Personal Health: Reflections in a Global Mirror

{Revised November 2022}

This blogpost, first written in 2013, has been revisited in the light of an apparent 'awakening' to the urgency of an impending climate catastrophe. 

Currently (6 to 18 November 2022) our illustrious leaders are at the 27th Conference of the Parties to the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change' (COP27) being held in Egypt.

Opening the Conference, António Guterres, Secretary General of the UN said we are on the “highway to climate hell”. That received some interesting responses, including mocking derision. (See [3] below. 

We are still talking instead of doing. When will we get to serious adaptation, upscaling infrastructure to mitigate the impact of climate change and save lives?

We are told that as things stand right now, current climate policies will condemn the world to a disastrous 2.8-degree temperature rise by the end of the century. Our collective goal is to limit that rise to 1.5 degrees.

Whilst we are getting there...

• Greenhouse gas emissions are still climbing. 

• The climate is changing (worsening year by year). Half of humanity is in the danger zone.  

• Vulnerable communities in climate hotspots are being blindsided by climate disasters without any means of prior alert.

• People in Africa, South Asia, South and Central America, and the inhabitants of small island states are 15 times more likely to die from climate disasters.

• These disasters displace three times more people than war. And the situation is getting worse. 

My initial 2013 blog coincided with a time when a global spotlight was being placed on Climate Change, amplified by the uprising of school children led by that extra ordinary young leader, Greta Thunberg. The Swedish schoolgirl climate activist had begun a 'school strike for climate'.

My own 'climate activism' began in 2008 from my sickbed. I had to stop working (self-employed) and was going rapidly into debt. It was a year of biting cold when my central heating broke down and I couldn't afford a new boiler. That is a horror story which lasted for two years. One of these days I will write the book. Well, I have written the book, but the manuscript sits on my shelf gathering dust. 

Bed-bound for over a year, I suddenly felt, and 'saw' from a symbolic point of view, how the state of my physical health was being reflected in the extreme weather conditions battering the environment globally, especially the unprecedented 'bush fires' raging around the world at the time.

During that period my blood pressure fluctuated dramatically, rising to 243/136 at one point. In the middle of the night and in the height of winter I was drinking pint glasses of ice-water to cool my body which was boiling inside but shivery with cold outside. All sorts of tests revealed nothing amiss. Finally, my GP told me I would have to seek more in-depth tests outside of the NHS. The only thing she could offer was placing me in a hospital bed on a drip for a week. 

That didn't happen. I wasn't going there. It was clear that in this instance medical intervention was not going to help. I understood that my lifestyle needed to change. My choices up to now had generated an (inner) environment, not conducive to my wellbeing. That had to change. 

Our physical symptoms have emotional, psychological, genetic as well as environmental roots, all of which will eventually be symbolically mirrored by the planet.  If we wish to understand what is happening in the human body, take a look at its reflection in the external world. 

Increasingly many more scientists and physicians as well as proponents of ‘energy medicine’ (and this last one appeals to my proud heritage of 'woke-ness') are relating levels of pollution and the deterioration of the environment to various diseases of the body.

British Scientist, James Lovelock refers to the carbon dioxide fever of global warming, the acid indigestion of pollution and hair loss or the dermatologist dilemma in the thinning of the ozone layer.  

Caroline Myss, medical intuitive, suggests that Kaposi’s sarcoma, the cancerous skin lesions that form in many AIDS patients is symbolic of the destruction of the earth’s natural surface…which is now as fragile as the immune system in a very ill patient”. She goes on to suggest that "the lung disease pneumocystis carinii pneumonia may be symbolic of the destruction of the rain forests, from which the earth draws the greatest proportion of its oxygen supply”. [1]

Myss, Lovelock and quantum theorists are affirming the legacy of those ancient alchemists, seekers after truth, that all external manifestation is simply a reflection of an inner state.  Or, put another way, the personal is planetary.  

The Global Mirror

The symbols presented by events in the world and in our personal lives provide us with critical information. 

Whilst accepted wisdom say study the microcosmic to understand the macrocosm, we are mainly oblivious of the deeper truths in our world and cannot see what is going on in our own bodies; the state of the planet is our mirror.

It is said that whatever steps we take to 'fix' a problem, unless we understand that all external manifestation has an inner causation, we are unlikely to heal or stop a recurrence of that problem. 

Everything in our world, in our lives is a reflection of the personal and collective level of consciousness at which we currently function. Putting profit before people is an indicator of the current level of human growth, despite the extraordinary advances made by humankind in my lifetime.

Quantum theory identifies an aspect of the cosmos as harbinger and imprinter of all wavelengths and frequencies. It is a kind of shadow of the universe, a mirror image and record of everything that ever was for all time.  When we abuse our own bodies and degrade the global life support system, Mother Nature seems to generate symbols in our immediate environment that mimic symptoms in the human body.[2] 

I often wondered how much the state of my respiratory and circulatory system, part of my catalogue of health issues, was being mirrored by the very high levels of pollution documented for the area in which I lived at the time. Which came first?

98 people in every 100,000 in UK die from air pollution a year

The universe sends frequent messages about what is emerging or about to manifest in our lives, if only we understood. Mirrors do not lie; they help us to see things as they are.

Can we change what is about to emerge and devastate us? Yes, in most cases. At the very least we can mitigate the damage. 

How do I know that? 

Because I've been managing my own internal climate change for nearly fifteen years now. It has taken much sacrifice and a complete reassessment/rearrangement of how I live. Each day is different, has its own rhythm. Some days I can; other days I can't. Some days I can party, other days require stillness. 

I've lost friends as a result but I'm still alive. 

This revision of my 2013 post was prompted by a twitter user's [3] mocking response to UN SecGen opening remarks at COP27: 

When you know, you know. When you don't know, you don't know. Or, maybe, when you don't know, you deny.




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[1] Myss, Caroline; Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing
[2] Lynne McTaggart, The Field

[3] https://twitter.com/EmmyEick85/status/1589646417832079362?s=20&t=7eA8iFyPXG-v3HmFxuwFVw

Related Posts: Ecology of Relationships (January 2013)

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