“Everything is everything
What is meant to be, will be
After winter, must come spring
Change, it comes eventually”
Everything is everything is another way of saying that everything is personal and collective. We cannot separate the two. I get livid listen to popular healers who make healing out to be an individual responsibility. They tell us that if we just eat the right things, in the right ways, and do the right practices, we’ll feel better, beat cancer, avoid cancer, live longer, blah, blah, blah.
Then a lot of people, desperate for good health, take this advice, they do all the “right” things, and they don’t feel better. Or they feel better for a while but then they relapse. That is because this individualistic approach to healing doesn’t take the collective into account. It’s more of the American pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps narrative that keeps us from experiencing collective health and freedom. And the popular hyper-individualistic approach to healing can be really traumatic when people don’t have success with the protocols they’re prescribed and their healers make it out to be their fault. Patients are left to assume that something must be wrong with them, when in fact they’re being asked to heal, mostly alone, in the context of generations-worth of toxic and oppressive influences.
Drinking celery juice and doing coffee enemas everyday could really change your inner landscape but it won’t change factors like pollution, pesticides in our food system, systemic racism, and the capitalist-informed busyholism that causes dis-ease.
This is one of the biggest failings of the wellness industry in the United States. You can bust your ass to heal yourself and it will be really challenging as long as the collective is still unwell. Unless you are fortunate enough to get hide under a rock off grid somewhere, you’re going to be trying to heal in an environment that is culturally and environmentally antithetical to healing.
Part of how we survive this, and work to reverse it, is to see that our healing is bound up in the healing of our neighbors and the earth around us, and grasp every opportunity we can to support collective healing. This is what it means to see that everything is everything. You can see that it’s just as important to say “hi” to your neighbor and use natural resources responsibly as it is to get yourself to yoga class.
When we are willing to treat everything as everything, it allows us to be in right relationship with ourselves, each other, the earth, and the universe. Understanding this and acting from this knowing is fundamental to healing fully, in part because it keeps us connected to the bigger picture making it easier to not sweat the small stuff.
When we are in right relationship with the earth and each other, it is easier to roll with the punches and the natural ebbs and flows of life. Instead of feeling like something to complain about or fight against, we understand upsets as just energy doing its thing. We can resist it or allow ourselves to go with the flow. :)
Listen to the song here.