We have a lot of healing to do, and we can't do it alone ... it is a task far beyond relying on 'professional healers', is one of the take-home messages in a thought-provoking and really well prepared topic by David Pollard at his website How to Save the World. This was posted on Sunday, June 15th, Father's Day, so it is 'hot off the press', and was shared on Facebook by Lumigrate's resident spirituality expert Beth Patterson, who I noticed is on David's website list in the margin where he thanks the people who provide him with insights and furthers his development.
He's helping people see the 'two camps' with many other subgroups that fall under the headings of "Collapsniks" or "Salvationists". He has a really great graphic in the topic he's written, so please go and see it, and then think about who YOU are and what camp you're in. See where it fits on one side of the line or the other, or perhaps is a bit of both. This is the overview:
A. Deniers - "civilization will last forever"
B. Rapturists - "God will save us"*
C. Globalists, shock doctrine randians - "a hard-nosed elite will save us"*
D. Technotopians, neo-environmentalists, post humanists - "technology/ innovation/ 'progress' will save us"*
E. Integrals, reprogrammers - "a kind elite will arise and save us"
F. Humanists, occupy / metamovements, human consciousness - "together we will save ourselves"*
G. Transition / resilience movement - "preparation in community might save us"*
H. Deep green activists - "smash/undermine civilization now to diminish its damage"
I. Communitarians - "find/rebuild communities / tribes on a scale that works"*
J. Existentialists, dark mountaineers - "know & prepare yourself"
K. Neo-survivalists - "we can preserve some civilization behind a private fortress"
Collapsniks - civilization collapse is inevitable
H, I, J
G and K are on the line / have both collapse/save elements
Salvationists - civilization can/will be reformed and 'saved'
* = "save us" = reform civilization so as to save humans from suffering its collapse
A, B, C, D, E, F
Naturally, I encourage people to go to the source of the information and see how it is presented there (and other things). I call it 'taking the trip to see the sites'. And, in order to give enough of an idea here as to why I'm encouraging such a journey that takes more time (and energy), I provide below some of the highlights for YOUsers of Lumigrate to view. Here's the link to the topic at How to Save the World:
howtosavetheworld.ca/2014/06/15/getting-ready-for-the-fall/
This is what you'll see when you arrive:
"Dave Pollard's chronicle of civilization's collapse, creative works and essays on our culture.
A trail of crumbs, runes and exclamations along my path in search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works." Other highlights:
"I describe myself as a “joyful pessimist” and I try to model that, to show that it’s not oxymoronic. I’m not a very good model, but I’ve learned that not being very good at it can be useful to others as well. My honesty about my failure to be truly present, my paradoxical love and fear of the wild, my moments of self-doubt, I have been told, all have helped others to see that their struggles are not unique, that it’s OK to fail, that “self-improvement” is a fool’s goal."
This topic, titled Getting Ready for the Fall, begins like this:
It seems it is both too early and too late for us to do much to prepare for what James Kunstler calls The Long Emergency — the gradual collapse, over the coming decades, of our global economic/political, energy/resource and ecological/climate systems. These systems are so complex and so interrelated, and the number of variables affecting them so vast, that it’s impossible to predict what crises will hit, where or when. All we know is that we’ve created a perfect storm, and that the systems that comprise our amazing but unsustainable and teetering civilization are soon going to fail on a scale unseen since the last great extinction of life on Earth.
So what, we ‘collapsniks’ are continually asked, should we do?
The answer, of course, depends on your point of view. If you’re a salvationist (a member of the groups on the right side of the chart above) you’re probably not a regular reader here, and you’re probably going to invest in whatever form of salvation you believe will save civilization from collapse. If you’re a transitionist, a deep green activist, a communitarian/neotribalist or an existentialist, or one of the growing number of humanists who are now doubting that a great upswell in globally coordinated human collective effort will be enough to stave off economic collapse, resource exhaustion and runaway climate change, you’re more likely to be working on projects that support those specific worldviews — creating local renewable energy systems, blockading the Tar Sands and its pipeline tentacles, starting an ecovillage, or helping Occupy block foreclosures, for example. If you’re like me, you find yourself moving between these ‘camps’ and thinking about all of these types of projects.
These are all worthy projects, but they each depend on a certain level of faith that the enormous effort, and in some cases risk, entailed in them will be justified by the result. Or they depend on a somewhat perverse but perfectly human and understandable belief that “we can’t just do nothing”.
Are there some “common denominator” projects, I wondered, that all of us leaning to the left side of the chart above can agree upon as worthwhile, and work on together? Projects that will have been worth doing even if we are preposterously wrong about the severity of crises awaiting us in the next ten or twenty or thirty years?
