How to be well in the age of fake news
Things are not what they seem on the internet, in the news or in social media threads rife with misinformation. Everywhere you look you’ll see fake news, fake friends, fake gaming avatars and fake comments. Google bombs and misinformation censorship that is itself misinformation surround the honest communications of some of the best alternative health practitioners. Who can we trust?
Facebook recently removed over 2 billion fake accounts. 2 billion—and that was just in one quarter. I think we can all imagine the election tampering going on with fake numbers like that. If we connect the dots to our shooting spree crisis, we can also imagine, with serious trepidation, the number of fake gamers trolling the gaming chat rooms of Fortnite and other multiplayer platforms. Imagine malicious players who are not who they seem, pulling up a virtual chair to sit next to your 13 year-old son gaming in his bedroom, chatting him up and eventually showing him how to shoot better down the rabbit hole. Makes you think twice about how top game reviewer #PewDiePie, who made his fame as an amoral insulting jackass who stirs up conflict in the gaming community, came to have over 100 million followers on YouTube. Are his followers all real? How many are trolls in the matrix who want to sow discord into the minds of game-playing youth?
Luckily there’s an easy way to know what is authentic and true. Hands-on bodyworkers, somatic therapists and psychologists, body psychotherapists, integrative holistic practitioners and holistic bodyworkers all understand where human truth is actually located. In the body! Hence the healing maxim: the body knows the truth and keeps the score. To find the truth, all we have to do is listen to our bodies and to the body memories stored there and to the physical and emotional needs that are expressed there. Do a muscle test! Hold a bottle of RoundUp herbicide with glyphosate in one hand and muscle test the other hand. You’ll get your answer. Your body doesn’t want poison, even if smart marketing and ad campaigns have convinced your mind that it’s safe when it isn’t.
The next step after listening to the embodied truth is to accept it for what it is, with emotional honesty. Only then can we make the changes we need to heal—to return to harmony, health and balance as individuals and as a collective. Even as a species.
When we tune in and listen to our core embodied self, we hear what our gut intuition says and what our heartfelt feelings say, and we know instinctively when we are ill and need to heal. When we are thirsty and need to drink. When we are hungry and need to eat. When we are stressed and need to calm down. When we are agitated and need peace in our hearts. Focus on what matters to the bodymind because that’s real in the sense that your current state of mental, emotional, physical and spiritual health is real. It’s the most real thing of all.
Every body has a story. And it’s our shared story too. The one each of us is writing personally, and the one we are writing together. It’s our story. Our collective history of who we are and what we believe as a society and as earthlings, and how we adapted and survived, even flourished, or didn’t. We are writing that history now in real time. Based on what we believe and trust to be true and authentic. Starting with our own gut sense of what is sick and illness-causing, and what is healthy and life-sustaining.
There are many bullies on the world political stage vying for our attention and our votes and our loyalty and also our money and resources, especially energy resources. Uranium mines, coal pits, petroleum processing plants, and petro currencies put all of us at constant risk of endless war, chronic illness and environmental catastrophe. Yet we know the stark truth from health stats that show the rate at which our bodies, minds and hearts are becoming poisoned in the toxic environment we have engineered by clinging to dirty energy when we need to let it go and move on to renewable energies that are life sustaining.
Listen to your bodymind in its own language to know deep in your heart that nuclear energy isn’t clean, for example. It’s greenwashing misinformation to say it is. If your mind is unsure, hold a radioactive isotope in your hand and muscle test. Marie Curie did it with radium and polonium and she developed cancer in her hands. Or look at the cancer rates explode in Denver after the two plutonium fires at the plutonium processing facility in Rocky Flats just outside the city. The half life of radioactive plutonium 238 is over 24,000 years. What does your mind need to know that you already know in your body to be true?
If we are sick, it’s time to heal. Saying 'it won’t happen to us' or 'we didn’t see it coming' or 'not today' won’t help us. The only way to heal is to admit we are sick and need to heal from within. Starting with our ability to discern interoceptively from inside what the truth is. Because the body knows the truth. Another war over oil will not heal our climate change crisis around the globe. Nor will a political assassination abroad by drone heal our shooting spree crisis here at home. Even our enemies and heroes are fake. Our real enemy is within.
We’re in a healing crisis. All of us, together. And as in any healing crisis, we return when we’re sick to the basics of life on our planet—clean air and sunshine rather than smoke and fire storms. Clean water we can drink and bathe in without contaminating ourselves. Healthy food we can eat without being poisoned. Less stress and fighting. More peace and calm. More love in a language our mindbody can understand. Starting with the self-love and self respect to know what we know, and know what we need to do to be well within and without, personally and together, now and in the future.
