I: Thoughts on creating “Safe Havens” within and without ourselves. Safe havens are all around us, if we know where to look. One small opportunity is the Dr Matt Family-Patient Picnic coming on Saturday, October 28th from 11am to 1pm, which is also a chance for the kids to play in a very fun playground :-). See below for more details on this and other local events in the natural health community.
II: Music of the Week: Japanese ambient music, and later this week, Japanese jazz fusion
Japan has some extremely high quality musicians, and they also have a love for all types of Jazz. We will start with “ambient music” first envisioned by Erik Satie as described in the music section of my newsletter January 4th. Here is an example from Japanese artist, Hiroshi Yoshimura. It is designed to be in the background while people converse, wash the dishes, practice mindfulness, and read newsletters.
Hiroshi Yoshimura: Four Post Cards.
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III: Research of the Week: A large high quality study done ten years ago showed that cleaning and disinfecting daycares actually increased the chance of kids being absent due to sickness.
Yes, you read that correctly: A well-controlled study found increased absences due to illness in day-care centers that engaged in extra cleaning and disinfecting. They had two groups of centers, half with the extra procedures and half continuing “business as usual”. This would be a shocking finding for most people, but if you have been reading my newsletters for the past year you are well prepared for this seemingly paradoxical result. If we proved anything during the covid years, it is that the war-motif of “super-viruses attacking us” is extremely simplistic. Sadly, this belief pattern also plays out in real wars like in Ukraine-Russia, Iraq-Shia-Sunni-Kurd, and Israel-Palestine. “Killing the germ” does not actually help us heal.
We have our own healthy “microbiome” with about 39 trillion bacteria, fungi, and viruses, on us and inside us all the time. Without this we would become ill and die rather quickly. This was covered over a year ago, on September 14th, 2022 along with some beautiful pictures of bacteria on the human tongue :-). Our own healing systems keep things in balance, and illness is more like a mind-body-spirit “unbalancing”. Fear of illness and fear of death are two factors that create imbalance and make illnesses worse: Mother Teresa would heartily agree.
Suffering, however, is an entirely different concept not related to pain, illness, or other discomforts. I wish I was immune to suffering and fear of illness, but I am actually just like everyone else :-).
Does this study remind anyone of the finding that using clean needles for IV drug use increased people’s chances of testing “HIV positive”, as I described in my Newsletter on August 28th? Of course it does!
This study will be described in more detail later this week in a short “Newsletter Update”, along with some Japanese jazz fusion.
IV: New sections from the book by Nicole Angelique Kerr, who died in a car accident and had a profound spiritual “near death experience”. I also attended a talk by Amanda Wideman who had an NDE in 2017. She had a dream during covid about “safe havens” which was similar to my own experience. In her dream she had to head to high ground where there was clean water to drink: sounds like a “Safe Haven Community” to me :-). And as a final bonus, a 9 minute talk by Thich Nhat Hanh about “internal oases of mindfulness”.
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I: “Safe Haven” Local events:
The past few years showed how valuable having a community is, but at the same time it caused rifts in communities. This continues with new fear stories designed to push people apart, and also pushing people towards separate belief-camps. These include stories of new scary viruses (RSV, influenza, polio, deadly strain of chickenpox, etc), the World Health Organization voting in “pandemic powers”, and wars that pressure people into allegiance while ignoring long-term peaceful solutions. However, with a little effort we can all find healing communities, and also work on our own internal “safe havens”. Below are four examples of local events, and please email me with others that you have found or put them in the comments at the end.
1: The 2nd annual Dr Matt Patient-Family Picnic Potluck, from 11am to 1pm on Saturday, October 28th, at the playground in Collingwood Park. This park has an enclosed playground for toddlers, a tennis court, half-court basketball, a softball field, and a grass soccer field. It is about 4 miles south of Alexandria along the George Washington National Parkway. Please email me if you plan to attend.