I think there are four such ‘projects’. I’ve written about them on my blog , and in my articles for SHIFT Magazine, and I’m now starting to talk about them at public events because they seem to resonate with a lot of people. This will be my first attempt to explore them in a bit more detail. Here are the four projects:
- Relearning essential skills
- Learning to create and build community
- Living an exemplary, self-aware, purposeful, joyful life as a model for others.
- Healing ourselves and helping to heal others
And then the portion that is about health care, naturally, something I wanted to focus upon, begins like this: (Bolding added by me to help our YOUsers with brain dysfunction, whether just tired or with chronic conditions that affect the brain's abilities for reading over information easily.)
James Truong has written a chapter on “resilient health care” in the aforementioned book Communities That Abide that describes what we as individuals and communities can do to heal ourselves and others, both to supplement what ‘professionals’ do and to replace them when centralized health care infrastructure and systems collapse (caveat: James is not a big fan of alternative medicine, and IMO dismissive of some forms of ‘modern’ psychological suffering). Some of the key means to more self-sufficient, community-based health care are, he suggests:
- A healthy diet, hydration, hygiene, exercise and lifestyle and other illness/accident prevention actions
- Adequate rest, freedom from stress, social interaction, meaningful work and recreation
- Learning to self-diagnose and self-treat non-critical acute (e.g. minor injuries) and chronic conditions
- Democratizing knowledge of how to treat critical acute conditions through self-directed learning, so that every community has broad lay skills in health care (and being aware that the people in our community, people we care about and who care about us, are the most important part of our ‘first aid kit’)
- Shifting to a mindset of taking personal responsibility for and experiential learning about our own health
- Maintaining community toolsets of supplies, medications and equipment that can help us self-treat many illness and accident conditions (and frequent use of their contents, hopefully mostly in non-critical cases, to familiarize us thoroughly with their use)
- Realizing that some acute illness and accident conditions, even those that may seem innocuous, may not practically be treatable at all in a sustainable health care system, and coming to grips with the limits of what any sane health care system can reasonably offer
- The chapter, and another in the same book by another Canadian doctor, Peter Gray, focus principally on physical illness and accidents. What about psychological illness, both acute and chronic?
- Just as many of us are moving (either out of necessity or out of a desire to be less dependent on unsustainable centralized health care systems) to self-managed, alternative and peer- and community-based physical health care models, so we are moving to more peer- and community-based psychological health care. Many in the ‘alternative’ culture have adopted programs like NVC and Co-Counselling to help each other cope with grief, depression, trauma, stress and other emotional challenges. Even skeptics of such programs appreciate that we have a responsibility to be more aware of effective ways of coping with the emotional damage we all, to some extent, suffer from, as part of our self-care practices and as a means of strengthening relationships with others and being of more value and support to them.
- We can benefit from learning to self-monitor, self-diagnose, and self-manage both our physical and emotional health, and support others in our community to do likewise, to wean ourselves off dependence on an increasingly dysfunctional health care system, so that we can manage without it when it is no longer there.
We have a lot of healing to do, and we can’t do it alone. And the task is far beyond depending on ‘professional’ healers.
David Pollard closes the topic (again, please go and see it with all the graphics and full information that he presents) with this:
I wish I’d known about these options when I worked, for the better part of a year, on a large government emergency preparedness project a few years ago. The sentiment then was that we couldn’t depend on citizens to do anything to prepare for or cope with crises like pandemics or earthquakes; citizens, they said, were too preoccupied and disorganized, so governments would have to take charge and tell them what to do. If you’ve ever had to scramble for an emergency first-aid kit, a fire extinguisher, or a back-up generator, you’ll know how well ‘just in case’ tools and processes work if you’re not familiar and practiced using them. I knew then that such top-down projects were doomed to fail, but didn’t know what might work better. Now I do. We have to do it for ourselves.
There is perhaps a fifth type of activity we can all undertake to prepare for crisis and collapse: supporting radical activists who are fighting the systems’ most grievous and dangerous activities — the Tar Sands, fracking, coal extraction, offshore and arctic drilling, pipelines and tankers, nuclear reactors, foreclosures, the plundering of the third world, corporatist corruption, ever-growing inequality, and more — hopefully mitigating the degree of suffering our inevitably collapsing economy will cause, or the rapidity and extent of now-unstoppable runaway climate change. They are doing this work, mostly, without expectation of significant success, undermining these systems even as they crumble. We don’t have to join them on the front lines, or in the prisons and hospitals many of them will spend time in fighting this good fight — we can support and help them by providing them with information, funding, asylum, legal and moral support, and safe harbour. We owe them no less.
Re-skill, build community, exemplify, heal, and help undermine. Those of us who know, and care, about our teetering civilization and what its collapse is leading us to, should at least be able to agree on these common actions. These are things we can do, ways we can be, no matter what we face in the decades ahead.
So now this begs the question: Looking at the Lumigrate YOU! Model -- who are your providers today? And who do YOU think will be surrounding you in the future times? Just some food for though.
