The Wellness Bitch

About seven years ago, I completely lost faith in my government.

It’s likely that I was always wary of government and just never really noticed before. I’m not someone who typically submits to or mindlessly accepts authority. On the other hand, before seven years ago, I wouldn’t have called myself an activist either.

Seven years ago, the scaredy cat in me still hoped that my government was doing a good job protecting me from the bad guys.

Seven years ago, I didn’t know how many bad guys I needed protection from.

But then I woke up.

When I woke up, I slowly started to notice a chain that led from the government to my health and my children’s chronic illness.

A chain link of connections beginning with my oldest son’s first allergic reaction to peanuts and then his reflux and then his asthma. A chain link connecting my second son’s colic and his eczema. A chain link connecting my children’s health and the food they were eating and the cleaning products they were being exposed to and the vaccines they were receiving and the sprays that were blanketing the lawns they played in and the water they were drinking from the tap. A chain link connecting their health to their the environment.

And then I woke up to the weakest link.

The chain that was supposed to connect the government to our environment to our food to our water to our big business to our farms to our pharmaceutical companies was broken.

Is broken.

I don’t know when it broke. When profit and political office became more important than protecting our children.

And I don’t know if one man or woman elected to office today can heal my wounds enough to restore my faith in government, but I would really like someone to try.

If your name is on a ballot today, please:

Try being a stand for my children.

Try being a stand for the environment.

Try being a stand for what nourishes our bodies and our minds.

Try fixing the break in the chain.

Connect us again. Heal this country. Heal this planet. Heal our families. Heal yourself.

This morning, I was in my backyard lovingly watering my growing passionfruit vine and grapefruit tree. I feel very lucky to be renting home with inherited fruit trees and to have a mother-in-law with a green thumb and a generous heart. She planted the three vines alongside our fence with the hopes that the fast-growing vines would soon produce fruit for us.

I have already admitted that I have a black thumb. Though I’m also proud to say the thumb is greening. One day, about a month ago, I realized how soothing was the practice of watering my trees and my herb garden. Perhaps, sometime in the near future, I might pick up a pair of gardening gloves and plant something into the dirt myself.

A few years ago I would have easily sprayed pesticides in my yard. No one likes weeds or bugs.

But now I know the collateral damage of pesticides, even the ones deemed “safe” enough to sell and buy at Home Depot.

Which is why I was angry and frustrated when I noticed my neighbor spraying his yard with pesticides at the same time this morning I was nourishing my trees. Not only was this a horrifying irony for me, but we live downwind from his house. The wind will blow the pesticides straight into our yard, and perhaps inside our kitchen through our open windows.

I wanted to say something to him. But he’s not exactly approachable. My neighbor is a military professional. He likes to walk around shirtless smoking cigarettes. He has a particularly hairy chest. The chest in itself is intimidating.

Had there not been a language barrier (his Hebrew, my English); would I have said something to him? Asked him if he knew about the harmful side effects of spraying pesticides to his and his children’s health?

I’m not sure I would have. Which is a little embarassing for The Wellness Bitch to admit.

What stopped me? Was it purely a language barrier? Was it a gender issue? Had I already made up in my mind he wouldn’t have listened? Wouldn’t have cared?

What stops us from sharing the information we know with our neighbors? With our friends and family? With our children’s teachers? With our colleagues at work or school?

And at what stops us from listening?

I thought about that, too. About all the times my mother or my mother-in-law tried to share useful tips about parenting or about marriage they learned from “the trenches.”

I thought about the advice seasoned moms of teenagers or young adults try to impart on me when I share with them stories of raising my school aged kids.

I thought about the countless times I screamed at my parents, “You don’t understand!” when I was a teenager, myself.

I thought about how they, in fact, did understand. And had wisdom to share that would go mostly unlistened to.

And then I considered the times I’ve listened.

What were the conditions that enabled me to free my hands from my ears? To open my eyes and my mind? To incorporate new information into my belief system?

1. I was seeking help.

2. I respected the person sharing the information.

3. I didn’t feel threatened. Or if I did, I felt safe enough in my environment, or with the person imparting the information, to tolerate my fear.

4. There were open lines of two-way communication. It was part of a larger conversation. The person on the other end was open to hearing my point of view, too.

As we continue to navigate a world where people are waking up to wellness; it’s important we recognize the pathway to transformation begins in our own listening. In being perceptive to our audience’s needs and ability to hear what we have to say. In recognizing their fears and the limits of their own belief systems. And measuring whether or not the time is right; or whether or not you are the appropriate messenger.

If you want to be heard, you must first start by listening.

Well, there you have it folks. This nut has finally been called a nut. And by none other than the medical establishment, and his ever loving cronies, the mainstream media.

Eating too healthy has a new name: Orthorexia.

