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One of the most anticipated experiences for our group was the opportunity to learn about Andean healing from an indigenous herbalist.
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On a sunny Andean morning, Juan (not his real name to protect his privacy) arrived at the renovated monastery where we were acclimating to the high-altitude environment. Along with his wife and two children, he set up an extensive display of living plants, herbs, vines, flowers and native grasses, as well as concentrated elixirs, soaps and salves made from extracts of the living pharmacy that was in front of us.
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After a 30-minute presentation describing his family history and how the herbs are grown and prepared, the group was encouraged to sample lotions, taste the elixirs and ask questions regarding the traditional healing of everything from common colds, coughs, headaches and rashes to specific conditions that included diverticulitis, diabetes and even cancers.
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Not surprisingly, however, he also emphasized the role of personal responsibility when it comes to choices of diet and especially our “inner” pharmacy of thoughts and emotions. I think it’s fair to say that everyone who took the opportunity to immerse themselves in the experience came away with an even deeper respect for the indigenous wisdom that Juan shared with us that day.
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Women Running The Show
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.Following a late-afternoon drive over up the winding switchback road that leads to the Chincero Valley, our group arrived at one of the most inspiring destinations of our entire journey—the high-altitude Quechuan women’s co-op in the town of Chincero.
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As the sun set over the towering peaks that surround the valley, the temperatures quickly dropped and we welcomed the local tradition of hot coca-leaf tea that greeted us as we arrived at the communal compound that is home to the women’s co-op.
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In the rich light of the late-day sun, Quechuan elders, mothers and children—all women—greeted us warmly with a demonstration of how Andean wool begins with the shearing of local alpacas (no animals are harmed in the process) and is then cleaned, dyed using local insects, plants and minerals, and then spun into the yarn that is woven into intricate patterns of traditional Quechuan scarves, table runners, ponchos, gloves, warm head coverings and some of the finest textiles available in the world today.
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The co-op is a beautiful model of cooperation between men and women, as well as community members in a uniquely Andean way. In this particular co-op, the women run the details of the business and creating the products, while the men work for the women in a variety of ways to sustain the business.
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In 2015 I invited a friend from a United Nations NGO to join me for a visit to this particular co-op. I wanted her to meet Marlene, the woman and visionary that organized the community.
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Since I met her in 1989, Marlene has worked to preserve the Quechua traditions of weaving in the modern world of machine-generated textiles.
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As a result of the 2015 meeting, Marlene was invited to the UN in New York to participate in a meeting of indigenous people from throughout the world struggling with the same issues. Marlene’s warmth, language skills and heartfelt desire to help her people inspired each of us and demonstrate the power of localized living in a world where centralized communities are becoming unsustainable in the emerging world of extremes.
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A Step Back In Time
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Lake Titicaca is one of the most mysterious lakes in the world. At 12,500 feet above sea level and covering over 3,200 square miles that overlap the border between Peru and Bolivia (the border runs through the middle of the lake) Lake Titicaca is the highest navigable lake in the world.
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Before his death in 1997, the explorer Jacques Cousteau, and the crew of the famous research vessel Calypso, explored the lake and documented life forms such as the giant toad, measuring approximately 24 inches in length, and mysterious archaeological sites under the water that had never been known in the past.
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From our hotel on the Peruvian side of the lake, the new-ish catamarans have cut the travel time from the shore to the ancient islands of the lake nearly in half from 3 hours to just over 90 minutes.
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Our destination on the most recent trip was the mysterious island of Taquile, and a visit with the families that have developed a way of life based upon a uniquely Peruvian code of living known in the Quechuan language as ama sua, ama llulla, ama qhilla, (“do not steal, do not lie, do not be lazy”).
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The island rises from the floor of the lake to 12,900 feet above sea level and covers an area measuring 3-miles long and 1-mile wide. There are about 2,000 people living in the community that is governed as 6-geographic sectors that determine everything from land ownership to crop rotation and ultimately influence dating and marriage practices.
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The inhabitants lead meditative, yet productive lives based upon terraced farming and the weaving of unique textiles. Legend states that the inhabitants of this island maintain a close relationship to a greater family in the cosmos—one that continues to influence their traditions of longevity and healing.
