Welcome to the Fifth Carol Ann Schwartz Cancer Lecture. This lecture has been generously supported over the years by the Lerner Family, who joins us again today. Michael Lerner, our speaker today, was actually the first Carol Ann Schwartz Lecturer several years ago when he spoke at the time about “Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer” and today he is addressing health from a very different but intimately related direction. The choice of the topic today came from shared interests of our Center and of Helaine Lerner who is very committed and active in the area of environmental health and public health and her organization GRACE, the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment, has been very active in putting together research policy and grassroots community efforts toward the end of preserving and protecting the environment.
And one of the Rosenthal Center’s interests in addition to the ones you may be somewhat familiar with in terms of research and educational efforts in complementary and alternative medicine relate to being a forum for discussion on the social, economic, political and environmental forces that relate to complementary and alternative medicine.
Michael Lerner’s work similarly involves research, policy and grassroots efforts with respect to the environment. He is the Founder and President of Commonweal, which is a health and environmental research institute in Bolinas, California. You may know Commonweal best for its Cancer Help Program , which was made more popular through the 1993 award-winning PBS series by Bill Moyers, “Healing and the Mind”.
But Commonweal has other interests as well, and one of its primary areas of interest is the environment. Michael is particularly skilled at focusing on specific efforts and specific programs and projects. He sees them begin as grassroots campaigns, and sees them end with considerable public policy and public health impact. Commonweal is a place where a lot of new ideas are nurtured and new initiatives are begun.
One such project that Michael has been involved with is called Healthcare Without Harm, The Campaign for Environmentally Responsible Health Care. It was initiated to try to reduce the dioxin and mercury in the environment that come from the incineration of medical wastes, because medical centers are an important source of dioxin and mercury exposure. The idea was to try to have our healthcare institutions be promoters of environmental health rather than promoters of environmental pollution. Today, Michael will address something that I think really deserves to be foremost front and center as we go forward in the coming years and that is environmental health as a public health issue and, more importantly, as a human rights issue. Today, Michael’s presentation is entitled, “THE NEW HEALING BOND: Why Personal and Environmental Health Are Inseparable in the 21st Century”.
MICHAEL LERNER: Thank you, Fredi. It is a joy to be back here five years later and to be honored by Fredi and Helaine Lerner with the opportunity to give the Carol Ann Schwartz Cancer Lecture for a second time. I want to note, for the record, that Helaine Lerner and I are not, so far as we know, relatives, though we share our last name. Helaine is a visionary at the interface of health and environment. She not only is deeply committed to work with cancer, and the exploration of complementary approaches to cancer, but also she really understands the deep and profound linkage between personal health and global health, which is to say she understands the connection between personal healing and planetary healing. So, it is a real honor to be asked by Helaine to be with you again.
The Commonweal Cancer Help Program: Transforming the Experience of Life with Cancer
For the last 25 years at Commonweal we have worked in three areas. We work with at-risk children, we work with adults with cancer and health professionals who work with people with life-threatening illnesses, and we work on global environment and environmental health issues. So, kids, cancer, and the environment are the three areas that we work in.
In the Cancer Help Program, which is the core of my personal work -- and there are a number of alumni of the Cancer Help Program here today, both from Smith Farm, our Center in Washington, DC, where we offer the Cancer Help Program on the East Coast, and from Commonweal, we’ve done about 130 of these week-long retreats for cancer patients over the last 15 years.
There are 8 or 9 participants who come for the week on a Cancer Help Program. Every day you get up in the morning and start the day with yoga and meditation. Then there is a breakfast, followed by a morning support group led by a gifted psychotherapist. After lunch, in the afternoon, you have massage or individual sessions with the psychotherapist/co-leader or with me, or with a sandtray therapist who does art therapy using sandtray, an expressive arts technique developed by followers of Carl Jung. Or, you have time to walk by the ocean or read in our library. There is a second yoga class at 5 o’clock and then a 6:30 dinner. Most evenings I’m with the participants. On the second and third evenings, I talk about five areas of choice that I believe all people with cancer and, indeed, any of us in the second half of life face as adults dealing with the illnesses that are inevitable for us. And those five areas are:
· choices in healing;
· choices in conventional therapies;
· choices in complementary and integrative therapies;
· choices in pain control and in suffering;
· choices in death and dying.
