It is the Holiday time of year. The weather is cooling off and there is an air of festivities and perhaps a hint of goodwill in the
air. Challenging times demand more of us
just to stay where we are. It is
perhaps, more important than ever to find the spirit of this time of year and
examine the past year in anticipation of the coming one. To begin, we might examine what we are
thankful for. If this last year was as
tough for you as it was for me, you might think there is little to be grateful
for, but you would be wrong.
A bit of perspective goes a long way. There are now seven billion of us on our
planet Earth. 80% of us live in
poverty. That means most of us can’t
take care of our basic needs. 70% are
illiterate. That means that the vast
databases and the accumulated knowledge that lives in the written word is
unavailable to us and our lives. Half of
us suffer from hunger and malnutrition every day. 500 million of us are in prison, being
tortured or close to dying from starvation.
3 billion of us cannot go to our house of worship without risking
assault or death. If you have a full
refrigerator, clothes to wear, a roof over your head and a place to sleep you
are wealthier than 75% of us on this planet.
If you have money in the bank and also some in your wallet, you are
among the 8% of people who do. One
percent of people on the Earth own a computer.
One percent has a college degree.
6% of us own 59% of the wealth and statistically they all come from the
USA. If you fall on the
fortunate side of these numbers you can certainly be grateful. If not, you don’t need me to tell you about
it.
Gratitude isn’t about how much you have, it’s about your
perspective. Being grateful connects you
to something much bigger than yourself.
It changes the way you see everything that unfolds in front of you. We are all interconnected. What we do, the choices we make, the things
we buy, the food we eat, the people we associate with, all make a difference in
the world. Being grateful is a willful
act of perspective. We can be irritated
that things aren’t going the way we planned or we can be grateful that we
simply woke up this morning. Our arms
and legs worked (If they did. If not, we
are grateful for the ones that do!) Our
brains work. We can see and hear. We can move about. We may have others who care about us. We may have family that pulls together every
day. We may have a job that allows us to
pay our bills and to live the life we choose.
We may have love in our life. We
certainly have the love that we can give.
Love’s origin is inside each of us.
And given the reciprocal nature of love, if you give love out daily it
returns in spades. This is one time that
the more you give the more you receive.
This is Love’s secret.
I know from my own journey that living in fear, constantly
worrying about survival, struggling to take and hold onto what you want is a
lonely and unsatisfying life. Fear and
creativity are mutually incompatible.
Even if you have others around you, survival consciousness is a lonely
prison. Everything that occurs is
registered as either more or less for and about you. “What’s in it for me” is the mantra of greed
that has made this planet so inequitable.
On the other hand, there is another perspective. This perspective comes from an appreciation
of the ‘pattern that connects’. You may
be religious, you may not. This isn’t
about theology but it does have a central spiritual component. We are not just ‘meat machines’. We are not just selfish clots of
desires. We are not actually independent
at all. We may imagine that we are
self-sufficient, but no one is. We are
part of an unimaginable pattern bigger than anything our brains can come up
with. Our lives are connected to
everything around us from the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we
eat to the people we interact with. More
than this realization of connection is the realization that we can trust Life. In the upper cervical work I do it is called
the ‘non-interference paradigm’. It
means that we can trust the life inside of us and that our best medicine is
removing any interference to it and trusting that the life that created you,
that made what would one day become you grow into a cell and from there into
trillions of cells (that you are now!).
The life that built and grew your tissues and bones and the nervous
system that connects you to all of life will manifest in the optimal way, if it
can. There is always enough. There is even abundance.
You won’t read this much in the medical literature. It doesn’t get airplay on the news. There is no profit in
self-sustainability. There is nothing to
buy. Our health is our greatest
treasure. Without it, nothing much
matters. With it, everything is
possible. The real true and only healer
is inside each one of us. We are not
here by accident. In fact incredible
things had to occur for you to be walking the planet at this time. We have somehow come to see the world as cold
and cruel and indifferent but it is us who have those qualities, not life.
Once gratitude has washed its way through our hearts and
lives, we find the end of the year to be a moment when we ponder what comes
next? We generally move in the direction
we are headed. What is our
direction? How can we be better
people? As we serve our communities, we
ourselves are served in a manifold of ways that we could never predict. As we are generous with others, generosity is
unleashed in our own lives. As we reject
fear and worry, it is replaced by the peace of a kind word, a selfless act, an
unlikely courtesy. And with these sweet
moments comes the health we have despaired over. The friends we wished we had, perhaps even
the money we desperately need to keep afloat.
Not because we took it from others who don’t have enough for themselves,
but because we allowed it to occur. We
can’t see the big picture. This is what
faith means.
It is in the present moment that this gift comes, and only
in the present moment. If we are lost
lamenting the past or agonizing over an imagined future, we miss the possibility
that is engendered in the moment. Each
moment that we miss is lost forever. But
the good news is that a new one occurs in the present that is equally pregnant
with possibilities and hope and power and satisfaction. This universe appears to be a well of
ever-new creativity. To drink from this
well we must be present now. We can’t
drink the water of yesterday or tomorrow.
Roughly two thousand years ago, a man named Jesus of
Nazareth postulated a doctrine of love.
In a most unreasonable fashion, he told those who listened to him that
they had no need to fear the future or be tortured by the past. He said that if one is met with violence that
one should return love. All these
centuries later we still can’t quite get our heads around that one. We come from many millennia of ‘an eye for an
eye and a tooth for a tooth’. Gandhi,
who many centuries after Jesus, noted that this idea, carried out to the
logical conclusion would leave the world blind and edentulous. He met violence with non-violence as did King
and many others who have talked of returning love for hate, but the idea didn’t
die with them. It never dies because it
springs full formed over and over in each of our hearts. What we do with this gift is up to each one
of us. We make this choice every moment
of our lives.
As useful as our rational mind is, it cannot conceive of the
infinite possibilities that await us each moment. This mind can only compare our memories of
what happened in the past and then give us a ‘best guess’. This guess is laden with our neuroses and our
feelings and of course our ‘rationalizations’.
Our memories are often inaccurate and substantially incomplete. In this way we are blind to our present
because of the baggage from the past.
Healing is always about changing our consciousness. In upper cervical care we remove neurological
interference at the junction between the head and neck and find that when this
Life within us can flow without impediment it sings a much happier song! In the same way that this work can transform
our physical lives, gratitude and love can transform our inner and outer
lives. We are not made to be victims of
our mind. Our minds are instruments we
use in this life. We must be present in
the moment to use and not be used by our minds.
Our choices make our lives, one moment at a time.
Merry Christmas!
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