Part 1
In Chinese Medicine, which has been addressing the human condition for 5,000 years, it is understood that all illness operates on many levels, just as do we humans. Each organ and system in our bodies gets ill in characteristic ways, and in the process of the working through of the illness, those many levels are also worked. We carry physical, etheric, emotional, mental, and spiritual energies in an interacting arrangement in our vehicle. For instance, the lungs are part of what the Chinese call the Metal Element. What I want to point out here, for the purpose of shedding some light on our present situation on earth, is that the emotion associated with the Metal Element, with the lungs, is grief. The lungs process grief and are made ill by an overloading of grief and an unresolved build-up of grief.
And the corona virus affects the lungs. Sometimes with deadly results.
What can we make of this, without making it up?
Most of the time, we who do healing work look at illness on an individual basis. A person presents themselves to us needing relief, healing, counsel, comfort. But this illness is worldwide, simultaneously affecting (so far) hundreds of thousands of people, with the potential, depending on what we do in the face of it, to affect many millions. There are very smart, dedicated people working tirelessly to come up with medical solutions. And social, communal solutions are being instituted as well. It is interesting to note that the emotional level is being left to individuals to deal with on their own. What is it that is coming up in so many people as we are forced to stop our outward dispersal and avoidance of feelings by stopping our outwardly focused, over-busy lives?
I submit to you that a large portion of the material coming up for many people is grief. It is for me. Grief is something we habitually avoid by restricting and overloading our lungs. This can be done in various ways. We can restrict our breathing, making it shallow. One way this is accomplished is by sitting and staring at a screen for hours, like I’m doing now. We forget to breathe, and our focus is completely outside ourselves, our energy crammed into our heads. We wouldn’t know a feeling except for frustration if it crawled up and bit us. We can also stress our lungs by over breathing, by strenuous exercise that makes the lungs work so hard and fast that they don’t have space to feel. There are then the obvious lung cover-uppers: cigarettes, marijuana, alcohol (processed by the lungs), overeating (pulling energy and blood away from the lungs for constant digestion). We also cover up the grief by giving primacy to anger, exacerbating anxiety, and indulging fear.
What about the griefs, big and small, that you haven’t acknowledged and have run over, pushed aside, and denied? The heartbreaks, the betrayals, the disappointments, the forsaken hopes. Is that stuffed pocket of grief zipped into a corner of your lungs making you more vulnerable to a virus that wants to take up residence in them? The Chinese and Indian doctors I studied with, and my 44 years of doing healing work, would say yes.
But what about collective grief? What about the grief of the millions of refugees, driven from their homes by war and violence and dire poverty? What about the families stuck in horrific conditions at the borders of the United States, of Greece, Turkey, of Africa? What about all the people whose dreams for themselves and their children and their families and friends and communities have failed to be realized? I submit to you, because I know it’s true, that the grief, fear, and despair of those people is not confined to them. It is in the collective lungs, the etheric breath of the world. It flies around this planet, looking for open lungs to inhabit, to be processed, as is the design of the human body and consciousness, for the collective healing of all humanity. Because, although most of us in the so-called first world have designed our systems of living to avoid feeling the reality of our connectivity, that connectivity is nevertheless there, underlying our busyness, shopping, traveling, computing, and addictions. We share an energetic as well as a material atmosphere. And since we have built our social, political, and economic systems to perpetuate the lie of separation, of “those poor people, I’m so glad it’s them and not me”, the truth is being put in our faces, or rather our lungs, by a virus that has brought our systemic distractions to a grinding halt.
The truth is that we all know, because we feel it, sense it, intuit it, what the actual human and earthly conditions are. We lament what is happening without actually allowing ourselves to feel it, because we assume that there is nothing we can do.
The virus is calling it out of all of us. For most people the grief is a feeling that is pushing to be released. For some of us it is and will be real, true, immediate grief of the loss of those who the virus will claim as it sweeps through the planet.
What can we do, even as we are obeying the call to stay in our place and await the passing of the wave? How about, for a start, since you’re inside anyway for a time, sit quietly in your house and breathe consciously for a little while. Turn your phone, your computer, your tv, your mind off for a few minutes. Sit in a place with no external distractions. (For parents of young kids, that might be a closet or your car.) Put your awareness and your focus in the center of your chest, in your heart center. That center encompasses your lungs. By focusing your breath there, you are giving your lungs permission to relax, expand and begin to discharge whatever they are carrying. You are automatically raising the vibrational rate of those organs. And as you breathe, feel. Even cry if you need to. To some of you reading this, the invitation to cry is just an acknowledgment of what you do anyway. To some others, it’s a foreign concept. You’re learning a new language. Be patient but determined. The reward of freedom, health, and the breaking of emotional and energetic isolation is supremely worth the discomfort, strangeness and even embarrassment of learning how to cry.
The biological purpose of grief is to clean the past, to make space for something new to happen. In this case for you personally and for humanity in general, because grief is riding on the wave of the virus that is flowing over the earth. Double healing, just by doing what you were designed to do; breathe. And by breathing deeply and consciously, by clearing the crust of repressed grief from your lungs, you will maximize your lungs’ ability to fight off whatever might want to invade them. Triple benefit.
We have lived our lives, many of us, in desperately maintained expansion. We don’t allow the natural contraction side of the in-and-out, breathing nature of life. Now we have no choice. Our organism has been forced into conditions that allow it to do what it has needed to do for years; contract, go inward.
My strong advice; stop fighting it. Follow this externally mandated forcing of the natural movement inward. It may seem in the middle of the contraction that it’s never going to end, that you will be a squeezed prune forever. You won’t.
Of course, if you actually do what I’m suggesting, your mind will scream at you that you are becoming depressed, or dysfunctional, or miserable, or otherwise useless and hopeless. Not so. In fact, by acknowledging, feeling and allowing for the processing of some grief, you are freeing yourself to see new possibilities; for you and for the whole. As long as we are holding the past in our bodies, which is simply what unprocessed grief is, there is no space for new ideas, feelings, health, and inspirations to come front and center. Allowing the grief to be present doesn’t imply anything but that you are allowing the grief to be present. It’s not a commentary on your worth. Although, because feelings of worthiness are another level of the lungs’ array, by allowing your lungs to breathe, your feelings of self-worth will in fact increase.
Tomorrow- Another level of the mystery