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The Power to Thrive in A World of Extremes
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Today we find ourselves living in a world of extremes. And because the world is changing, it makes perfect sense that the way we live and the way we think must change as well. It makes perfect sense to live resiliently and adapt to the world that’s emerging rather than to impose the obsolete thinking and unsustainable solutions of the past onto the problems that we face.
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If we have the wisdom to recognize the reservoir of knowledge preserved among the world’s indigenous traditions—some of the most resilient people on Earth today— we have at our fingertips the time-tested principles that we can apply in our lives today.
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Clearly, I’m not suggesting that we need to live primitive lives. I am suggesting that the principles of natural healing and localized community— localized sources of food, localized economies and the sharing of local resources, are the key to sustaining us today.
As we allow ourselves to recognize the wisdom of our past as a global resource of time-tested knowledge, something wonderful awaits us all—we discover that we have the power to thrive in the chaos of a changing world. And it all begins with our willingness to accept our role of continuity as a vital link in the ancient chain of human experience.
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In each moment of every day, a conversation is taking place inside us that’s one of the most vital we will ever find ourselves engaged in. It’s the silent, often subconscious, and never-ending conversation of emotion-based signals between the heart and the brain. The reason this conversation is so important is that the quality of the emotional signal the heart sends to the brain determines what kind of chemicals are released into our bodies. When we feel what we would typically call negative emotions (for instance, anger,hate, jealousy, and rage), the heart sends a signal to the brain that mirrors our feelings. Such emotions are irregular and chaotic, and this is precisely what the signals they send to the brain look like.
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If you can envision a chart of the ups and downs for the stock market on a wild and volatile day, you’ll have an idea of the kind of signals we create in our hearts in times of such emotions. The human body interprets this kind of signal as stress, and sets into motion mechanisms to help us respond appropriately.
Figure 4.1. A comparison of the signals between the heart and the brain in two extremes of emotion: the “negative” emotion of frustration and the “positive” emotion of appreciation. Source: The Institute of HeartMath.
The stress from negative emotions increases the levels of cortisol and adrenaline in our bloodstreams, hormones that are often called stress hormones, which prepare us for a quick and powerful reaction to whatever is causing us stress. That reaction includes redirecting the blood supply from the organs deep within our bodies to the places where it’s most needed in such times: the muscles, limbs, and extremities that we use to either confront the source of our stress or run as fast as we can to get away from it—our instinctive fight-or-flight response.
For our distant ancestors, this response would save them from an angry bear that had camped out in their cave, for example. When they felt that the threat was gone, their emotions shifted and the elevated levels of the stress hormones returned to the normal levels of everyday life. The key here is that the stress response is designed to be temporary and brief. When it kicks in, we infuse our bodies with the chemistry needed to respond quickly and powerfully to the threat. It’s all about survival. The good news is that when such high levels of stress chemicals are present, we can become superhumans. We’ve all heard stories of a 98-pound woman successfully tilting a full-size automobile off the ground long enough to save her child pinned beneath—and doing so without first considering if such a feat was even possible.
The Fight or Flight Response
​In such cases, the fight-or-flight response is activated on behalf of the child, who would have died without intervention. In these instances, the extra-human strength of the mother is attributed to the surge of stress hormones pouring into the body from her feelings of do or die—feelings that originate in the heart. The flip side of the good news is that while the benefits can be helpful during a short period of time, the stress that triggers the surge effectively shuts down the release of other chemicals that support important functions in our bodies. The release of vital chemicals that support functions of growth, immunity, and anti-aging is dramatically reduced during times of fight or flight. In other words, the body can be in only one mode or the other: fight/flight mode or healing/growth mode.1 Clearly, we were never meant to live day in and day out with constant stress as a way of life. Yet this is precisely the situation that many of us find ourselves experiencing today.
In our modern world of information overload, speed dating, multiple consecutive double cappuccinos, and the often-heard sense that life is “speeding up,” it’s inevitable that our bodies can feel that we’re in a constant state of never-ending stress. People who cannot find a release from this kind of stress find themselves in sustained fight-or-flight mode, with all of the consequences that come with the territory. A quick look around an office or a classroom, or even a glance at our family members over Sunday dinner, confirms what the data suggests. It’s not surprising to find that people with the greatest levels of sustained stress are also in the poorest health.
