Transcript:
Welcome friends to another episode of the Migraine Alchemy Podcast. This is your hostess, Maria Gendron, and today I want to talk about paradoxes in healing.
And I’ve wanted to do this for a while, but you know, healing is paradoxical, and so are paradoxes. It’s paradoxical to talk about paradoxes, and I’m going to explain to you why I’m still going to attempt this, even though it’s difficult to talk about paradoxes. I want to explain why I think it’s relevant to speak about paradoxes here on a podcast devoted to healing migraine, and that is because paradoxes are essentially polarities.
So I think they’re the same thing. And in the course of going through life, and in the course of navigating a disease, we come across and face many different contradictions that seem irreconcilable. That is in fact what a paradox is.
And just to stop being so abstract and get a little more concrete about it, one example of a paradox would be the paradox that we are neither healthy nor sick, but we are simultaneously both healthy and sick at any given time. We may encounter toxins in our environment, we may get viral or bacterial illnesses, we may have chronic diseases, and yet none of that precludes the fact that the body is responding in a healthy way that health is present and health does is elicited by these challenges in our environment. And that even while our body may be encountering those challenges, it is never completely overtaken by them to the extent that we don’t die.
You know, if we have not been killed by our environment or a virus, it’s a testament to the amount of health that is in the system. And yet we often overlook this, we often focus only on the challenges and or start to identify with the disease states that we’re experiencing, and seem to almost completely forget the health and vitality that’s at work in the system that allows us to maintain whatever level of homeostasis we’re able to maintain. And obviously, you know, with a chronic illness like migraine, when that happens, where essentially the homeostasis is threatened from such long-standing impacts from environmental pollution or long-standing compromise to the homeostasis of the system, you know, the health and vitality is definitely compromised.
And yet it’s always at work, it’s always present, right? So that is one paradox, I think, as an example of how we’re, again, we’re never just sick or just healthy. Any person walking the earth who looks on the outside to be completely healthy is experiencing some degree of challenge or compromise. And every single person who identifies as sick also has a very great degree of resiliency and health at work in the system.
So the purpose of this podcast, I think, is to reduce some of the stress that we feel in perhaps our attempts at reconciling paradoxes, which by definition can’t be reconciled. And I’m basing the framework for this conversation on the work of Barry Johnson, who created the polarity thinking framework in MAP, and he’s used this polarity thinking as a way to navigate complexities in relationships, even on the level of intergovernmental or even conflicts between countries, but this could also be applied in families between individuals. But it’s also something that can be applied when we look at our approach to health and healing.
And I think what often happens is in this kind of reductionistic culture where we tend to think in either or terms, we think either we’re healthy or we’re sick, or either I can keep toxic food out of my body or I can’t. We are really setting ourselves up for an impossible task when we think in either or terms, because the reality of life is that we live in paradox. So one paradox as an example in my own life is that I think probably most people can relate to is the paradox that while we can accumulate large amounts of knowledge about various health conditions, or in my case, the properties of certain minerals, it’s true that we can acquire knowledge and we inevitably will and should, but it’s also true that the more we know about something, the more we think we understand, the more we’re an expert in something, the more we don’t know.
So we have to balance this paradox between knowing and not knowing, between the story we have of what our illness is and also the reality that that’s just a story, and hold the paradox of how we identify with and understand an illness, and the reality that there’s more available, the reality that we could change our story, right? So this is a complex topic and it’s difficult to speak about in a clear way, but I think it’s worth doing because again, the trap that we often fall into is this either-or thinking, and as Barry Johnson points out, when you apply either-or thinking, in other words, kind of standard problem-solving to something that is a paradox, you end up in the downside of both sides of the problem. So let’s say, as an example, the paradox of activity and rest. It’s a paradox that it is both true that we do need to be active and we do need to rest.
It’s similar to inhalation and exhalation. No one would ever suggest that we need to decide between which is more important, inhaling or exhaling, right? It’s widely understood and accepted that those two opposing and opposite actions are interdependent. One depends on the other.
So we need both activity and rest. We need to inhale and exhale, and that will never end. That’s one feature of paradoxes, that they never end.
So rather than being problems to solve, paradoxes are energies to manage. But when we apply either-or thinking to something that is actually just a spectrum of qualities, we end up with unnecessary tension and sometimes with polarization. So let’s give an example of a paradox.
So say in a family, a mother feels emotionally obligated, also by way of the way her hormones of estrogen affect her consciousness, where she can’t tune things out, she feels obligated to the functioning of the whole system of the family at the expense of her own autonomy and independence. And yet, at the same time, if she sacrifices her autonomy and her independence and her ability to act as a sovereign individual person, the health and the functioning of the whole family will suffer. This is a perfect example of the paradox between the reality that we are both individuals and we are parts of teams and relationships.
