The topic today is more than redundant.
It’s redundant because we all know humans need community to function at all, notwithstanding having a chronic illness. We live in an interdependent universe, and from a whole systems view, our lives rely on EVERYTHING in the Web of Life.
But as human mammals, we need human community in a distinct way. To be a woman also means that we need community in our particularly female way. And female human mammals with chronic illness will need community in a more chronic way. And that chronicity will only be reinforced by lack of community.
We need to belong, we need to be from somewhere, we need to have something to take care of beyond the nuclear family unit, and we need to be taken care of. The functioning of our bodies and the health of our emotional state are both dependent on our tribal sense of connection as much as they are on the quality of the food we eat.
I believe it is the breakdown of the fabric of community life in a corporate cultural landscape that is causing the stresses on people (and on women in particular), that is manifesting in so many as migraine (and in others as other forms of illness).
In order to solve migraine we need to look at its root cause. We don’t just need community because we have migraine, we need community because our migraines are stemming at least in part from the stress of loss of community, or the way our souls suffer when we do not have a tribe to rely on.
Martin Prechtel is a shaman who, as a half-native, half-white youth went down to live with the Tzutujil Maya to discover what indigenous village life was all about. As he explains bleakly in his exquisite book “Secrets of the Talking Jaguar: Memoirs from the Living Heart of a Mayan Village“:
“Since the human body is the world, every individual in the world, regardless of background or race, has an indigenous soul struggling to survive in an increasingly hostile environment created by that individual’s mind, which subscribes to the mores of the machine age. Because of this, a modern person’s body has become a battleground between the rationalist mind and the native soul. As a shaman, I saw this as the cause of a great deal of spiritual and physical illness”
Let me give you an example from my own life – a day of my life that still pains me
My son was 1.5 years old and I was a new mother, still recovering from the c-section operation that catapulted me into total hell at a time when I needed my energy and strength (oh yeah, and HELP) more than ever.
Outwardly, my life was idyllic. My husband and son and I lived in rural Vermont outside a quaint town, up a dirt road that headed towards the vast forest on the mountainside. Clear blue rivers of water tumbled over beautiful stones. Our mountain home on 15 acres was heated by a huge woodstove and we were equipped for the winter with ten cords of wood. My husband would cross-country ski out the backyard under the full moon at night. In many respects, our life was nothing short of epic.
If you are familiar with central Vermont, you’ll know that it is full of incredibly wholesome, progressive people. Although our family was new to the area and we were only starting to get to know people, we were continually impressed with how grounded, friendly, and upbeat all the people who surrounded us were.
Nevertheless, we had no family nearby. And the few friends that we did have were young and very busy taking care of their own small kids. It’s ironic that those who are most acutely aware of the need for community are the ones least resourced to create it.
On this particular day, my husband had been gone on a ten day trip to Ecuador for work. Being in the midst of migraine hell that I was living in at the time, I was nervous about my husband being gone. My active 1.5 year old son needed a lot of attention, as all kids do – 24/7.
On about day four of my husband’s trip, the lack of sleep from breastfeeding and insomnia from chronic migraines combined with having no support to allow me to rest, had begun to really wear me out. I remember driving down the road with my son and having to pull over to puke out the door. A car drove by and a man got out, concerned. He asked me if there was anything he could do to help and I said no, the migraines usually dissipated after vomiting.
My son had become used to this state of affairs. His nervous system is to this day still very easily alarmed.
A day later the migraine reared its head again. I continued to parent as best I could in the midst of intense pain – nursing my son, playing with him, trying to function. Absolutely alone.
At a certain point I remember being so overwhelmed that I screamed at the top of my lungs for help. I screamed into the forest while I was holding my baby. I still blame myself for losing it because I know that this moment has been a defining moment in my son’s life. To a new little being in the world, to have your orientation point – your Mother – be in acute stress is dysregulating. Babies learn to self-regulate within the safety of the Mother, and if Mother does not feel safe (ie, is dysregulated herself), there is nothing to regulate or orient to. This is terrifying for a little one.
