Since the spring, I’ve been predicting to people that we would see a surge in the coronavirus as we approached the election.
Here we are.
I don’t have a crystal ball. I based my prediction on patterns and on what I’ve learned about how the body, mind, and emotions work together to facilitate healing or disease.
The BioPsychoSocial-Spiritual Model
Dr. Gabor Mate, a physician based in Canada, points out that the approach of modern Western medicine to disease is based on two false beliefs:
- that the mind is separate from the body.
- that the individual is separate from its environment.
To this would add a third: – the belief that the site of the pain is the cause of the pain.
More holistic approaches to health, like Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic Medicine, appreciate that everything is related and everything is connected.
All health issues, regardless of where symptoms arise, have underlying pathological, psychological, and mental causes.
In modern medicine this is know as the biopsychosocial model.
There is also a spiritual cause. So it’s really biopsychosocial-spiritual.
Dr. Maté is hardly the first to illuminate these patterns. Louise Hay and others have written about the metaphysical causes of illness. Metaphysical means beyond physical.
When we don’t process trauma, when we hold on to toxic emotions like anger and hate, when we don’t release tension or stress, when we stuff down our feelings and our words, it breeds disease.
Chinese Medicine: The Autumn Temperament
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, each season is associated with an element, an organ and with certain emotional states. The elements also represent archetypal temperaments.
Autumn is the season of metal and the lungs. The lungs are associate with grief. A metal temperament is rigid; it’s about control and judgment. When you harvest the crops in autumn, you separate the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff. This is the metal temperament. It tends to view things as good or bad, right or wrong.
Rigid bodies create rigid minds, and rigid minds create rigid bodies. Because it’s all one.
How This Is Playing Out in Current Events
Just from these two models, we can understand at least in part, why the virus is surging.
The US is more polarized than ever.
Everyone is walking around armored in protection from others. I’m not talking about the physical masks and PPE, which are necessary for our physical health, but about our energetic and physiological armoring.
Rigidity. Refusal to open to other viewpoints and ways of thinking.
The desire to control what others think or do, or how a situation plays out.
“My way or the highway” type thinking.
Judging others as right or wrong, good or bad, based on their views.
An inability to see another perspective, or a broader perspective, to give someone the benefit of the doubt.
These are metal qualities. And we are in the season of metal, in a year when we are asked to vote — making a judgment about who’s in and who’s out.
Of course all this emotional and mental rigidity creates physical rigidity: tensing against life, which affects the breath.
And after months of this, there’s been little acknowledgment of the losses; and little processing of the grief, because in our culture grief remains a taboo subject.
Grief lives in the lungs. COVID lives in the lungs. Coincidence? Unlikely.
The Rest of the World
U.S. elections tend to draw the world’s attention, and the world is watching as we embark on the latest test in our democracy experiment. The noise levels are off the charts.
Everyone is anxious, on edge, wondering what’s going to be next in a year of unrelenting surprises, waiting for the next big story to hit, the other shoe to drop. Bracing for impact. Tensing against life.
And in that mix we now have a surge in new COVID cases not only in the U.S., but around the world.
It’s not a coincidence. In fact, The more we brace against life, the less effective we are at breathing, the more susceptible we become to illness.
Is this the only reason cases are surging right now? Almost certainly not.
Will any of this show up in a blood test or a CT scan? No.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not a factor.