It’s actually not so new. I first heard about this “diagnosis” last year when Time magazine reported it. At the time, I chuckled and waited for one of my family members to hit “forward” and send it to my email with a gentle suggestion that I seek help.

But somehow Orthorexia has made it back into the spotlight again; perhaps, someone on the Today Show staff needed a good comeback for that annoying co-worker. You know the one. She constantly brings in her own homemade lunch every day — a healthy salad filled with organic veggies from her co-op, with sliced grass-fed beef, seasoned with fresh herbs and spices and no salt. She dropped 20 pounds when she stopped eating gluten. She’s fit. Her skin glows. She no longer needs to smoke or wear black.

I can’t imagine why else a health reporter could take seriously and reprint an indication from the Mayo Clinic that states, “To feel clean and pure, orthorexics may avoid food with artificial coloring or flavoring or added salt and sugar. They may require food to be washed several times and cooked to kill bacteria, the clinic says, and some won’t go to restaurants to avoid meals they haven’t prepared themselves.”

I’m reprinting those words exactly from the Today.com article, which were excerpted from an article written by a physician and registered dietician on the Mayo Clinic web site,  and then shared with millions of unsuspecting Americans on the Today Show by the show’s “nutrition expert” Madelyn Fernstrom.

To that, I can only parrot another reader’s comment on the Today.com article: “If only more Americans had this condition.”

Fernstrom, who seems legitimately concerned that too many Americans are focusing a disproportionate amount of time on healthy eating, also says that one of the indications of someone being orthorexic is spending three to four hours a day reading labels on food packaging

Stop.

Hold on just a minute.

I have spent two hours reading labels on food packaging.

Shit. Someone grab a prescription pad. Quick! Write me a script for Lexapro — Pronto!

Or…wait a second. Instead of writing that prescription, why don’t you write a letter to Fernstrom explaining to her that shopping in a mainstream American grocery store these days is like shopping in France when you can’t speak a word of French.

The labels are filled with the names of chemical concoctions that can only be interpreted and understood by a scientist or someone at the FDA who has been paid off by Kraft.

Want to know why I “can’t live life normally” or why I am in “social isolation” because of my food choices? It’s because I’m spending so much time at the grocery store trying to translate food labels!!!

Whatever you do, don’t tell her you heard about this from me.

Fernstrom also warns that those who “lecture” others on the safety of food are also prime candidates for Orthorexia.

Uh-oh.

I’m going to spend the next three hours working on a magical potion with herbs from my organic garden that I grew myself so I can comfortably eat Kraft Macaroni and Cheese for dinner like sane Americans.

The last thing I need is one more diagnosis.

It’s funny (and not) how often I have forsaken the Earth in the name of health.

What I mean by that is I never directly intended to heal the planet by changing my lifestyle. My lifestyle changes were always very selfish: I cleaned “green” because it reduced my asthma symptoms. I started drinking filtered water and stopped polluting water sources because I learned that water filled with the antibiotics I had previously flushed down to toilet was making me sick. I started eating organic meat and produce because I understood the long-lasting health consequences of ingesting toxins. I realized that my and my children’s symptoms of chronic illness were partially due to toxins in our environment.

I never really made these decisions with an eye on the planet, though I did understand that my efforts towards healing myself were also contributing to a healthier Earth. In fact, there were even times when I told people outright, “I’m not an environmentalist. I’m just a concerned mom who wants my children to grow up healthy. I’m just a woman who is sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

I wish I could say that my marketing campaign was strategic: I purposefully did not align myself with the green movement because I wanted to reach a population that was not going to be responsive to “healing the world.” I didn’t do it purposefully and yet somewhere down deep I think I understood that there was a group on the verge. People like me who didn’t necessarily possess an impulse to the “change the world,” but who were sensitive and rational and could understand the connection between healing ourselves, healing our planet, and healing humanity.

Perhaps I wasn’t operating on my plan, but a divine plan: To reach people through messaging they can access. Messaging that fits with their understanding of the world, which for many people is “Me.” Or “survive.” Or “feel better.”

I became a vegetarian in 1998  not because I thought eating animals was inhumane, but because I had a health scare and giving up meat seemed easier than giving up drinking and smoking.

I stopped eating sugar the following year because I was tired of getting yeast infections and I read a book that told me sugar addiction was connected not only to yeast overgrowth, but also to anxiety, IBS, and other chronic illnesses. That diet lasted about a month that first time.

I started doing yoga in 2000 because my therapist told me it was a way to deal with my anxiety. At that time, I practiced yoga, not instead of medication as I might now, but alongside. It took me a few more years to give up the crutch of medication.

In 2001, I got married and in 2002 pregnant: And from then on, my mission has been to know what I need to know to keep my family healthy.