So rather than thinking either, I have to sacrifice my needs as an individual to the whole, or the functioning of the whole has to suffer because I am deciding to prioritize myself. Instead, a more intelligent approach would be to recognize that this dance between individuality and relationship, individuality and our connection to a larger system, such as a family, will never end. That is a tension and a dynamic that’s a moving target that is something that we must learn how to expertly manage if we want to have a healthy life.
It’s not an either or decision that is a final thing that can ever be solved, right? So hopefully, I’ve been able to explain this well enough to kind of demonstrate why understanding paradox is useful. Because if you can think of the number of times where you were aware that in order to heal, you need to be aware of pollutants in your environment while simultaneously understanding that there will never be a point where you can completely eliminate environmental pollutants, right? It would be crazy-making. It would and it does add a lot of stress if you think it’s actually realistic to get rid of all pollutants in order to be healthy or if that is your strategy.
It is both true that you need to be aware of pollutants in the environment and try to avoid them while at the same time realizing that because they exist, you will have to learn how to integrate them. In other words, to not be freaked out and not to add extra undue stress to your body by being, by knowing that you can never get rid of those pollutants while at the same time being proactive to not unnecessarily overburden your body with them, right? Does that make sense? So I’m just trying to articulate this and point this out because I think that it’s one of the things that’s vexing about life, but especially when you have a chronic illness, it can be extraordinarily challenging to know how to navigate some of the decisions and how to make a plan and how to proceed when faced with paradoxes that are this complex and confusing, right? So I want to go through just a few of the paradoxes beyond the ones I’ve already mentioned that I think illustrate just how many paradoxes we’re living within and this of course is just a small sampling, but I just want to talk about a few of the ones that I think are most relevant to the challenge of resolving a chronic health condition and I already mentioned a few that the paradox of health and sickness exists simultaneously, that pollution and purity can exist simultaneously, the inhalation and exhalation can exist, you know, as an interdependent whole. It’s what the Hermetic, the principle of polarity and that is that essentially what a polarity is, is it’s two things that seem irreconcilable and because they’re opposites but which are actually interdependent and they’re interdependent because the two poles of the polarity represent two ends of a spectrum.
So one example of this to make it seem less paradoxical is the seeming opposite of hot and cold which are both just a spectrum of temperature, right? So there’s many gradations and variations of temperature between the extremes of hot and cold and hot and cold are simply two ends of the pole of the energy of temperature, right? So what are some of the other paradoxes that we encounter in healing? I think one of the biggest ones is activity and rest. So if you think because our culture is focused more in a masculine mode of doing at the expense of being in the feminine and receptivity, if you think that you have to be active all the time, you are going to probably end up with a health condition like migraine that will force you to rest. That’s a perfect example of just how interdependent activity and rest is.
If you go too far in the extreme of any side of the pole, you will be forced to end up on the other side of the pole and rather than being forced to do so with a chronic illness, we can take the level of sickness and disease as an actual siren call and wake-up call from our body to indicate to us that we’ve gotten out of balance with the basic polarities in life and that we are not managing those polarities well, that we need to learn how to manage them, right? So in the case of if we have ended up too far in any one extreme, not only will life probably check us, but we could proactively notice when we’ve gotten out of balance and actually actively seek to embody the energy from the opposite pole and even build it into our life so that we’re managing the polarity rather than reacting to the extremes. So when we end up in any one extreme of a polarity, we end up in polarization, right? So in the case of activity and rest, a proactive approach to healing would be the recognition and the awareness that we do too much, that we’re too driven, that we’re too in our doing masculine and that in order to heal, we need to rest more, not just because our body is forcing us to through a migraine, but because we recognize that we cannot nourish or restore ourselves without rest. And I know, unfortunately, that a lot of people with migraine, by the time they realize this, they’re not even physically able to rest anymore because their system is so out of balance and out of homeostasis that they can’t even sleep or rest.
So we don’t want to let things get to that extreme. And so a health condition like migraine is inviting us to balance the masculine and feminine, to balance doing and being, and to balance activity and rest. And I would like to say that rest is not just laying in bed.
I mean, many people with migraine know that if they’re lying in bed, being tortured while everyone else thinks they’re resting, that’s not rest, right? Rest can be any kind of activity or any kind of experience that is rejuvenating, even if it’s something like dancing or doing something that other people, you know, would normally see as active. If it’s rejuvenating and nourishing to the system, it could be considered restful. But we are deeply out of balance with our receptivity and in the same way that our body loses homeostasis between anabolic and catabolic or the building up and the breaking down functions of the body, we also have gotten very out of balance as a culture between many of these polarities.
