Before the lungs fill, before the cry, before the skin meets open atmosphere, the body has already been written. Every year, the spleen remembers. I lost mine in August of 2001, and still the pattern holds. My bruises arrive on schedule. The count drops according to a geometry I can describe but not exit. Whatever the spleen encoded, the rest of the body learned it by heart.

I know this the way you know weather in a joint: not as information but as pressure arriving before the language to describe it. Twenty-five years of immune thrombocytopenia^[1] have taught me to read the season in my platelet count. The bruises come first. Then petechiae, the fine red scatter across the shins that means the count is dropping. The haematologist will call it relapse. The general practicioner will tell me to see the haematopathologist. The Ayurvedic framework names the condition Rakta Pitta, the blood’s own fire turned against its vessel. Pitta gets aggravated and the blood cannot stay in the channels.

I have spent twenty-five years as a subject of the biomedical literature on why this happens, and the literature keeps arriving at a threshold it cannot cross. The data points backward through time, through bodies, through landscapes, and the frameworks keep insisting on linearity. I want to tell you what the data actually says, because it says something the researchers cannot quite bring themselves to conclude.

Autoimmunity is ancestral. Autoimmunity is ecological. It is the immune system operating exactly as it was built to operate, but built under conditions that no longer exist.

If you were born in April in the Northern Hemisphere, your risk of developing an autoimmune disease is measurably higher than if you were born in October. This holds across more than a hundred thousand patients, across multiple diseases. The wave rises and falls with the calendar like a tide.^[2] The reason is light. Vitamin D, made in the skin when ultraviolet light hits it, is the molecule that teaches certain immune cells to be tolerant. It changes their posture and calms them. Without it, those cells never learn to recognize the body’s own tissues as safe.^[3] If you were gestating during the dark months, if your mother’s skin saw almost no ultraviolet light during the trimester when your immune system was learning what to tolerate, the teaching simply didn’t happen. The architecture was never built. The darkness is not a risk factor. The darkness is the shape of the immune system itself. This may be why it is now recommended pregnant women take Vitamin D supplements.

I was conceived in May. My second trimester fell across the autumn. My third, the one that matters most for this, landed in deep winter. February in the Northern Hemisphere.

At the same time, another system was being set. A gene builds the receptor for cortisol, the stress hormone, and this receptor anchors the feedback loop that tells the stress system to stand down: cortisol rises, the receptor catches the signal, the system dials back.^[4] In babies born to highly stressed or traumatized mothers, a small chemical tag drops onto the DNA at this gene before birth and the gene goes dark. The receptor never gets built. By three months, these infants flood with stress hormones in response to mild stimuli, regardless of how the mother is doing after birth. The alarm was set before the child met the world that was supposed to cause it. This has been documented in the children of depressed mothers, survivors of the Rwandan genocide, and families of Holocaust survivors.^[5]

My mother was a traumatized woman, an abuse survivor. The cortisol in her blood during those nine months was not a metaphor for stress. I would not even need to know the content of her story for the biology to carry over. It was the physical substance of it, crossing the placental barrier and landing in me as chemistry.

If both these systems fail at once, if the immune cells never learn tolerance because there is no vitamin D and the stress-response feedback loop has no anchor because the cortisol receptor was silenced, then both brakes are gone.^[6] What gets diagnosed years or decades later as autoimmune disease is the consequence of an architecture that was set, in darkness and in cortisol, before birth.

The data goes further back than one generation. In Sweden, researchers tracked over four hundred and fifty thousand children and found that when men experienced bereavement in childhood, the children of those men, conceived years or decades later, developed autoimmune disease at significantly higher rates. No social or economic factor explained it. The transmission was biological and direct.^[7]

In a separate study, mice trained to fear a specific smell produced pups and grandpups who startled at that same smell despite never having encountered it. The researchers removed every possible route of social learning by extracting the sperm, fertilizing in a dish, and having the pups raised by unexposed mothers. The fear persisted. It was written into the sperm itself.^[8]

And in Holocaust survivors, a gene that regulates cortisol sensitivity carries an epigenetic tag elevated compared to controls. In their children, born decades later on a different continent, the same tag is lower. The adjustment moves in the opposite direction, as if the offspring’s biology is preparing for an anticipated environment of extreme stress it has never directly experienced.^[9]

This is what I mean by ancestral. My paternal grandparents were the sole survivors of their respective families through Auschwitz.

