Health Beyond Civilization

So now what? How do we start the process of adjusting to a wider world of climatic forces? In this post I outline a way to orient yourself toward that, which I’m currently using myself. It’s an experiment in progress.

Opening that door and stepping out into the elements is, in many ways, like a car shifting into a higher gear. Things move faster, and more energy is being moved through the system — both the environment, and your own physiology. So it takes a different level of dynamic equilibrium to maintain your balance in the midst of these increased forces.

To achieve equilibrium under these circumstances, two things are required: Available energy, and the integrity of the organism.

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When it comes to wilderness skills, or even just being outdoors, some things are just assumed. If you go hiking, mountaineering, or camping; if you sign up for a course on survival skills or foraging wild herbs; if you go tracking deer or wolves; then there’s a good chance you’ll get dirty, cold, wet, and tired. It kind of comes with the territory — it’s a no-brainer. It’s the first step that’s so obvious that no one ever talks about it: In order to enjoy and learn from the wild, you have to take a step outside.

But because it’s so obvious, that transition from indoor to outdoor becomes overlooked as a category of study in and of itself. Often this doesn’t matter for people who are predisposed to enjoy those activities; they whiz right through and are playing in the dirt before you can sneeze.

For the rest of us, though, it can be of some value to walk through that step over the threshold a bit more carefully. If we’re stepping from a closed space to an open environment, and especially if we’re used to spending 90% of our time in the closed space, then there are many things that influence us that we’re not used to, from physical sensations of weather and dirt to mental changes like the fact that there’s just more space.

In this post I’ll be examining the effects of weather and climate on that first step over the threshold.

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Vision problems are epidemic in our society. Nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism, as well as more serious disorders like cataracts and glaucoma, they’re all part of the picture. Socially, vision problems have gone from signs of weakness to being so widespread as to be perfectly acceptable, even normal. Not too long ago, it was still out of fashion to wear glasses; now I hear there are even people with good vision who wear glasses for the look!

There are a lot of theories on the causes of this vision epidemic; certainly poor diet, stress, technology, industry, etc. can’t help. But in the end, like many other things that aren’t urgent enough for a busy person to worry about, we take the easy way out and get glasses or contact lenses, or some of the more cutting-edge technologies like lasik.

But there are alternatives out there, and many of them have their origins with a man named William Horatio Bates.

If you’re interested in natural vision improvement, you’ve probably heard of Dr. Bates. He was an ophthalmologist in the early part of the twentieth century who broke with the mainstream idea (which is, to my understanding, still mainstream) that vision, once worsened, cannot improve. The mainstream “cure” for vision problems was, inevitably, corrective lenses; but to him, this made little sense. It was like telling a person with a broken arm that they must stay in a cast for the rest of their life. So he set out to discover if it were possible to restore perfect eyesight.

To make a long story short, he did indeed find that this was possible. For this he was essentially excommunicated from the medical community.

I suppose this has always been the story of mavericks who devise better ways of doing things, but I’m always surprised by attacks on this sort of thing because it is perfectly verifiable in a scientific way.

The essence of the Bates Method and its successors is actually quite simple:

Relax.

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The Chinese, among others, have developed a philosophical framework to understand health based on the notion of qi, or vital energy. It can constitute a very useful set of metaphors to use in organizing the cultivation of one’s own health.

According to the Chinese, the three most basic types of energy related to physiology, termed the “Three Treasures,” are:

• Jing, or innate essence
• Qi, or vital energy
• Shen, or mental energy

Jing can be considered potential energy. It’s the “battery charge” we come into the world with, the genetic and inherited and ancestral influences. Some people are born with a lot of jing and they don’t have to do much to be or stay healthy; they can eat anything and do anything and still be running circles around you. Other people are born with very little jing, and they are sick from day one, and maybe even have some disabilities.

Potential energy is useless, though, unless it’s converted into something usable. In physics it’s kinetic energy; in Chinese medicine it’s qi. This is all of the things for which we use up the charge on our batteries: All of our basic physiological functions, like eating and digesting and moving around; all of our ways of interacting with the world, like walking and talking. Pretty much everything, really, is based on the flow of qi.

