As I work with people struggling with diseased bodies, I find eye-opening parallels to disease in the planet body. Most who come to me are afflicted with lifestyle-induced illnesses: cardiovascular issues, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, arthritis, diabetes, ADHD, irritable bowel, cancer. The lion’s share of these are a set of symptoms that emerge as a result of contaminating the body—for years—with unhealthy fats, excess low-quality protein, excitotoxins, carcinogens, refined carbohydrates, gluten, preservatives, concentrated sugars, hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, and a whole truckload of horror-story environmental toxins. All government approved, mind you. The body in its most healthy state is like a crystal clear pond. As we add contaminants, the pond starts to get muddy, murky. Our bioterrain can no longer sustain perfect health. Cells mutate into diseased forms. Symptoms emerge. Pharmaceuticals enter the picture. More symptoms. More drugs to treat the side effects of the initial treatment. Sound like pollution? It is. Eventually the pond becomes so toxic we hit a tipping point where we can no longer handle the load and we die.
In like manner the Earth is ill-equipped to handle the foreign and toxic materials we scatter across the land, sky, and water. We clog our arteries; we clog our rivers. We leave chemical deposits in our ground water; we leave chemical deposits in our liver. With poor nutrition we have inferior oxygen delivery to the cells; with deforestation we hogtie oxygen delivery systems. Our wetlands disappear as our organs shrivel. Our atmosphere is compromised by contaminants; our brains suffer the same fate. As our bodies decline from chronic systemic hyperacidity, so does the planet. We’re losing species as fast as we’re losing brain cells. As go our bodies, so goes the planet.
How The Heck Did We Get Here?
For most of our existence we have lived as hunters and gatherers. As such we had a profound connection to weather, seasons, animal life, trees, water, the rising and setting of the sun. We survived by being attuned with our natural world. It’s in our genes and cells. We were in the very deepest sense, connected to nature—we were nature. With the advent of agriculture, things began to change, nature became something to manage. It was no longer humans in nature, but humans against nature. Paul Shepard, the founder of human ecology, refers to agriculture as, “the single most catastrophic event to befall the human race.” As successive generations designed increasingly complex mechanisms for dominating the natural world, we as a species grew into a disconnect with our bodies. We moved from beings of intuitive feeling to beings of analytical thinking. As we have become mental giants—superduper managers—our ability to be intimately connected with our natural world has atrophied.
In our lives as hunters and gatherers, matter—our bodies as matter—was spiritual. Fueled by emerging organized religion, the new “let’s control everything we possibly can” mentality determined that spiritual was something other than matter, apart from our somatic world. Our bodies became carnal machines, breeding grounds, where sin festers. We began to see “self” as the part of us that exists somewhere between the ears—give or take—and steers this hunk of flesh like an RV. Bodies became possessions—along with cars and toasters. The disconnect is so profound we have little or no idea what it feels like to be healthy. We’re satisfied to live lives of subnormal health, toughing it out, malnourished, propped up with a smorgasbord of pharmaceuticals. Sadly, we’ll settle for every day above ground is a good day. It comes as no surprise this is also our relationship with the environment.
Give Me a Pill
Our approach to treating sickness is very similar to our methods for dealing with planetary ailments. Medical science has reduced the body to a set of plumbing parts, offering multiple medications for each. Can’t sleep? Take a pill. High blood pressure? Take a pill—make it a few. One of my new favorites, restless leg syndrome is a doozy of a disconnect. In restless leg, the body is telling us we need to walk. When I inform some people of this simple cure, they’d rather cling to their recliner and take a pill. Nature, where art thou? And so it goes—this pill will reduce triglycerides by 20 percent. This little beauty will reduce cholesterol by 38 percent. In like manner, cutting auto emissions, power plant emissions, managing pesticide runoff, regulating heavy metal contamination, hiding nuclear waste, chemically neutralizing effluents dumped in rivers—doing these things will provide for percentage improvement. Pills for the environment. Just as we do in medicine—treat the symptoms. No mention of cure. No context for a cure.
Get Your Body Off the Meat Hook
In order for people to create bodies that actually heal themselves, they must first begin to identify with their bodies. Change the view—my body isn’t a meat carcass I’m dragging around and have to feed and evacuate. My body IS me. It’s not mind and body, it’s body is mind; mind is body. I am every cell, every neuron, every DNA molecule, every drop of blood. If we don’t move past seeing ourselves as a collection of parts separate from self, we never come to know the joyous symphony the body is—a symphony that performs in magnificent splendor when provided with the natural living foods we ate for over 99 percent of our evolution. We need the micronutrients, the enzymes, the phytonutrients, minerals, vitamins, friendly flora in living foods. We can’t have health courtesy of Nabisco, Kellogg’s, Lean Cuisine, and Colonel Sanders. Maybe 500,000 years from now we’ll have evolved into Burger Man. Swell. We’re on our way. To head that day off we need to change the big picture, return our bodies to the clear pond. Simple cause and effect. If we put junk in—our bodies or the environment—we get disease out.
Microcosm Macrocosm
As I watch people halt the flow of garbage into their bodies, as they load in nourishing, healing, nutrient-dense living foods—often to their considerable surprise—their symptoms disappear. I remember one panicked man, Clark, with diabetes, told by his doctors they had to amputate his foot. He was highly motivated to save his foot. Who wouldn’t be? Clark cut out all the manmade food, nourished his body with living vegetables, fruits, sprouts, nuts and seeds. Not only did he save his foot, he created a bioterrain where his body could heal itself of advanced diabetes. Completely. What I notice in people like Clark—when they learn to see their bodies as self, their bodies as magnificent auto-healing organisms, they also have a shift in their perception of the natural world.
As long as we insist on stuffing manmade, nutrient-lousy, toxic concoctions into our mouths, with so little disregard for the true nature of our bodies, we are going to do likewise with the Earth. We can manage, control, and dictate only so far, only so much. A renewed Earth won’t come from an assembly of politicians any more than a renewed body will come from a committee of doctors. We have to go further than treating symptoms. If we own and heal our bodies, we’ll own and heal our home planet.
Jerome Armstrong is a writer, medical researcher, nutritionist and holistic practitioner.