The grandfather’s grief is in the grandchild’s platelet count. Not as metaphor. As chemistry. As a molecular tag on a stretch of DNA that says: the cortisol flooded in. Not when, not where, not to whom. Just that it happened. The mark does not encode time as a sequence. It encodes time as structure.

In 1998, a five-day ice storm knocked out power across southern Quebec. Researchers tracked pregnant women through the disaster and separated what objectively happened to them (days without power, temperature drop, caloric disruption) from how they felt about it (fear, emotional distress, cognitive appraisal). Thirteen years later, the children’s immune cells showed massive epigenetic rewriting across nearly a thousand genes, and these changes tracked precisely with objective hardship. How frightened the mother felt, how she narrated it to herself, was completely uncorrelated.^[10] The fetal immune system did not record the story. It recorded the cold. The thermodynamic fact. The number of days without heat.

A 201-country study confirmed that average annual temperature predicts the prevalence of five major autoimmune diseases with overwhelming statistical strength.^[11] Cold environments concentrate autoimmune conditions. But the same nutritional deprivation in the Gambia produced no equivalent immune shift, because the ecology is different, the microbiome is different, the endemic organisms are different, the soil is different. The environment does not surround the body as context. The environment is the body. The gut lining is an internalization of the soil. The respiratory membrane is an internalization of the atmosphere. That is what I mean by ecological.

I was born to a blood bath. My mother hemorrhaged during her 30 hour delivery and had to be transfused, someone else’s blood entering her body as mine was leaving it. Then her milk was insufficient and I was fed by surrogates. Other women’s milk, other women’s microbiomes, seeding my gut with ecosystems that were never meant to be mine. At five, I was diagnosed. The treatment: spleen removal and prophylactic antibiotics, which burned the gut flora to the ground. Intravenous immunoglobulin pooled from the plasma of thousands of donors, infused directly into my bloodstream to modulate the immune system that could not recognize its own platelets. The treatment for the failure of self-recognition is the introduction of thousands more selves.

Auschwitz in the germline. Cortisol in the placenta. Winter in the genome’s folds. A stranger’s blood in the veins. Other women’s milk in the gut. Thousands of strangers’ immunity in the infusion bag. The boundary between self and other was crossed and re-crossed before I had language. The self was never one thing.

It is not the cold that triggers the relapse. It is the transition. I left Montréal on December 31st and was sick in Thailand by January 3rd. I left Thailand in February and relapsed when I landed in Kerala. Last April, I went south to New York and got a severe flu. The bruising showed up in Montréal three weeks later with the thaw.

The pattern lives in the crossing from one thermal regime to another, the sudden change in temperature that cracks the fire pot. The immune system, calibrated to the cold, meets the heat and cannot recalibrate fast enough. ITP peaks in spring alongside viral triggers, at exactly the moment when vitamin D stores are at their lowest after the winter trough.^[12] The system, unable to complete its tolerance signaling, meets a routine pathogen and the absence of the background condition turns the encounter into a cascade. The fire at what used to be the spleen still works through the blood, but the fire is calibrated to a thermodynamic reality that no longer matches the present season. The platelets are consumed not because they are foreign but because the apparatus that would have recognized them as self was never fully assembled.

The perceived contaminant is the self, but which self? The one that arrived through the placenta, already formatted by winter and cortisol and the long shadow of Auschwitz? The one reconstituted by a stranger’s blood on the first day? The one colonized by another woman’s milk? The one periodically flooded with the pooled immunity of thousands of donors? The one whose gut microbiome was decimated by antibiotics and rebuilt from whatever remained?

