Too Sensitive

 Pine trees reach for the sky all around, cascading towards the sky in jagged assembly amidst rocky mountainsides. The wind blows cooly, weaving lazily through the cliffs.

I am with family sitting at a table outside, and it feels like a miracle to have arrived here. Though the mountains surround us, we are sitting at a picnic table on the patio of a barbecue restaurant underneath the gorgeous grey sky.

In the past six months my mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer, and my uncle has been waging his own war with lymphoma; another type of cancer. My aunt is the only one of the three siblings who has not been battling illness, and the air is filled with a fearful sort of nostalgia. On the one hand it feels like a miracle to have all three siblings united with their parents, but the undertones of the evening seem to be one of uncertainty and the terror of loss... One of the beauty of love mixed with the sadness of

My family does not realize how much I understand what it feels like to have incurable disease. Years ago, I had been in the depths of my own personal hell as I battled Morgellon's Disease. Turns out, what has been thought of as a disease isn't a disease at all, but a cluster of symptoms which were all as a result of GMO sensitivity. When I was the most sick I told no one in my family what I was going through; part of the reasons were shame related to the disease's bizarre symptoms, and part of it was the recognition that doctors would not be able to help me (the disease is called intreatable by many), and not wanting to cause worry.

My GMO sensitivity makes it difficult for me to go out to eat anywhere in America. Because GMO foods are not labeled in the US, I am often put in a difficult situation when eating out. Often I am forced to rely on my own intuition completely when it comes to knowing what I can eat. If I make the wrong call, I pay the price with stabbing abdominal pains, or a gash that appears on my face, or splitting migraines that last hours.

Because my reactions when exposed to GMOs are so extreme, it tends to be stressful. While I often prepare ahead of time, plans often change when I actually get to a restaurant and talk to the staff to see if I can get a list of ingredients used (which is usually much harder to access than one might think).

People aren’t aware of my condition and it is not medically recognized as valid, which just adds to the alienation I feel as a result of my sensitivity. While the scenery is beautiful and I am happy to see my family enjoying food, I have no choice but to be content with water, despite my growling stomach.

In a sick sort of way, I feel forced into an eating disorder. It feels bizarre to be surrounded by food in a country filled to the brim with glutinous desires of every kind, but know that if I partake, it will kill me.

Like I have felt so often in my life, I am an outsider looking in; an alien life form observing humans as I reside in my own planet just an arm’s grasp away.

It feels painful to feel like an outsider looking in, when a part of me knows that I am not an outsider at all.

The reality is that my sensitivity to GMOs is not my own. GMOs are in part responsible for the cancer that is slowly killing the ones I love. The reality is that even though no human is meant to tolerate genetically modified foods, we have become accustomed to what does not resonate with us, because our bodies, our souls, our very DNA, is programmed towards life, and we adapt in even the least life-giving circumstances.

The human body is wonderfully adaptable. Even in the most desolate of circumstances, life persists.

It kills me to know what I know about the food system in America.  Many children grow up thinking that food is food, that all food nourishes the body in varying degrees, and that an ear of corn is an ear of corn.

My reality is that while I can enjoy an organic ear of corn happily, a conventionally grown ear of corn will have me keeled over with stabbing abdominal pain within a half hour, which will then leave me scarred for weeks afterwards.

It kills me to know what I know about the medical systems in place in America.  As children we are taught that doctors have the best interest of their patients. As children we are taught that doctors learn about the human body and search for solutions to problems.  As children, we are taught that doctors are heroes, when the reality is this is the exception, not the rule.

We aren’t taught about the role money plays in the industry of healthcare. We aren’t taught about the 60 hour work weeks nurses and doctors work, thus compromising their own health. We aren’t taught about the lack of solutions for our modern diseases, suppressed advancements in medical technology, and we certainly aren’t taught about the fact that doctors are oftentimes paid more to prescribe pharmaceutical drugs, some of which are incredibly addicting, as a means to suppress immediate symptoms so that a person can continue functioning just enough to continue being alive.

