Virus or No Virus, We Have to Find Our Way Back to Healing
just me trying to untangle a knot in my belly....
Something weird is happening within the health freedom community. I’m concerned because it echoes the cultural autoimmunity I see all around.
Hopefully it’s just a growing pain that we ultimately weather with grace.
You can find your own way around the Virus/No Virus Debate here, here and here. And lots of places. It’s an enormous topic once you start to dive in. And, while I was interested in the discussion initially, I’ve stepped away recently. “Science” seems more like a language or a code right now and it’s changing too rapidly for me to invest too much time in it. It started to feel unhealthy.
My husband and I practice Chinese medicine. We’re not attached to virology. We look at patterns - excess/deficiency, interior/exterior, heat/cold, dampness/dryness, toxicity, stagnation, yin and yang - as observed via the radial artery, a person’s tongue, their voice, gait, musculature, presentation and health history. PCR tests, blood tests - they don’t really impact our treatment plans. There’s plenty that can be perceived and addressed without them. Healing is not dependent on them and I imagine the “no virus” advocates and I would agree that these tests often get in the way.
For me, the obsession with viruses, bacteria, pests and pathogens has always been a wild goose chase. The kind of reductionism that stunts our growth. I’m looking forward to WAY BIGGER conversations than the virus vs. no virus debate. And I’m grateful that I can continue to find routes to healing that aren’t dependent on the outcomes of these debates.
So I find the contentiousness around this subject puzzling. Not that it doesn’t matter whether a virus is real - I get that we’re all pretty traumatized about the lies we’ve all been told over the last few years and likely decades - but why is this the hill? Particularly among a community that is so clearly dependent on a population that is willing to remain open-minded and engage different perspectives.
My question (why is this the hill?) is genuine. Is it similar to the don’t call the mRNA shots a vaccine because they’re not technically vaccines argument? (This is a perspective I relate to, but also not my hill.) Is it something regular people can engage in or do we need to have expertise in Koch’s postulates and electron microscopy? Is it that some people feel that we must all stop and agree there’s no virus before we can move onto an important discussion about lifestyle and environmental toxins or accept that we are energetic beings? (I hope not.)
I ask because I appreciate so much of the conversation. Most of it, actually. There’s so much value in exploring these questions and I was following along until it started to feel confrontational. Like I had to pick a side. Like there was a wrong side. At some point I couldn’t like the Tweets of people I’d been learning from, even when I agreed with them, because there was judgement and anger and othering attached to the ideas.
I guess that’s the part I’m struggling with the most. Is this a showdown? Must we patently reject certain people and ideas to be able to move forward in this conversation? There’s a perversion in the “Silence is Violence” approach that makes me uncomfortable. Isn’t it absolutism all over again?
Perhaps it’s the frustration of not feeling heard. That could make more sense. I personally wish people would consider more of the emotional and spiritual components of illness. I wish people would observe more of the natural patterns around pathology and rely less on tests. I certainly believe in energetic imbalances. And it can get frustrating while so many other conversations remain at the forefront.
I can empathize there.
But this feels like another draining battle in a much bigger spiritual war. Arguing repeatedly among ourselves over whether there’s a virus and confronting the people who are not engaging in this conversation is antithetical to healing. It feels to me like stagnation - we got stuck in this place and things stopped flowing properly. Like a kink in the garden hose. An engaging conversation ground to a halt and now nothing can grow. Our discomfort with uncertainty and subsequent drive to root out the “wrong” got the better of us again.
I’m experiencing this as more semantic muddling than scientific debate. I suspect many people use the word “virus”, not because they so fervently believe in a virus, but because they’re trying to speak a language that most people can at least try to understand. We can’t keep making words radioactive if we want to foster communication. We’re in Babel right now and people are suffering - I don’t want to argue about every single word. If I did, I’d be making distinctions between healing processes, imbalances and illness… infections and detoxification. I don’t look at a lot of things the way other people do, but sometimes it makes more sense to try to understand why other people look at things the way they do than push forth my perspective.
Empathy seems like a much better way of getting out of Babel.
It’s all US. Every side is US. Team Humanity.
We can keep having the conversation… just a friendlier one. One that doesn’t need to target, disparage or alienate other people who are also trying to discover for themselves what’s true. Let’s please find our way to heal together.
Virus or No Virus, We Have to Find Our Way Back to Healing
I really appreciate your thinking and your writing. I agree completely. The infighting is unfortunate, and some of it is by design, some arises from within. Some egos get in the way of our higher purpose. Sometimes we are pitted against each other, like right and left. I feel like disparagement is our national sport. Thanks for your contribution to the healing process.
I don't think that virus/no virus is the hill, or at least not directly. The hill is proven/unproven. The entire pandemic was part of a systematic attack on meaning and sense; masks, social distancing, martial law, all of them are inversions of reality. That is the classic trick of totalitarianism; to get people to say up is down, black is white, and to accept things without evidence, and so one of the foundational defences against the march of totalitarianism becomes truth. There's no evidence for contagious viruses just as there's no evidence that vaccines prevent you catching them, and so for people who purport to be fighting for freedom to stay wedded to a them doesn't seem to me like a a small thing, it seems like everything.