The immune system is not failing to recognize the self. It is performing an exact calculation on a self that was always plural.

I should say plainly that every time I use English to describe Ayurvedic concepts, I am already mistranslating. The frameworks do not map onto each other. When I say ojas and gloss it as “the luminous substrate of immunity,” I have already lost something essential. The word carries a density of meaning that belongs to a knowledge system structured by different axioms, different observations, different millenia of clinical reasoning. When I draw parallels between epigenetic data and desha prakriti, I know I am doing something that risks flattening both. I do it anyway, because I know no other way to begin to make sense of my own experience than to translate as I learn. The translation is imperfect. The experience is not.

The Ayurvedic tradition calls the continuity of body and land Desha Prakriti, the season threading through the embryo’s blood vessels, modifying the solvent before the solute crystallizes. Winter tightens the tissue. Summer loosens it. The flesh is weather held under a dermis.^[13] It names my condition Rakta Pitta and classifies it clearly: manageable, but incurable.^[14] There is no promise of restoration to some imagined original wholeness. There is care, precise and ongoing.

And it says something the biomedical literature cannot say, because the biomedical literature does not have the vocabulary for it. Caraka lists, among the primary factors that deplete ojas and open the body to disease: chinta, bhaya, shoka. Worry. Fear. Grief.^[15] Not stress, which is mechanical. Not trauma, which is an event. These are placed not among the psychological complications of illness, not as downstream consequences, but as root causes, on equal footing with excess fasting, with adverse season, with exposure to wind and sun. Before the inflammation, before the cascade, before the fire at the spleen burns through the blood: grief. And its antidote, also from Caraka: dhee dhairya atmadi vijnanam. "Intellect, courage, and self-realization are the supreme medicines for disorders of the mind." What the gut cannot break down, the mind cannot clear. What the mind finds the courage to face, the channels can begin to process.

I carry an incurable condition. It is manageable. The spring bruises come and the spring bruises go. The count drops and the count recovers as the fractal geometry repeats. This is not a story of healing, it is the story of tending to a garden.

What strikes me is how long it took Western science to arrive at what Caraka stated without fanfare. The passage on ojas depletion lists the causes plainly: excessive exercise, fasting, worry, fear, grief, dry and scanty meals, exposure to wind and sun, insomnia, adverse season.^[15-1] Read that list after reading the epigenetic literature and something shifts. Adverse season is not a metaphor for seasonal affective disorder. It is the angle of the ecliptic during the second trimester. Grief is not a psychological complication of being ill. It is a primary cause of the depletion of the body’s deepest reserve. Fear is not an emotion to be managed. It is an etiological factor, written into the same list as fasting and wind, granted the same clinical weight.

The biomedical literature needed the ice storm, the Swedish cohort, the mice startling at their grandfather’s fear, the Holocaust methylation studies, and a 201-country regression analysis to begin to see what Caraka organized into a single verse. I do not say this to diminish the science. The science is extraordinary, and its precision matters. I say it because the convergence itself is the point. Two knowledge systems separated by millennia, geography, language, and epistemology arrive at the same claim: the body is not separate from the conditions that formed it. The environment is not backdrop. It is etiology. And grief, fear, and worry are not secondary to the physical causes of disease. They are physical causes of disease.

Caraka also offers the antidote, in a formulation so compressed it could be missed: dhee dhairya atmadi vijnanam. Wisdom, courage, and self-knowledge are themselves therapeutic.^[15-2] Not as psychology. Not as positive thinking. As clinical intervention, placed in the therapeutic literature alongside diet, herbs, and seasonal regimen. The treatment for an incurable condition shaped by ancestral grief, adverse season, and a self that was never singular is not a drug that restores the architecture. It is the cultivation, ongoing and precise, of the capacity to understand what happened, to face it without flinching, and to know the self clearly enough to navigate what cannot be repaired.

