Kale is the New Black

Everyone's a doctor.  More to the point, everyone these days is a holistic health practitioner.  Post a Facebook status about being sick, and you'll get countless replies featuring magical remedies that your colleague's sister's mother-in-law swears by.  And she should know because she's been sick, like, 83 times in the past year, and she didn't die.  Apparently, it takes a social media village to cure a common cold.

You'll also get a couple of rants about the evil conspiracy of Big Pharma, including warnings that you should not, under any circumstances, go to the hospital, even when a limb has been severed, because you could die of a staph infection in a place like that and, of course, you will be forced to refuse antibiotics, no matter how hard those greedy doctor shareholders push them, because they mess up your gut, like, forever.  So really you might as well be dead.

I myself fed into the anti-medical-model paranoia for most of my 20s, and have dabbled in everything from aura clearing to aromatherapy to long-distance Akashic Records readings to cure me of several mild to moderate ailments.  Here is a less-than-exhaustive list of the alternative pop healing interventions I tried during that time, not necessarily in this order:

• Place a crystal on the body part that is sick
• Place a crystal above your bed
• Place a crystal over your door
• Place a crystal in every corner of your house
• Go to a crystal bowl meditation circle
• Wear a crystal around your neck
• Visualize a crystal in your meditation
• Live in a crystal cave
• Chant in Sanskrit
• Chant in Pali
• Chant in Hebrew
• Chant in Greek
• Chant in Latin
• Chant in Sino-Japanese
• Chant Rah-Rah Ah-Ah-Ah/Ro-Mah Ro-Mah-Mah/Gaga Oh-La-La/Want Your Bad Romance
• Speak in tongues
• Pray to your guardian angel
• Pray to the Archangel Rafael for healing
• Pray to Gonesha to remove barriers to your health
• Pray to the Blessed Virgin to have mercy on your suffering
• Pray to everyone you possibly can, just to cover your bases
• Place an image of the deity of your choice on a shrine in your house
• Get a tattoo of the deity of your choice on the body part that is sick
• Visualize yourself as completely healthy
• Visualize yourself as the powerful goddess you are
• Visualize your guardian angel performing spiritual surgery on your illness
• Visualize Matthew from Downton Abbey coming back to life and reuniting with Lady Mary and the baby

Hang on, yogis and yoginis.  Take a deep cleansing breath and chillax your chakras before you accuse me of undermining the legitimacy of the above practices.  I am convinced, through years of direct experience, that many of these methods worked on some level to rebalance my system and fortify my wellness.  People have been using natural medicines and indigenous rituals for millennia, and somehow our species has survived, most likely due in part to the effectiveness of such practices and in part to pure dumb luck.  Science itself, no longer the enemy of religion, has verified the efficacy of many of these approaches, from Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for pain management to t'ai ch'i for arthritis.  But I personally didn't start getting significant results until I gave myself permission to break down and go to the damn doctor.  Once I did and got the additional treatment I needed, all the other things I was doing for my health began to actually work, as though a missing puzzle piece had finally fallen into place and completed the whole picture.

While there is likely some legitimacy to mistrusting the FDA's ability to discern public safety from profits, I have come to understand that being truly holistic regarding health means being inclusive of all wellness systems, regardless of their source.  Through several years of complex but not life-threatening health concerns, I have found traditional Chinese medicine as effective for some conditions as Western surgery and pharmaceuticals are for others.  My great aunt's aloe compresses are fantastic for minor to moderate cuts and burns, but high-tech skin grafting they are not.  I'm not saying that natural remedies don't work. But if they worked universally, pharmaceuticals would never have been invented.  The Black Death would not have wiped out an estimated half of medieval Europe's population if nosegays and bloodletting were panaceas.  It occurs to me that perhaps wellness is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor.  If it were, no one would get sick.  Or die.  Ever.

I had somehow convinced myself that receiving modern medical help was less "spiritual," as though I were selling out somehow.  Yet my mother had raised me to have an intelligent spirituality.  When a family acquaintance, whose religion dictated faith healing over medical care, died of an extremely curable form of skin cancer, she told me, "That was just stupid.  How do you think humans got the inspiration to develop medicine, if not from the Divine?"  She taught me not to split my perceptions into black-and white-thinking - that there was room for both/and, not just either/or.  Even my elderly Chinese-born and -trained acupuncturist would send me to my PCP when something was outside of his scope.  He said, "I can detect cancer earlier than many of your physicians, but I can't remove the tumors.  Surgery and emergency medication are what your Western doctors excel at."  I found lasting success when I began to incorporate both traditional and contemporary systems in a comprehensive approach, customized specifically for my body by highly trained and experienced practitioners.  As opposed to the opinionated dude working for minimum wage at the vitamin store, not because he has any knowledge or interest in health but because the schedule's ideal for his stoner snowboarding rock-n-roll lifestyle.