I try not to feel guilty about it but this moment in my life as a parent is the one I regret the most.
I realized I needed to get some help so I drove down the nearest driveway and knocked on someone’s door and two women came to my house to help watch my son while I puked my guts out. They stayed for a few hours, and then I went back to my solo parenting until my husband returned.
Without community, the husband becomes everything. It is incredibly stressful on a marriage to be healing from chronic migraine without the help of relatives or community. A husband is not community.
Beth Berry of Revolution From Home sums up the predicament well, even while she is not writing about chronic illness, but rather motherhood:
Since the beginning of time (and until very recently), mothers have borne life’s burdens together. We scrubbed our clothes in the streams while laughing at splashing toddlers and mourning the latest loss of love or life. We wove, sewed, picked, tidied or mended while swapping stories and minding our aging grandmothers. We tended one another’s wounds (both physical and emotional), relied on one another for strength when times were tough, and sought counsel from our community’s wise, experienced and cherished elders.
Village life fostered a sense of safety, inclusivity, purpose, acceptance and importance. These essential elements of thriving were built in.
Now? We’re being forced to create all of that for ourselves within a society that has physically and energetically restructured itself around a whole new set of priorities. It’s a profits before people model that threatens the well-being of nearly everything we mothers are wired to protect.
Friends are also not community – so what is?
After we left Vermont, we moved back to places we had lived before, where we had friends already (Seattle and Portland). Initially I told myself that I now had community, but I began to realize this was not actually the case. I had friends who were strewn about the city, and the congestion in both cities required hours stuck in traffic to get to said friends.
Our local neighbors were all very busy. To get a date with them required weeks of planning ahead. In three years living in Portland, we probably had about five or six spontaneous play dates. Americans are buys people – it is our sickness.
I knew what I was missing because I know what community is. I grew up in an intentional community in the high mountain desert of Southwestern New Mexico. And I don’t say this because my experience gave me high standards. But it did give me a thorough frame of reference for what community is – and what it decidedly is not.
Community consists of those people who you live in walking distance to, who can help one another spontaneously if need be – who live close enough by that someone might actually even notice that you need help without asking them.
More than that, community is a group of people of different ages who make the space and time to hang out because they like each other – or still do even when they don’t!
Communities exist because they have shared spaces in which community members can spontaneously connect, or plan to connect. Community members meet to make decisions together about their shared fate.
Community raise kids together. They eat together on a regular basis.
They help build each other’s houses – or yurts, as the case may be.
They help welcome new members into the community as they are born. They take care of each other when they’re sick. And they even help each other die.
That’s my most basic definition of community.
While my upbringing has probably provided me with some strong contrast and awareness of the differences between village and communal life and the mainstream life of American culture which has largely become dominated by corporate interests, I believe that this human mammal need for community is universal and unavoidable, because it’s how we evolved. Our survival depended on community, and our DNA still craves it.
And I’m sad to say, in my life right now, I don’t have community. But I’m building it. And as I build it, my stress resilience grows. Maybe some day I’ll be rooted enough in community nourishment that I won’t need to take minerals every day. Meanwhile: thank you minerals!
I realize this post may be annoying . . .
After all, it’s tempting, in the Western Medical Paradigm we live under, to think of everything in terms of broken physiological mechanisms. If only healing migraine were only about that: then all we would need is just a pill to fix things, right? Well we all know how well that is going – and the lack of success with the pharmaceutical-based approach is the reason why that paradigm is crumbling before our eyes.
Let it fall. It’s not about more pills.
Pills are not the holy wafer. Just because copper, manganese and zinc are like the Holy Trinity to me, they only are because I really have nothing else to rely on – such as, for example, an auntie who would come by and ask me if she could watch the kids while I take a nap or a walk.