I do not know how to end this essay because the condition does not end. The geometry repeats. The springtime bruises will come again. What I know is that the body I carry was written before I was born, by the light and the cold and the grief of people I never met, and that the work is not to undo the writing but to learn to read it.

1. Immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) is an autoimmune condition in which the immune system destroys the body’s own platelets, the cell fragments essential for blood clotting. It is classified as a rare disease. In Ayurvedic clinical terms, it is understood as a form of Rakta Pitta, but Rakta Pitta is a broader category than ITP.↩︎

2. Goldacre et al., 2013. 115,172 UK patients across multiple immune-mediated diseases. April peak (OR = 1.045, P < 0.0001), October trough (OR = 0.945, P < 0.0001). Second trimester UVB correlation: Spearman’s rho = −0.49, P = 0.00005.↩︎

3. Hsu et al., 2018. Vitamin D Receptor (VDR), activated by calcitriol, forces dendritic cells toward a tolerogenic phenotype: upregulating inhibitory molecules, suppressing CD80/CD86, dampening IL-12 and IL-23. VDR binds at CTCF motifs dictating borders of topologically associated domains (TADs), restructuring chromatin architecture. Six MS risk genes co-localize with VDR binding regions in dendritic cells.↩︎

4. Oberlander et al., 2008. Glucocorticoid receptor gene NR3C1, exon 1F. Methylation at the NGFI-A binding site silences receptor expression, disrupting HPA axis negative feedback and Th1/Th2 cytokine balance. Altered cortisol reactivity at three months independent of postnatal maternal mood.↩︎

5. NR3C1 methylation replicated across cohorts: Rwandan genocide survivors (Perroud et al., 2014), Holocaust survivor families (Yehuda et al., 2016), domestic violence-exposed mothers (Radtke et al., 2011).↩︎

6. Morante-Palacios et al., 2021. Coordinated glucocorticoid receptor and MAFB action in tolerogenic epigenome remodeling. Dual absence of VDR-mediated calcitriol signaling and GR-mediated cortisol feedback simultaneously strips both primary regulatory mechanisms. Cao-Lei et al., 2014 (Project Ice Storm) demonstrated that objective hardship, not subjective distress, predicted genome-wide DNA methylation changes at 1,675 CpG sites across 957 genes in offspring T cells at age 13, enriched for NF-κB signaling and Th1/Th2 cytokine regulation.↩︎

7. Song et al., 2021. 453,516 Swedish children born 2001–2012. Paternal childhood bereavement associated with offspring autoimmune disease: HR = 1.31 (95% CI: 1.06, 1.62). No mediation by SES or mood disorders.↩︎

8. Dias and Ressler, 2014, Nature Neuroscience 17:89–96. F0 olfactory fear conditioning to acetophenone. F1 and F2 behavioral sensitivity, enlarged M71-specific glomeruli, CpG hypomethylation at Olfr151 in F0 and F1 sperm. IVF and cross-fostering confirmed biological inheritance.↩︎

9. Yehuda et al., 2016. FKBP5 gene methylation. Holocaust-exposed parents: higher methylation. Offspring: lower. Orthogonal transmission suggesting compensatory rather than mimetic epigenetic inheritance.↩︎

10. Cao-Lei et al., 2014 (Project Ice Storm). Objective hardship predicted DNA methylation changes at 1,675 CpG sites across 957 genes in offspring T cells at age 13. Genes enriched for NF-κB signaling and Th1/Th2 cytokine regulation. Subjective distress uncorrelated. Dancause et al., 2015.↩︎

11. Rademacher et al., 2024. 201-country regression. Robust linear correlation (p < 0.0001) between average annual temperature and age-standardized prevalence of alopecia areata, type 1 diabetes, IBD, psoriasis, and rheumatoid arthritis.↩︎

12. Moulis et al., 2015. Seasonal peaks in adult ITP: 35.8% spring, May = 18.2%. Corticosteroid resistance in spring-onset: 52.1% of resistant cases (p = 0.001). 62.7% of chronic patients diagnosed in spring.↩︎

