Being really alive is something much different than just not being dead. What are the qualities of a well lived life? How does one construct a life that is worth dying for? I take a walk through a nostalgic childhood and consider the current state of the world and what we value, particularly in the current medical climate. There is no arguing that we are in a state of transition, but in which direction will that shift lead us? Moving forward, how do we design a healthcare system that reveres life more than the mere absence of death? Patient empowered medicine is a consumer driven model that will have to happen at a grassroots level in order for our healthcare system to not only be financially solvent in the long haul, but it will be a movement that shifts the balance from surviving to thriving and places more value on living well rather than just not being dead.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Jen Mayo:
What does it mean to be alive… like really alive vs just not being dead?
As I’m recording this on a crisp February morning with about 6 inches of snow on the ground outside, I hear birds singing reminding me that this season will pass and sunnier day are around the corner. At the same time, I feel like even this more dormant season is a time to honor and an opportunity to reflect on the past year and glean from it what we’d like to build upon moving forward.
As such, the current state of the world has had me pondering the notion of what it means to be really alive, and what it means to be human.
I’m not going to go into the politics of what’s happening in the world right now, but I think no matter where your opinion falls on matters, we’ve all been figuratively and literally sent to our rooms to think about some things, including what our individual roles are in the health of the organism we inhabit, Earth, and how we care for our own vessels reflects the collective health of the Earth as a whole. What does a vibrant Earth look like? What does a healthy body look like?
What comes to mind when you think of beauty on Earth? A concrete jungle or something more pristine and undisturbed by man’s interjections. When I think of beauty, visions of nature come to mind. I see lush, vibrant, hydrated landscapes of greens, and pinks, and oranges, and blues. I hear sounds of birds, and wind, and water. I feel Earth beneath my feet and the breeze against my skin. I smell familiar scents that register with olfactory centers in my brain that reminisce simpler times playing outside as a child before every man, woman, and child owned handheld computers and there was a flat panel television in every room of the house.
I’m probably aging myself here, but I grew up on a small sporting lake in rural Michigan. Sure we watched some television, back in the days when you had to reference the TV guide to find out what time Family Ties and the Facts of Life would be on and you had to sit down and watch it when it aired, there was no on demand or digital recording. My family was fortunate enough to own a gaming system called Colecovision which made Pong and Atari seem like Babylonian relics. My best friend lived four doors down and we were inseparable. We rarely wore shoes and spent much of our days dancing in the grass, making up songs, drawing, swimming in the lake, catching turtles, frogs, and I had system for using an old window screen to catch minnows and small catfish which I would, of course, release when I was done playing with them. Once I even devised a box propped by a stick with a long string attached to it to lure ducks with bread. I never caught one, but I still long for connection to an innocent imagination that would have concocted such a plan. It’s not that we never watched television or tuned out with mindless games, but they weren’t addictive fixtures in our lives. They were the occasional indulgence not the overconsuming , dopamine addiction that they are now.
So I’d like to go over the what the difference between not being dead and being alive is. So when I think of not being dead, I think of vital signs. So you have a heartbeat. You have blood pressure. Your body is over 95 degrees Fahrenheit. And you’re breathing… that’s pretty much it.
When I think of being alive, though, I think more in terms of the quality of those vital signs among other factors. So you have an optimal heart rate and heart rate variability. You have blood pressure in an optimal range. Your body temperature is pretty close to 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit or 37 degrees Celsius most of the time. You’re able to take full regular breaths that thoroughly oxygenate every tissue in your body. Your pathways of elimination work optimally to remove toxins from your body. Your digestive system works optimally to deliver nutrients to cells for proper functioning. The energy in your body flows in an unrestricted way that allows all systems to work harmoniously together. Your mind a body interface flawlessly to keep you in tune with both rational thought and connected to your intuition. You’re able to stay connected to your emotions and have an awareness of how they feel in your body.
You’ll notice my use of the word “optimal” rather than “normal”. What we’ve come to accept as normal in our healthcare culture isn’t normal at all. We’ve come to view functioning of the body and mind and their integration with each other as dysfunctional by default. The psychological priming by expectation has had enormous consequences for our physical and mental health.
Most people are familiar with the term, the “placebo effect”. This is where an inert substance is given to a patient with the expectation that it has active pharmacological agents in it intended to alleviate whatever their ailment is. In the case of an effective placebo, the inert substance provides the same relief of symptoms as the active substance it’s being tested agains. Oftentimes, placebos perform just as well as their pharmacological counterparts, and yet this phenomenon is usually dismissed in conventional circles. While the exact actions of the placebo effect aren’t known, it is presumed that its actions are psychogenic and produce measurable changes in the body. Essentially, the power of belief, of the mind-body connection, is able to alter internal chemistry. That is, the body has it’s own innate intelligence connected to your mind and an internal pharmacy, and when your mind orders up a painkiller, an antidepressant, or even a chemotherapy agent, your internal pharmacist delivers. Pretty powerful stuff that mind of yours is!
But have you ever heard of the nocebo effect? Essentially it’s the other side of the same coin and it’s effects are far more common than it’s placebo counterpart. Nocebo comes from Latin meaning “I shall harm”, the opposite of placebo which means “I shall please”. The nocebo effect has been studied to show negative symptoms including nausea, depression, bloating, itching, sexual dysfunction, etc. Essentially, negative expectations can render negative symptoms in the body. Patients often develop negative side effects from drugs, just from reading package inserts of side effects. I’ll save the discussion for understanding the true meaning of the term psychosomatic for a different episode, but make no mistake, the effects of both nocebo and placebo aren’t all in your head. They create physiological and biochemical changes in the body that can be scientifically measured.
