Why Is Everybody So Sick?
It's All Anyone Seems To Talk About Anymore When They Talk About Themselves
When I started cultivating a daily meditation practice ten years ago, I was doing it for anger management, and I didn’t expect it to work. But it did. And then it kept on working. Here are some of the direct experiences I’ve learned from:
Once anger and stress start to erode, you’ll feel better in your body.
Once you feel better in your body, your emotional field clears up.
There were times when I was a child and had so much energy but didn’t have a place to put it. I acted out in unproductive ways when I had an abundance of youthful energy and little adult stress to sponge it up and leave me dry.
This gradually changed as I made behavioral and environmental shifts to better align with my nature and the world around me.
Once stress is better managed, one realizes that it is part of life. But carrying stress in our nervous system and corresponding emotional weather patterns is a choice, though not a conscious one.
This choice is often made in ignorance, while suffering the aforementioned stress state across phases of waking, dreaming, and sleeping consciousness.
Stress is somatic, meaning it’s stored in the body.
Stress is not intellectual. If you could think your way out of stress, you would have done it by now. You can’t outthink being stressed any more than you can outthink your car being out of fuel or charge.
You must physically release stress from your body to emotionally release it from your mind.
Experience tells me it’s the same stress manifesting through three deeply related modes of experience (body, emotions, and the observing intellect that pulls them together). When you pull one of these table legs, the whole table moves, all three legs together.
There is more than one way to release somatic and emotional stress, but very few consistently produce results and remain maintainable over an entire lifetime without damaging the body, mind, or the emotional presence that integrates both into the individual’s conscious experience of life.
Hard drugs will kill your body over time or make you lose your mind before that, because when we kick some doors open, they don’t shut again.
Exercise is good, but overdoing it as we age can harm the body. Physical movement and eliminating stress through exercise are elements of good health, but pull that leg too hard and too fast, and the whole table topples over. There are plenty of people who have exercised themselves to death and felt horrible along the way, despite their best efforts.
Eating clean and well is one of the most important elements of feeling good in our body.
Sleeping well and getting good rest at night is another critical element of feeling good in mind and body.
Finally, meditating to breach the fourth state of Consciousness
There are benefits beyond stress management and feeling better in the body and mind. I wasn’t expecting the explosion of creative inspiration that came into my life after my meditation practice kicked in. I am more inspired and productive at fifty years old than at nearly any other time period in my life, save one.
And while I am consciously aware of my health, I have noticed it isn’t through the lens of how bad I feel all the time. How often is it that, when we ask someone how they are, they give us a litany of their pains and woes instead of sharing moments of joy and appreciation for the beautiful experiences in this life?
We are conditioned by culture to see the world as if we were born victims of an inevitable disease and doomed to a meaningless death, barren creatures made to suffer and die. But this doesn’t have to be the way we live and behave. There is another way, and it involves collecting and sharing moments of pure joy and recognition of beauty in all of life, even the parts that perpetually ill people find ugly about themselves, the world, and all the life inside animals, insects, and other people.
All illnesses emerge from stresses in the body. Dis-ease. Not being at ease. Holding stress. Carrying it every day in our cells, organs, and tissues. Hauling stress hormones around in the endocrine system, funneling it through the body by blood. Our human species suffers from a global pandemic of stress, both self-imposed at the social level and the natural stresses that come from being a physical body that requires energy from the Sun to operate. We must grow, gather, and kill or support the processed killing of animals, in order to obtain the concentrated energy of the Sun we need to function day to day.
And of course, there is the stress that comes from fear of death and the unknown.
At lower levels of consciousness, the world feels stressful, like living at the bottom of a murky swimming pool. If all one has is the fractured, limited rest that comes from broken sleep, poor nutrition, an immobile lifestyle, no joy and pride in labor, and no cultivation of a spiritual presence in one's life, then, of course, the world will look and smell like a sewer.
Of course, there will be few moments of authentic joy that aren’t simulated masks one shows to others in socially appropriate situations. Faking it as if we made it to being happy.
Of course, anger and rage partner with apathy and depression to power the cynical and cause the weak to self-destruct while harming others.
But does life have to be this way?
Is there a better way to live?
It turns out there is a better way, and it’s knowledge thousands of years old that has been validated by millions of individuals over that time. I’m talking about the Vedic science of expanding Human consciousness by aligning one’s behavior and environment with how the natural world functions and thrives, despite human suffering.
Suffering is a mistake.
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