These are the five arenas of choice I discuss in my book, Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer.
In some ways, participating in these week-long programs with people who often have life-threatening cancer diagnoses is a very difficult thing to do. As a staff member, you don’t maintain "professional distance" from the participants. You become close to people and in the course of doing that you really experience their suffering in a fairly direct way. So the question is: what keeps us coming back to continue doing these weeks? The answer is that, in the course of a week, it is possible for people with cancer to deeply change and often transform the human experience of living with a life-threatening illness. That is such a powerful thing to witness that it actually fills you with hope.
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The Failure of the Mind-Body Health Movement to Achieve a Truly Holistic Vision of Health
I want to suggest to you today that there is a relationship between the work of personal healing that many of us have been involved with for the past 25 years with the mind-body health movement at an individual level and the planetary healing issue that we face as a species. I want to suggest to you that there is a planetary wound that is very much like the personal wound of cancer. I want to suggest that there is a two way learning process between what we’ve learned from the mind-body health movement about personal healing and what we have to learn about the environment and planetary healing.
I wrote an article for Advances called “Mind Body Health at 25”. I was looking at what the mind-body health movement had and hadn’t achieved. And, I said, look: the mind-body health movement has greatly increased, on a horizontal axis, the number of interventions that are available to patients and practitioners. And on an ascending vertical axis, the mind-body health movement has brought the psychological and the spiritual dimensions of healing very much to the forefront. But, on the descending vertical axis, what the mind-body health movement has profoundly failed to do is to ground healing in the economic, social and environmental determinants of health. That failure is authentically extraordinary, because the mind-body health movement presents itself as truly holistic. But instead of a truly holistic vision of health, grounded in the well documented of the social, economic and environmental determinants of health, what the mind-body health movement really has done is to create a boutique of services, largely for the upper middle class. The mind-body health movement has failed to achieve a truly holistic vision of health because, if it went into the deep economic, social and environmental determinants of health, it would find itself face-to-face with some of the most powerful economic forces of our time. And, so as a result of that, the movement has largely boutiqued itself. If we are to live healthy lives in the 21st Century, that boutiquing will not work as a strategy for the future of personal and planetary health. We have to recognize that the personal wounds that we all face are also planetary wounds that are affecting the earth as a whole.
The Age of Extinctions: Its Five Principle Causes
Because the truth is that we are living in an Age of Extinctions. This is actually the sixth spasm of extinctions in the history of the planet Earth. We are driving biodiversity, which is the scientific name for the Tree of Life, back 65 million years, to its lowest level of vitality since the end of the age of dinosaurs. We are exterminating species at somewhere between a thousand and ten thousand times the background level of extinctions that normally goes on. And this spasm of extinctions, the greatest in 65 million years, is created by humanity.
The way we have created this Age of Extinctions is described by Paul Erlich with a formula, I=PxCxT, which states our ecological Impact (I) as a species equals Population (P) times Consumption (C) times Technology (T). That is: how many of us there are, how much we consume, and the technologies that we create to produce this consumption, describes our Impact on the earth or our ecological footprint.
The really defining characteristic of the 20th Century, as my colleague Pete Myers and others have pointed out, is that humanity has come to scale as a force in the biological and geochemical processes of the whole Earth.
There are five principle causes of this Age of Extinctions, this holocaust of life. These five meta-forces driving this Age of Extinctions are: (1) climate change, (2) ozone depletion, (3) toxic chemicals, (4) the destruction of habitat, and (5) invasive species that move in when ecosystems are destroyed. Notice that three of the five are all the result of the abuse of the hydrocarbon assets that lie below the surface of the Earth. Climate change, ozone depletion and toxic chemicals are all a result of this hydrocarbon century that we’ve lived in. We have become Hydrocarbon Man.
These five principle causes of the Age of Extinctions are by no means the only forces at work. Nor are they the only forces that threaten us. Nuclear energy and contamination remains a potent prospective cause of future extinctions. Bill Joy, Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, has suggested in a prescient article in Wired Magazine that biotechnology, nanotechnology and robotics are three "technologies of mass destruction" that each have the power to loose into the environment entities that can, once released, multiply out of control. Biotechnology has that power today; nanotechnology and robotics will acquire that capacity when they reach the stage of development where micromachines or robotic machines have the capacity to recreate themselves. Indeed biotechnology, as it turns its face toward modification of what it means to be a human being, with potent germline techniques now under development, holds the prospect of transforming us as we continue to transform the earth. Francis Fukuyama has written a magisterial account of this prospect in Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, in which he argues for a ban on human germline biotechnology and cloning. Gregory Stockl has done a remarkable job of arguing the opposite case in Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future.
