Mind the Gap

How powerful is your mind?

Mine gets out of hand sometimes. When I try to ignore something that's really bothering me, the non-verbal part of my mind, my body, whatever you want to call it, rises up and demonstrates, by metaphor, what's really going on.

I sometimes wish I could control it better and sometimes I wish I would learn more from it but the truth is, there are two parts of my mind at work at all times. The rational, conscious, controllable part and the irrational but deeply pragmatic, unconscious and unmanageable part. I usually keep that part leashed and that suffices to keep the metaphors and physical demonstrations to a minimum.

Yesterday, the difficult part got off the leash and struck me down with a serious asthma attack.

Of course, that part is harder to control when you're not really sure what it's getting at. It will surprise no one to hear that I am having serious misgivings about the political structure of this country and I am quite concerned with the potentially disastrous impact that very seriously compromised structure could have on North America. My concerns about this are not limited to the social context although they certainly began there, they extend to the natural environment as well.

In Canada, the Prime Minister, (as we've all witnessed) is able, if he understands the system well enough to pretend he doesn't understand it at all, to wield practically absolute power. The Prime Minister is the head of his party, his caucus does not ever vote against his policies - they can't. He also appoints and therefore controls the Governor General who is the Queen's representative in Canada and our Head of State.

This means the PM commands the power of the Crown and the Crown owns Canada.

As I have explained before, all real rights to land in Canada are the property of the Crown. All it takes it one PM with an agenda that runs counter to the interests of the environment or the population to wreak havoc on the land. Since we are the northernmost country in North America, we are stewards of the great majority of natural resources flowing south. Water being the most important of these.

As the oil fields destroy watersheds in the North, rivers in the south begin to run dirty or dry. The Americans grow food for export, an industry that requires a great deal of water, and we buy it, consume it and carry on doing whatever the PM wants us to do with our natural resources.

For me personally, the fact of this kind of existence has reached the point where it bothers me enough that there are times when it literally makes me sick.

In Victoria, when the situation got to be too much for me, I ignored it. Eventually, allergies manifested. They were not allergies to things you'd find anywhere however, they were and are, allergies to pollens found in abundance only on the west coast. Pacific grasses.

Now, things here are preying on my mind and I am feeling helpless and unheard, despite publishing on the issue of property rights with some frequency and indicating what it means to Canadians that we really do not have a meaningful stake in what happens to the land under our feet, things seem to be getting quite a lot worse. And to add to that, people seem to know even less about their rights and responsibilities as citizens of this continent.

Apparently, I am more upset about that than I realize. Yesterday, I couldn't breathe.

My physical body/mind is always the first to know. When relationships fail, long before I know I am unhappy, my ability to be physically responsive disappears. In the same way people will get headaches when they don't want to go somewhere or suddenly feel ill when faced with a particularly frightening confrontation - I, like many people (probably most people) seem to manifest these large symptoms in response to large issues.

I have my personal reasons for being somewhat uncomfortable in this particular setting, of course, but it does seem to be the big issues that get the big response. And in my case, my body does not seem to care much whether they are issues about which I can reasonably or measurably effect change.

So the question is this; does recognizing the body's unconscious demonstration of dissatisfaction give one the power to remove it or does it just give the unconscious mind more power to express?

Honest to goodness, if I never saw another birch tree again at this point, that would be just fine with me. And so it follows that if I never had to think about Canadian politics again, I would be a happier, healthier woman. Given the fact that I make my living as a reporter, that seems unlikely.

Can we ever achieve mastery over the thoughts and feelings that roll like tides over and through us at the sub-verbal level? Was that Jung's holy grail? And how do you let go of concerns that you've grown up assuming are vitally important? How do people reconcile all the lovely things about an individual life on this beautiful planet with the things we do daily to destroy it?

I should have taken that job as a fashion editor when I had the chance.