In 2007, however, I realized (with the help of many friends and colleagues) that I had it in me to share my message of well-being and empowerment with others. As I said before, I never saw beyond health and wellness. I understood my mission of “healing my community” to be one that focused simply on personal health and wellness. My eyes were never set towards the horizon.

For many years, I ignored the fact that the Earth’s resources were being so exploited that one day it wouldn’t matter how healthy I was. Because the Earth would one day soon no longer be able to sustain even healthy beings.

Over the last year or so, however, my focus has shifted. My awareness has heightened. My awakening, which started in 1998, has reached a tipping point.

I understand that there is no divide between healing my planet and healing myself.

I understand that healing myself is healing my planet. And healing my planet is healing my family.

I understand now that I could work 24-7 on cleansing my body through detox or boosting it through vitamins and supplements, but that a dying world is not a world a healthy body can live on.

And I am worried that our world is dying.

I don’t mean to be an alarmist or a doomsday prophet. But as a researcher, as a thinker, as someone who has woken up already to wellness, I cannot ignore the signs that our Earth is sharing with us.

She’s unwell. And if we don’t actively and intentionally incorporate into our wellness initiatives the healing of the planet, our wellness initiatives will be for naught. This message is directed to others like me who blog in an effort to educate or spark dialogue; it’s a message for health and wellness practitioners who preach holistic and preventative care and yet still use toxic cleaning products to wipe down their examination tables; it’s a message for the health conscious, and for the unconscious.

It’s clear to me that the only way we will heal ourselves is to adopt a two-pronged approach.

Heal the planet, so that you may heal. Heal yourself, so that the planet may heal. One depends on the other.

But to do this, we need to change our messaging.

My recommendation to the spiritual and wellness gurus out there who have the ears of many more than I:

Stop speaking esoterically. Stop using words like “Oneness” and “Mother Earth” and “Gaia.” These are words only the awakened can understand. We need to be reaching a much, much larger audience. And we need to be reaching them NOW.

Speak in a language that the average mother or grandfather or high school student or gym teacher or scientist or medical doctor or college professor or postman or construction worker can access. Speak to our awareness and our fear.  Speak to our logical minds. Speak to our preconditioned understanding of how to world is. Speak to our every day needs.

To speak this way is not to perpetrate negativity; it’s simply acknowledging that in order to speed up our global enlightenment, we need to turn the lecture into the Cliff Notes. It’s time to stop sounding elitist and academic and…well…weird. We can shift humanity. But to do this, we might need to stop using words like “shift humanity.”

There are many out there like me: People who will easily shift from thinking only selfish to thinking selfless. But without an easy onramp to the road of enlightenment, they will simply just keep driving down the road that’s familiar.

I remember distinctly when I first heard and fell in love with the word “fester.”

I was on a high school summer political communications program in Washington, D.C. That night, Jill, a fellow Jersey girl, was offering up the punch line of yet another tale of her boyfriend back home, Terry, whom none of us had ever met, but was quite the character.

Terry was not just a Jersey guy, but a permanent resident of the Jersey Shore (if I may use euphemisms) and presumably possessed a signature style of speaking and behavior that lent itself to fodder for good storytelling.  

“And then Terry says,” my friend set it up, “That guy is like a sore festering on the back side of my ass!”

Wow. What a visual, I thought at the time. Fester: It’s a verb, I thought, with the power of an adjective.

And now something is festering inside me. It’s not just annoying or irritating me, mind you; it’s causing me lingering worry and emotional pain.  And like a festering sore on the back side of my ass, I can’t ignore this worry because it doesn’t look like it’s going away.

My worry has to do with anti-Semitism.

What does anti-Semitism have to do with wellness, you ask?

I’d have likely asked the same question a few months ago. But recently I’ve discovered there seems to be a connection between the two. And I fear I risk something by sharing my concern with you; by bringing politics into a non-political blog. I fear I risk alientating readers or worse, attracting unwanted ugly attention to this blog. But, I realize I risk a lot more by keeping quiet.

While the connection between the “wellness community” and anti-Semitism is under the radar, the overlap between social progressivism and left-wing politics is not. For instance, it’s understood that an environmental activist is often a liberal voter, right? If I were a betting girl (and I am), I would place a wad of cash on the chance that the majority of card-paying members of GreenPeace don’t vote Republican.

In many ways, I’ve ideologically aligned myself with those liberal voters because they often subscribe to expectations for society I also support, such as a woman’s right to choose, egalitarianism in the workplace, and, most important, the freedom to question and protest government intention and policy.

However, I learned somewhere along the way (read “college”) that left-wingers are often also anti-Israel: Something I am not. I am pro-Israel. So much so that I now live here.