For more information on the power of mind over matter, I strongly recommend the Biology of Belief by Dr. Bruce Lipton.
None of us live in a clinical trial. We live out in the real world and have subjective experiences unique from any other person’s and our thoughts and feelings, in particular, and the alchemy they create cannot reasonably be controlled for in all scientific observation. We can spend our lives waiting for science to validate our experiences through the limits of its methods, or we can choose to be really alive and take back the keys to our own health, happiness and vitality by being the executives of our own wellbeing. Our medical system should exist as a supplement and a safety net, not as a disempowering crutch. Doctors, nurses, therapists, and the like are partners in health, not authoritarians.
I’m not at all saying that the methods of scientific inquiry don’t have a place in our healthcare model, they certainly do, but the gold standard in care should not be a double blind placebo clinical trial often funded with corporate interests in mind structured to reduce individuals into very restrictive compartments of population medicine. The gold standard of care, one that supports helping people feel really alive, is patient led healthcare that puts the individual in their own driver’s seat with healthcare practitioners as compassionate partners.
So I think the real difference between being really alive and not being dead is not the years in your life but the life in your years. How you begin to infuse those years with love, pleasure, health, and vitality relies on choosing to be administrator of your own destiny. Choose your thoughts wisely as every cell in your body is listening and your internal pharmacist is on call 24-7 to fill every on and off-label use of whatever prescription you demand.
Moving beyond what being alive means for an individual human organism, we have to reflect upon the fact that human beings are tribal creatures. We are intended to live in community with others. This increased our chances for survival. Our very biology requires positive relation and collaboration with others. We were not intended to live in solitude. Isolation, too, creates an internal alchemical shift towards disease, depression, and low energy. Cultivating relationships that nourish instead of deplete is at the heart of the shared human experience. In a time of Zoom meetings and disinviting your family over to share in a holiday feast because of fear, I think we’ve lost sight the role chemicals like Oxytocin play in fostering true aliveness as well as physical health, that is if you need a biochemical explanation for what makes us feel alive. Oxytocin is known as the “love hormone”; it is a peptide hormone and neuropeptide. It makes people more social, generous, trusting, and loving…. All of which are a pretty big deal in feeling alive rather than just not being dead. The brain releases Oxytocin to communicate with the body. The best ways to alchemize more of this feel good chemical isn’t through a pill or a nose spray, it’s through hugging, cuddling, and especially sex.
There are certainly vast complexities to the state of the current world situation. While it may be true that all we need is love and a lot more Oxytocin, how that actually translates to big picture global solutions will probably require everyone doing their part on an individual scale to foster health on a much larger scale. Perhaps embracing more of what makes us feel really alive will, likewise, contribute to our not being dead.
Perhaps embracing those things that really make the human experience worth experiencing might heal the organism we inhabit.
Which life experiences make you feel alive and in their absence, would you still feel alive, or merely not dead? Can true connection with others be substituted with wifi connections and instant messaging.
Have we become so obsessed with not dying as a culture that we cease to be living? Most indigenous cultures, past and present, have a spiritual relationship with the Earth and with death. While death isn’t something any of us post to our Google calendars and eagerly look forward to, is it possible that dying is not the worst thing that can happen to your life? Is it worth having an unlived life just to avoid death?
It wasn’t until I witnessed Western medicine’s version of the ritual dance of death inside of an ICU that I really came to have an appreciation and profound understanding for spirituality. The rituals of magic inside the walls of a hospital, the ones that manipulate vital signs and assert from a scientific perspective the notion that life still exists in a body when deep intuition asserts otherwise, birthed a perspective I was not expecting in my rigid worldview of Newtonian science as a means to understand the world around me. Witnessing the last rites of undeadness from inside an allopathic medical view offered me an opportunity to re-examine, for myself, what being alive really means and how cultivating that vitality truly is an inside job that we cannot pass off to the keepers of medical establishment.
Western medicine may have nailed the technological advancement to sustaining vital signs, or undeadness, but for those seeking to live a life worth dying for, I challenge the rigid ideological constructs of mainstream medical science outside the heroics of maintaining vital signs. I champion the technological advances that have made such measures possible. They have a wonderful place in the bigger picture, no doubt. But as we look at philosophies of what constitutes healthy living, employing life saving measures does not equate to really living.
We’re at a crossroads for the future of medicine. We’ve reached a tipping point and more and more people are asking themselves if the Western institutional healthcare structure aligns with their life goals and resonates with a feeling of wholeness. We’re at a point where Western medical technology that shines in acute situations and time tested Eastern healing modalities that address wellbeing and wholeness over the course of an entire lifetime should be collaborating in the most advanced system of patient-empowered, physician collaborated healing in the history of medicine, and instead one party continues to resign to a stalemate facilitated by defensive corporate interests while real people and real families continue to suffer when real solutions that fascilitate true living exist.
Knowledge is the most powerful tool any of us have to lead the kind of life that is worth dying for. In the patient empowered model, informed consent is the responsibility of the patient. Breaking from an authoritarian model of medicine that demands compliance often in conflict with one’s own innate internal intelligence requires courage. It is easy to do what we have always done, but expecting different results in doing so is the definition of insanity.
Designing a future for healthcare that honors and reveres living over not dying will have to be a grassroots effort that likely happens one individual at a time. In a hybrid capitalist/socialist economic model of healthcare, seeking solutions that deviate from antiquated treatment modalities that do not address whole person healing require both placing economic value on paying out-of-pocket for solutions that do not conform to the current insurance model, and finding resourceful free or low cost tools for healing which, in many cases, can be very time consuming and require dedication to immersive self-education will launch a movement towards really living vs just not dying.
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