James McNeill, direction of the Brundtland Commission, which introduced the concept of sustainable development, once told me at a Commonweal conference that he found it useful to imagine four possible futures for humanity:
· We will to some extent continue to live in a world of business as usual.
· We will to some extent experience descent into chaos.
· We will to some extent move toward a sustainable world.
· We will to some extent become artificial people on an artificial planet.
I like this formulation very much because it indicates that the real future will not be one of these four ideal types, but will inevitably be a mixture of all four. Thus what those of us who cherish the Creation and wish to preserve it are fighting for is a world in which we retain as much of our natural heritage as possible. But the most interesting thing about this formulation, I have come to realize, is that achieving a sustainable future is the most artificial of all four possibilities. To move toward sustainability we must learn, as the great French scientist Rene Dubos proposed, to cultivate the Earth as a garden, to be gardeners of the Earth. A garden is by its nature an intimate mixture of nature and artifice. The artifice that will be required of us if we are to serve as faithful stewards and gardeners of the Earth is a higher and more complex level of artifice than is required if we just let the other three futures -- business as usual, descent into chaos, and becoming artificial people on an artificial planet -- fight it out, as it were. Those three futures will happen "naturally," without intervention. The more natural future, that of achieving sustainability, will require the most skilled artifice of all.
We often think about this Age of Extinctions, this holocaust of life that we have created, as primarily a threat to other species. We may recognize that climate change, for example, is hitting humanity very hard in less developed countries, with drought, weird weather, mega-storms and hurricanes. We have begun to have an inkling that climate change will affecting America as well, with the melting of the permafrost in Alaska and the incredible droughts and forest fires that are hitting the American West.
What we rarely consider is what this Age of Extinctions is doing to our health right now in America and, indeed, on the Upper West Side of the island of Manhattan, where I am speaking to you today.
Toxic Chemicals: The Environmental Threat of Which We Are Most Aware
I think for many of us toxic chemicals are the one of these five drivers of extinction that we are most aware of in terms of our own health. Poll data repeatedly shows that North Americans have a low awareness of climate change as a major issue, but a high awareness of the role of toxic chemicals as a potential threat to human health. That may soon change, as climate change makes itself felt in our daily lives in North America. But toxic chemicals as a threat to human and environmental health is what I want to explore today.
Toxic chemicals and heavy metals are essentially what our global technological-industrial system extracts from the fossil and mineral resources below the surface of the Earth and then distributes in the biosphere. Recall that the biosphere is no thicker than dew on a blade of grass -- in terms of its relationship to the Earth. We take all these hydrocarbons and heavy metals out of the Earth, we transmute them into products and by-products that we use or discard, and then we distribute them in the biosphere and they enter the whole set of biological cycles including our bodies.
Now, what are some of the diseases that are linked to chemicals and heavy metals, either by traditional toxicology or by the very important emerging science of endocrine disruption and other forms of signal disruption? Those of you who know Theo Colburn’s book, Our Stolen Future, co-written with Pete Myers and Dianne Dumanoski, may have had an introduction to the subject of endocrine disruption. There is an explosion of science on these chemicals, which are also being called “developmental toxicants.” The new science indicates that the developing fetus is affected by chemical and heavy metal exposures at levels orders of magnitude lower than the level at which these toxics cause cancer by traditional toxicological mechanisms. These endocrine disrupters send false signals to the developing fetus, as though they were signals from the mother’s endocrine system, which guide fetal development. These endocrine disrupters can affect intelligence, health, fertility and the whole spectrum of human consciousness: intelligence and behavioral responses and so forth.