There is a part of me that genuinely longs for a time when I could accept the foods that my body now rejects so acutely; but only for a moment.

Until I remember the farmers whose life’s work was taken by Monsanto; farmers whose land was stolen because they had supposedly used Monsanto’s patented seeds without permission; when in actuality their genetically modified seeds had cross pollinated with their non-gm crops, sometimes ruining heirloom varieties that had taken decades to cultivate.

Until I remember that thousands of farmers in India committed suicide because they were promised their insurmountable debts to big agriculture companies would be forgiven. Debts that had been gained because of being forced not to save seeds every year, and being ultimately cornered into buying new seeds and new pesticides every year by massive agricultural corporations.

Until I remember that the FDA intentionally suppressed reports revealing the glyphosphate content of common foods in America because it has far surpassed safe amounts, and the information has still not been published because the results are terrifying especially once the magnitude of the problem sets in.

There is a part of me that genuinely longs to go back; but only until I remember that being alive is not the same as really living.

People are walking around sick and they don’t even know it. That’s the funny thing about feeling; Once we feel a certain way for long enough, we forget that there is any other way of feeling; any better way of feeling.

With enough time passing, we forget how good we can actually feel; and pretty soon, the memory is gone and all we have are these fleeting moments of peace that are gone as quickly as they come. Much like the moment I sit amidst right now, a stranger to though I am all at once, familiar.

I am not saying this to make light of my family member’s pain; far from it. I know saying that food is what is causing so many deaths each year sounds like a stretch to many of you.

Consider this: Why does someone you know likely have cancer, diabetes, alzheimer’s, autism, or an autoimmune condition, when our society is so advanced in other ways?

How can we ignore such a massive problems as rising rates of addiction, of mental health crises, of broken relationships?

How long are we going to ignore the fact that we have built a society of lies?

I reflect on this snapshot and mourn the disconnection.

I mourn the fact that we have lost sight of unity so much that we can see someone like me and not be aware of the implications my sensitivity has on the greater picture. Highly sensitive people are the canaries of modern day society, and when we start dying, you better believe society is in trouble.

I mourn the fact that pain has become normalized. Now that I have found a way beyond suffering, there is a part of me that wants to take what I’ve learned and run for the hills. It is so hard to continually be alienated from everything I once knew because I can really never go back to how I was beforehand. Like it or not, this is the path that has been chosen for me; the path I myself have chosen.

But I also know that running is just putting a bandaid on a leaky pipe. With time it will fall off and the water will drip down, creating a bigger and bigger puddle until it begins to flood.

There is no such thing as too sensitive. I am only too sensitive in regards to most, in a society where it is not only beneficial to disconnect emotionally, but it is necessary. In a world where pain is normalized, it is completely necessary to dissociate from pain entirely because that pain is too much to deal with.

In a world that has become desensitized, any divergence from the numbness means you are ‘too sensitive’.

We cannot do anything to create positive change until we realize the state we are in. We must realize that we might not even know how good we can feel. We must realize that we might not have ever experienced what it feels like to feel good, and if we have, we might not even remember it.

Now is the time to remember our own peace. Now is the time to move forward, by going backwards.

We are much more powerful than we think. The mind has the capability to focus on what is desired and from this focus we begin to attract. Once we begin to attract, we can begin to build with what shows up.

It breaks my heart to see things the way they are now. I want a family where my needs matter. I want a world where it matters when someone is dying from completely preventable reasons. I want a world where where truth is celebrated higher than a rotting façade. I want a world where we no longer fear the darkness because we trust the light to highlight its contours.

Chrysalis

A caterpillar has no knowledge that it will become a butterfly...

That's one of the reasons, in fact, it is a caterpillar.

Blind to its own potential, the caterpillar crawls forward using what little vision it has. 

The eyes of a caterpillar only function well enough to see if there is light in front of it, or dark.

This vision is just enough to keep the caterpillar crawling forward, driven by the ancient instinct for survival; an unwritten book that is being remembered.

A caterpillar spends the majority of its lifetime eating, and mulching.

