What Is Health?
tl;dr: it's not a diet
It’s holiday USA time, and that means most of us are going to be and / or be around people lamenting their (life-giving) desire for food and lamenting the sizes of their bodies. It’s also winter in this hemisphere, which means my family is sick about every other week. Although we did get covid in June so it’s not even that different from summer. I have been sick for at least three weeks, and yesterday my sinus pain was so intense I could only sit in a dark room and cry at everything included in living on this planet right now.
Today I’m here typing to you, and having the capacity to do so fills me with gratitude.
I still grapple with the false ableist notion that I can whatever-the-fuck-hack my way out of being sick as told to me by this meritocracy bootstrap culture. So here’s a reminder to myself and you that we are interconnected beings and no matter how many vegetables we eat or water we drink we are still inhaling a level of nano-plastics that cannot yet be measured. We are still living with the stress of the cognitive dissonance of living in a country which makes genocides possible if we’re in the US. I don’t say this to be depressing, although it is all absurdly depressing, but to remind you that you can go a little easier on yourself if your body is not speed-slamming the capitalist grind you used to, or feel you should be, or wondering what supplement you should be taking etc etc etc.
And so from time to time (every day?) I need to remind myself what my definition of health is, not what this culture’s definition is. It’s super confusing and easy to forget what I think health is when I’m immersed in a culture in which we consider ourselves not nature at all, but some abhorrent thing outside of nature which is only messing up real nature. When we think we are outside of and messing up nature, we tend to think most of our natural desires are wrong. Like being hungry, and eating, for example.
Anyway, here’s some of my list of what health is, in case it is of use to you. Obvs take what is supportive to your health, and leave the rest.
Health is remembering interconnectivity is contained and lived in one breath. I breathe in the generosity of plants, the harms of industry, plastic, the carbon of stars and dinosaurs, the love in the form of efforts made by other humans to keep more carbon contained where it needs to be, to keep more trees alive. I breathe out my own cosmic participation, offering to plants, engagement.
Health is receiving and offering, in a circle.
Health is remembering my motivation, which comes from a desire to alleviate the suffering of others. When I am asking how I can be of service, not at the expense of myself, but with the inclusion of myself to be of service to as well, I have more vitality, I am healthier.
Health is revisioning my perception of beauty so that I can look at my own face and see the wrinkles, the drooping, the changes in color and size as evidence of life itself, love itself, not in need of injections to paralyze it into a certain position, or plastic injections, or injections of any kind.
Health is standing with my palms open to the truth of impermanence. This body will age and die, I cannot avoid this. And, crucially, politically, spiritually, I don’t want to. I want to participate in the sacred mystery circle of life and death, as all beings do. It’s remembering the story of the velveteen rabbit to aid me in my perception of aging as not a problem to solve, but as a sacred experience of being alive.
It deserves quoting, in addition to the link:
“Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.'
'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.
'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'
'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'
'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
-Marjorie Williams Bianco
Health is reminding myself to delight in the nourishment of the boxed tomato soup and boxed croutons I found to feed myself the only thing that has tasted good in weeks. Instead of (actually, physically) diminishing the nutrients that are contained in this food by stressing about what nutrients are not in it.
Health is dissolving my resistance to caring for my body by reconnecting with my politics. My politics being all life is precious, this body included. Therefore I practice not seeing the care of my body as a burden, or an interruption to my life and work, but instead a crucial part of the meaning and purpose of my life.
Therefore health is turning off my tv to give my body more sleep, when I can muster it.
It’s forgiving myself when I don’t turn off my tv early enough.
Health is drinking water, and absorbing the full nutrients of that water by remembering my awe at all of the people and species which conspired to bring that water to my tap.
Health is eating food and savoring the taste. It’s also giving myself permission to prioritize other things like writing when the energy is behind writing. And returning to the care of my body in a cycle.
Health is not intentional weight loss because weight loss is not inherently healthy. In many ways, if I am focused on intentional weight loss I am not tuning into the needs of my body, I am trying to follow a program which was made for mass consumption based on incomplete / inaccurate science at best (here’s a helpful place to start if you’re unfamiliar with this idea and are curious.) and as a distraction from many crucial problems at worst. In short, there are just so many more things worthy of my time in relation to my own true health / the health of the beings I share this planet with (same thing in the long run).
Health is cultivating my listening skills. It’s becoming a more nuanced, perceptive listener to my own body. And taking action in response to the information received. It’s responding to the moment, not reacting frantically out of fear. (It’s keeping track of my own fear, a lesson made continually clearer through codependents anonymous.) It’s walking when I can walk, and being astounded I can do so. It’s not walking when my hip pain is too intense, and appreciating the things my body can do, and grieving the movement I was attached to, and remembering I’m in a fellowship with every other human on earth who has experienced the limitations of their bodies (or will soon).
Health is doing my little pilates because it feels so good to move in this body, because this body was born to move, and because it feels so good to be devoted to the strength of this body, the resourcing of this body, emotionally, spiritually, physically (same thing).
Health is also turning my attention away from the care of my own body at times, toward the care of others. It’s not a zero sum game, but if I start obsessing about my own health it means I’ve lost the plot of health, because my own story as separate from every other beings’ is not the truth of it.
Health is listening to the people who inspire me about health.
Health is touching plants. Living amongst plants. Health is praying. Health is finding the gratefulness of every condition of my life, finding the reversal of perspective that opens more space.
This list could go on, but let’s pause for now. I’m wondering if you’ll share your ideas of health with me, responding to me here, if you like?
One final thing - most of my understanding of health comes from buddhism and Virgie Tovar and the light at ocean beach and the Blue Mountains on the border of Arizona and New Mexico.
With a lot of love and wishing you all of (y)our health,
Sarah
ps still some astrology reading spots open for December.