.
But where there is a trigger, there is an ego attachment. On the other side of letting go of that attachment is the ability to engage freely with more of life!
So breathe and watch your ego agree and disagree with what I’ve written today. Be curious about where your internal reactions are arising.
Remember that the overall takeaway of this blog post is to be curious and inquire.
We’re Sick
No, I’m not just talking about how the ego makes us sick generally.
I’m talking about how physically ill Westerners are.
All around us, we have normalized physical illness and disease. Whatever your political thoughts about the Make America Healthy Again movement in the U.S., it’s arisen because there is a reality that needs to be addressed.
We’re sick.
Mental health, emotional health, and physical health are all in bad situations.
Examples of diseases of affluence include mostly chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and other physical health conditions for which personal lifestyles and societal conditions associated with economic development are believed to be an important risk factor—such as type 2 diabetes, asthma, coronary heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, peripheral vascular disease, obesity, hypertension, cancer, alcoholism, gout, and some types of allergy.[1][2] They may also be considered to include depression and other mental health conditions associated with increased social isolation and lower levels of psychological well-being observed in many developed countries. — WikiPedia Diseases of Affluence
The sickness continues to spread, but our prideful egos refuse to look or to question.
Furthermore, numerous people justify these sickness as the price of a progressing culture. Or they say, that this is what is happening because we’re living longer.
There’s so much to unpack there.
I’ll send you to Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari to get started.
The Distressed Human Body in a Sea of Toxicity
Human beings are living in massive levels of disease and distress. Our bodies are in shock. It should be no surprise that there is tons of trauma in human relationships and that we’re seeking solace in a thousand different ways to feel better.
We evolved in a very different natural world. But the hunter-gatherer world has been steamrolled over. Now we and our bodies have to contend with different levels of unnatural living and pollution like:
- Bad air quality,
- Poor water quality,
- Unhealthy food options and polluted foods,
- Not sleeping on circadian rhythms,
- Lack of community and regularly being surrounded by strangers (or being alone in rural areas),
- Lack of full range of motion activity,
- Poor sleep,
- Noise pollution,
- Light pollution, and much more.
This barely scratches the surface of how dramatically we’ve changed and polluted everything.
We are interconnected beings.
We Are All One: The Law of Interconnection
It all impacts us. Just like the microplastics in your body.
Stanford University: Microplastics and our health
I haven’t even gotten to the coping mechanisms like sugar, alcohol, drugs, media addiction, travel addiction, stimulation addiction in general, self-harm through excessive activity, and many other unhealthy coping tools.
It’s different for everyone, but everyone is impacted.
Why wouldn’t we behave in unhealthy ways?
Transpeople and Being Curious
I get it.
You don’t want to believe it’s this bad. That’s the problem of the ego.
The ego doesn’t even want to consider an idea that doesn’t fit its story.
But it is this bad.
So let’s drop into some of the disease identities.
And let me be clear:
An expression or adaptation is different than the person.
The whole issue of trans rights and trans people has exploded. I am not saying people are bad. I don’t care how you dress, whom you love, or how you identify.
But are we wondering why people are adapting to life in that way?
It’s a different way to think about it?
Why is someone creating that behavior? These are adaptions driven by feelings and beliefs.
Instead of asking about the amount of stress that is crushing people’s hormones that determine if they feel as adults or develop as children to be male of female, we create ego identities.
This effectively stops important discussions and inquiries into things like:
How are toxic chemicals in our environment impeding male and female development?
How is trauma impacting people, which is an intense form of stress?
What about lack of natural light?
You’re like, light?
Yes, light.
Light regulates our hormones and how we feel as men and women, and many of us are living indoors A LOT.
What about [insert your question]? You’re a thinking person. I want you to explore; not agree or disagree.
In saying this, one side of the political spectrum of my country is immediately defensive, trying to “protect” the person. They’re protecting an ego identity instead of illuminating what is going on in the situation.
The other side of the political spectrum will jump onto this post to reinforce their “traditional values” mindset. That’s pointless and harmful.
If for some people there are physical and psychological traumas at work, then choosing a trans as well as any other coping ego identity is an expression of sickness.
Do we let people remain sick?
If after healthy investigation the person sees that they are living a healthy and happy life, then who the Hell cares if they’re trans?!
