What Are You Doing with Your Outrage

Energy Medicine and the Politics (Politeia) of Health

“Politics” is derived from the juicier Greek word, “politeia,” which implies an active engagement in which people empower each other to enhance their communities. – Jean Houston

“The Earth is what we all have in common.”

—Wendell Berry

6th of Series

If you didn’t read the earlier installments, we suggest you start here.

What Are You Doing with Your Outrage?

Donna Eden and David Feinstein

A recent series of decisions by the Supreme Court in the wake of everything else that is unfolding prompted us to write, within the same e-letter, another article in the series.

In our January e-letter this year, we initiated the “Energy Medicine and the Politics of Health” series with an article called “Political Choices Are Health Choices.” It showed how social policies, based on state-by-state comparisons in the U.S., impact life expectancy, sometimes by as much as seven years!

We believe that the majority of people, whether progressive or conservative, support policies that are favorable for health. We all want our children’s and grandchildren’s generations to thrive. We are writing this to encourage you to champion health-affirming policies.

Our reasons for concern are accelerating. In the past month, we’ve seen 19 elementary school children murdered by a teenager with a legally purchased assault weapon. Another 13 mass shootings occurred during the first weekend (yes, weekend!) of this month, resulting in a dozen deaths and 70 injured. Also last week, we witnessed the terror in election workers getting hundreds of death threats to themselves and their families, with mobs coming to their homes, for just doing their job. We’ve seen how the events leading to January 6 put democracy in the U.S. on a razor’s edge and how millions of Americans are totally dismissing incontrovertible video-taped evidence of a nearly successful violent insurrection attempt, including close calls on the lives of the Vice President and Speaker of the House! We’ve seen a former Missouri governor, now running for Senate, air an ad suggesting that right wing Republicans have a right to shoot other Republicans who don’t adhere to the party lines. Following all this, we saw the Supreme Court reverse a state gun control law.

In addition, the Court has, in rapid succession, made it easier for police to lie to suspects, made it easier for the government to meddle with religion, and in the much-publicized decision last Friday, made it virtually impossible for many disadvantaged women to have an abortion. A decision the Court made last year was also perturbing. One of the horrors of Nazi Germany and many other totalitarian regimes is the way citizens were/are pitted to inform on one another. That could never happen here, we thought while learning of these despotic methods in our high school history classes. Yet the Supreme Court acted last September to uphold vigilante laws that make anyone discussing abortion as an option, even with the woman’s doctor or parents, vulnerable.

Such decisions could very well also be precursors to even greater intrusions into control of one’s life. Justice Thomas was clear that the reasoning used by the majority to overturn Roe and Casey could also be applied to limiting access to contraceptive options, criminalizing consensual same-sex relations, and banning gay marriage.

The right to personal choice in contraception is common sense healthcare and a fundamental freedom. Being able to love who you love rather than who the state says is appropriate for you seems so basic that it startles us to see it being revisited in 2022. It is hard to imagine that you don’t know and respect people involved in same-sex consensual relationships. Our company and our extended community are blessed with many such loving couples.

In the area of our specialty, when protections against fundamental rights are being targeted, the right to choose holistic health care is at risk. This is not a leap in logic. We have already in the past year had to ask for your help in battling legislative attempts to, in several states, restrict access to innovative health care practices.

We know that our views do not reflect everyone in our community. We know that some are offended by our position that it is the mother’s personal and weighty moral responsibility, not the government’s, to make choices about her pregnancy until the fetus reaches the capacity to survive outside the womb. In fact, we have people on our core staff and faculty who vote opposite of us on most issues, yet we treasure them. We respect and value different opinions. But we are also aware that many in our community look to us for our opinions on matters that impact emotional and physical health, and we feel compelled to take a stand when the right to love and be loved is threatened; when the right to decide if conception or birth should be avoided for health or other personal reasons; when health care choices are being limited to protect the interests of traditional health care providers; when the basic rights of certain segments of the population are at risk because they do not meet the approval of a minority that has power.

The historians who study the ways democracies go authoritarian talk about “gradual, gradual, gradual . . . and then sudden and unstoppable.” We imagine that most of you in our community who have read this far feel outrage over at least some of the above developments. We want to suggest that feeling it is not enough. We want to suggest that you use your outrage to fuel constructive action.

In fact, we want to suggest that you take an action every day, however small, so that your outrage becomes a force toward shifting the situation. What actions? Three of the articles in our Politics of Health series – by Jean Houston, PhDAnneloes Smitsman, PhD, and David Gruder, PhD, in this issue – address that question. These include not only simple steps – such as liking a post, sending an angry emoji, displaying a bumper sticker, or going to a rally – but deep considerations of all the issues involved in ensuring that your children and grandchildren will live in a world that supports the best in humanity. These principles will create a mindset for envisioning how to put your intentions into motion, for formulating daily actions, small or large.