Finally, even kinetic energy is useless unless there’s something to direct its movement and make it purposeful. That’s the shen, the mind and the emotions.

Though placed in distinct categories, functionally they all flow into each other. Pushing yourself until your qi is depleted and you’re really tired will affect your ability to function mentally and make you irritable and moody. Thinking and worrying too much will, likewise, affect your physical energy, maybe disrupt your digestion.

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Having established a certain degree of grounding in our experience of our own health, it’s worth it to start exploring goals.

I’d like to set the bar sky-high by looking at a few accounts of, for lack of a better term, superhuman feats.

Ernest Thompson Seton, in Gospel of the Redman, wrote,

The most famous runner of ancient Greece was Pheidippides, whose record run from Athens to Sparta was 140 miles in 36 hours. Among our Indians, such a feat would have been considered very second-rate. In 1882, at Fort Ellice, I saw a young Cree who, on foot, had just brought in despatches from Fort Qu’Appelle (125 miles away) in 25 hours. It created almost no comment. I heard little from the traders but cool remarks like, “A good boy”, “pretty good run”. It was obviously a very usual exploit, among Indians.

The two Indian runners, Thomas Zafiro and Leonicio San Miguel, ran 62 1/2 miles, i.e. from Pachuca to Mexico City, in 9 hours, 37 minutes, November 8, 1926, according to the El Paso Times, February 14, 1932. This was 9 1/4 minutes to the mile.

The Zunis have a race called, “Kicked Stick.” In this, the contestants each kick a stick before them as they run. Dr. F. W. Hodge tells me that there is a record of 20 miles covered in 2 hours by one of the kickers.

The Tarahumare mail carrier runs 70 miles a day, every day in the week, carrying a heavy mailbag, and he doesn’t know that he is doing an exploit. In addition, we are told: “The Tarahumare mail carrier from Chihuahua to Batopiles, Mexico, runs regularly more than 500 miles a week; a Hopi messenger has been known to run 120 miles in 15 hours.”

The Arizona Indians are known to run down deer by sheer endurance, and every student of Southwestern history will remember that Coronado’s mounted men were unable to overtake the natives when in the hill country, such was their speed and activity on foot.

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From SurvivalBlog, here are a few letters discussing emergency medical care in a post-civilized environment, with a lot of good ideas. They tend to have more of a doomsday and militant perspective over there than I feel familiar or comfortable with, but who’s to say that’s not warranted in a post-civilized situation.

The original letter:

I have been a reader of SurvivalBlog for at least a year now, and I feel it’s time to get involved. During this time I have been adding to my preps, building a library, and re-certifying my medical credentials. I have also done a lot of reading, getting many opinions concerning the future. I found one thing that I am at a loss for, and that is the subject of this letter.

In all my medical re-certification courses and also in the medical library that I have put together, I have these questions: If society does go down the dumper and all social services and amenities cease, along with gasoline and diesel fuel for transport, how do we get injured or seriously ill individuals to proper medical facilities? Who would be there to receive them, and what kind of treatment could we except once this patient arrives? None of my training programs nor the books that I have in my library address these questions. They all state: “Transport the patient to the nearest medical facility for treatment.” So, what do we do?

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The importance of rooting in the body can’t be understated. All of the methods I’ve described to establish a baseline of body and health awareness are not only to gather data, but to acquaint one’s own consciousness with the lived experience of inhabiting and using a body and being a physically alive being in the corporeal world. For civilized people this is a simple and fundamental thing that’s nevertheless very easily overlooked. The ease with which many of us get basic physical survival needs met, and the ease with which we can dissociate into altered states thanks to the abundance of music, television, movies, etc. in our lives, tends to enhance the illusion that we are, physically, just machines whose functioning needs to be maintained. But the closer we get to our biological, animal selves, the more it expands into a living complexity.

Living as we do in such ease, surrounded by the marvels of modern technology sustaining our lives, it can seem like chaos to descend into corporeality. It can feel unfamiliar, crazy, like there are too many details to manage, and that it would be so much easier just to let those details be, and return to the realm of the gods where food comes from boxes and love from a television screen. In such apparent chaos, more refined methods and strategies have to be used in order to maintain balance in our descent into embodiment.