We have HOPE for where the future leads us, and that Lumigrate will continue to be a resource for YOUsers in increasing numbers to have the ability to do the things that are outlined in this piece, if things continue to shift the way they have been, and as are brought to light by David Pollan.
As our Lumigrate logo says: "Lighting the Path to Health and Well-Being", as we created it in 2008 (registered in 2009). We're one of many resources that have our grass roots started and planted and we're here to connect YOUsers who are seeking this type of information with resources that assist them for health and well-being as we go through this transition.
The summary of how Lumigrate came to be had to do with my having a surgery at the end of 2006 in what is acclaimed and proclaimed to be an exceptionally good, small, osteopathic hospital where I was living. I ended up with a doubled bill for the room and medical care that came with it because of a medication error that was incromprehensible how it happened and then more unbelievable how the doctor didn't catch it. His apology to me was appropriate and I accepted it. "I've never had to watch over them there before, they were always so good, until that night."
When the experienced RN who had told me they'd figured out the mistake (30 hours later, on the doctors second visit to the facility) and we came up with the plan of action AGAIN brought me the medication that we'd just established was causing the problem and then told me that since she'd dispensed it there was nothing to be done aside from that I 'had to take it' ... she THEN found out that I was a medical provider. Nobody knew that, I'd been too sick to talk beyond the simplest of words or gestures. I knew that the medical system collapse was coming, I'd heard Andrew Weil say it would be within a few years and it was ... a year or so since he'd said that.
I felt that there was a huge need to get the information out to people. I created a live education group with my collaborative psychologist in my allopathic medical building where I provided all the OT services via contract. Many people wanted to come, some were able to and others were not. I knew that online would be a way to reach more people -- it's not nearly as 'ideal' as being in person, but it would allow for getting the BUSIEST people 'in the know', which was the medical providers and the more sophisticated medical consumers. And we've been creating content ever since our arrival on the Internet just prior to my 49th birthday in 2009.
I hope this is a topic which aids YOU and many others in this challenging time. Much of what is brought up here is covered in forum topics at Lumigrate. The mind, body and spirit have had many topics over the years provided in the forums from our various experts. Beth Patterson has enough topics to be represented, for instance and people can then follow out and find her blogsite and delve in more if her work resonates with them. Etc.
Where do I see myself on this list or graphic (at the link provided)? In several places, but I am very proud to have provided a website that is positioned and has been assisting people in the transition. I would have to say that I have been commended for my 'resilience' and that is probably reflected in Lumigrate.
We're all in this together. I say this often. And I also always sign off as you'll see, below: Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better!! ~ Mardy
The link to the source topic at How to Save the World, by David Pollard:
howtosavetheworld.ca/2014/06/15/getting-ready-for-the-fall/
Link to just one of the forums at Lumigrate which has information about the 'mind' aspect, referred to, above: www.lumigrate.com/forums/integrative-medicine-parts-make-whole/therapy-behavioralmental-health/-head/brain-body/mind-p Some Search words on Lumigrate's search bar: forgiveness, tapping, ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience), shame, blame, letting go. Or cruise the long list of forum titles for things about the head/ mind, and heart. We even have a DIY (do it yourself) Australian website relative to mental health therapy. And be sure to catch tips from me about the backlash and alternative thought processes about the conventional 'bible' of mental health, the DSM-V or DSM-5 which came out with much scrutiny and debate, as you can literally find something for every one, literally EVERY person, to label them with a mental health condition. From there a treatment is awaiting, billable to the places that do that sort of thing. The controversy has advanced the 'split' between conventional and non (outside versus inside the box, so to speak) and is simply part of this 'shift'. (And collapse.
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Live and Learn. Learn and Live Better! is my motto. I'm Mardy Ross, and I founded Lumigrate in 2008 after a career as an occupational therapist with a background in health education and environmental research program administration. Today I function as the desk clerk for short questions people have, as well as 'concierge' services offered for those who want a thorough exploration of their health history and direction to resources likely to progress their health according to their goals. Contact Us comes to me, so please do if you have questions or comments. Lumigrate is "Lighting the Path to Health and Well-Being" for increasing numbers of people. Follow us on social networking sites such as:
Twitter: http://twitter.com/lumigrate and Facebook. (There is my personal page and several Lumigrate pages. For those interested in "groovy" local education and networking for those uniquely talented LumiGRATE experts located in my own back yard, "LumiGRATE Groove of the Grand Valley" is a Facebook page to join. (Many who have joined are beyond our area but like to see the Groovy information! We not only have FUN, we are learning about other providers we can be referring patients to and 'wearing a groove' to each other's doors -- or websites/home offices!) By covering some of the things we do, including case examples, it reinforces the concepts at Lumigrate.com as well as making YOU feel that you're part of a community. Which you ARE at Lumigrate!