As we move through life in a caterpillar like form, we have a tendency to polarize things. Things are either good or bad, right or wrong. We refuse to see the gray matter, and we crawl determinedly and sometimes desperately towards anything that gives us sustenance.

But the process of transformation transcends one of simply taking in what is good for us.

Slowly, the layers begin to shed. The person we thought we once were begins to come undone, and underneath, a newer, fresher self resides.

During the process of mulching, the self is especially vulnerable.

Before the new exoskeleton has a chance to harden, any small disruption could cost the caterpillar its life. Due to its skin being softer, there is a less defined boundary between the caterpillar and the external world.

Yet, slowly; surely, the invisible script that seems to be laid out begins to take tangible form. 

We find that though its exoskeletons were mulched, the caterpillar never really changed at all.

Instead, it becomes a clearer, more refined version, of its former self. 

As time goes on, we see that nothing is really lost in the process of change. Nothing is lost, but illusion.

The caterpillar begins to settle, building around itself, gathering upon itself, curling into a ball.

From outside, it seems as though death is imminent.

And in a certain sense, it is.

Walls build up around the caterpillar; soft at first, then impenetrable. Nothing is allowed in this sacred coffin that the caterpillar has built for itself. Only light can penetrate the translucent sarcophagus made of remnants of its former self.

It crawls in, curls up, and prepares to fade into oblivion. It seems as though death will claim it.

A caterpillar willingly goes towards its own destruction; and this is ultimately what shapes a caterpillar into the butterfly it always was.

A soup begins to form around the dying form of its own skin, dissolving every cell in its body.

Everything the caterpillar knew is gone, forever.

But it is no longer alive; not in a traditional sense.

I like to think to myself that the caterpillar dissolves in its own tears as it grieves its old life, though there is no real way to prove this is true.

On Choosing to Live in my Car

I’ve been living in my car for almost a week now.

The reasons for this are multifaceted, but it has been a conscious choice on my part. While there could be a whole essay written on the privilege I’ve been lucky enough to have to be able to choose homelessness, that’s not the reason why I chose to write about my experience today.

I’ve done this as a way of pushing my own boundaries and for the sake of my own expansion, to bring me right outside my own comfort zone. While this is also somewhat spiritually bypassing the very real difficulties that come with living in my car, for the sake of this piece I’m going to choose the ‘higher self’ perspective that as a conscious creator I am choosing this path which is just one path of many.

Being in a place of recovering from abuse has put me in a lot of very vulnerable situations, and tossed me WAY outside my comfort zone. I’ve been put in the very vulnerable space of relying on other people to help me in my times of need, which is about the hardest thing to do when you have ptsd and in the core of your being have every reason to distrust other people’s intentions and motives.

Don’t get me wrong, I have been very grateful to the help that has been given to me. However, I have also noticed the dark side of offering help to people, and I want to expose this shadow today.

When receiving help from others, I observed an unspoken pressure to ‘get better’ already, or to ‘just move on’ from a past that still has a very real grip on my present. Help came with a price. The thinking behind much (though not all) of the help I received was one of, “If I give this person a place to stay/an ear to listen/money, they will not have a reason to be anxious/sad/powerless, and thus will feel better again.”

When I still felt those things after receiving the sort of help I need, I almost felt worse because not only did I still feel those things (anxious/sad/powerless), but now I had no tangible reason to be feeling that way.

The difficult truth that I’ve witnessed is that people are not willing to be present with these hard emotional states because they’ve spent so much time running from these spaces within themselves.

Because of this, receiving help feels like rejection of where I am, and I have ultimately witnessed that allowing this rejection of the self to take place is causing greater harm than good. This may not be the case for everyone, but in myself personally I have witnessed again and again that the pressure to ‘get over it already’ has actually inhibited my ability to heal at all.

This is my thinking behind ultimately choosing to live out of my car, than to be given a place to stay from others. I do not want to receive help because I cannot promise that I will be better as a result of the help I receive from others.

In America, we claim to be the land of the free; Yet it is illegal to be homeless, and it is illegal to be suicidal. 