2: Weston Price Fairfax Farm Tour - By some synchronous power, this is occurring at exactly the same time as the Dr Matt Family Picnic. Date: Saturday, October 28, 11 a.m. - 2 p.m. Location: Spring House Farm, 16848 Hamilton Station Road Hamilton, VA 20158. “We will meet at the farm store and then carpool/caravan to the pastures.” There is plenty of room on this tour, but please RSVP to jane.kadish@gmail.com by October 25. Jane and Florissa are the volunteer chapter leaders of the Fairfax Chapter of the Weston Price Foundation
3: Local monthly speakers on Near Death and related spiritual experiences: IANDS local group meets once a month on Sunday Afternoons in Vienna, Virginia. I attended last month and met an open minded-spiritual community. Angie Willson-Quayle is the host and if you’re interested you can email her at angiewq09@gmail.com
4: Children’s Health Defense-sponsored monthly Natural Rights & Health Roundtable meets on the third Thursday each month in DC. This event is attended by child health advocates and parents from DC, MD, and VA. There is one this coming Thursday, October 19th. Email Noelle Callahan for info and to check availability.
These days it seems we do not need such safe havens as much as we did in 2020 and 2021, but I find they are just as valuable today as they were then.
II: Safe Havens Today and Yesterday
There is a new baby expected any day in my practice whose grandparents are from the former Czechoslovakia, where the idea of “parallel communities” took on a special meaning. These grandparents are a bit younger than myself, which was a bit sobering, and they were teenagers when the Velvet Revolution happened in 1989.
I asked them about the concept of parallel communities as safe havens for freedom of expression. I learned that they are very aware that we need these safe haven communities just as much today as the people in soviet socialist republics did back then. If you would like to learn more about the Velvet revolution and Velvet Divorce, a documentary from 2021, The Art of Dissent, has interviews and footage with people who lived through the Czechoslovakian resistance, and shows how it strengthened them to face the ups and downs of government restrictions.
When we establish healthy safe-haven communities, we can easily find ways around things like the forced quarantine-camp regulation that was enacted by the New York state government. If you haven’t heard about these quarantine camps and the lawyer who sued New York’s governor to get the regulation repealed, I recommend you read this update from October 15, two days ago, by attorney Bobbie Anne Cox.
Starting in March 2020 when the world went into isolation protocols, I had competing visions of how to respond. I was tempted by the idea of Gandhi-like nonviolent protests, but I saw myself alone in a jail cell being accused of being “crazy”. I also saw the image of the lone Chinese college student in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989. As you might guess, these images were not very appetizing. Fortunately, the one that came in strongest was a bit more realistic: the concept of a safe haven, an oasis where people could “breathe the air”, similar to the parallel communities of the former Czechoslovakia. I hoped my office would be a bit of this for families who needed a primary care practice.
For those who do not recall the lone Chinese student outside Tiananmen Square, and the larger student protests in 1989, it is difficult to say what effect they have had. Although the new government in China dropped communist economic ideology, they have held onto totalitarian ideology, complete with absurdities and “labor camps” for critics of their regime. Then again, the Prague Spring in 1968 also seemed to have little or no effect, but in 1989 things changed dramatically, seemingly overnight.
The standard of living in China has improved thanks to the economic reforms, but the enormous painting three stories high of Mao Tse Tung’s smiling face still stands in Tiananmen Square, where those protests occurred. I read a book by Mao’s personal physician, Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao. His physician describes Mao’s incredible self-serving lack of empathy for suffering, including for tens of millions of starving Chinese who died during the “Tragedy of Liberation”, the “Great Leap Forward”, and “Mao’s Great Famine”. Historians argue that Mao caused far more deaths in China than either Stalin or Hitler caused in Europe, but, unlike Mao, their statues were torn down decades ago.
The modest oasis in my office was quite healing for me for the past few years. Families could show their smiles freely without face coverings and their kids could have normal play with each other. One of my patients, Jane Kadish, got things going even better with a “parent and child hiking group” and I found a number of schools that were safe havens, encouraging normal play.
