The relationship environment created by authority and parental figures in our formative years - as well as our choice of response - often determines our health and wellbeing throughout our lives. There is a simple test called the ACEs questionnaire that helps to quickly identify your Adverse Childhood Experience score. The ACEs website takes time to load, so please be patient. Those who score high may have suffered trauma that make them more likely to have chronic health problems that tend to worsen with aging. It is important to note that a given incidence on the questionnaire, like divorce, is not necessarily a trauma, but how divorce is handled within a family, often is. Still, divorce is worth tracking simply because few divorces are handled well when children are involved.

The goal here is not to blame but to address and learn to prevent. 
We can prevent future health problems of the chronic sort by becoming better parents, teachers, supervisors, etc. To become better people, we must become better at relating to others, especially those in our charge.

We can choose to relate in ways that contribute to trauma or help offset trauma. It is our choice. Let us choose the healthier way.

Our past traumas show up in our present. We cannot change the past, but we can change how we respond in the present. There are probably many ways of accomplishing this. Most people will likely find themselves in need of professional help, but it can be done, individually, as well. A good place to start may be with trauma recovery specialist, Michele Rosenthal. I don't know her, but found her serendipitously. As I found my own way to healing the past, I can tell that Michele Rosenthal is on the right path. By right, I mean she is taking an approach that more closely resembles what I know to be needed for true healing to take place.

We can heal from the past and we can change the future by changing the present: How we choose to relate to every person, place, or thing, matters.

Paula knows what it means to be blindly or covertly enslaved, which is why she's always been bit of a rebel with a cause. As a manual therapist, her main cause is to free her clients from bodily restrictions - and from dependence on therapists. Every client body that has been under Paula's hands has helped teach her how to get better at freeing the body. The biggest lesson learned from helping clients is that indoctrination, blame, complexity, diagnoses, and pressure are often smokescreens keeping us enslaved.
Examples of health-related enslavement:

• Therapists who pressure clients into ongoing weekly appointments;
• Believing that a diagnosis, like arthritis, means we'll suffer for life;
• Confusing complexity with truth;
• Blaming our own body as it if is working against us;
• Refusing to learn and grow beyond what we were taught or told.

To begin to break free:

• Test what was learned or heard, always seeking to improve upon it;
• Instead of blaming our body, let us accept that it is here to serve us and wants to be healthy;
• Remember that complexity is always founded on simple, universal laws like cause-and-effect;
• See diagnosis as a means of communication, not a reason to stop seeking to better the situation;
• Relentless pressure may someday manifest a diamond, but not all pressure is healthy or sustainable.

To be free take right action:

• Seek out those who care about setting people free not creating dependency;
• Be an attentive listener;
• Believe yet still seek evidence;
• Respond appropriate to the situation and your core values;
• Do your best, admit your mistakes (even laugh if you can), and never give up on yourself.

To be free be brave.
Health problems can be scary, but they don't have to be if you see your own body as the truthful servant it is, asking for your help. Over time, these efforts build trust in self and the ability to help one's self, while reducing dependence on others. Let us be free.

​Those who truly know me would never accuse me of being narcissistic. And yet, … I have had my moments. 

When I felt alone in the pain of extreme unfairness, I let myself be guided by well-meaning others into blaming my primary caregivers. But when I learned that I was not only alone, but in vast company, I let go of blame and started seeking understanding through the sometimes harsh light of truth. 

When I found myself unemployed along with millions of others at the start of this pandemic, I started to act like an entitled victim when I couldn’t get a job despite being broadly and highly competent. Yet I knew it was inappropriate to lay blame even as I did so.

We all have moments where we slip and fall and don’t react like an accountable adult. Yet there are those who spend their lives feeling special and entitled while bitterly blaming others for all that has been denied them. 

Whether we are immature adults part-time or full-time, each and every one of us is responsible for elevating ourselves into maturity. Our world is in great need of every adult doing their part.

I can think of no better spokesperson for self-maturity than Dr. Ramani, who manages to balance truth with vulnerability and courage in a way that can potentially move the mountain that is the suffering we have, all of us, brought upon ourselves. Life is challenging enough, let us not add unnecessary suffering to it.

Let us be good-natured and steadfast in the face of unfairness and adversity for it is the only path to freedom for one and all.

I am wind.
My wind cleanses.
My wind refreshes.
My wind topples the weak.
Wind despises stagnation.
Wind is not loud nor visible. 
Wind is not judgmental but responsive.
I am wind.

I woke up, finally, to the painful reality that most of humankind is rather batshit crazy.

My odd awakenings usually follow a desperate search across the Internet for any and all articles that reveal if anyone else sees what I see, feels what I feel, knows what I know. When I inquired if anyone else has realized that humanity is insane, I was both saddened and relieved to find fellow wakened sufferers. The worst suffering is when you see what you love, dying through self-sabotage. Yet most articles seem to only complain and not offer concrete answers. 

