The “Economy” is an eco-system composed of mutual interdependencies. It features worlds within worlds and therefore resists singular statements. For example, you can declare that “the economy is bad,” but at the same time, there are always people who make money during recessions and even depressions. The “Economy” is not just something “out there,” or something directed by big corporations or federal regulators. It is also a most accurate reflection of who and where we are as a people, and it tells us much about our own inner workings.
Every moment of life is one of exchange. The in-breath brings life-force in, the out-breath flows in return, the tides move in and out with a rhythm that interpenetrates everything and everyone, an implicate order of wondrous beauty and intelligence. This order of exchange is centered in the natural world of which our bodies and minds are a part, but it is also reflected in economic exchange. When the economy loses its moorings in the eco-system, people tend to fly off into disembodied concepts, chasing phantoms that breed ever increasing anxiety. This is so because such misalignment obscures the evident connection to everything and everyone. The more one moves away from the center, from the rhythms of here and now, the more probability exists for fear to morph into toxicity, ill will, resentment, and bad karma.
The world goes on doing what it does. Empires and economies rise and fall. Am I going to allow myself to be caught in this vortex of downward spirals, or am I going to rise up and know that my soul was made for more than this?
The so-called “one-percenters,” the people with hoards of money, are not the problem. They are a symptom of an economy blown off course. Are the very rich necessarily abundant? Do bodyguards and vaults make you free, easy, or radiant? Does the ability to influence and control the economies of other beings make you feel any better about who you are?
Imagine a body with all its resources in one percent of its tissues. Clearly, this is not healthy. Do you just cut it out (vindictive revolutions), however, or do you rebalance the entire body by listening to the messages of imbalance. Illness, whether of the economy or the body, is a call to go deeper, to rebalance things in a truer way. Placing the blame on others becomes vindictive, leaving one perpetually angry and frustrated. Blaming oneself creates guilt, a strategy that has not worked for two thousand years. The failure of the economy reflects unwholesome forms of exchange and may be a call to create a terrain that allows for more flow, more kindness, and more conscious sharing. But first, there is a need to experience, to really understand that the strategies of domination and manipulation of markets, the constant running around without awareness, and the sacrifice of soulfulness for worldly success is unsustainable on the most fundamental level. It robs one of sensitivity to others, to nature, and to life itself. The work of conscious reciprocity in every life-situation enables us to move toward a sustainable abundance, toward a deep and integrated relationship with all of life.
Over the next few posts, I’ll be sharing some ideas and practices that can help to rebalance the terrain, that can allow us to sidestep the more destructive aspects of a toxic economy: wage slavery, seeing others as objects, dependence upon the whims of markets, and being constantly caught in hope and fear.
This round: Take Responsibility for Your Health
The health-care industry has become one giant confidence game. Like hotels in the U.S. and temples in India, they are built to relieve you of your money in as many ingenious ways as possible. The goal of the current health-care industry is not health; it is, at best, maintenance. The popular term “managing your condition,” advertently or inadvertently, assumes that healing is impossible. Maintaining your functionality, and maintaining your illness with it, keeps you beholden to mainstream pharmaceutical culture in two ways: by keeping you working in ridiculous and stressful modalities, making optimal health impossible; and by offering the chronic use of pharmaceutical drugs as a lifetime strategy (instead of a one-time necessity), assuring continued dependency.
Allowing health to be defined by mainstream media places the premium on functionality. The drug ads that list the vicious symptoms of your drug of choice (i.e. “stop taking if headache, shortness of breathing, or suicidal thoughts occur”) can only be taken seriously by someone who has become totally desperate. And why is there such desperation? Why are we suffering so? Why have prescription meds, vaccines delivered with toxic mercury, non-vital air and water (plastic bottles), working under florescent lights, the constant barrage of information, and above all – stress – become the norm? Stress, as a lifestyle, is a symptom of not living in flow. Our schools have literally become stress machines: getting kids up way too early to answer the bell and marking them down if they are not in their place. Daylight savings time started due to War, and is still kept in place. Why? Why is the economy shot through and through with an ongoing “war mentality?”
