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. They’re part of our intelligence. They helped get us this far. And they will help us find our way now through a chronic disease epidemic that is threatening our personal and collective wellbeing.

Today, nearly 50% of the U.S. population has one or more chronic disease. That is such an astounding statistic. It is both mind-boggling and terrifying. We don’t get chronic disease rates like ours without a lot of denial, dishonesty and delusion. Because chronic diseases are man-made. You don’t catch a chronic illness, and you can’t transmit it. Rather, you create it over a long period of time with a mess of environmental toxins, nutrient-deficient foods, and questionable healthcare practices driven by profit over people.

We won’t be able to turn those rates around without equal amounts of introspection and honesty. So we have to ask ourselves, have we done everything we could to nurture and maintain our own well-being, and that of family members? And have we, as a collective, done everything we could to nurture and maintain the public health? Healing starts with answering those questions with brutal honesty. 

Let's begin by admitting that, as a society, we have not done everything we could in terms of policies and practices to nurture and maintain our children’s wellbeing, or students’, or elders’. Neither government agencies nor corporate conglomerates have really been honest with us about the effects of their policies and products on the public’s health. In a culture that is sick with so much dishonesty, there’s only one cure—more emotional honesty about the social causes of our chronic ill health. So let's begin with the admission that as a collective we haven't done enough. We've accepted questionable policies and products into our lives that have increased the risk of chronic ill health—from mandatory vaccines in schools to drinking water in plastic bottles to putting mercury fillings in teeth. And all of it has added up to a chronic disease epidemic that only we can heal.

Each of us has choices. To make better choices, we need to feel them. 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 them, and take collective action to remedy them. But first, we have to be able to look them in the face, talk about them, and touch them with emotional honesty in order to heal them. We need to stop lying to ourselves about the real causes of cancer, Alzheimer's, autism and diabetes. We need to transform deliberate ignorance into more awareness and know-how. Especially when it comes to our health, because our choices today about self-care and prevention will determine our longterm health outcomes in the future. Outcomes that will affect all of us—as individuals, as families, as communities, and as a society.

The choice is yours. Take a deep breath. Feel it.