Some of the health conditions in which in which chemicals and heavy metals are either known or suspected of playing a contributing role include Asperser’s Syndrome, asthma, Alzheimer’s Disease, autism, birth defects, brain cancers, breast cancer, bladder cancer, shifting birth ratios of male to female, very heavy toxic loads in breast milk, childhood cancers, esophageal cancer, liver cancer, leukemia, lung cancer, lymphoma, melanoma, mesotheliomoma, testicular cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, reproductive cancers in DES daughters, developmental disabilities, juvenile diabetes, Down’s syndrome, endometriosis, eczema, fibroids, fibromyalgia, infertility, increased time to conception, lower sperm counts , lower birth weight, miscarriages, premature birth, premature puberty, declining age at menarche, immune disorders, rheumatoid arthritis, Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, learning disabilities, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and so forth.
I would just like to ask first for a show of hands: how many people in this audience have a family member or somebody close to you that’s been touched by one of those conditions?
Now the second question: how many of you saw the person you cared for with a chemically related environmental health condition as one more wounded person, wounded by the same set of chemicals and heavy metals that are wounding people with so many other diseases and disorders? That’s a smaller number of hands raised.
The recognition that the pandemic of environmentally related health conditions are linked, that they form a pattern, and that the environment (in this instance we are speaking of chemicals alone) is affecting our health and that of those we love right now, is the kind of shift in consciousness that I think we need to think about. It’s wonderful for breast cancer patients to have a sense of community with other breast cancer patients. But the linkage between breast cancer, asthma, learning disabilities, birth defects, infertility and all these other diseases and conditions, is the thing that still escapes most of us. We haven’t learned to think holistically about those linkages.
Norco, Louisiana as a Metaphor for Our Experience of Environmental Health
I want to tell you about a small town where exposure to toxic chemicals is less abstract than it is for many of us here. Before I was here, I came back from four days in a town in Louisiana called Norco, which is just outside New Orleans on the Mississippi River. For the last two years I have been working with a black community within Norco, in the Diamond district of Norco. And Norco, I believe, is a kind of a metaphor for our times. It’s a town of about 3,000 people. It is sandwiched between a Shell chemical plant on one side and a Shell-controlled refinery on the other. So, there is a chemical plant on one side, there’s a refinery on the other side, and when you come to the town for the first time you can’t believe that anyone would live here because there is, particularly if you come at night, and you see these vast metal structures with flames and lights and smoke coming out of them. But if you come during the day, you enter this little town, and if you drive through the white part of town there are these nice clean houses and these well mowed lawns and these Catholic saints and so forth on the lawns and it’s all very beautiful. And lots of American flags, and it’s all quite beautiful if you ignore the fact that you are right between these two chemical plants.
If you go to the black side of town, it is right next to the Shell Chemical plant, which is one of the 11 plants in Cancer Alley, Region VI EPA, that has the highest level of accidental chemical emissions and exposures. If you go to those four streets, the Diamond neighborhood, you find that it is cut-off from the white part of town by a wide block of foliage and trees. So you have the chemical plant, and next to it you have the black community, and then you have this big kind of sponge of trees and foliage that may block or mitigate some of the ground-hugging chemical releases before they reach the white community, and then you have the white side of town.
I’ve been to Norco four times in the last two years. I have been trying to help Concerned Citizens of Norco, which is an African-American activist group in Diamond, to win the right to relocation for their community away from this Shell Chemical plant to somewhere where they and their children can breathe the air. It only takes about four hours in Diamond to begin to feel dizzy. Your eyes water, your throat itches and stuff like that. But, these folks have been living in Diamond for generations. This is actually one of the original African-American communities in the state, the site of one of the great slave revolts in Louisiana history. And there are families that trace their family histories back to the plantations on which they were slaves. Actually, Diamond was the name of a plantation there. And, then, the black community was moved as Shell bought the space and began to develop the chemical plant. And the chemical company kept growing right up next to them. And the number of chemicals that were coming out kept expanding.
And here’s the deal. The black community feels sick and wants to move. The white community, four blocks away, in general, feels healthy and feels that there is no problem living between these two chemical plants. The black community got no jobs at Shell and no benefits. When there was a huge explosion that blew out doors and windows and collapsed walls and ceilings throughout the town, the black community got much less compensation to rebuild their houses than the white community did in the 1970’s. The white community got the well-paying jobs at Shell. An operator at the Shell plants starts at $50,000 a year, which in rural Louisiana, and for the children of sharecroppers, is a fortune. So, they got these good jobs, they got pensions, they got benefits and they want to believe that they are OK. And the black community got nothing. The black community is closer to the chemical plant and you can’t avoid the fact that the chemicals make you feel bad all the time.
