A Rethink of Pink

With all due respect to people who have gone through cancer, and gone through things I find difficult to even imagine, I can't help but look at all of the pink products, some made of plastic, and wonder if people are getting the big picture. 

Synthetic dyes and plastic particles are, no doubt, newly created things that the body doesn't know what to do with. Chemicals in plastics have been linked to breast cancer.  There is a tendency of society to treat symptoms rather than causes, either directly or indirectly, with more agents of the underlying problem.

Furthermore, someone out there, behind the curtain, is working at the factory which produces these synthetic additions to our collective system. That is to say... a business somewhere is making a profit and benefiting by the consumer demand for a product, which in this case, regardless of intent, is ironically tied to the pink ribbon movement... and ironically entangled with potential and known carcinogens.

If we really want to get at the root of things, one place to start is at a square-one examination of what we produce. We may raise the question of whether or not these elements are actually compatible with our personal and collective ecosystems.

This seems especially important in the collective sense, because people are exposed to things that we collectively put into the habitat, to include an abundance of, often unnecessary, plastics and dyes, without any of their say in the matter. So how can accountability for one's health only lay with the self?

If we, as a culture, wait until newly created and synthetic things prove to be incompatible, we become part of an experiment. 

We may ditch nutri-sweet, only to replace it with splenda... outcome unknown. We may spray radically new chemicals onto the fields and onto the plants we eat... thus into our bodies. And there are financial players there too.... Monsanto being an easy example. 

I met someone who was involved with a study in Oregon that examined the houses of migrant farm worker's families and measured pesticide residues. She mentioned how disturbing it was for her to discover what had been tracked into houses and spread around, even when recommended precautions were taken.

Someone familiar with cases of spontaneous remission & powerful therapies, in the holistic circuits, might envision a society that rushes the walls, to embrace purity of food and water and a wealth of holistic approaches to dis-ease.  We might imagine a society that has the boldness to see beyond the false safety of convention. The boldness to move.

We might imagine the barriers of politics, artificially created consumerism and narrow-minded thinking to float away, receding quickly to a vanishing point.

A woman I met in Arizona described her friend's use of a biomat (infared therapy) to send her breast cancer into remission. A friend of mine in Oregon used visualization, at first with great skepticism, to get rid of ovarian cysts. Another friend in Arizona is said to have rid herself of cervical cancer by a radical shift in diet.  

My neighbor in Maryland was paralyzed from the neck down, said a desperate, yet surrendering prayer one day, and heard a voice, shortly after, telling her it was time to get up. Much to the shock of her physical therapists, she did get up, and to this day she continues to walk.

I would add in Joe Dispenza's book You Are the Placebo. He now has individual brain scans, taken before and after his workshops, and before and after extensive meditation of participates. These often corresponded with tangible physical healings.

I am humbly aware that for people who are actually, right there, in the situation, the choice may be different and include conventional aspects, and I get where people are coming from... as I am no stranger to fear, and a feeling of urgency. Furthermore, I have plenty to learn, to re-learn and to re-integrate into my own life, which is folded into the modern landscape.

Overall, however, I don't believe we are getting it. Selling pink dye and plastic to benefit breast cancer patients reminds me of that captain planet toy that was, you guessed it, made of plastic. It is akin to selling candy bars with sub-par ingredients to raise money for a school... or having a coke machine in a school courtyard to help raise funds... which invest in a student's future (while the high fructose corn syrup divests in it). 

Modern life is complex, and one has to see beyond the Ronald McDonald House charity to that company's broader promotion of unhealthy foods and all of their implications... not to mention the extremely inappropriate treatment of animals, to include sub par habitat. A mixture of abuse and kindness does not a good relationship make... but it is what makes it difficult to see clearly and leave a bad relationship.

People get together for a good cause but sometimes lose site of the agents involved in that cause. While meanwhile... some other group, with some other cause, is going to have to address those ingredients. Purity is more than one completed side of a Rubik's cube. Sometimes we sacrifice one side to complete another... this is not a holistic approach. Imagine us all trying for, rearranging reality for, one particular completed color (pink?) without the knowledge that, like ghosts to one another, we each were invisibly messing up the other's side... 

Still I comment on all health matters with some hesitation. If I take an overly critical tone, what impact am I having? There is a lot to be said for feeding solutions... and yet to ignore the dynamics at hand may be to feed something as well.  

It is ever astounding to me what people have endured... We each have our seemingly individual lives, and yet with a collective habitat, it is difficult to claim exemption.

Our grand departures from balanced living, as a society, have created great leaps, requiring deep breaths. In a context... "We Didn't Start the Fire" (Billy Joel) And, though one can manage his/her own life to a degree, she/he is still immersed in multiple layers of existence... in other words, we impact one another.

Mindset and collective engagement can make a big difference... if we would only, as a society, begin to grasp the deeper issues and begin the grand exploration of what is right here, perfectly powerful, waiting for the spotlight, the one typically granted to the very limited western approach.  If we would shift it... to light up the landscape.  

One has to ask where the funds raised from the sales of pink products are going?... Likely they are channeled into research with narrowly focus. 

This search may be further complicated by financial interests & a treament-of-symptoms, synthetic pharmaceutical-based, market based, approach to disease... and the mentality that seems to don blinders as it walks through a field of cures. 

Lynne McTaggart (What Doctor's Don't Tell You) offers some resources... approaches of doctors who have successfully treated cancer by holistic means. Like Joe Dispenza, she herself has been there.  Both accounts of their own medical conditions are fascinating and inspiring.

For the person with an obvious discomfort, weary of exploring anything outside the system s/he is used to, there is naturopathic medicine, doctors of which offer much familiarity, to include options of conventional medical treatment, with a much more preventative sway.  These doctors are covered by conventional insurance (in I believe 6 or so states now... and counting) 

These doctors may wear the familiar lab coat... and even offer a comfortable pathway into the unfamiliar by incorporating such modalities as western herbalism, Traditional Chinese Medicine, body realignment and stress relieving mindfulness practices such as yoga/meditation.

What changes in society's vision must occur for it's investment to jump the wall and see the world of possibilities that lay beyond? If critical mass has anything to do with it, each person's realization is a step forward to that place.

One day it may offer the same familiarity, comfort and assurance to the patient as the family doctor.

UPDATE: Okay, now we are talking.