Polar Avoidance

 In a previous post, I wrote very generally of what I fondly call native medicine.  It was a very broad introduction to native medicine - or at least to my definition of it - and warrants further inquiry.  But at least one critical element in the native medicine experience is avoidance of extremism, or rather what I'm calling polar avoidance.   

If you haven't noticed, the world subdivides everything now.   There was a time when I could say that this was just happening in the West, but now it's happening all over.   The conflict in Ukraine right now is a very good example of this, but there are countless others, too.    Villains are everywhere.   Charles Eisenstein wrote a bit about this phenomenon in a recent essay, too, though he calls it scapegoating.  Whatever we call it, it creates polarized views worldwide - whether with regard to the Ukraine conflict, the pandemic, or any other crisis that will fit.   

In fact, we might look at this polarization as the hyperbolic emphasis on crises as a means to an end:   a way to further subdivide the already very divided population.     I do not believe that there is an evil "them" in charge of managing worldwide crises and exploiting for gain the mass suffering of large groups of people, and I realize this is a very unpopular view.   I understand that - in this day and age - we need our villains.   

But this is nothing new.  Historically, we've always assigned the role of villain to someone - and it creates for us very clean historical narrative to which we can assign predefined values of good and evil.  This has a tendency to create for us very clean lines in the proverbial sand: "You can come this far, Villain, but you can't come any further." And we know who our enemy is, which is valuable for any fight. 

The practice of native medicine, however, demands that we move beyond the identification of good versus evil.    We must begin asking why:  why are villains everywhere?  Why is the world culture so dysfunctional?   And when we ask why, we have to be willing to hear the truth as an answer.  

Avoiding polarization into positives and negatives is not an easy feat.   We are hardwired to believe that "out there" lies the other - the bad, the ugly.  We ourselves are separate from it. We must be. We cannot believe that we are a part of the ugly that makes the world corrode.  No, it cannot be us.   It is those people over there.  It is that thing right there. But it cannot be us. 

But it is us. It is you and me.  It is our people. It is all of us.  We are all decaying and corroding inside, and all of us are villains.  We are those enemies against whom we have drawn lines in the sand. But when we did that, we forgot about self-reflection .We forgot that we, too, cause anger and hurt.  We forgot that we, too, consume and take without concern for giving or mending the hurts we have caused.  In the noise of living created by the pollutants clutter of our culture, we are no longer able to reach for the calm center in us.  We must follow the noise. 

In the narrative of separateness, we adopt amnesia - and we lose our connection to the earth and the people in it. It becomes very easy to identify villains in that world - the world where everyone "out there" could potentially be bad, but not us.    We indemnify and hold harmless our own selves, in favor of a much easier bad guy who can be blamed and serve as the sacrifice. Then, after the mayhem has died, and the villain neatly dispatched, we can wipe off our hands and get back to the sanitary life into which we were born.

This practice must stop.  We must start repairing our insides.  We have to stop looking for a villain out there, and we must begin the process of reflecting on self.   So for those who are emerging into the practice of native medicine, consider as part of the process of engaging in native medicine the necessary act of polar avoidance: let's not assign values to anything until we examine it, and examine ourselves and our reactions to it.  Then, we can begin to heal wounds and close gaps.