So another example would be the paradox of trying to choose between short-term needs and long-term needs. So taking an abortive medication like an Imitrex so as to meet the short-term need of facing the day and all the responsibilities of the day is one end of the spectrum of the paradox that we both need to deal with short-term needs while also keeping long-term needs in mind. So if we’re using a medication that works on the short term at the expense of the long term, we’re actually deepening the problem.
We need to find short-term solutions to pain, which I do offer in my coursework short-term natural solutions to migraine that allow us to abort a migraine in the short term without compromising the long-term needs that we have to keep our body healthy. If we’re using a medication that aborts a migraine at the expense of our whole system, we’re trading out a short-term gain for a long-term problem. So as we take anything to stop a migraine, we want to be doing so without compromising our longer-term need to stay in homeostasis and to prevent migraine, right? That would just be one example in that area.
So another set of paradoxes, we’ve gone through health and sickness, pollution and purity, inhalation and exhalation, activity and rest, doing and being masculine and feminine, short-term needs and long-term needs. But there’s also this paradox between objective knowing and subjective knowing. And I see this a lot in my coaching clients that, you know, most of us when we’ve tried to solve health problems have been subject to the mainstream medical model, which comes from a very reductionistic worldview, one that seeks objectivity and seeks objective reality through analysis, which of course there’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s only one side of a polarity of knowledge, right? So of ways of knowing, if the energy that we’re looking at is ways of knowing, objective reality and science and analyzing is only one side of a spectrum.
And if we really want to honor the polarity, we would need to also recognize that subjective experience, our personal perceptions, which is not objective reality. And, you know, the way that we perceive our illness and our life has as big of an effect on our body as the amount of minerals or chemicals that we’re exposed to, right? And the role of our intuition and our feeling sense and our somatic wisdom is just as valid a form of data as any kind of analytical objective data that we may look at in the course of trying to heal. So essentially looking at paradox, which is basically looking at two ends of a side of a spectrum is a much more integrated way to approach life because it’s using both and thinking instead of either or thinking.
With polarity thinking, we’re not saying either you can analyze lab results at the expense of your intuition or feeling. We’re saying, yes, analyze lab results, but also utilize your intuition and your feeling. And I think that that’s really elegant, even though it seems more complex to think in polarity terms, it’s actually not more complex because polarities are real.
They exist in the universe and what becomes complex is when we use either or thinking to, and deny the existence of polarities and therefore we, we, we miss the opportunity to manage them. So how do we manage polarities? The way to do it is we have to have dual thinking. So, and awareness.
So we need to realize whenever we’re applying either or thinking to something that’s actually a polarity. And instead just simply try to see how far have we gone on one side of a polarity and one extreme at the expense of its opposite. So as an example, the polarity of boundaries and surrender or autonomy and belonging, if we have surrendered our autonomy in our role at the expense of having the boundaries that would allow us to have the energy to show up in our life, then we’re doing a disservice to ourself in that situation, which is very common among mothers.
We would notice that we’ve done some self abandonment and, and surrendered our, our autonomy and our boundaries. And see that on the spectrum between boundaries and surrender, we have ended up more on the pole of surrender at the expense of boundaries. And we would use the dual perspective of seeing how we are, how far we have gone in one direction at the expense of the other.
And we would correct, in other words, bring more homeostasis to our life by way of being willing to develop boundaries while recognizing that that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a time when we’re, when we won’t need to surrender or sacrifice ourself to a greater whole. Right. So I think the key is just to get out of either or thinking.
And I think most women are pretty good at this. We’re more integrative in our perspectives than men often. And so it really just takes a lot of awareness and a commitment to either or thinking.
So if, for example, you recognize that, okay, here’s another polarity. I’m trying to eat a low histamine diet. That’s because my body has become so full of histamine that I’m too far on that side of the pole and I need to balance out inflammation with anti-inflammatory foods.
Right. But say you simply have the awareness that that week you’re close to your period and you have gone to a bunch of potlucks or you have been in a number of situations where you didn’t eat as low histamine as you would like. You would be aware that you had done that and you would choose to then try to balance that out by eating more low histamine foods and alkalizing cooling foods to balance out the polarity without beating yourself up for eating some high histamine foods.
Because after all, it’s impossible to stay on one side of the polarity. It would be impossible to be such a purist and to be so self-controlled that you would never let any high histamine foods get in. Right.
