Corona: The Virus is Our Medicine

Seven years ago, I made a decision to leave my prior life behind and step into a new chapter. This was a conscious step away from the pandemic of dis-ease so rampant within our modern way of life. I wanted to experience another world. I didn't know what that new world would look like, but I knew Health would play a prominent role within it...

This desire took me off on a journey in which I'm still travelling. I learned from Indigenous wisdom keepers living in constant communication with a living world. I explored the integral role that community plays in Health and realized the startling degree to which this dependency - in which true community relies - has been largely stripped away from so many of us. I dove headfirst into meditation, plant medicines and other psycho therapeutic techniques and became amazed at the seemingly never-ending baggage of beliefs which I was carrying which were not my own. I became fascinated with permaculture and regenerative agriculture, convinced of the urgency to build new (old?) re-localized systems of food production. I immersed myself in yoga, different forms of body work, dance, and a whole host of other psychosomatic modalities and experienced first hand the essential role that touch and movement have in unlocking and releasing the extraordinary amount of stress and trauma all of us accumulate over the course of our lives.

So, you can imagine my consternation when I hear, as is so often the case today, the parting words: "Stay healthy".

As if health was merely a check in the box measure - either ya got it or ya don't. If there are no symptoms, expressing themselves in the form of some particular illness, then rest assured, you're totally healthy!

Can you see how this description of health we're being sold fits in so neatly within consumerist packaging?

Don't think about Health as this huge spectrum of possibilities of what it means to be a Whole Human. As a potential data point along a vast continuum of Evolutionary possibilities. As Health representating the vitality of our entire Being - the composite of our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual "bodies"...

No, don't think about any of that!

Instead, just buy this little piece of crap which isn't really making you happy built from the blood and bones and tears of little African children. Consume this mind-numbing entertainment to make you forget about all your problems, create fear, define for you success and other acceptable social norms, and atrophy your extraordinary creative capacities. And here, eat this chemical laden fake food produced through the annihilation of natural ecosystems and biodiversity. And then, when you get sick (ie experience some set of particular symptoms), I got some pills to sell ya. You'll be back and "healthy" before ya know it!

This is all just another way of saying the same thing that Krishnamurti once expressed: "it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society".

Which brings us back to Corona and the interesting times we're all navigating through.

The typical narrative we are being presented goes something along the lines of this:

"We are all victims to this terrible tragedy that has fallen upon us. Poor us humans! Such dark times filled with so much suffering and angst. This is all such a colossal cosmic error - a gigantic mistake that never should have happened! Somebody please save us! (Yes I'm looking at you Big Brother: when will this vaccine be ready for Christ sakes!?)"

Okay, so this is one Story.

I'd like to invite you to try on another Story for size and see how it feels to you....

What if this global pandemic is not something that "just happened" to us, but rather, what if this crisis is something that absolutely needed to happen? Could it be that Corona, visiting us in the guise of tragedy and hardship, really is the perfect medicine that our suicidal species requires?

Mother knows best after all, and this is the medicine she has given us to try and help us heal ourselves of our ailing sickness. And, unlike our fancy Western medicine, Mother knows better than to just go after the symptoms. Na, she's going straight to the Heart of our Dis-ease.

******

Death.

Destruction.

Despair.

The world that was so familiar to us disappears into a thick cloud of smoke. What once appeared to be unquestioningly real, now reveals itself as a mirage of faded memories appearing from a distant past, ashes underneath our footsteps as we attempt to navigate through a hazy and foreign terrain.

Our deepest Fears come boiling to the surface. We have spent lifetime(s) avoiding these Fears. Suppressing them underneath layer after layer of the superficial garments that we wear.

Using any opportunity to escape having to be together in the same room with them.

Avoidance, though, is no longer a strategy that's available to us.

We've spent so long running, constantly chasing, from one distraction to the next. And through all our incessant commotion, we have lost connection with the Life that runs through our veins, becoming blinded to the broader consequences of our actions outside of our little self-centered human bubble of existence.

Now, though, Corona is inviting us to come back home. To drop all this "time is money" nonsense, and to slow down. To stop and reflect for a moment. To be still. To just be, precisely where we are, without the knee-jerk reflex to be anywhere else.

********

Crisis, we're told, is signified by two characters in Mandarin:

one being danger,

the other being opportunity.

What if, in the mist of the danger, within the darkness and despair, lay the seed to the next stage of our Evolutionary journey?

Could Corona, through this crisis, wake us up out of our death-inducing slumber? Helping us to re-member all that we have lost, to re-collect all that which money can't buy?

A sense of belonging and purpose.

A yearning for community and connection.

A relationship with Nature and our broader family of Life.

A desire to create and express our Soul's unique gifts, and a longing to love and to feel loved.

As the role of money has extended it's tentacles into more and more aspects of our lives - making transactional which was once provided for by community and relationship - we find that many of our core human needs go unmet.

Sure we try to fill them, typically unconsciously, through pursuing whichever learned strategy that is available to us in that moment. But no amount of power or material success or accomplishment or hedonistic pursuit will sate the rumble within our bellies. No matter how many "poor man's substitutes" we may acquire, we'll always be left hungry for more. It's like trying to plug a void with another void. Only the real thing will satisfy our itch.

Through slowing down, though, through confronting the impermanence of our existence and the fragility of the world around us which we construct, some deeper questions will naturally arise.

"If I die tomorrow, is this the life that I really would want to live? Am I truly living the life that I am intended or am I living out the life that someone else intended for me?"

These times remind us precisely how precious this life really is and ask of us if a reprioritization of values is in order.

She asks of us, of the infinite possible worlds that I can imagine, which of those am I personally investing in?

For, Yes, a More Beautiful World awaits us. It's not in the far distance, but it's right here in front of us.

A world which values connections and relationships over possessions.

A world that nurtures our human yearnings for creation and play.

A world that celebrates the growth of our Whole Being over the growth of GDP.

In short, a world where Health is the preferred currency, where Health is the ultimate form of wealth.

This is not a distant pipe dream, but rather this is a reality that is alive right now with where you choose to align your focus and presence. And it's not about waiting for this world to magically appear out there. No, for it already exists as a seed within the corridors of your imagination. For first it must live within our imaginations, and then, through our conscious awareness, we cultivate this seed into our experienced manifest reality.

The Hero's Journey awaits us, and this crisis is our call to action to nourish that seed within each one of us.