Particularly in recent years, as Israel has become a main target for left-wing activists, I’ve become more and more conflicted about my alignment. And, while I will agree that Israel is certainly a piece of the human rights puzzle, I find it frustrating that activists often have a singular focus on Israel. This singular focus is peculiar and suspect to me and has always smelled a little bit like anti-Semitism, and/or Jewish self-hatred. When I read their posts on my left-wing friends’ Facebook wall I want to respond (but don’t): “But what about Syria?!? Or Libya, or Cuba, or Iran or other non-democratic governments in the U.S. State Department’s top ten most violators of human rights? Can we also talk about them? Are you also boycotting them? Are you crying for their abused women, brutally treated gays, and starving children?”

As a Jew with an interest in history, I’ve learned that left-wing thinking and anti-Semitism are no strangers to each other. (Look up Marxist theory. Or spend some time on the campus of a Liberal Arts college.) And I’ve learned to…ignore it. It’s just not my thang.

As an American Jewish Wellness Bitch who recently became an Israeli Jewish Wellness Bitch, however, I’m increasingly disturbed by the amount of anti-Israel, and even anti-Semitic messaging I find running through many wellness-related blogs and forums I visit; ones that focus on the types of ”alternative lifestyle” topics I’m interested in. 

What do I mean by alternative lifestyle topics?

Well, according to Wikipedia, something may be labeled alternative if it’s considered “outside the cultural norm,” but examples listed include lifestyle choices that I think many of us might consider normal, such as vegetarianism, meditation, herbal medicine, homebirth and hypnosis, to name a few.

It turns out, there are bloggers out there writing about topics I’m interested in (such as climate change and human consciousness) who are also entertaining submissions and comments from people who blame the world’s troubles on a “Zionist plot” or the Jewish-influenced media and banking elite.

Through following eco-friendly bloggers on Facebook and Twitter, I have discovered well-known and well-followed bloggers who position themselves as health-conscious and as concerned for the welfare of humanity; who speak and write like intellectuals, not like members of the lunatic fringe; and who, in one figurative breath preach meditation and in the other, rant about the “Rothschilds” (a reference to a Jewish banking conspiracy) and accuse Jews and Zionists of being part of a “New World Order” involved in secret governmental affairs. 

And just like other grassroots activists taking advantage of social networking, these individuals are also creating You Tube videos; they’re publishing e-books; they have radio shows and RSS feeds; all while selling nutritional supplements and invoking mantras.

It frightens me that an individual who may be searching for news and information  about “natural medicine,” or “Monsanto,” or “global warming” will stumble upon the unfiltered alternative news site, Before It’s News, or the alternative news magazine “Signs of the Times,” which admittedly offers relevant wellness-related news you likely won’t get on CNN.com, but also dedicates a significant part of their content to blatant anti-Israel op-eds and conspiracy theories that position Jews as “puppet masters.”

It’s mind boggling to me. How can you possibly promote “well-being” and ”awakening” when you are still so stuck in a cycle of fear?

Is it not hypocritical and counterproductive to foster paranoia and anger against other human beings when you preach well-being? I just don’t get it.

My message today?

1. I am a Jew and an ideological Zionist and I am not part of a global elite. If I controlled the world, there would be a lot more love and compassion and a lot less fear. My children would be growing up in a world that was safe for them. My blog would already be a best-selling book. I’d have much cooler clothes. And there would be more love.

2. There are Jews and Israelis both, hundreds of thousands of us, who are enlightened individuals – vegans, environmentalists, green builders, holistic health coaches, energy workers, midwives, yoga masters, spiritual gurus, organic farmers, writers, thinkers, and teachers. All of us passionate healers and educators, and many of us whom are working both behind the scenes and publicly to foster peace in both this region and the world. Our only plot is love. Our only intention is healing.

3. There is certainly evil in this world, but it’s evenly distributed among all nations and our energy is better spent on healing ourselves than it is on imagining and assigning blame.

If you found this blog because you were searching Zionist Plot or New World Order or Anti-Israel, I invite you to consider the idea that there is a Zionist Jew out there whose only purpose is to be one of many guides on your road to wellness.

Did you ever think: “If only we could manifest every day the level of love, caring, awareness, and positive energy that our civilization manages to muster during times of tragedy?”

I’m shocked and saddened by the news from Japan and the Pacific, and of course rally my positive thoughts and healing energy toward the people who have been impacted by the earthquake and tsunamis. It does strike me, however, when I’m reading status updates on Facebook for instance, how powerful we are as a greater community. And how easy it is for us to rally around victims of natural disaster (as we did after the 2004 tsunami or the Haitian earthquake) or around certain fatal diseases (such as AIDS or cancer), but that we are incapable of joining together for the simple daily purpose of compassion, kindness, and understanding towards each other and our physical planet.

I include myself in this observation, of course.

And, I ask you…why?