212. double punishment
Our collective narrative — the stories passed down through generations to help the next succeed — has become lost amid a rapidly advancing world. No longer can we agree on a path forward, as a result, our health suffers. All this stems from a profiteering medical system that seeks to “better” humanity by further disconnecting us from our natural past, and what gave us the strength and vitality to thrive up to this point, instead creating greater discord within our body.
We’ve been misled in thinking that there is no knowledge to be drawn from our past that can improve our health, when everything in life, and especially science, has been built upon the foundation that came before it. What works sticks, what doesn’t sloughs off. Now we are led to believe that the best way to capture health is NOT to look back to what gave us strength and vitality in the past, but to look forward to what science can manifest. That medicine has the power to save us from ourselves, if only we take this or cut that out. All the while we casually walk down the path of double punishment, losing who we are, along with the health we are trying to reclaim.
130. find the value in everything
Find the value in everything. Everything that ever happened to you has been instrumental in defining the person you’ve become. All the good and bad, love and heartbreak, success and failure, brought you to where you are today. With the power of hindsight, it’s easy to look back and say, “I should have done that differently,” but we forget that it is those past choices — that we may regret now — which grant us insight to our past actions and offer wisdom with how best to move forward. If you went back and made a different choice, you would be a different person, with a different point of few, making different choices, and perhaps even making the same mistakes.
Our experience in this life, as Vernon Law put it, “is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, and the lesson afterward.” We have to have the experiences to understand the wisdom lessons otherwise we will keep making the same mistakes. So find the value in all that you do, and know that everything you’ve done, is as is should be.
122. the beaten path
The trouble is not that life is short, but that we waste so much of it following someone else’s directions while searching for our happiness. Rarely do we sit with our thoughts and truly ask ourselves, “what would be the next best course of action for me to take that will put me on a path to create a better life?” Instead, we find a guru, we google, or youtube, or ask our friends how they did it, or follow any number of narratives put in place by society that are deemed acceptable ways to live your life and find your happiness. But that’s the problem. Your path shouldn’t be defined FOR you, it should be define BY you. Sitting on the shoulders of giants is different than mirroring the footsteps of those that came before you.
Matsuo Basho, a famous poet from the Edo period in Japan, said; “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought.” Too often we become blinded by the narrative espoused by the “wise” to realize that the path they’re walking isn’t always in alignment with the direction we need to take in life. Even though we may be searching for the same thing, it is important to understand that there are many roads that can lead to the same place.