Mindfulness with Gisele Harrison MSW, RSW

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Whoa--who would have thought that posting my gratitude to get my second dose of Covid-19 vaccine would elicit thousands of comments--many of them irate. It's a...s if people had strong feelings about this--who knew? (I'm being ironic, in case you can't tell.). All of which makes me think perhaps I should post more about why I decided to get the vaccine, what my thought process was, and how this all relates to The Fifth Sacred Thing--which many have read but few seem to remember accurately. Plus, it gives me an excuse for posting Happy Picture Number 2! So here goes-- Why did I choose to get the vaccine? Couldn't it be dangerous? Is it experimental? Well, maybe yes. No one my age, who remembers thalidomide, DES, the Dalkon shield, etc. can lightly dismiss the possibility that a new medication or vaccine might have side affects that only show up later. It is a risk. But, no one my age--70 in June--can deny that there is a real, potentially deadly and highly contagious virus circulating around. I am in the high-risk age group. I have asthma, and while 'obesity' is a term I dislike, let's just say that weight-wise, I'm also in a high-risk group. I have taken a lot of precautions not to get the damn thing--but so have a lot of people who have gotten it. And were I to get it, the risk of getting a serious case, of Covid and having long-term complications, should i survive, is also extremely high. So---tiny, unlikely risk of a long-term surprise versus a far more likely, immediate risk of potential death and suffering--no contest! But what about herbal medicine and natural methods? Hey, I drink ginger tea whenever I feel fluish, or chomp on turkey tail mushrooms, and that generally works fine for me. I have a good, strong immune system. But Covid-19 is not the flu. It's something our immune systems have not yet evolved to deal with. When Europeans arrived on this continent, the indigenous people of the Americas were amazing herbalists, incredibly skilled healers, extremely knowledgeable about all the medicines of the land, and they ate completely wild, nutrient dense organic food--but they had never developed immunities to European diseases and millions died. For that matter, the old Witches of Europe were damn good herbalists but that wasn't much help, either, against the bubonic plague. I'm not arrogant enough to think that I'm in their league, anyway. I have a deep belief that there is more to the world than the quantification of science--but that doesn't mean that science is wrong, it means it's a work in progress, and any good scientist would agree. I love to think about how science might evolve if admitted consciousness into matter--but I have flown on airplanes and lived to tell the tale, I've had a serious infection cured by antibiotics that might have killed me in an earlier era, and I'm writing this on a computer to be posted on the world-wide web--so even in its current nascent state there are many ways in which science works pretty darn well. I don't have to discard it or deny it to enjoy my ginger tea, or to go get acupuncture if I feel like that's what I need. As for The Fifth Sacred Thing, the futuristic novel I wrote in the late '80s and early '90s, Madrone, one of the main characters, is a midwife and healer--but she's also a medical doctor! Her dear friends are scientists, breeding cell lines to bioremediate toxins. She combines Western medicine, herbal healing and psychic healing in a world where they are united and compatible, and she goes off on a quest to bring back samples of the virus causing an epidemic so scientists can figure out how to treat it--and maybe even vaccinate against it! Yes, there is a moment in the book when she refuses to wear a mask while treating a patient--saying she has other ways of protecting herself. But A. she is a FICTIONAL character, and B. she is a gifted psychic healer capable of battling it out on the inner planes with viruses and healing with a touch. If you can do the same, by all means don't wear a mask--as for me, I have been wearing them and will continue to do so. Were I writing the book now, I would change that scene, but when I was writing it back in the day, I didn't know that mask-wearing would become the battle line of the culture wars. Also, at the time the pandemic of the day was AIDS, which is not transmitted easily, and part of our activism of the time was to counter the stigma, the shunning and the dehumanizing of those who had the disease. So, here I am again--still happy, still appreciative of how efficient and well-run the whole process was here in San Francisco, and still very, very grateful to be protected from this awful disease!

Diet culture https://www.instagram.com/p/CMCrq3ngoLY/?igshid=gtor7hgmwgef