Healing or Fighting?
The narrative regarding our approach to change has a quality of war. We’re fighting climate change, we’re battling cancer, we’re fighting poverty, we’re fighting crime. Who came up with this? What is the origin of fighting and battling against something? To me the main problem with this is that it artificially separates us from the issue we’re describing and wanting to change for the better. It perpetuates the narrative and culture of separation of the individual from the issue, as something to crush, to disintegrate, to remove.
There’s no place for it in this type of world. What this means is that there isn’t room for acceptance of what is. If we fight something, then by definition it means we don’t accept it. To accept does not mean to simply resign oneself to having something remain unchanged. Quite the opposite, In order to understand how we can go about changing something, we have to first be willing to look at that issue straight in the eyes, and see it for what it is.
If I’m truly curious about how to resolve an issue, I’d ask myself how I could heal it. I don’t mean to fix something either; I mean to heal, in a way that the change is a gradual return to wholeness. Whether we strive to fight versus heal something could produce very different types of outcomes. Following a breast cancer diagnosis in late 2019, many people would reassure me with “You’ll battle it”, or “You’ll fight this”, or “You should do everything you can to kill it all”. Just battle the cancer away. While I knew they had the best of intentions, It made my whole body cringe to hear those words. Why would I want to be in battle with my own body? To me it seemed logical — seeing that the body is a living system made up of a whole slew of other systems (i.e. endocrine, nervous, metabolic, lymphatic), whereby a glitch in one area impacts the entire system of which it is a part, then wouldn’t it make sense that in order to fix what’s out of balance, a healing of that part of the system (or some other affected part) would be required?
I never wanted to merely kill the tumors that I had, and any remaining cancer cells that might have spread in my body. Sure, I opted for surgery to remove the tumor, in addition to radiation to address any potential rogue cancer cells. However, my real goal was to heal the root conditions that allowed cancer to grow in the first place. I wanted to regenerate myself, and create the most optimal conditions in my body, such that it could efficiently and continually balance all the parts of the system to sustain a harmonious balance. These conditions would naturally avoid cancer cells from dividing and multiplying because each part would know and carry out its unique role to the fullest, and checked growth would naturally result. There wouldn’t be a home for cancer, no host for it to live among. The self-healing capacity of my body would be optimized, that not only would I not be prone to disease (whether new or recurring), but my regenerative potential would increase — meaning that my body would give itself more and more life in perpetuity. Of course our systems naturally fluctuate, seeking balance. The body would be able to do the work to continually restore the balance to the best of its ability.
This is no different from how we approach regenerative agriculture or regenerative business, or regenerative fill-in-the-blank. And this is central to our evolution — that we as humans must learn to regenerate life on earth. Not just for ourselves, but for all species and for all life — both animate and inanimate. Life knows how to adapt to changing conditions through collaboration. Look at ants, fungi, bacteria and bamboo as examples. Similarly, if we plan to continue to proliferate and grow as humanity, we have to learn to see and accept the wider system of which we are a whole, and heal on an ecosystem level. There’s nothing to battle.