13. Charaka Samhita, Sharira Sthana. Embryological formation as negotiation between inherited seed and atmospheric conditions. Seasonal modulation through Rtu: Ashtanga Hridayam, Sutra Sthana. Desha Prakriti: the constitutional type shaped by the geographic and climatic conditions of conception and gestation.↩︎

14. Charaka Samhita, Nidanasthana 2.4. Jwara (fever) has as its cause vitiation of doshas (V, P, K, VP, VK, PK, VPK). Fever causes Rakta Pitta. Pitta gets aggravated and blood cannot stay in the channels. Curable if of Kapha type, palliable if of Vata type, incurable if both.↩︎

15. Charaka Samhita, Sutra Sthana 17.73–77 (Kiyanta Shiraseeya Adhyaya). Ojas is described as the very first substance created in the body, situated in the heart, clear and slightly red-yellowish; its destruction leads to death (17.74). Symptoms of its decrease: timidity, debility, constant worry, discomfort of the senses, loss of lustre, dryness, emaciation (17.73). General causative factors for depletion of ojas: excessive exercise, fasting, worry (chinta), fear (bhaya), grief (shoka), dry and scanty meals, exposure to wind and sun, insomnia, excessive excretion, adverse season, and major mental illness (bhuta-upaghata) (17.76–77). Cf. Charaka Samhita, Sutra Sthana 25.40: dhee dhairya atmadi vijnanam.↩︎↩︎↩︎

Autoimmunity is a heart that is breaking.

I mean this physically. The heart, the muscular fist behind your sternum, is the reservoir of something the body cannot function without, and when that reservoir cracks, the body loses its capacity to recognize itself.

In Ayurveda, the heart is called hṛdaya. It is the seat of ojas, the final distillation of everything the body digests. Every sensation, every encounter, every piece of information you take in gets processed through a sequence of tissue layers, each one refining the input further, and what arrives at the end of that long metabolic cascade is ojas: a small, luminous, unctuous substance that the classical texts describe as honey-coloured, sweet, and cool. Eight drops of it live in the heart. It never moves. It is the anchor.

The rest circulates. It coats your tissues and lines your vessels. It is what allows your immune system to scan the body and say: this is me. This belongs. Ojas is a recognition system. It is the substance by which the body knows itself.

When ojas is depleted, the body loses that knowing. The immune system scans the tissues and finds something it cannot read. It encounters its own marrow, its own nervous tissue, saturated with material that was never fully digested, residue from experiences the system couldn’t metabolize. The body reads itself as foreign. The inflammation begins. The joints swell and the skin erupts and the fatigue descends like a door closing, all at once or in sequence over months. This is autoimmunity: the body attempting to purify what it can no longer recognize. A desperate, burning effort to clear the archive.

And ojas, the substance that would prevent this, the substance that holds the self together, lives in the heart.

So when I say autoimmunity is a heart that is breaking, I mean the container is cracked. The reservoir is leaking. The place where the body stores its most refined capacity for self-recognition has been damaged, and what damages it is grief.

The classical texts are explicit. Charaka, one of the foundational authors of Ayurvedic medicine, writing over two thousand years ago, lists the causes of ojas depletion: excessive exertion, prolonged hunger, harsh exposure to the elements, intense worry, fear, anger, and shoka. Grief. He also names vishada, despair, as the single most potent aggravator of disease. The foremost one.

Grief depletes ojas through a precise mechanism. When you grieve, the body’s principle of movement, vata, which governs everything that shifts and dries and contracts and cools, surges. It moves like a cold wind across the digestive fire. The fire gutters. Digestion falters. Instead of producing the refined, nourishing substance that eventually becomes ojas, the system produces ama: a heavy, sticky, toxic residue. The incomplete product of incomplete processing. At the same time, that cold wind dries out the existing ojas. The reserves evaporate. The container empties from both ends.

You know this in your body. You have felt what grief does. The heaviness. The fog. The sense that your skin is thinner, that sounds are louder, that you cannot tolerate what you could tolerate before.