Let me also note the shameless and disrespectful co-opting of indigenous healing practices in which I participated.  My intentions were good, but they were, frankly, ignorant and superficial.  No system of medicine works unless the patient takes the full cure.  So goofing around with a shamanic ceremony here and a tribal talisman there is like taking only half the course of your antibiotics.  Unless the healer you are working with is fully immersed in that approach and has been mentored by elders in that tradition for years (not unlike the way our Western doctors train in medical school and residency for nearly a decade), there is no way to get the full benefit of the treatment.  Many of those healing practices are part of a way of life and a community that cannot be taken out of context without seriously diluting their effectiveness.  Tribal peoples have been so grotesquely exploited in our world that many are fiercely protective of their practices, for damn good reason.  So, unless you have specifically been invited into that community for a rigorous course of healing and participation, you may well be being sold the equivalent of tourist souvenirs by people who themselves may not have the deep understanding and respect for those practices.  Or are laughing all the way to the bank about your whiteass idiocy.

Try telling that to followers of the Church of Transcendent Kombucha, where if you defiantly take a supplement pill instead of foraging your own herbs in a virgin rainforest, you risk excommunication followed by public flogging with dino kale stems.  It never ceases to amaze me how fiercely dogmatic people get about health, as though wellness were a measure of spiritual virtue the way that some churches in history viewed wealth as a sign of being favored by God.  This view is what civil rights advocates refer to as blindness to privilege.  It's easy to believe that there is something inferior about the character or efforts or even the souls of folks who struggle with something with which we ourselves have not had to contend.  In the case of survivors of trauma, particularly that of the compounded early childhood variety, judgy views about wellness can seem especially callous considering the statistically poor health outcomes of that population (more on that later).

Perhaps perfect health is in fact the exclusive privilege of the fortunate few who get to work, as I once did, peacefully from home in our vocation of choice, or no vocation at all, as we enjoy a life of no children or full-time childcare.  Our schedules provide the flexibility to attend 10am yoga classes, followed by an anti-oxidant power smoothie at a designer juice bar, followed by a nap.  We can live reasonably stress-free lives because we call our own shots, make our own schedules and rarely interface with the general public - certainly not poor people, who often have unreliable access to healthcare because they themselves have limited transportation or childcare.

Most importantly, we get street cred from our trustafarian peeps for carrying around a spendy green drink from a trendy cafe at our exclusive yoga studio.  The so-called weird shit I used to get teased about in college - doing sun salutations each morning, drinking milk alternatives like soy and almond - are now upper echelon status symbols.  Trust me, I have been a poser amid this hypocritical brand of snobbery, and it is the contemporary equivalent of wearing Guess? jeans and Giorgio perfume in the '80s to signal that you have arrived.

Nowadays, as a social services professional in school, hospital, corrections and other public health settings, I have much more compassion for the health struggles experienced by much of the world.  After working with children for the past five years, I am now convinced that they as a population have more germ warfare at their fingertips than the biological arsenal of all NATO countries put together.  And there is simply no defense against that hard-wired part of our mammalian brain that melts helplessly into the nurturing protector who picks up their tiny, convulsively crying bodies to soothe and comfort, no matter how much thick, chartreuse snot gurgles in gloppy pools from their cute little button noses.

Last fall, after six days down with a flu that went viral like Gangnam Style in my lungs, I vowed to never spend another dime on Oscillococcum, loquat honey, osha root, frog sphincter or some smelly but beautifully packaged tincture made by a sweet old hippie named Granny Gaia, no matter how much peace and vitality she radiates.  Maybe hard-to-pronounce herbs and kale smoothies are enough to bolster the immune systems of those who don't work with small runny-nosed children, who never - not even once - cover their mouths when they cough, sneeze or vomit.  As for me, I'm going for the hard stuff.

Why I Defected from the White Light

Dear New Age Movement,

We both know this has been a long time coming, but I will say it anyway: I am leaving you. We have had some really good times, and I thank you for all you have taught me. In so many ways, I grew up and found my place in the world with you by my side.

But lately your narcissism and magical thinking have left me feeling empty and exhausted. I feel there is no room for me as I mature and encounter the limitations of my own humanity.  I am certain you will not be alone for long. There are countless sweet young things as eager to worship you as I once was.

Meanwhile, I believe I have found an intelligent spirituality to partner with, one that includes everyday people with the courage to face realities like illness, financial hardship, disabled children and sagging breasts - realities which affirmations and prosperity prayers somehow don't instantly fix. One wish I have for you is that you can find a place in your heart for such people and stop blaming them for their frailties and foibles. Many of them really are great people, even if they don't look as polished as you and your bleached front teeth.

I wish you well as we go our separate ways. Namaste, you charming bastard, you.