One school that stood out was Heritage Christian School in Woodbridge. They reopened in summer 2020 with no social distancing or masks. The school director, Brian Kosa, wrote a letter in early summer 2020 to all the school parents about their non-mandatory mask and no social distancing policy.
I met with pastor Kosa in September 2020 to ask how he came to his decision despite the pressure all around, including from parents of kids in his school. His motivation had nothing to do with politics: these events occurred before the lockdown was a political issue, and at that time both parties were in favor of it. You may recall that the Republican governor of Maryland instituted much harsher social isolation policies than the Democratic governor of Virginia, and they lasted a lot longer.
What was behind Pastor Kosa’s decision? It was based on his spiritual faith and an intuitive knowing of what would be healthy for his community physically, mentally, and spiritually. I gave him my copy of a book by Eric Metaxas about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had a similar spiritual understanding of the evils of Germany’s “National Socialism”, combined with a very strong instinct for common-sense :-).
III Nicole Angelique Kerr’s book, “You Are Deathless” Part 2.
I met Nicole at the IANDS conference in the beginning of September and I described her book in my newsletter on September 12th along with a video interview. You may recall that she died in a devastating car accident, and had a spiritual experience while her body was lifeless. Because each page of her book gives a lot of food for thought, I have been reading it a few pages at a time, and here is an update.
Like many people who have these spiritual experiences, she kept it hidden for many years. When I first learned about how common this is, I was surprised. However, I now see that sharing these experiences is very difficult, and any one of us would likely do the same thing. Family, friends, and even mental health professionals often have negative reactions, and there is a risk of losing one’s main support system.
In Nicole’s case she not only hid it from her friends and family, but also hid it from herself! When the repressed memories began to surface many years later, along with memories of the traumatic events in the crash, she needed a lot of help. It took years to come to terms with the lessons she received, and her family had still not accepted what she experienced as “real” at the time of her interview in 2022.
In addition to explaining her healing journey, she weaves in what she learned about how to manage the fears and anxieties we all face and how they hold us back. She challenges us to think differently, but she does not undersell how painful life can be, including grief, loss, anxiety, and even just having a “bad hair day”. After all, we all wake up on the “wrong side of the bed” sometimes, including myself. We also have many significant challenges throughout our lives, and need firm present-moment awareness to get through them in as healthy a way possible.
Nicole does not claim that she is above these unpleasant emotions, which is quite refreshing. As I stated in my last newsletter she writes on the very first page: “I am not saying I am above my body’s innate fear of death.” She writes about finding her own “parallel communities” during the period after her accident. She found a supportive church with a “life affirming approach to spirituality”, (page 77). She got long-term help from healing practitioners including a chiropractor and a therapist. She states: “I had worked for years to find both individuals and communities where I received care and compassion. If I had hidden out in the familiar religion of my childhood,… I might have lived the remainder of my life without achieving conscious access to what had happened to me.”
Her book took over ten years to write, and it is a gift from her to the rest of us. She offers her own story to help us face our underlying fear of death, and to “transform the mud of suffering into lotus flowers”, as Thich Nhat Hanh liked to say. He also emphasized that discovering the inner oasis that exists in present-moment awareness is a key way to handle difficult emotions when they appear. Here is a 9 minute talk where he discusses this in an answer to a very difficult question from a child.
Thich Nhat Hanh: “Why are there bad days, and why are there good days?”
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Amanda Wideman on “Inner Oases”:
Amanda is a healing coach who had a spiritual experience in 2017 that changed her life. Although she focuses on going inside ourselves, with mindful reflection, she would also agree that we can find like-minded people around us who give us strength, although it may take a bit of effort.
She says: “When things around us seem to fall apart, and people who have tremendous influence lose the spirit path, society seems to lose this path as well.” Her dream symbolically showed her a healthy way through.