WRITING|CREATIVE WRITING|SPIRITUALITY

Reclaiming Our Bodies, Minds, and Souls

What happens when we get an invoice for the damage we do to ourselves?

Aged five I had my first real encounter with the much-praised health system in Cuba. My parents rushed me to A&E one night after I complained of having a sharp pain in my stomach. I was discharged the same night. The physician who saw me said I had “nothing more than a stitch”. Luckily, my mother persisted and a dentist friend of my family, whose sister happened to be a paediatrician, referred me to her.

The “stitch” turned out to be gastritis. Just to make things more interesting, the tests revealed that I also had a stomach ulcer. For the next four or five years of my life, I was in and out of hospitals.

This early experience goes some way to explain why my view of medicine for many years was through disease-focused lenses. Along with my hospital memories, there was also the Cuban-state-sponsored pro-conventional-medicine propaganda we were all part of. The health system, flawed as it was, was one of Fidel’s achievements. Needless to say, whatever faults it had, they were well hidden and only a glossy picture was presented to both the local population and foreign visitors.

This attitude towards conventional medicine was replicated across the Soviet-dominated socialist bloc. There was very little space and time for traditional remedies. Herbs and beverages belonged to the past. The future (or rather present, then) was pharmaceutical.

In the UK, I found a different scenario when I relocated more than twenty-five years ago. Whilst mainstream medicine still called the shots, there was also an alternative medicine niche. The latter proved useful when my children were little and suffered from asthma and eczema. Non-mainstream practices like homoeopathy were less aggressive in their approach to diseases. I appreciated the time spent on consultations, the questions asked of us, and the fact that sometimes the answer given was a non-conclusive one.

Both my children are now in their 20s and I doubt that they still buy into the homoeopathic model. Yet, by giving them an alternative worldview when they were little, I believe that they gained a new insight into how, when it comes to medicine, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all.

All this came to mind recently when I began reading Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. Specifically what he says in one of the first chapters:

“Our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; we have the ability to regulate our own physiology, including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching; and we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive.”

Right there, the four fundamental truths that our illness-driven health model ignores are exposed: healing, language, body & mind, and environment. There’s no point in keeping marching forward, when we’re not looking in. I spent most of my 20s and 30s looking out, until I took stock of what was important for me and my family. In the last seven years there have been three life-changing events that have made me slow down and ponder the big questions we sometimes push aside out of convenience.

I stopped just seeing and began to look for the feeling of being seen. First by myself, then, by the world around me. I’m not being obscure or trying to confuse you, even if my words might sound (to use plain English and, please, pardon my French), wankish. However, I’ve no other way to explain what’s happened since 2016.

Caught as I am between two worlds, that of conventional medicine and its alternative counterpart, I feel lucky for having been able to create my own disease-preventing template. A healthy diet, plenty of exercise, regular meditation and time spent with loved ones, have all reaped the benefits I hoped for. They’re not substitutes for a pill or vaccine (for the record, I’ve been triple-vaccinated against Covid), but if I can avoid a visit to the doctor’s, I won’t lie to you, I’ll be chuffed to bits about it. This is my way of healing. The relationships I’ve nurtured and grown over the years are part of what keeps me sound of body, mind, and soul.

The Body Keeps the Score’s central thesis is trauma. As I read it (I haven’t finished it yet. I had to return the virtual book to the library on the day it was due. There’s a long waiting list on Libby which might give a clue to its popularity), I realised that as a society we need to revise our concept of trauma.

We tend to think of trauma as the effect of war on soldiers, for instance. Or violence on survivors of sexual abuse. All this is correct, but trauma covers a lot more. Currently there’s a UK-wide crisis of people not being able to pay their bills, living in squalid conditions because there isn’t enough housing, and feeling disillusioned with the status quo. This is also trauma. Coupled with the effects of Covid-19, one might be forgiven for thinking that there’s an understandable sense of anxiety in the air. Of course there is. Our future is uncertain. We’ve wrecked the planet and along the way we’ve also laid siege to our bodies and minds.

Any surprises when the invoice finally arrives? The bill for the damage we’ve done to ourselves? Remember, somebody is keeping the score. And that somebody is inside you.

Cuban, Immigrant, and Londoner, on sale now.

You can buy me a coffee here.