Get up with the light, and notice how at different times of year, the time of light and dark varies with its own inherent rhythm. The watch-manacled society, on the other hand, is built for stress, built for war, built for “efficiency” as its premium value. And what is the purpose of such efficiency? Is it really greater wealth, strength, and health, or is it an unconscious, manic habit that keeps us going fast enough to not notice the void that is ever beneath? The same void that when embraced and relaxed into becomes the source of creative flow and abundance.
Stress is a form of contraction; Health is connection – with everything and everyone, with all energy frequencies. To be healthy is your first and most important job. Look at the foods served in schools and hospitals, and tell me if they have any major investment in their people being healthy. Your body is a sacred temple, your life, the most precious gift, a chance for true and ultimate freedom. Educate yourself. How? Shut off the screen and listen to your body. Every morning scan your field and sense the quality of your energy from “one to ten.”
“One” is feeling completely vacant and ill; “ten” is feeling completely radiant and open. What do you need to do to at least get above a “five” every day? Instead of obsessing about your bank account, learn to maintain and grow your “Qi (Chi) account.” When are you in flow? When do you feel good without props or external reward conditioning? Emerson said it well in his essay, “Self Reliance.” You think something is going to change your life? Your long lost love returns, a huge sum of money falls on your head, but nothing will make a real difference except “the triumph of principle.” What is he talking about, “principle”? This is not a moral code, or a belief system: this is an inner alignment that prevents you from being a chronic victim. It is the deepest core, not just of your values, but also of your integrity. One who sacrifices integrity becomes a slave, whether to whim or to the leering promises of the market place.
Republicans and Democrats pray on peoples’ insecurity. “This is a dangerous world, look at all the bad things that can happen?” And the medical industry does the exact same thing: “get early screenings for cancer, protect yourself against the avian flu, who knows what might happen?” Principle, your own set of resonant values, your sense of integral integrity, allows you to withstand the ups and downs of the world, gives you the strength to get through the hard times, takes you out of fear and into courage.
Get good health people around you, a good team of people who have proven themselves trustworthy. Remember, with regard to medical or healing professionals, you are hiring them. They work for you. Do not allow yourself to be bullied by Medical Divinities. They may know their own protocols, but that does not necessarily translate into wisdom or healing. They, more often than not, have not gone through the fire, have not investigated the higher regions of health, or the more subtle precincts of the body. If you want to experience what its like to be poked around by aliens, just go for a check up. Humans have ceded their sensitivities to machines, losing trust in their own integral natures. Protocols are fine, but not absolute in any sense of the word. America ranks at approximately 37th in longevity among the nations of the world. How good have these protocols been? Learn to take what works for you without being captured by the system; because once you’re in it, you are vulnerable to having your money, your time, and your energy taken from you. How much time do people spend in waiting rooms, filling out forms, going from one so called specialist to another? How much money is siphoned off, with our without insurance?
Supplements and so-called health foods can be just as pernicious: How much money do people spend on vitamins, projecting their magical hopes onto a little pill or the latest healing machine? Is taking hundreds of pills a day, whether prescription or not a healthy, beautiful lifestyle? Again, I am not saying to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Doctors and healers can be wonderful resources, but ultimately your body is your responsibility. Call in the people who have proven themselves trustworthy and work with them.
Go on a media diet. Drink lots of pure water. Get the electronics out of your bedroom. Walk and move your body, understand that spirituality, abundance, and health are non-different; they are absolutely part of one another. Unhook from elementals of scarcity (“the game is rigged, I’ll never have enough) and romantic hope (when someone gets elected, or when the world ends, all will be well again”). Do not let your emotional life be controlled by “The Din,” as the poet Lou Welsh called it; i.e. – who is winning or losing in the news. Locate what is important around you and honor it.
Look at all of the so-called information sources critically: what are the agendas of the meat and dairy industries, which popularized the “four food groups” of the previous generation, for example? Understand that your birthright is love, bliss, gratitude, care, and openness. Settle for anything less and you are selling your birthright for a mess of porridge, even if it has a shiny screen.