So the beauty of what polarity thinking offers is it helps us realize that we’re just trying to balance homeostasis and that’s kind of a moving target. And if we have a dual perspective where we recognize that we will get some high histamine foods, you know, despite our best intentions and so we don’t beat ourselves up when that happens, but that we’re just constantly trying to be aware of kind of what our threshold is and what we need to do to kind of balance out the scales and act in such a way that we’re balancing out the polarity of whatever extreme direction we’ve maybe gone into. And yet in our attempt to balance out, we shouldn’t go too far in the opposite extreme and end up in the same situation only on the opposite side.
Right. So I think a lot of times when people are trying to make change in their life, when it comes to their habits and their lifestyle, maybe they’ve been in one extreme, let’s say a lethargy and lack of activity. And so they set up a plan to be super, super proactive and perhaps in a way that’s a little extreme or sets themselves up for failure because it’s going so far in the opposite direction.
I think that one feature of knowing how to manage polarity as well is the ability to do things in moderation. So that means that sometimes if we’ve ended up too far in one extreme, the solution isn’t to go to the opposite extreme, but simply to do the thing that we’re doing in an extreme way, in a less extreme way, in a more moderate way, in a more mature way. Right.
And yet overall, I don’t know as far as where you fall in the spectrum of these paradoxical and these polarities, which I think paradoxes and polarities are basically the same thing. But I think generally I can make the observation from years of working with people with migraine and observing myself as someone who has the type of personality of a migraine person, is that people with migraine tend to have an enormous amount of internal sense of pressure that they apply to themselves to do and to act and they feel overly responsible and overly beholden to those outside themselves and mothers especially fall into this trap. So while your area of balancing out for homeostasis may be different, overall, I think that culturally we can see that most of us are sick because on the level of the paradox between active and receptive, we are being too active and not receptive enough on the level of analyzing and trying to solve problems.
We’re too stuck in either or thinking we don’t do enough both and thinking we don’t listen to our intuition or our instinct enough. So getting healthy and finding homeostasis involves more receptivity, more rest, more intuition and feeling. Also for women and mothers, we tend to have very poor boundaries.
So to balance the scales, we need to not give up our dedication to our families and to the whole system, but to become a little less extreme in that way and to start to develop more boundaries and more autonomy for ourselves. We need to, when it comes to the level of inhalation and exhalation, most of us inhale and hold our breath. We need to commit to more exercise, commit to inhaling and exhaling at a more even tempo that we could call that reciprocal breathing or there’s different breathing techniques that I go over in the Repattern Migraine coursework.
When we breathe in an imbalanced way at the expense of exhalation, it actually affects the pH of our body and the CO2 and oxygen balance in our body. So that’s like a really tangible way that something that is a natural physiological thing like inhalation and exhalation, we can even get out of balance with that and that can contribute to migraines, right? So most of us are stuck on the inhalation at the expense of the exhalation, exhalation of letting go, right? Most of us are, if we’ve gotten really sick and get triggered by food a lot, end up more on the spectrum of becoming hyper-pure. This would be orthorexia, where we become hyper-paranoid about different foods and the way they may trigger or affect us, and we need to get better at integrating different types of food and integrating the fact that there’s pollution, but not going so far to the other extreme where we’re literally eating whatever, right? And I think most of us have gotten too far in the extreme of over-identifying with our sickness at the expense of identifying with and giving appreciation for the health in the system, which is always at work.
So that doesn’t mean we need to ignore our sickness. It doesn’t mean we need to go in the opposite extreme of being in denial about the sickness, but we need to also take the time to thank our body for how well it is working under the conditions, right?
So that’s just my riff on that topic of navigating paradox in healing. I hope that this seemed relevant to you and didn’t seem too abstract and seemed, I hope that I gave some concrete examples of why this is important.
And I think the point is, is that as an organism, a human animal trying to survive in an environment, and there’s another polarity or paradox right there. The paradox between human animal and human spirit – that we tend to over focus on surviving and the fight-flight response at the expense perhaps of spiritual centering and spiritual development that would allow us to have the perspective and the resiliency to be able to face life’s challenges in a more centered and calm way.
So I understand that it’s not that easy to find balance, that it’s not always easy to navigate paradoxes. But I do think it’s worth doing. And really, it just comes down to more balance. We live in a very extreme culture, a culture of extremes, and one extreme leads to its opposite.
And so I think that that’s part of what health is: developing the maturity to recognize that things are not mutually exclusive, we need to integrate to heal, integrate opposites, and be more moderate and more mindful and aware of where we are at, less unsconscious and just more aware of what we need to do to keep our life in balance so we can manage these polarities.
Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next episode.