Now, I would just suggest to you that Norco is a kind of a metaphor for our time. You have these poor communities, often communities of color, that cannot avoid what the factories and chemical plants and toxic waste dumps and incinerators that they are right next to are doing. And then you have the more middle class communities that are far enough away from the factory so that they don’t have the constant physical reminder of what’s going on. And, yet, those chemicals don’t stop at the grass dividing line between the black community and the white community. They don’t stop there. And everything we know from this exploding science on endocrine and signal disrupting chemicals is that they function at parts per billion or even parts per trillion. So, the reality is, when we look at Norco as a metaphor for our times, that the white community says, "why do those black folks want to move? You know, they are just trying to get something for nothing. We’re all healthy. We’re all fine here. If they have health problems, it must be all the drugs and alcohol they do." Yet I go into the black community and I find these hardworking, church going families that have neat houses and do everything they can under very difficult conditions. And they are homeowners. And they would love it to be healthy enough for them to stay there, but it just isn’t so. And so they are trying to move. So, that is that kind of dichotomy. How many of us, in effect live in the white part of Norco, because of the jobs that we have, and the reality that our way of life is comfortable enough so we want to ignore what the chemicals may be doing to our health. We want to believe that it’s OK. And how many of us, either because of disease, or exposure, or consciousness, or where we actually live, -- how many of us live on the black side of Norco, and we realize we really have to do something about it. [Note: Shell Chemical and Concerned Citizens of Norco reached an historic agreement allowing Diamond residents to choose between selling their homes to Shell for a fair price and moving elsewhere or receiving home improvement loans and remaining in Norco in June, 2002.]
I speak of Norco as a metaphor because the situation I am describing is not just taking place in Norco. And it’s not just facing workers in chemical industries. The problem is not just in disease cluster communities where childhood cancer, or autism, or systemic lupus is endemic. The fact is that the chemical contaminants that make you dizzy after a few hours in Norco are in every one of us. Literally every single person in this room, every person on the Earth, every mammal on Earth, carries hundreds and hundreds of these chemicals, no matter where you live on Earth. So, for example, a highly toxic zone now has been established up in the Arctic Circle. The Inuit, a First Nations people living in the Arctic Circle, have very, very heavy loads of toxic chemicals in their body because the chemicals skip up through the atmosphere and then, with the cold, drop down there. The polar bears up there are referred to by many scientists who study them now as “chemical factories”. You find polar bears being born with dual sex organs as a result of endocrine disrupting chemicals. In fact, it’s kind of a race to see which will destroy the polar bears first. Will it be the chemicals which may make them infertile. Or, will it be the fact that global warming is destroying the ice structures that they depend on to hunt seals? And, more and more of them are on the edge of starvation. And, for me, the polar bears are a kind of a symbol again, like Norco, of what climate change and chemicals together are doing to our health.
Bill Moyers, "Trade Secrets," and Body Burdens of Toxic Chemicals
Some of you may have seen Bill Moyers’ documentary, “Trade Secrets”, about the chemical industry and how, like the tobacco industry, it has conspired to keep the true science on its product from us. And, you may remember the scene where Moyers is tested by a physician named Mike McCally at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. This testing was virtually identical to some body burden testing that Commonweal, Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the Environmental Working Group did together, where we tested a dozen people through a comprehensive assay of hundreds of chemicals, like what the Centers for Disease Control is able to do, but very few private labs can do. My wife, Sharyle Patton and I were also among the dozen people tested for our body burdens of toxic chemicals. The experience of learning what is in your body is very remarkable. Sharyle has levels of dioxin in her body that are pretty much the same that you find in Mossville, on Lake Charles, in Louisiana, where the PVC industry is based and dioxin levels are higher than just about anywhere else in the United States. Sharyle has very, very high levels of dioxin. And I have very, very high levels of mercury and arsenic in my body. So, when you get these tests you can look at all the pesticides and the industrial chemicals and the heavy metals in your body. It would be very interesting if each of you could have this test and learn what is in your body. And one of my great goals for the next decade is to make these chemical assays like a pap smear: cheap and accessible. Because if every person in this room knew what the chemical industry is storing in your body right now, you would not have the same feeling about being a storage tank for the chemical industry. It would not be quite all right with you.