The vagus nerve is the longest nerve in the body. It runs from the brainstem through the throat, past the heart, into the gut. It is a living tissue, a wet rope of fibres, and eighty-five to ninety percent of those fibres run upward. From the viscera to the brain. The heart is issuing reports. It reads the blood, the rhythm, the hormonal tide, and it tells the brain what is happening in the body.

When vagal tone is strong, when the parasympathetic system is doing its work, it holds inflammation in check. The way a riverbank holds a river. The channel keeps the water where it can move, where it can nourish. When the channel erodes, the water goes everywhere. The fields flood. Nothing is reached and everything is saturated.

This is what happens when grief overwhelms the vagal channel. The inflammatory signalling that the parasympathetic system normally regulates spills into every tissue. The cytokines, the body’s alarm signals, rise and stay risen. The immune cells, bathed in distress signals, begin to read the body’s own tissue as debris to be cleared.

There is a cardiac event called Takotsubo, named for the Japanese octopus trap, because of the shape the left ventricle takes when it balloons under acute emotional shock. It happens after the death of a spouse or a child, after witnessing something the heart cannot metabolize. The catecholamines surge. The vagal tone collapses. And in the heart itself, in the actual muscle, inflammatory cells flood the tissue. The organ that holds ojas becomes the site of its unravelling.

Grief is a physical event. It happens in the flesh of the heart, in the lining of the gut, in the wet fibres of the vagus. Complicated grief, the kind that does not resolve, that sits in the body like a stone the system cannot pass, produces its own specific pattern of immune reorganization, distinct from depression, distinct from post-traumatic stress. The body does not merely “react” to grief. It reorganizes around it. It takes the shape of what it cannot digest.

The rivers are poisoned and the forests are burning and the ice is gone. The air carries particulate matter into the deep tissue of the lungs and from there into the blood. Microplastics are in every human placenta ever tested. The soil, stripped of its microbial intelligence by decades of industrial agriculture, produces food that fills the stomach and starves the cells.

You feel this as a weight in the body. A fog that is visceral, not cognitive. Something saturating.

Ecological grief has a name now. The psychological descriptions proliferate, the scales are being adapted across cultures, the interviews are being transcribed. And no one has drawn blood. No one has measured the inflammatory tide in farmers watching their land die, or the vagal tone of communities watching their rivers turn. The question has not been asked in a form that crosses the disciplinary walls. The immunologist does not read the climate grief literature. The environmental psychologist does not measure cytokines. The Ayurvedic practitioner holding the classical understanding of shoka and ojas-kshaya is not in conversation with the researcher measuring vagal tone in bereaved spouses.

The body is not waiting for these conversations to happen.

Children who lose a parent, who experience attachment disruption, the grief-shaped wound at the foundation of self, carry measurably altered immune landscapes into adulthood. The loss itself is the sensitizing event, more so than other forms of adversity. The grief reshapes the immunological soil. The inflammatory baseline shifts. The capacity for self-recognition narrows. And decades later, autoimmune conditions emerge at higher rates. The grief you carry from childhood is still alive in your immune system. It has been there the whole time, shaping what the body can and cannot tolerate.

If you are living with an autoimmune condition, you have likely been told that your immune system is confused. That it is overreacting. That it has made a mistake.

Your body has not made a mistake. It is responding to the weight of what it has received. The grief you carry is the felt registration of real damage to the real world, processed through a real organ, along a real nerve, into an immune landscape that reorganizes around what it cannot metabolize.

The grief is real. The body is real.

The heart is grieving the world. The grieving heart is no fit container for ojas. And from that vessel, the conditions of autoimmunity emerge as echo: the body registering the state of the earth it inhabits. Deha to desha. The body to the land.

The first gesture of navigation is to stop treating the body’s signal as noise. The vessel is carrying something. The sea is rough, the cargo is real, and the signal your body is sending is not confusion. It is the weight of accurate perception, and it will not stop until it is received.

