As my sister @Crysta Zuli ☯️ says in El Poder de la Autosanación, "everything has to do with EVERYTHING". I love the concept, practice and reality of self-healing. It resembles the concept of autonomy which is something extremely profound in Zapatista thought. For me it has to do with trusting oneself. Where did we get the idea that we have to trust external authorities every time we don't know what to do, every time possible courses of action escape our domain or control?
Someone, some expert, is supposed to know more than oneself. Sometimes it is submission to the hierarchies of government, sometimes family, sometimes scientific. In short, the institutions that we culturally consider legitimate. I am not saying that it is a bad idea to learn from everyone around, no doubt you can learn from everything. And if someone has devoted their human energy to a subject for a while (like Crysta in self-healing) it is surely worth listening attentively and openly.
However, what I mean is to put an external authority, whatever it is, above one's own internal feeling, above one's own internal guidance. It is to disempower oneself so much as to get a person or an external theory (or combination) to make the decisions for me.
It is also to disempower intuition and inner feeling, versus logical, linear and separate reason. This is something that saddens me and makes me passionate. It is for me one (not the only one) of the consequences of the archetypical wound of science on the human soul. In other words: distrusting oneself. The same situation can be seen in some spiritual groups today, where trust is placed in a guru (or anything external), and not in oneself.
Self-healing, then, is healing of the archetypal trauma from science. Self-healing is essentially holistic, that is, it does not go against science or any external source of knowledge, such as doctors. Confidence in oneself, in one's own feeling, might well be aligned with a doctor's prescription, for example. The distinction is autonomy: the inner being who decides and who has authority over his/her own life.
The consequence of the trauma of science, on the other hand, is fear, anguish, the vulnerability of making decisions that are not one's own. Decisions in which one only half-trusts and never fully trusts because they are not one's own. Personally, for me it is to remain in doubt of what one is doing (not in fullness), and repeating an internal discourse over and over again to try to convince oneself that such a decision is correct.
I need to say that I suspect and hope that the path of self-healing leads to fewer and fewer external allopathic prescriptions. Less and less separate science. Less and less control. Less and less linear logic. More and more dance in mystery.
It is not a matter of a balance between allopathic and alternative medicine. I think that when we talk about the balance between allopathic and alternative medicines, even with good intentions, what actually happens is that there is still a patriarchal supremacy of the former, that is, the wound of distrust in oneself remains. Like any deep wound, when something comes close to it, it hurts, and therefore many times we choose to remain in that distrust, that submission. Until the doubt of oneself hurts even more.
On the other hand, I don't make an apology of alternative medicines either. It is a typical patriarchal practice to try to overcome patriarchy with patriarchal force. One example is to argue that permaculture and organic agriculture is better business than industrial agriculture (is that why a permaculturer practices permaculture?). Another example is to say that natural childbirth is safer than hospital childbirth; my point is, even if that were true, that's not why I choose natural childbirth.
In the case of medicine it would be to say, for example, that alternative medical practices "are more effective in eradicating diseases" than allopathic medicine. As if the reason why one uses them is still to eradicate disease, and as if one had to defend them against the establishment under the parameters of the establishment. For me, that's not the reason to use alternative medicines. There is a deeper, actually more loving concept of health, which is not that dichotomy between presence and absence of disease.
Science continues to be the most preponderant legitimizing institution of our culture. It "establishes" the truth on the basis of "facts". Do you feel the almost violent harshness of those words: 'establishes', 'facts'? As if reality were made of physical, verifiable, and hostile hardness.
That is why I continue to work on this healing, investigating with the heart. My next post will begin by expressing how the good/bad separation mentality makes it culturally unacceptable to denounce the archetypal wound of science.