Sincerely,

DF

It's not like I actually planned to join the New Age movement.  Not the way someone might plan, for instance, to register as a Democrat or relocate for a job in Des Moines.

What drew me inadvertently into what I call the Crystal Blue Persuasion in the late 1980s was an interest in recovery from mental illness beyond what traditional psychiatry offered at that time.  I was fascinated by approaches like body-centered therapies and acupuncture and yogic breathing for managing moods, reducing symptoms and increasing a sense of well-being for the kind of people who used to get sent away to someplace unspeakably scary or sent home grotesquely tranquilized for, like, a really long time.  People like a great aunt who suicided just before the FDA approved the use of lithium as a psychiatric medication.  People like me, who received a PTSD diagnosis during my senior year in high school in 1988, when many Americans still equivocated that condition with post-Vietnam Syndrome.

Please understand that this was a good 10 years or so before downward dog became a household word or anyone had ever even heard of kale.  Quality-of-life pharmaceuticals like Prozac, which could alleviate symptoms without completely tranquilizing patients, were just barely making their entrance on the treatment scene.  I simply refused to believe that people with mental disorders like PTSD were doomed to a life of either emotional torment or Mother's Little Helper coma.  There just weren't a heck of a lot of treatment options at that time.  Either you were in a hospital, in decades-long analysis, in a Skinner box, or hopelessly unstable with emotional issues that none of the above could alleviate.

I started exploring alternative psychotherapies like Gestalt and Bioenergetics, first as a client and later as a therapist-in-training.  Initially, these approaches grew out of the humanistic psychology model and took hold amid the counterculture of the 1960s.  I thought they were cool and a little rebellious.  There was so much creativity and inspiration going on, and sometimes downright heroics.  People's lives were bravely turning around before my eyes as they confronted their demons with unfathomable pluck.  The methods were a little out there, but still practical and in many cases effective where talk therapy interventions fell short.

I'm not entirely clear on how the practicality of techniques that relaxed and restored the nervous system morphed into an inclination toward metaphysics.  Something to do with Ram Dass and acid, I'm told.  Also, in the absence of today's unprecedented advances in neuroscience and brain scanning technologies, the benefits of these therapies seemed magical.  Even miraculous.  There was no doubt to me that there was a strong spiritual component to this kind of emotional healing.  I had always had mystical proclivities anyway.  In fact, I discovered my own spirituality in those types of somatic processes and continue those practices as my form of private worship to this day.  What I did not find inside myself was the wacky superficial theology that began to spring up around these holistic healing communities like mushrooms after a rain.  I did not drink the Kool-Aid.

Well, maybe a sip.  There was a phase of my own trauma recovery that was so brutal that I began buying into the magical thinking.  I began to believe that my thoughts could control outcomes (and incomes) and that imagining myself in a bubble of white light would exempt me from the human condition.  And I would secretly praise myself when this worked and chastise myself when it didn't.  I lived in what amounted to a spiritual meritocracy whose basic tenants echoed the wish fulfillment fantasies of a seven year old.

Until a dear friend got sick and much of our healing community either blamed her (for taking on bad karma) or blamed themselves (for giving her negative vibes).  This woman was on her death bed.  Her family was planning her funeral.  And our so-called spiritual group was morbidly preoccupied with who was to blame energetically?  I knew then it had to stop.  This was not a mature spirituality.

Yet I also knew there were some grains of truth amid all the hype and how-to gurus.  True, I could no longer emotionally afford to believe that we humans completely "create our own reality" like mythical sorcerers of destiny.  If we were that powerful, no one would ever be poor or sick or homely or heartbroken, ever.  I understood that deep acceptance of life as it is, without judgment, was key to happiness and mental health. But what I did draw from the movement was that how we choose to view reality - what we focus on, what narrative we attribute to events, how we organize ourselves around what happens to us - does impact our experience of life.  And, because of a whole bunch of cool, complicated neurological shit like mirror neurons, the world responds in kind.  (More on that later.)  Try this: wherever you are currently located while reading this, look around for as many red things as you can possibly find.  Red is freakin' everywhere, right?  Now look for green.  Wait, the whole entire world is totally green!  And so on.  But there is no way that you can make red not red, or green anything other than green, without a can of spray paint for which you will have to show some i.d. to purchase at Ace.

Fast forward a few years, and you'll find me a snarky veteran of the experiential workshop.  If, like me, you have been to countless touchy feely psychotherapy trainings, you have no doubt encountered the "What kind of animal is most like your personality and why?" group icebreaker.

And no doubt you've borne witness to such cosmic pearls as "wild gazelle," "winter swan" or "sparkly vampire."

And if you happened to be in that same workshop with me in recent years, you might have heard me say "billy goat - friendly, curious, stubborn, playful, naughty, bold and sometimes ornery just for the fun of it."

Because, Sparkle Pony, no one shits magic dust.