There are trans-cultural principles to guide healthful decision-making when eating. Recognize first that the manner and content of eating has a direct and cumulative effect on autoimmune balance. Accepting that for a fact, it becomes extremely important to take care in order to avoid autoimmune relapse. And even then, I know I am not fully in control. I am a picky eater. I rarely accept food offered to me that I did not explicitly choose or implicitly trust because I know the person offering it. You’d think I’m trying to avoid getting poisoned. In some ways I suppose I am. Perhaps I am overcautious, but I do not trust the dietary choices of industrialized nations.

1. I need food that avoids deep frying (heating in nature + free radicals = inflammation = āma (toxins) = autoimmune relapse).

In damp and hot climates, tending jatharagni (जठराग्नि, the Central Digestive Fire) in the stomach and small intestine becomes exponentially important.

Agni is the Sanskrit word for fire, both in the cosmos and in the human body, our capacity for transformation and heat, for assimilation and transmutation. Adapting to moderate spice levels is not only a matter of personal taste; it keeps digestion functional, keeps Tejas (तेजस्, the subtle essence of fire and radiance) manifesting physically as jatharagni. Eating local food is the surest way to co-regulate with the environment. And I check: how many people eat there? A busy restaurant is a safe restaurant.

Heat is a double-edged sword. Enough of it will support Pachaka Pitta (पाचक पित्त, “that which digests”) and Agni, enabling the body to handle food, absorb nutrients, and separate waste. Too much of it, and patterns of disharmony begin to emerge. My specific condition, immune thrombocytopenia, involves complex signs of heat in the blood and on the skin. Purpura and easy bruising are signs of Rakta Pitta, a category of bleeding disorders in Ayurveda caused by an excess of Pitta dosha affecting the blood, appearing as purple discoloration or tiny red spots under the skin due to capillary breakdown and “leaking” of vitiated blood.

2. I need vegetables to be my primary food group, in close equivalence with whole grains. Fiber, vitamins and minerals.

I don’t eat like a monk. Some monastic sects are vegetarian; they are considered strict. Then there is eating Jay. If vegetarianism is a dietary choice, Kin Jay is a karmic firewall. No meat, no dairy, but also no “pungent herbs”—no garlic, onions, chives—because stimulation is the enemy of the spirit.

But I walk past the yellow flags of the Jay stalls and I see the glitch. It is not just vegetables. It is “fake meat” engineered to uncanny perfection. Fake fish, fake pork, fake shrimp that taste fresh off the boat but are born in a vat of soy isolate and flour. To compensate for the lack of animal fat, the food is swimming in palm oil. It is sometimes greasy, heavy, and ultra-processed. It is “pure” in spirit but difficult for the body.

I’ve eaten Jay many times since arriving in Chiang Mai. It’s a good option, as long as I stick to the rice, tofu, and vegetables. Again, back to basics: skip the deep-fried foods, skip the overly processed. With the fake breaded meats, my Agni would drown in the oil, and my blood sugar would spike on the simple starches.

City monks, village monks, are expected to eat whatever they are given. In the morning, they leave their temple and walk around the neighbourhood carrying an alms bowl. People offer them what they have. Often rice, curries, portions individually packaged in plastic bags. So if you peeked in their bowl you may see whatever happened to be available that day. It may include meat, or not. More important than content is apparently timing: Thai monks are forbidden to eat after noon. In some temples, meat broth may be taken as medicine. Medicine, including herbs and pharmaceuticals, may be taken at any time it is needed. Ultimately, the abbot decides. How do they survive this? The randomness, the stochastic input of the street? Ayurveda has a word for it: oka satmya (ओकासात्म्य)—acquired habituation. It is the biological truth that a body can learn to tolerate the unwholesome through repeated, small-scale exposure. The monk has trained his physiology to accept the chaos of the alms bowl as self. It all becomes nourishment because the system has expanded to include it. He has immunity. I have no oka satmya. Oka satmya is built through risk. The monk risks illness to gain immunity, while I have chosen safety.