The rise in U.S. statistics for stress-related conditions, including heart disease and stroke, eating disorders, immune deficiencies, and some cancers, is less of a surprise when we take into account the relentless stress that many people experience in their daily lives. The good news is that the same mechanism that creates and sustains our stress responses, often on a subconscious level, can also be regulated to help us relieve the stress in a healthy way—even when the world is in chaos. And we can do so quickly and intentionally.
Just the way our hearts send our brains the signals of chaos when we feel negative emotions, positive emotions send another kind of signal to our brains that is more regular, more rhythmic,and orderly. In the presence of positive emotions, such as appreciation,gratitude, compassion, and caring, the brain releases a very different kind of chemistry into the body. When we feel a sense of well-being, the level of stress hormones in our bodies decreases, while the life-affirming chemistry of a powerful immune system with anti-aging properties increases. The shift between the stress response and a feeling of well-being can happen quickly.
Studies documented by the Institute of HeartMath (IHM), a pioneering research organization based in Boulder Creek, California,have shown that cortisol levels can decrease as much as 23 percent, and levels of DHEA, a life-affirming precursor to other vital hormones in the body, can increase 100 percent if we spend as little as three minutes using focused techniques designed to produce such responses.2 The reason why I’m describing these phenomena is because the techniques that are found to have such benefits upon our health are the same ones that create the resilience in our hearts. This is the key to personal resilience in life. The quality of our emotions determines the instructions our hearts send to our brains.
Why does the maximum human age seem to hover around the 100-year mark? Why not 200 or even 500 years? If we’re to believe accounts in the Torah and Old Testament texts, many ancient people measured their lives in terms of centuries, rather than the decades that we use today. Adam, for example, is documented as having lived for 930 years, Metheselah for 969 years, and Noah for 950 years.
According to the texts, these men were not simply shriveled husks of their former selves, meagerly surviving and hanging on to the frail thread of life. At advanced ages, they were active and vital, enjoying their families and even starting new ones!
And why not? We clearly live in bodies that are built to last. The Torah states that Noah lived for 350 years ‘after’ the Great Flood. If he was 950 years old when he died, this would mean that he was fit and vital enough to build the ark that would ensure the survival of the entire human race when he was 600 years old!
If there was a time when people lived longer and healthier lives, what happened? What changed?
Through countless texts, and spiritual traditions that have spanned centuries, we’re reminded that we are souls expressing ourselves through bodies. And while they’re made of the elements of the universe, it’s our souls that bring the bodies to life. When our souls hurt, our pain is transmitted into our bodies as the spiritual quality of the life force that we feed into each cell.
Is it possible that the 100 years or so that we see as the duration of human life is actually the limit of how long the body can endure unresolved hurt in the soul? Does a century tell us how long we can bear the sadness and disappointments of life before they catch up with us? We can all attest to the pain that comes from watching the people we love, the pets we cherish, and the experiences that we grow attached to disappear from our lives.
Could a lifetime of loss, disappointment, and betrayal have the power to disable even our strongest and most durable organ: the heart?
Or maybe our hurt is more ancient and goes even deeper.
In addition to such obvious sources of pain, perhaps there’s another one that’s less obvious, yet so monumental and universally shared that it’s hard for us to even bear thinking about it.
Across cultures and societies, creation stories state that to become individual souls in our bodies in this world, we must ‘break away’ from a greater collective soul family. At the same time, one of the deepest universal fears is just that: the fear of being separate and alone.
Perhaps the great hurt that underlies any other is the pain of separation from a greater existence. If this is true, maybe we miss our larger soul family so much that we try to fill the void by re-creating a sense of unity through smaller families here on Earth. It’s no wonder, then, that their loss can be so devastating to us. It throws us right back into the pain of the original hurt.
For many people, it’s their longing to ‘hold on’ to their families, their relationships, and memories of their past experiences that creates the conditions that lead to their greatest suffering. When they yearn for the things that they can never have again, and the people they miss, alcohol and drugs too often become the socially acceptable anesthetics that are used to numb such deep soul pain.
If we can find a way to appreciate the time that we share with those we love, as well as a way to feel good about the time we had when it’s over, then we will have taken a giant step toward our greatest healing. From this perspective, the same principles that allow us to hurt ourselves to death also work in reverse. They offer us the healing power of Life. This key appears to be related to the way we feel about what life shows us.
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