This is a microcosm of the bigger issue at hand… We have built our entire society on a unifaceted existence, when existence is anything but unidimensional.

We are free to be anything but broken, hurting, and alone. And in fact when someone is broken, hurting, and alone, we assume that they must need help moving out of these spaces. It is not comfortable to be broken, hurting, and alone. We take the task upon ourselves to rid other people of these feelings because we have not allowed ourselves the ability to feel this way ourselves, and thus we can't handle it or don't know how to.

And honestly I am probably the minority in this thinking because again, I am choosing to dive into my shadows and that is why I am choosing homelessness over seeking to escape homelessness.

In my time living this way, I’ve kind of laughed to myself at the morbid truth that it’s more culturally acceptable to be a white supremacist than it is to be homeless. That wishing or perpetuating violence on other people who supposedly deserve it will not land you in prison, but being homeless will.

A person who only feels good in their lifetime, in truth, can never be really sure that they have lived at all. There will always be a part of themselves that wonders if there is anything ‘better’ out there.  

Our existence is not all sunshine and rainbows and we need to be allowed to experience the rainstorm in order to really understand the beauty of the sunlight.

Making suffering illegal does nothing to alleviate suffering. Making suffering taboo in fact puts suffering on top of suffering for those who have tasted the bitter consequences of feeling in a society that only allows us to feel good.

The thinking behind this is capitalistic in nature. Feeling bad is not productive, feeling bad is not conductive to creating value, and so feeling bad must be bad and we must get rid of feeling bad in any way possible.

Because creating value is more important than truly living, we have made it not okay to be not okay.

Suddenly we are punished for feeling bad. Suddenly we are punished for not having our ducks in a row. Suddenly we are punished, for existing at all, if our existence is rebellion to the status quo.

The intention behind making homelessness illegal was done so with the vision that making homelessness illegal would prevent it from happening. But we did not do anything to stop it from happening. All that has been accomplished is that it is taboo to have that happen, which prevents people from reaching outwards in fear that the hand reaching towards them will hurt them.

People say what I’m doing is hard, and while I suppose they are right, the truth is living in my car in the wilderness is not the hardest thing I’ve ever done. 

In fact, after living this way for several weeks, the lasting impression I’m left with is how sad it is that living in your car is illegal.

So many people, myself included, have an excess of material possessions. In America specifically, people think they need a large amount of space to live, when this isn’t actually the case. While the task of living on my own was daunting at first, it was brought to my attention pretty quickly how little we need to live, and also the ways that I had excess in my own life.

Because this lesson is one that I think many could benefit from, I wish there to be an end to the stigma of homelessness.

Typically when people hear what I am doing, they react with resistance. I feel like this resistance is a reaction that goes mostly unquestioned in people… Similar to how people react to seeing girls stop shaving their armpits, there’s an immediate energetic constriction that says, “this should not be happening!”

Few people have found a reason to question the seemingly inherent belief that there is no value in suffering, and as a result just cast their suffering out.

I am here to tell you that there is inherent value in our pain, but this value is realized only with the passage of time.

Suffering is the seed from which all sweet fruits are born.  We can’t just carelessly toss the seed anywhere and expect it to change form. We must nurture our own suffering, carefully tending to its needs. With time, we will begin to notice our suffering has transformed into something different entirely… And it is from this slow transformation that we can begin to cultivate the fruits that we seek to harvest.

It sounds so backwards, right? But I am here to be a living example of what it means to live authentically, and so living authentically means being open about my genuine experience. Someday others will be around to witness when my life seems to change shape, and when that day comes, I will direct them back to this day, when I chose to consciously embrace my suffering.

When Silence is Violence

It genuinely bothers me to hear people responding to Charlottesville by saying that we need to "unite"...

It is not possible to unite if we also condemn. Any sort of condemnation, hatred, or division, prevents us from unity.

If we claim to unite with people who condemn, we are uniting with condemnation! This is basically the same thing as not uniting at all, because it is not possible to be in a state of unity while also seeking to separate oneself (which is what condemnation is at its core).