Reducing Body Burdens of Toxic Chemicals By Breast Feeding
There is one way to reduce your body burden of toxic chemicals. But it is only available to women. And that way is to get pregnant and breast-feed your baby. Because if you get pregnant, it mobilizes the toxic chemicals that are stored in your fat, in your breast milk, and you can download a very substantial portion, particularly to your first child, who will receive a substantial load of his or her total body burden of toxic chemicals for his or her life from his mother, breastfeeding. And, yet, breast feeding the baby remains the best thing to do because most of the damage done by these endocrine disrupting chemicals has been done during fetal development and the studies of the breast fed and non-breast fed children who have, for example, heavy PCB exposure demonstrates that the children who were breast fed because breast food is the perfect food for babies, do better than the children who were not breast fed. Sandra Steingraber, the preternaturally gifted poet, scientist and cancer survivor who wrote Living Downstream has written an even more important book, Having Faith, about giving birth to her daughter Faith, as a cancer survivor herself, and about breast feeding her with breast milk she knows as a scientist to be filled with toxic chemicals. Now, I don’t know about you, but the fact that the sacred act of breast-feeding now gives babies milk that sometimes could not pass FDA standards because of its chemical contamination is not OK with me. It’s just not OK with me that that’s the world we’ve created. I’m not willing to be an onlooker in that world. I can only be a citizen in that world and a citizen is somebody who chooses to engage with the issue.
I believe that the right to breast-feed your baby toxic-free is going to be one of the defining human rights issues of this new millennium.
Hope in the Age of Extinctions: The Tradition of the Wounded Healer
So, I’ve told you enough bad news. There’s kind of a rule that you can only go for about 35 or 40 minutes in a talk about bad news. And, then, you have to provide hope. So, the last 20 minutes of this talk is about hope.
Where is the hope in this Age of Extinctions? How can we best live in this time of gathering darkness when we are poisoning all life on Earth, changing the climate, and stripping the biosphere of its protective ozone layer? I think there is hope. I think there is a way. I think there are, in fact, a beautiful array of ways to move from cynicism or denial or despair to lives of peace and purpose. And that’s what I’d like to talk about for the last 20 minutes here.
The first of these observations comes from working with people with cancer and with others facing difficult diseases. In the Cancer Help Program, as I said, one of the things I’ve learned (and I’ve learned it so profoundly that it’s in my bones) is that there is a way to carry a wound that moves you toward the light. What really happens in the Cancer Help Program is that it’s a process of giving people enough quiet and enough space and enough caring so that they can take all the suffering that they’ve been dealing with and use it as a means toward moving toward the light. You know, this may sound like a California New Age concept. But it really is not. I have witnessed hundreds of people from every walk of learn to use their suffering as a path to deeper wisdom and awareness. This idea, the right use of suffering, is enshrined in all the great religious and spiritual traditions. The idea that suffering properly used can move us toward the light has a very ancient lineage.
For example, this lineage can be found in the archetype of the wounded healer, an archetype named by Carl Jung. Many of you are familiar with this idea. Jung based this observation on the shamanic tradition, which Mircea Eliade and others had explored. The shamanic tradition, Michael Harner and others have shown, is culturally invariant around the whole world. All the original peoples of the world have shamans or medicine men and women. And what these medicine men and women have in common is that they experienced a life threatening illness themselves. This wound, this illness, took them to the door of death. But rather than be destroyed by this experience, they used it to open up to forces within them that not only help them survive the illness but that helped them come back with a profound sense that the rest of their lives had to be devoted to helping others who were lost in illness and suffering themselves. The only other universal comparably universal archetype, some say, is the incest taboo. So the archetype of the wounded healer seems to be rooted in the human genetic code in a very, very deep way.
That it is possible to use the experience of being wounded to move toward the light. You know, Dame Edith Sitwell once said of the great poet William Blake: He was cracked but it was through the crack that the light came. And you find this sense that the wound, as Rachel Naomi Remen puts it, is not only a wound but an opening, in all the great spiritual traditions. In yoga, one of the most ancient traditions, the third book of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, starts this way: The acceptance of suffering as an aid to purification, the study of great wisdom teachings, and complete surrender to the divine force in each of us, these three things are yoga in practice. Notice that Patanjali did not say that the core of yoga is stretching exercises, breathing exercises, vegetarian diet, and so on. He said, “The acceptance of suffering as an aid to purification, the study of wisdom teachings (which are about how to turn suffering into purification) and complete surrender to the divine light that is in each of us, these three things are yoga in practice.
