Heart Reading … Day 84

The Pursuit of Wellness IX

This is day 9 of 10.

I love numerology — just enough for it to exist in a magical realm.

The number 9 (IX) is special because it can be added to anything, give it dimension, but not change it — in the same way that truth can give dimension but not change reality. For example if you add 9 to 4 you get 13 but in numerology you add the digits of larger numbers to get their essential number and 1+3 is still 4. It’s elemental like a baseline. And the number 9 represents wisdom … like the wisdom of Title IX giving equal rights to female students!

With the wisdom element of today’s pursuit of wellness I feel inspired to receive and offer some wisdom about wellness. In the 15 years that I have held space for Inner Fortune — as a life witnessing practice — I have seen no evidence that personal healing comes from anywhere other than within the body-mind, the self (which brings one of the famous inscriptions from the oracle at Delphi to mind: Know Thyself).

Societal realities can create positive or negative conditions for that healing and within those conditions we have choice. When more people make the same choice together (either aware of each other’s efforts or not), the positive conditions for healing expand — like what we’re seeing with feminine leadership uniting against millennia of gender based oppression.

When conditions get so unwell — like the greed of white culture — collective choices to address these conditions come to bear, to counter balance and bring conditions for wellness — like shared power.

Greed is a tough energy to identify in oneself. It can be so habitual — like overeating — that notions such as feeding others first can fail to register in one’s mind much less be accepted as valid. Greed can also be so subtle that one can feel it emerge in the simplest acts of taking.

I take a lot of photos with my red heart and have taken many beautiful ones with interesting mushrooms (way more than the ones featured in day 67) and I recently noticed that I want to thank nature for existing when I take these images for “consumption” in this blog. This helps me not feel like I’m creating an imbalance. It’s an effort to have a mutual regard not an “extractive” disregard that has led to widespread depletion and exhaustion of life energy, the unwellness mentioned above.

When I reflect on greed …

• …I think of stories I’ve heard of my grandfather selling cars to family members for profit (including his wife and daughter).
• …I think about businesses conveniently not accounting for the very real toll on their “human resources” with every so called efficiency measure and business obsession with productivity.
• I think about the gaslighting and invisible war on humanity with artificial intelligence and the psychographic profiling that I write about in my book Beyond Karen.

Greed has without a doubt become an existential challenge and collectively we in the US of A are intensely unwell (and anxious and suspicious) because of it. But, like in nature, the antidote is always growing close by — we just need to choose to look for it. For example, the antidote to poison ivy or stinging nettles is jewel weed which grows near both.

To pursue the antidote to greed, we will need to be intensely honest with ourselves and each other — to call out extractive capitalism at every level, to doggedly pursue fairness and equity, and to defend wherever possible those who cannot defend themselves.