In fact, often the methods and strategies that work best are those that take advantage of the natural things the body does to maintain balance—the cycles, rhythms, actions and responses that occur naturally in the body.

The simplest and most obvious of these, and therefore one of the most emphasized in older practices of yoga and qigong, is the breath.

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This essay has been floating around for awhile, but it seems very apropos to this blog so I think it’s appropriate to repost it here.

This is Anarcho-Herbalism

Thoughts On Health and Healing For the Revolution
by Laurel Luddite (used by permission of the author)

My medicine chest is a council of bioregions, with representatives gathered together as I make my way around the world west of the Rocky Mountains. The Coptis root was picked out of the churned-up scar left by an excavator, at the retreating edge of the Idaho wilderness. The tiny amount of Pipsissewa leaves came from an ancient grove above the Klamath River just feet away from where the District Ranger sat on a stump talking about his plans to cut it all down. I am drying Nettles from the California creek where salmon die in the silt left after a century of industrial logging.

Every jar holds a story (often a ghost story of dying ecosystems and places gone forever). I am honored to have known the plants in their home places and to have studied their uses as medicine. But for people not lucky enough to roam throughout the wilds, purchased herbal preparations such as tinctures may be the link back to this sort of healing.

Like so much in this consumerist society, it is easy to ignore the connections between a bottle on a shelf in some store and a living, growing plant out in the world somewhere. It can be hard to know if the plant grows a mile away or on another continent. There is much to be said for reconnecting, for educating ourselves about the herbs we use and gathering our own medicine when we can. That’s how we will be able to build a whole new system of healing ñ one that can support our movement away from the corporate power structure that medicine has become.

The development of a new medical system, or the recovery of ancient models, will be another link in our safety net when industrialism fails. It will keep us alive and kicking out windows now in the system’s last days when so many people have no access to industrial medicine. And it will reestablish our connection to the real medicine that is the Earth.

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I recently saw a patient who was so healthy he was almost intimidating. He was young, tall, handsome, and athletic. He literally had no complaints; said he woke up every morning feeling great, could run a mile without being winded, took about 2-3 breaths per minute, could do everything he wanted to do. He was just in for the experience of acupuncture, and get a one-time tune-up. So when I put my fingers on his radial artery, I expected to feel an abnormally healthy pulse.

Instead, I felt distinct signs that this person had been depleting himself, burning the candle at both ends, so to speak. Sure, he had a lot of energy, and that showed in the pulse; but there were also indications of a significant long-term drain, consistent with chronic overwork or overexertion.

This, then, begs the question: What is the difference between health and fitness?

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We live immersed in an invisible environment of ideas, concepts, and beliefs that limit and shape the way we think, feel, and act about ourselves and each other. Though unseen, they shape and guide and limit us on the deepest level. But because they reach so deep, we think they describe reality itself, and we don’t question our assumptions about things.

Medicine is not excluded from this. It would be nice if it were above the fray, pure of culture, absolute and simple. But the truth is that it’s deeply rooted in culture, that it both reflects and expresses who we see ourselves to be. We can see it in our everyday language: “There’s a bug going around.” “She’s getting on my nerves.” “I can’t wrap my brain around it.” “He’s all raging hormones.” “It must be in his DNA.” “She’s trying to watch her carbs.”

Or we talk about our bodies as machines: “Men are hard-wired to have multiple sexual partners.” “She’s got a few screws loose.”

Or we talk about disease in terms of war. The skin is the “first line of defense.” Then there are various white blood cells that “attack” and “destroy” invaders.

What do these examples tell us?

They tell us we are a biology first and a psychology second (if at all).

They tell us that we are at war, and that our foes are tiny things we can’t see.

Or, they tell us that the tiny things we can’t see that make up our body can go out of whack and there’s not much we can do about it.

They tell us that our bodies are machines and can be understood only by highly trained experts using expensive technology and prescribing strong drugs or invasive surgeries.

They tell us that there is no whole, only parts. And all of those parts can and will break down, with no greater purpose or meaning to them at all.

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