Let’s talk about emotional honesty
If you’re honest about what you’re feeling, you know that your feelings tell you what you want and need at any given moment – what to fear and what to have faith in, what to grieve and what to give thanks for, what to fight for and what to surrender to. Our emotions evolved over millennia and are a key part of our embodied intelligence. They helped get us this far in our collective history on our planet, and they will help us find our way now through a chronic disease epidemic, a mental health crisis, and a suicide crisis that is threatening Americans’ personal and collective wellbeing starting at younger ages than our grandparents experienced. They will even help us get through an AI crisis, because AI chatbots don’t feel real emotions. They can simulate them, but they can’t feel them. Because they aren’t human.
Today, just over 50% of the U.S. population already has one or more chronic disease. That is an alarming statistic deserving of an immediate situational response. We don’t get chronic disease rates like ours without too much denial, dishonesty and self-delusion, saying we don’t know what is causing our dis-ease and distress when we do, or saying we thought it was safe when it wasn’t, or thinking it won’t happen to us when it is. Because chronic illnesses, including so-called mental illnesses, are not genetic; they are man-made. We create them ourselves over a long period of time with a combination of environmental toxins, nutrient-deficient foods, poor self-care and lifestyle habits, and questionable healthcare practices driven by profit over people.
I believe we will only be able to turn those rates around with equal amounts of critical introspection and emotional honesty. Along with the courage to take action.
Each of us has choices about our own mindbody health. But to make better choices, we need to feel them. Feel the weight of them and the gravity of them. Even the grief, anger and worry of them. We need to own them in an embodied way, take personal responsibility for our mindbody needs, and take personal and collective action to get those needs met when it matters most. That means we need to be able to look our own mindbody imbalances in the face, touch them, feel them, and talk about them with emotional honesty in order to heal them and bring them back to balance.
When we stop being emotionally dishonest with ourselves about the real causes of dis-ease and distress in our lives—whether it’s diabetes, obesity, cancer, Alzheimer's, autism spectrum and mental health disorders—true mindbody healing can begin in earnest. It starts with the desire to transform our own deliberate ignorance into more curiosity, awareness and knowledge. Because the choices we make today about preventive self-care will determine our longterm health outcomes in the future. Those outcomes will affect all of us—as individuals, as families, as communities, and as a society of Americans.
The choice is yours. Feel it.