Yes, I do take pills (minerals) daily, but that doesn’t mean that I can for one more moment ignore the reality that to the extent that stress is one root cause of all illness including migraine, the stresses of our lives are being exacerbated by the isolation of high-speed consumerist culture at the expense of all else. And this, just as much if not more than mineral depletion, is keeping us lonely and sick.
I can geek out on minerals and nutrition and physiology and that’s what people like because they want to believe it really all comes down to that – as though fixing migraine would be simpler when broken down in impersonal terms. Actually, I’m starting to see that while all of that is very interesting, the incredibly sophisticated workings of the body and of enzyme processes are no simpler than, or less important than, the most basic form of nourishment that humans absolutely need: to live within a functioning community.
Although mineral balancing alone absolutely can hugely reduce and also eliminate migraines, we miss the deeper transformational power of healing them when we bypass the questions about the real root causes of our stress.
In fact the two approaches (mineral balancing and stress reduction) are in NO way unrelated, becasue when we are continuously stressed, our adrenal glands no longer have the same capacity to secrete the steroids we need to retain vital minerals.
Stress reduction IS mineral balancing, and mineral balancing reduces stress by replacing lost minerals caused by stress.
Let me say it again in a slightly different way: stress reduction reduces the need to replace minerals because they are not as easily lost in the first place when you are regulated and resourced by your environment – in this case, your community.
Community is literally nourishment.
So here are a few starting points
The problem of how our food is less nutritious due to industrial agriculture is a mirror of the problem of the loss of rich community connection – and both are systemic problems caused by monoculture and not so easily solved.
While I don’t have all the answers to how to rehabilitate fragmented communities from corporate culture, I do know that I can’t hold back from writing about this topic. It’s that obvious, that important.
So if we’re stressed because communities have broken apart, then the solution is to heal the community. This is another way of saying: healing yourself and healing the world are synonymous. We are that much a reflection of the world and vice versa.
I’m not saying that in order to heal from migraine you have to heal the whole world first. I’m saying that literally:
- To heal your body and migraines, you need to heal your life, and
- To heal your life, you need to heal your community, and
- If you do that, you will heal the world.
Imagine: if we started to all eat organic or more local food to truly be nourished, it would revitalize food systems; if we created boundaries with our devices and reduced our sense of obligation and pressure in our jobs we would heal our relationships at home; if we slowed down and got grounded we would notice those around us and invest in community; if we admitted how much we needed rest and care and were explicit in knowing we deserved those things we could get them.
We absolutely can choose to reduce our stress. We absolutely can look within and change our priorities. We absolutely can take breaks from our phones and computers. We absolutely can reach out to and care for those around us. We absolutely can reach out for help and be cared for. We absolutely can get off medications.
We CAN get grounded. We CAN bring that chaotic energy down from the head, down from the sky, down from the ideas about everything that needs to be done. We CAN reconnect the fragmented parts of ourselves. We CAN unscramble the scattered energies.
WE CAN TOTALLY HEAL. But it’s unlikely we’ll do it alone.
I will leave Martin Prechtel with the last words:
The secret of village togetherness and happiness had always been the generosity of its people, but the secret to that generosity was village inefficiency and decay. The House of the World, like our village huts and our human bodies, no matter how magnificent, is not built to last very long. Because of this, all life must be regularly renewed. To do this, the villagers come together once a year at least, to work on putting back together somebody’s hut, talking, laughing, feasting, and helping wherever they can in a gradual, graceful way. . .
When an individual becomes ill, something in his World House – Earth Body is being attacked, gnawed away, eroded, shed, burnt, dismembered, or is beginning to fade away for neglect. The shaman assesses the destruction and, after dealing with the cause, begins to rebuild the World House of that person’s body by remembering all its parts back to life – by making it echo off the Original Flowering Earth. . . .
When I divine the Earth Bodies of many people of today, their worlds look like a post-war country, bombed out, dry, flowerless, and tired. The flat devastation wreaked upon these people’s Earth Body needs renewing. Their World House needs reassembling, replastering; it has to be remembered back to life, so that the faraway native souls, their natural indigenous beings, can return to their homes. . .