The Wellness Bitch

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 consider myself very lucky to be past the diaper phase. All three of my kids were potty trained within reasonable, developmentally appropriate times; with my daughter (my third) achieving genius status. She was fully trained by 23 months. I thought babies who were trained before the age of two were simply myths, legends, or products of overactive imaginations of mothers who spent way too much time gushing about their children. Not so.

It’s been a year or two since I’ve had to think about diaper accoutrements. But today I asked my coworker for something to clean my computer keyboard with and she handed me a baby wipe.

I took it…reluctantly.

After wiping down my keyboard with the baby wipe, it was no longer sticky but it smelled like an eighty-year old women who forgot that she already sprayed herself five times with perfume. Not a smell I want to be spending my day with.

And, not something you want to be wiping your babies bottom…or hands with.

Before I had my first child, a friend of mine told me she made homemade baby wipes for her baby using paper towel and water. She said her daughter never had baby rash – never a one! Being the psychotic mom I was with my first (and by psychotic, I mean obsessed with doing things “right”), I made my own baby wipes, too, and taught my husband how to use them and make them.  And, just like my friend’s baby, my son stayed rash free for months!

The truth of the matter is poop stinks. But baby poop, especially breastfed baby poop, is NOTHING. My refrigerator smells worse than your breastfed baby’s poop! You do not need to be wiping her fresh bottom down with chemicals that are trying unsuccessfully to smell like the summer garden of St. Petersburg! Even if your baby is formula fed – trust me, those poops are nothing compared to what they’ll smell like once she’s eating meat. Even still, you really don’t need to wash your baby’s bottom with anything more than water, and a little natural baby soap. (We liked California Baby brand’s unscented baby soap for sensitive skin, but castile soap is great too, and a lot cheaper.)

Janelle Sorensen of Healthy Child, Healthy World recently posted this great article with tips for homemade baby products, including baby wipes.  If you are a new mom, or a mom with a new baby, please keep in mind that what you put on your baby matters as much as what you put in her.

And if you are a psychotic new mom-to-be like I was, just remember: If you’re reading this and thinking about it, you’re one step ahead already.

This morning I was cleaning out my bathtub with Castile Soap when a bit of my cleaning solution splashed back right into my eye ball.

I flinched, waiting for it to sting, but it didn’t. I quickly rinsed my eye and felt fine.

Then I thought to myself, “Phew! That would have hurt like a M-ther F-er if that had been Clorox.”

But at least my eyeballs would have been ultra disinfected, right?

I haven’t used a harsh chemical cleaner in about five years. I think in that time, we might have used real bleach once or twice to get at some stubborn mold in our basement. But that’s it. For the most part, I clean with vinegar, baking soda, castile soap,  BonAmi, and a few Ecover products, particularly our dish soap, our floor cleaner, and a multi-purpose spray.

And, guess what?

You won’t believe it.

I promise you are in for a huge surprise.

Ready?

My house is just as clean, if not cleaner, than yours.

Yes, my house, wiped and sprayed with non-toxic, natural or plant-derived substances, is CLEAN.

In fact, I think my house is cleaner now than it’s ever been. Mostly, because now that I know what’s inside all those cleaning products my mom used when I was growing up and I used up until a few years ago (ie. Lysol, Pine Sol, Clorox Disinfecting Wipes, etc.) I think of houses cleaned with those products as DIRTY.

Not the kind of dirty you can see or swipe with your hands across a cabinet, but the kind of dirty the clogs up your lungs when you breathe it in. That makes your asthma worse.

That burns your eyes when it splashes back into them.

Those products no longer “smell clean” to me.

They smell like poison.

I’ve been…reconditioned.

Those of you who’ve read this blog for a while, know that I am an IMPERFECT being.

I am a work in progress. I am a WELLNESS BITCH in progress.

A few of the areas in which I still need to work hard include “kicking my nasty sugar habit,” “giving up coffee forever,” and a very broad category known as “getting in shape.”

I am fit for many things. I am fit to eat a chocolate chip cookie. I am fit to write a blog. I am fit to talk smack about doctors, Big Pharma, and the FDA.

But I am not fit.

I am certainly not fit to ride my bike, which I just had fitted for new tires yesterday. My bike hasn’t seen the light of day in six years, since we moved from Tucson, Arizona to Northern New Jersey. This morning, however, with the sun shining here in Israel and the streets finally dry after a week of heavy rain, I hopped on my Huffy and rode like the wind down my street. What a glorious feeling…until it was time to pedal uphill.

[Oh. My. God. I. Can't. Breathe. When. Did. I. Become. An. Old. Lady?????!!!!!???]

Through sheer will (and the prospect of humiliation) I made it up the very steep hill. Not without feeling the heavy burn in my lungs and trembling in my legs following years of inactivity.

WAKE UP CALL: You can eat right. You can even look thin and young. But neither of these means you are healthy or fit. If my life depended on running a mile in ten minutes, I’d surely be dead….within the first five minutes or so.

If it were up to me, aerosol cans would be considered an assault weapon.

Occasionally, you will find a minimally noxious ingredient inside an aerosol can, like olive oil, for instance.

But nine times out of ten, inside the aerosol can is a toxic substance set on kill. Air freshener, hair spray, deodorants, insecticides.

Isn’t it bad enough you’re killing me with your perfume, do you also have to attack me with your  industrial strength spray powder of death?

Yesterday, while sitting in on a sample Ulpan (intensive Hebrew language class), I decided to make a bathroom run. As I exited the ladies room stall, I almost passed out. The female janitor had just been through and sprayed something in the air. She might as well have put her raw-from-scrubbing hands around my neck and squeezed. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even stay long enough to wash my hands or scream at her, “Thou shall not kill!”

I had to hold my breath and run back up the stairs, praying the whole way that I’d make it. I did. But, now I’m seriously reconsidering Ulpan.

It’s one thing to sit for four hours in a stuffy room that reeks of B.O. It’s quite another to put myself in the Death Zone every time I go to the bathroom.

I wonder how much it would cost me to hire a tutor. Somehow I think I’d have to shell out a whole lot of shekels for a private tutor who promises not to wear perfume or deodorant, smoke, or wash his clothes in scented laundry detergent.

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P.S.: If you can tell me what film I’m quoting in the title of my post (without Googling it…Honor system), I will be your best friend for the day. I wish I had something to give away instead, but my friendship for the day is a lot cheaper than shipping from Israel.

If you gripe about secondhand smoke or car exhaust, please know this: You are a hypocrite if you continue to use fragranced dryer sheets.

When I walk past your house, I hold my breath when your dryer is running. If I don’t I will die.

Okay, maybe not a sudden death right there on the sidewalk in front of your house. But you don’t see people keeling over from secondhand smoke, either.

Earth-lovers and people of this world who care about health — indoor and outdoor air quality are impacted by more than just smoke and car exhaust.

You’re contributing to pollution with your home care products.

And you’re killing me.

Thank you for buying a Prius; now get rid of the Tide.