Where the Cracks Already Are
Some of you may have heard me speak about Dr. Zach Bush. He's a physician and researcher who has spent years exploring the deep links between cellular health, human connection, and the wider natural world.
He spoke about his research into cancer and found that a cancer cell isn't really an invader. It's a cell that has lost connection with what's around it. Isolated and cut off from communication. And when he began nourishing those cells rather than attacking them, something remarkable happened. They either reconnected, or they dissolved peacefully.
He extends this same idea to us as humans, and to society. Isolation, at any scale, tends to produce the same pattern. A person cut off from relationship and belonging can become dangerous.
A community, a nation, cut off from connection and difference can start to do the same thing.
In Australia, we've seen strong demonstrations around the country responding to One Nation's push toward a kind of isolationist vision, one race, one people. I'm not usually drawn to comment on politics directly, but I can't ignore how closely this mirrors what's happening at a cellular level in all of us.
Isolation, whichever direction it comes from, is still isolation. Polarisation, for or against, is still separation.
It feels important to say, because we so easily get pulled into thinking one side of a division is the healthy one and the other isn't. We see this so often, one party insists they're right, which immediately makes the other wrong. Binary. Separation.
But division itself, no matter which side we're standing on, tends to produce the same wound. It's a pattern that shows up everywhere once you start looking, not just in politics.
We see it mirrored in the specialisation of medicine: the body divided into cardiology, pulmonology, endocrinology, each department studying you, yet rarely speaking to one another.
Or in monocrops, where a field of a single crop becomes so vulnerable it turns into a target for insects, who are then called the enemy and sprayed. Killed, yet somehow the crop is still deemed fit for human consumption. (That's another topic!!)
Or consider the ultimate punishment in our justice system is solitary confinement. Why is that?!
Maybe this moment we're in, as a country and as a collective, is doing something similar. Showing us where the cracks already are.
So how do we navigate this?
How do we care for ourselves and our community in the midst of so much?
I don't have a clear answer, but I wanted to write about it, perhaps to open a discussion away from the cancel culture making speaking up so dangerous.
Can we ask ourselves what we really think?
I'm so drawn to this idea of what drives us. We can only make conscious choices if there's some awareness of what's driving our decisions in the first place, knowing that so much of it is unconscious.
Can we at least ask:
Where is my attention going?
What am I feeding?
If something here speaks to you, you can work with me in person at my clinic in Preston and at The Yin Palace gatherings in Melbourne, or online through my qigong community and Rage Rising. The Three Treasures Pathway is offered both in person and online.
With Love,
Anny 🌹