You find the wounded healer, the shamanic healer, in all the traditions. Think of the black spiritual that is written in the voice of the Christ: If somehow you could pack up your troubles/ and give them all to me/ you would lose them/ 'cause I know how to use them/ give them all to me. You know, that sense that the shaman, the Christ, the medicine man, knows how to use our suffering, can take on our suffering, because he has worked through suffering himself (or herself) and therefore knows how to purify suffering and feed it back to us as a source of light and wisdom. That is, I just want to suggest to you, is at the core of why it is possible for us to move forward, toward greater light, toward greater wisdom and compassion, toward greater reverence for life, in this Age of Extinctions. The enormous wound in the body of life, the body of Mother Earth, that we have created, is not only a wound of unspeakable proportions -- it can also be an opening of awesome power for us as a species. But in order for us to learn the great teachings of this wound in the body of life, we have to recognize its full extent. We have to witness it, feel it, grieve it. We cannot find the teaching of this wound in the body of life if we deny it, if we harden our hearts to it, it we suppress awareness of it. And yet denying the wound, suppressing awareness of the wound, hardening our hearts to the wound, is exactly what we are doing.
If this seems abstract in some way, let us go back to Norco, to the African-American neighborhood of Diamond next to the Shell Chemical plant. You might think that living in a place where you can’t breathe the air, and where you have been oppressed for generations, would destroy the human spirit. But, I will tell you that the Greater Good Hope Baptist Church in Diamond is the place where I participated in one of the most profound religious ceremonies that I’ve ever experienced in my life. So, it is not only at the individual level that we’re genetically coded to be able to turn suffering into wisdom and love. We’re coded to be able to do that as a community.
Women have a differential advantage in this genetic coding to turn danger and suffering into healing. Some of you may have seen the recent scientific work on the "fight or flight" response to danger. The scientists discovered that women don’t necessarily respond to danger or suffering with "fight or flight." When women are stressed, they tend to gather together and support each other and it improves their immune system. And it is no surprise to me that in the African-American community, it is the women who are at the core of the church, because they come together in that way. So, we are not only coded to be able to find light in the wound. But also, we’re coded to come together. So, you can also see that having said this response to wounds, to suffering, happens at the individual level and at the community level, you can also imagine a comparable response at a national or global level.
The Emerging Environmental Health Movement and The History of Upward Movements in Human Consciousness
If you look at the history of the human species, with all of our horrible experiences, nonetheless, if you look at the last few hundred years, what are the movements in human consciousness that you see? You see the democracy emerging as a potent global force and aspiration from monarchies and dictatorships. You see the human rights movement, the women’s movement, the labor movement, the environmental movement, the gay rights movement, the mind-body health movement, the animal rights movement, the peace movement, these are all examples of shifts in human consciousness that have decisively changed how we see ourselves and how we govern ourselves. All of these movements have something in common. They all propose an expansion of the community of being with which we feel kinship and which we seek to preserve and protect. So these are upward movements of consciousness.
Now, I want to suggest to you that we are at the beginning of a new movement of that kind. I believe that we are experiencing an emerging environmental health movement in this country and around the world, and I believe that it is going to make the right of women to breast feed toxic free, as I said, one of the great human rights issues of the new millennium. I think it’s going to be just that powerful, that we will say it’s not OK for us to have created a world where women have to worry that they cannot conceive and gestate and breast feed a baby without chemicals that are affecting fetal development and contributing to fifty different diseases in later life. It is not OK. It’s not OK to sit still for that. It may happen, but it is not OK to sit still for it.
Later this month at Commonweal, we’re gathering representatives of many of the wounded healers of this emerging environmental health movement. We are having representatives of cancer groups, learning disabilities groups, autism groups, asthma groups, Parkinson’s Disease groups, DES survivors, endometriosis survivors, and many others come together. Our goal over the coming decade is to make the community of environmentally health affected patient groups and the health professionals who care about them, and the family members who recognize that that toxic chemicals are affecting us all, a powerful voice for healing ourselves, our communities and the Earth. Our goal is to raise the awareness of all of us whose lives and families and friends have been wounded by environmentally related diseases and disorders. But our goal is not to create a movement of victims. We don’t want to speak in the plaintive tones of victim. Our goal is to create a movement of wounded healers.
