UN Calls Special Meeting To Discuss World Threat Posed By Microbial Frankenstein Monster...
Last month I pointed out the relatively subtle turn in the seasons, the change from summer to fall. Well, I think it’s fair to say now that summer is over. It’s getting colder and darker. You’re going to start hearing more and more about people “getting sick.” As I talked about in last month’s newsletter article, my close personal experience with the transformational process tells me that getting sick is not just about “catching a bug.” It’s also about the process we go through as our operating system gets upgraded from version summer.2016 to version fall.2016. Here’s the thing, as a culture, we don’t really trust our bodies. And getting sick brings a lot of vulnerability to the surface. If we don’t trust our own bodies and can’t feel that we’re being held in a larger process of healing, we’re likely to push the getting-sick-process and our vulnerability away. If we’re pushing our vulnerable parts away, we’re likely to project fear onto our external world. And this is why we wage war on the “bugs,” as if they’re competing with us for a limited supply of health. As if we could ever secure more health for ourselves that way. That’s not how it works. According to research being done by the National Institutes of Health, there are an estimated 50 trillion cells in the human body and the microbes in our bodies outnumber our human cells 10 to 1. It’s possible that as much as 5 pounds of us are microbes. The world of human inhabiting microbes is called the microbiome and includes the bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses that live inside our bodies. These microbes are responsible for things like digesting our food, regulating our immune system and signaling cell growth and development. We have a deeply symbiotic relationship with the world of microbes. Waging war on them will inevitably not end well.
Click the link to watch a video of run-of-the-mill bacteria mutating into superbugs...
And it might be that we’re just starting to feel the consequences now. Bacteria that have mutated in response to our widespread use of antibiotics, and become resistant, are being called superbugs. According to an NPR segment I was listening to the other day, antibiotic resistant superbugs kill 700,000 people a year. Recently world leaders at the UN General Assembly met to discuss the growing threat posed by these antibiotic resistant superbugs. This is only the fourth time in the UN’s 70-year history that the organization has met to discuss a health issue, which means they think this is a big deal. They’re vowing to slow the spread of global superbugs because of the widespread health and economic (I’m sure it’s the economic part that really got their attention) impacts it could have. Whether it’s world health or world peace or world hunger or world whatever, this is an example of what happens when we collectively ignore our internal experience. It gets externalized and amplified in our external world until it can’t be ignored, until the intensity of external circumstances eventually demands that it be felt internally by each of us. So this "getting sick" season, don't abandon your internal experience. Focus on what you can do to strengthen your internal constitution and your ability to adapt to stress and your environment (ahem, get entrained). Consider whether the antibiotics are really necessary. Think twice about that flu shot.