Let your daily actions be designed to influence others to also take action, actions that are informed by the ancient Iroquois wisdom that weighty community decisions should benefit the seventh generation into the future. With the dizzying pace of change, the choices we are collectively making today will have profound consequences even for our own generation. In case we haven’t been clear, we believe the November election will be the most consequential in our lives. Until November, in addition to your other daily actions, be sure you are registered to vote. Vote. Inspire others to vote. November is almost here.

We are interested in and value your thoughts on this series. Your comments will not be censored. We expect differing viewpoints and hopefully rich discussion. Comments do, of course, need nowadays to be screened for trolls, bots, being respectful, understandable, on-topic, et cetera, so there will be some delay between your submitting them and their being posted.

Even though Donna and Donna won’t be responding to these comments directly, our purpose is to get dialogue going among the members of our community. We will also have a staff person answer questions that are directly pertinent for our organization to answer, such as questions about our policies. Finally, Donna and David and the subsequent guest contributors will read all of your comments when they are writing subsequent articles so they will have them in their minds.

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Marcia

I am very disappointed in your opinions on the political views… I speak only for myself. I believe. No one has the right to take a life. I think the Jan 6 was peaceful but infiltrated by radical democrats on Pelosi watch. Trump called for extra protection before Jan 6 and Pelosi denied it so they could create upheaval. In love your energy work and respectfully disagree with your political views.

Jason

Thank you for speaking up and sharing your convictions on these important topics. So grateful for your powerful work and all of the continued clarity, love, and healing you bring to the planet.

Brian

What a shame that you are allowing the Eden Method to descend into a forum to air political views.
Please go back to the prctices of Energy Medicine, as politicising the newsletter will merely put off those of different views who would otherwise benefit form the Eden Method .

Brenda

Thank you for your frank discussion about what is happening in our country. It concerns many of us as well. It takes courage to be honest and share with others. I am grateful for your willingness to speak out and encourage action.

MLG

What should we do if we get outraged by your article???

Melinda

Thank you for awareness! I am grateful you use your right to expression and create expansion of a better world.❤️

Denise

What a profound and thought provoking addition to the monthly EEM letter. Living in the far North of Scotland, I had not realised the extent of so many troubling matters in the USA. We have our own problems with an unravelling moral core at the heart of government, immigration and Brexit issues and a post-covid weariness amongst the population. It is so important to watch keenly for the “gradual, gradual, gradual” erosion of our liberties, the subtle shifts in direction by those wielding power and influence that become the voice of the state. How important then to use our own voices and vote. The small but significant steps suggested in Politics of Health are positive actions we can all take, and to those who say “ What use is my one voice” I would quote the saying “It is better to light a candle than to sit in the dark”.EEM workers know the power and influence of energy: we can make a difference.

Ellen

This statement is my action for today:

Thank you for speaking truth to power in this article. I want to suggest that people read, The Family, Roe: An American Story, by Joshua Prager (It was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize). History informs us and Prager’s deeply researched book reveals, in eyeopening detail, the full story behind Roe v. Wade. Which ever side of the abortion debate one stands on, I believe it’s important to form fact-based opinions and Prager lays them out very clearly in the book.

In reading the The Family Roe, I was shocked to learn that many pro-lifers have actually had abortions themselves. The basis of the Roe ruling (the right to privacy), has afforded them the freedom to keep it to themselves – which is as it should be. I believe we all have the right to guard something so deeply personal, particularly women in this instance.

It is challenging to understand how a person can hold a double standard – condoning violent action against those who are pro-choice (which at times which has led to the murders of abortion providers or other healthcare workers) while “protecting” the life of non-viable fetuses. I am outraged.

Jackie Lopez

Well said!

Vanessa

Dear Donna&David,
Thank you on behalf of Humanity for speaking out. I am not an US citizen, I am Dutch, but I feel for you and your country. I lived my early childhood in NYC. And I still love America. In its Essence. And rich Native Wisdom and is still there in the soil and the trees..
i can say a lot about the issues at hand. But rather share a quote from a very wise yogi named Paramahansa Yogananda:

“”Forget the past. The vanished lives of all men are dark with many shames. Human conduct is ever unreliable until man is anchored in the Divine. Everything in future will improve if you are making a spiritual effort now.”

Remember all Human Beings and Creatures are Divine. Keep connecting with the Divine in what ever way feels right for you. And anchor into the Light. If we all turn to the Light and bring it down into our lives and planet. The shift is inevitable.
Bless you all!