You know, ultimately, the shamanic experience is not only about coming to terms with suffering; it is about coming to terms with death. And of the things that we do in the Cancer Help Program that is very liberating to people is to talk about death. It is often the first opportunity that people have had to talk about death and dying, and often they come in very afraid of that conversation. And then we go through it. Creating a safe place to share feelings, beliefs and concerns about death and dying is one of the most transformative things that we do in the Cancer Help Program.
Well, similarly, this Age of Extinctions that we are living with is not only about suffering, it is also about death and dying. And it’s about death on a massive scale. It’s about not only about the death of individuals; it’s about the death of tens and hundreds of thousands of beautiful species that are being extinguished. Tens and hundreds of thousands and millions of species that will never live again. Ecosystems that will be destroyed because these magnificent beings played some critical role in the web of life in which they participated. And so there is a way in which, in order to come to terms with this holocaust of life, there are a whole set of things that we could learn from work with personal healing, and with death and dying, that the mind-body health movement has helped us to recover in our time.
We have learned a great deal about how we can respond to the great dying that we’ve created on the face of the Earth. You know, that shamanic tradition of not only facing suffering, but also facing death, you can hear in the 23rd Psalm, Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil for Thou art with me. That sense is at the core of all the shamanic traditions. I will fear no evil in the Valley of the Shadow of Death for Thou art with me. If you try to deny or suppress awareness of the great dying in this Age of Extinctions, you feel depressed and anxious and it doesn’t work for you. But if you are willing to face the great dying, to step into it and live with it, then, along with the grief and the horror and the pain of it, comes the light. You can’t block off the one without blocking off the other. You can’t block off the pain and grief without blocking off the source of the light. If you are willing to experience the pain and grief, you can experience the light. So, today in this Age of Extinctions, the amazing thing is you watch television, you watch the news, and nobody talks about this stuff. Nobody talks about the fact that this unbelievable event that we’re in the middle of that we caused, this holocaust of life that is going on.
So, today, we all carry this wound of Mother Earth. The choice for us is not whether to carry this wound or not, but how to carry the wound. Can we come to see that the individual wounds we carry are so often simply variants of the common wound ? Can we find within us that wisdom of the wounded healer, which is our genetic heritage. We cannot know whether we will win or lose the struggle. Our choice is whether to raise our own vision to the level of awareness that Thich Nhat Han, the great Buddhist philosopher and poet and monk, calls the consciousness of Interbeing. Now, the consciousness of Interbeing is the awareness of the profound interconnectedness of all life. I speak of an emerging environmental health movement, and I use that as a phrase of convenience, but you know, the term "environmental health" will get used up just like the term "sustainable development" or any other phrase. Ultimately, in truth, we are not really talking about a movement, because movements self-destruct over time. They are useful for a period of time and then they self-destruct. What we’re really talking about is the need for one of the greatest leaps in human consciousness that we have experienced. And it is not an impossible leap. It’s going on. It’s among us right now. It’s no bigger than the leap to democracy, or the leap to the end of slavery, or the leap to the environmental movement or the women’s movement. But it is a big leap. And so the truth of the matter is that that consciousness of Interbeing is only something that we can cultivate in ourselves initially. This is particularly true because the mainstream media are controlled by forces inimical to full awareness of what is happening, and they are not going to tell us about this stuff. Awareness of what is really happening has to be a transmission from one of us to another of us. It has to start with us.
Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright and statesman, who suffered many years in prison for his beliefs, understood hope. He understood the difference between optimism and hope. He said: Optimism is the belief that everything is going to go right. And today in the world that’s a very hard belief to hold. He said: Hope is different. Hope is a deep orientation of the human soul that can be held in the darkest of times. We are living in dark times, and if we acknowledge that we are living in dark times, we can find that hope that is a deep orientation of our souls in the prison we have created for ourselves. People with cancer will tell you they may have a life threatening diagnosis that makes optimism impossible, but they know that living without hope is just an impossible way to live. What we’re living with is a life threatening illness of the Creation, of the body of life on Earth. And in order to face this wound of the Earth, and work with it, hope isn’t optional. Hope is the only way to be able to do the work before us.