There is only one way out of the craziness that we've allowed into our world, and it is for each of us to take personal responsibility to set and keep an honorable intention, every day, as if our lives depended on it. This intention requires no fealty to any given religion, culture, or philosophy. It only requires complete, nonviolent commitment to self to Action, Clarity, and Truth.

​I’m not the greatest navigator on the sea of life. I joke that my tombstone should say, “She got into a lot of scrapes.”

Nothing wrong with scrapes, just as there’s nothing wrong with mistakes: It’s how we learn. Yet I clearly wasn’t learning because my scrapes were increasing, not decreasing. From my point of view, I was always doing my honest best and had the courage of curiosity. These are good things, but clearly I was missing something.

​Then it struck me that I am also historically impatient and struggle with mental vision to the point of declaring myself lacking in imagination. This combination of blind impatience was likely the root of the resultant scrapes of my many, open-minded (no regret) adventures. 

You think romantic love is blind? Try impatience. Add courage and you have a bold blind person leaping without looking, leading to a lifetime of scrapes.

I began to wonder what else might cause mental blindness…

A long time ago, I entertained friends from a country most would agree allows no freedom. 

When they came to this country to study, they had a warped idea of what freedom means. Most of them got into trouble with alcohol, drugs, women, and the law. One suffered culture shock so severe that catatonia with foaming at the mouth struck - and did not dissipate until returned to his homeland whereby it magically evaporated. 

I cared about my friends - as I do all people - so I thought long and hard about how to explain to them that freedom does not mean free to do whatever you want. My friends could attest that being forced to obey is not freedom, either. Foreigners from restricted lands are not the only abusers of freedom, but they are the ones that made me think.

Somewhere, in the vast swath between wild and controlled lies the sweet spot called freedom that ebbs and flows like pleasant waves on a sunny day.

Freedom exists when we choose to avoid extremes like:

• too little diversity and too much diversity
• too few and too many
• too strong and too weak
• too passive and too aggressive
• too secretive and too open
• too critical and too agreeable
• too lazy and too hardworking
• too mindless and too mindful
• too heartless and too heartfelt
• ...

Freedom exists when we choose to moderate our own behaviors and attitudes so that no harm is done to any person, place, or thing.

Freedom exists when we choose to obey laws that make sense to an honest, fair, and peaceful society.

Freedom exists when we choose to negotiate our wants and needs honestly, fairly, and peacefully.

Freedom exists when we choose to keep our homes, offices, and bodies cleaned and maintained on a personal and global level, whether we rent, borrow, or own.

Freedom disappears when the sweet spot loses its pleasing waves and rises like a tsunami or stills like a swamp.

Freedom fades when people give up on being free.

What true anarchists want, ultimately, is a populace that chooses to be honest, fair, and decent so that there is no need for authoritarians, complex laws, or wasteful, energy-draining, broken institutions. 

Let us join together and choose freedom for one and all, in all ways, for all time.

This is my prayer.

Today's entry was motivated by a PsychCentral article on loneliness and, particularly in America, the death of platonic hand-holding between adults. That article is now gone, and I have to wonder if it touched a collective sore spot. If it did, all the more reason to talk about the problem.

​I’ve depth and breadth of experience in the loneliness parade of one. Therefore I will say what most will not.

One of the key factors contributing to the legit continuation of loneliness has to do with the toxic behaviors that first swamped governments before bleeding into every crack and fissure of our lives.

Once upon a time, a touch was innocent and pure, as was a need fulfilled. Today, touch and service have become sexualized. Sexualization is what the weak and valueless use to gain a false sense of power and control.

With two exceptions, I have not known touch as an adult that was not about sex or control. As a bodywork professional, touch is only about healing. But in my personal life, touch has never felt healthy or innocent. Flashback style and decades later, I still feel the confusion from the hand-holding by a female friend. I didn’t stick around for the end of confusion because I already knew what the likely answer would be, and I didn’t want it.

I wanted the pureness of healthy intimacy that comes from both touch and frequency that has nothing to do with power or control. I don’t think this purity exists anymore. And that is exactly why we need to make it happen if we want to end the loneliness epidemic that is far more deadly than this corona pandemic.

I don’t claim to know how to make it happen, but I have had enough experience with the toxic to know that you must be both assertive to the point of blunt and also clear and tough as bulletproof glass.

We must hug - and show in every hug that it is about love and connection between friends, neighbors, and guests - and nothing more.

We must hold hands in public - and show with every swing of the arms that it is about love and connection between friends - and nothing more.

​We must reciprocate and initiate equally and frequently - and be clear as a pavlovian bell that it is about love and connection between decent human beings - and nothing more.

Fight loneliness by being brave and blunt on all fronts. Beat back all attempts at power and control, especially through sexualization, as if your life depends on it - because the quality of all our lives does depend on it.

If there must be obligations in life
And there must
Then let’s be obligated
To tackle the problems before us
With good cheer. 
We’d have fun
And improve our lot
​At the same time.