As long as there are those who condemn, seeking unity is not possible; we can't even conceive of it. Unity has been, thus far, an idea that is so out of our range of experience that we can't possibly know what unity really looks like in the flesh.

We have not experienced unity because we have no been able to admit to the fact that we are divided. Like when we are lost; sometimes we need to admit to where we are, in order to become found again.

It is not wise nor healthy to deny our division as an individual, as a country, or as a species, because this is in fact where we are.

The paradox is that in order to find unity, we need to allow division to take place. We need to stop demanding, fighting, and pushing for those who genuinely believe other people deserve to be condemned, punished and killed, to change their beliefs. This is not going to happen and there is likely nothing we can do to prevent people from continuing to live in a hateful and punishing manner.

We can, however, begin to become aware of where we stand and begin to make that stance known.

We should all begin to ask ourselves the following questions with the intention of being as honest as possible.

How do I allow physical and emotional acts of violence to happen?

How do I perpetrate violence within myself and within the world at large?

Am I constantly on the lookout for ways to condemn other people? Am I on the lookout for ways people are different from me?

How do I respond when I notice someone is different from myself?

What do I value, and how do I bring my values into the flesh in my day to day experience?

Why do I value what I value? Do I value what I do out of love or fear?

How do I respond when I see acts of cruelty that do not immediately impact me?

It is extremely important to dive into the shadow reasons as to why we value what we do. For example, many of us value peace, with the positive intention of creating a more calm world. The shadow side of valuing peace, however, oftentimes manifests as allowing acts of hatred to happen without speaking up because we just want to "keep the peace". We value peace because we think that being peaceful is a way of avoiding painful and oftentimes terrifying conflict with other people.

Explore your shadow aspects, without holding judgement toward yourself. Observe any need to punish or condemn your shadow self, and question it.

It is time to drop the myth that being peaceful means "Keeping the peace". "Keeping the peace" when violence is taking place is a way of spiritual bypassing and thus denying reality. When we refuse to take a stand when violence is taking place, we are not "keeping the peace", we are perpetuating violence and defending a peace that was never there in the first place. When we stay silent, we perpetuate violence.

It has been written that there is a season for everything. Let me repeat that. There is a season for everything.

I trust that those who believe in peace will "keep the peace" when peace exists, as they most likely have been doing that. However, we must realize that peace will not exist if we continually choose to turn a blind eye to hatred when hatred takes place.

We need to become aware of when we are choosing peace over action as a result of our own fear. It is time for the peacemakers to have the courage to make waves with their words and actions as the world becomes increasingly less peaceful.

It is easy to be peaceful when the world is peaceful. It takes great courage, however, to take a stand for peace, when doing so can cost us our lives.

Sheep By Day, Wolf By Night

The following is a poem about a karmic relationship.

Some people have many relationships, and they learn all they know about love through being with many.

Others have one really intricate relationship in which they learn all they know about love.

The relationship I reflect upon is the second type of relationship. Sometimes we learn the most about what love is, by learning what it is not.

* * *

Sheep by day,

Wolf by night.

He saw my dark

He was my light

Like a moth, I seek his sight

And hope that love, is worth the fight

The chaos

The tears

The empty mirrors

Sheep by day

Wolf by night

Pluck my wings off, one by one

Did I give the sheep enough?

Did I give the sheep enough?

Taking my mind, taking my heart

Taking it all

Tearing apart

At the end of the day, I am but a moth

To you I will fade and soon become soft

Like the dust itself, it gathers like memories

Of the corner of a house that’s been crumbling for centuries

And you knew it, you knew it, you knew all along

That the heart that was true was to you just a song

In the mind of a twisted oxytocin high

Was I ever human, or am I just a lie?

You never answer me, so I’m left to rhyme

In hopes that the words will like hands intertwine

Grasping the orphan that lives in my mind

Screaming, crying, looking behind

Before you left her on her own

Before you hurt, no sticks and no stones

Before the light began to fade

No wind to ignite the ember that stayed

As everything burnt to a crisp I was shown

The sheep, once my friend

Now a wolf

Alone