I’m being curious.
I invite you to do the same.
Losing Your Gender and Sexual Identities
Mental Health Issues and Weaponizing Therapy
Continuing on, so many mental health disorders are also being turned into ego identities that no one can question.
I’ve been listening to Alain de Botton, and I heard him talk about how therapy jargon has been weaponized to justify whatever pain or issue someone has.
This is sad.
The same issue happens again; we’re no longer able to figure out the root cause of the behavior for fear that we’re bad people attacking a person who is just the way they are.
I can’t tell you how many ADD and ADHD people have come my way, and with a little curiosity, it’s seen that they’re hypervigilant due to serious or severe trauma.
Spiritual Awakening and Your Mental Health
Now that we know what’s going on, there is a way out of that dysregulated state. There is a way out of suffering.
Is it easy?
No.
Is it possible?
YES!
But it’s only possible to break free of these diseases when we’re curious, do the work to understand why this identity/adaptation was created, and then do the work to heal and learn new patterns.
If ADHD is who the person is, then all that is left is a life-time of struggle and medication.
Once again, part of this culture now demonizes anyone who questions something. They are considered to be attacking the person and not the malady.
Therefore, the questioner is considered to be “bad” or “unkind.”
So people stay quiet.
Suffering continues.
And, yes, there is a part of society that wants to condemn or delegitimize mental health concerns. That’s where we’ve already been as a culture. I know the “Hey man, walk it off” crowd.
That’s a denial of a problem. The former is an enabling of the problem.
I’m interested in freeing people from ego suffering and physical distress, and the only way to do that is to get the ego out of the way.
Being a Healthy Human Being
I didn’t want to believe how messed up our environments and society are, but I dropped my ego and started looking.
Letting go of the ego is critical to seeing. Otherwise, you’ll only see what you’ve been taught to see, and then you cannot change.
Any place where I’ve changed to be more natural, I’ve felt ten thousand times better. I know that I’m not anywhere close to my ancestors, but I see the wisdom of surrender and adapting back to more natural patterns.
In so doing, it has altered how I feel on a daily basis. Old feelings of lethargy are gone, which I discovered were linked to seed oils in the process foods I once ate. These low-energy feelings were so familiar that I thought that they were me.
They weren’t.
Many of your feelings are not you either.
They’re a reflection of your environment–inner and outer.
With diseased ego identities, your feelings are reflections of different levels of stress and distress to which you’re trying to cope and adapt.
Are you curious enough to go within to find out why you feel you are the way you are?
If you are, you may be surprised what you learn and how you now can transform.
2 Comments
Hi Jim. I appreciate this article. It seems so much more sane to look at how we are actually living as human beings, rather than get caught up with identity.
I think in some cases, when someone has been gaslit severely about their experiences, when some diagnosis/label seems to ‘explain’ what’s ‘wrong’ with them (e.g. ADHD), it can feel like a huge relief, something that can be handed to the abuser/abusive situation and say: see? Now do you understand? Almost like an attempt to explain oneself. And then it’s like a ‘tool’ you have that has been ‘legitimised’ that you can use to stop the abuse. In my own experience, I used some health issues and diagnoses as the only language my ‘abusers’ would even attempt to understand about why I was struggling at university (the real reasons were I was traumatised, unsupported, had never eaten healthy food in my life…and so on), and it became an identity thing for a few years that only served to limit my life, severely.
I especially appreciate your point that if it never goes further than that, and stays stuck where anyone who questions is labelled ‘bad’ or ‘unkind’, then we never actually get to have the conversations about reality- things like trauma, toxic chemicals, food and water pollution, and how our bodies are in shock. These things are quite horrifying things to realise, for me especially to see how the systems around us are so distorted that for my whole life I have not had access to healthy AIR and WATER, the complete basics of life. Let alone healthy food, and other basic things like a supportive community. It’s not asking for much, is it? but this is what is happening.
Thanks for sharing, AF.
It is really useful to have descriptors like diabetes, ADHD, obesity, etc. But these are ailments, not who we innately are.
As we journey on this path of self knowledge, we don’t reject any part of ourselves even as we no longer protect any story about ourselves–no matter how real our bodies make them feel. The other side of addressing root issues of ailments is feeling SO MUCH BETTER. 🙂