3. I need to remain aware of viruddha ahara (विरुद्ध आहार), an Ayurvedic concept referring to incompatible food combinations, preparations, or habits that disrupt the body’s metabolism, impair digestive fire and tissue metabolism (धात्वाग्नि dhatvagni) and cause the building of ​​toxic, undigested metabolic waste, āma (आम). It is described as a sticky, morbid, and harmful substance that accumulates in the body when digestive fire (Agni) is weak, resulting in incomplete digestion of food. There are 18 types of viruddha ahara. They are virtually impossible to completely avoid.

400 years of plantation-driven colonialism and global trade in processed foods leave our present-day options in a sorry state. The palate is habituated to empty, cloying, dampening foods. Sugar has been refined to the point of lacking all nutrients, being pure sucrose, the white poison. This isn’t news; it’s the ultimate dietary villain now.

Sugar caused such a craze in 17th century Europe that the Royals and aristocrats hired chefs to create elaborate statues and maquettes out of the stuff. They fought eloquent battles of prestige, outdoing each other in riches. It was, in effect, white gold. So infamous was the Royal love of sugar that they would never smile, for the stuff had rotted their teeth black and holey.

As plantations grew off the back of the transatlantic slave trade sugar became widespread as a commodity, and the plantation owners grew wildly rich. At first, it retained its prestigious status symbol. To add a teaspoon of sugar to your cup of tea in 19th century Britain after your 15-hour factory workday was to show you were one of the good folks, one of those respectable people. You were akin to the King. But as sugar was used as a primary sweetener all over the globe, everywhere industry’s tendrils reached, it replaced the nutrient-dense sweeteners traditionally used by most people. Palm sugar, jaggery, coconut nectar, maple syrup, honey — all of them lost their place to pure refined white sugar. And with the sweet tooth came the propensity for diametrically opposed rich and fatty foods. Deep-fried, clogging, metabolically chaotic industrial oils were created first as byproducts of refinement and then packaged as “cooking vegetable oil.” Fat and sweet in ever greater proportions, intensifying flavours and making impossible a nuanced taste.

White rice is analogous to white sugar. Everywhere it replaced its whole-grain cousin as the staple food in a monodiet, data shows lack of B-complex leading to beriberi, severe thiamine deficiency. And, like sugar, white rice was the food of the ultra-rich, the ruling class. So the ruling class lost their health first, and then once the factory-food was available, everyone else did too. Processed food is directly correlated to poor health outcomes. White basmati rice has the amusing position of currently being considered highly “ayurvedic” despite its lack of nutrient density. My teacher explained to me that it’s because it’s easy to digest. Fair enough. Where I can get them, I choose whole grains, but I eat white rice almost every day in Chiang Mai.

The simple foods of our pre-industrial ancestors are now unpalatably bland, but at least we have better hygiene than the Middle Ages. Have you ever had an everything-flavoured potato chip? What could you possibly compare that with? The spike in blood sugar is a physiological echo of the colonial extraction economy: a rapid boom followed by a devastating crash. So yeah, I eat sugar when I travel – it’s omnipresence gets the better of me.

4. I need to ensure that Bhutagni (भूताग्नि), the 5 elemental digestive fires located in the liver, remain sufficiently strong to clean and nourish the blood. I do this by eating phet nit-noi (เผ็ดนิดหน่อย, mildly spicy) and I am taking herbs for digestive function and to support my blood. TCM is readily available in Thailand, so I found pills: Dan Zhi Xiao Yao Wan (丹栀逍遥丸, Enhanced Free & Easy Wanderer Pills) acts as a systemic coolant, extinguishing the excess liver fire (Ranjaka Pitta) that “cooks” the blood and destroys platelets. Meanwhile, Gui Pi Wan (歸脾丸, Restore The Spleen Pills) reinforces the structural integrity of the blood vessels (Raktavaha Srotas), providing the necessary “holding” energy to prevent the blood from leaking out into the tissues. I ended up consulting a TCM doctor and she approved of my choices, using her own reasoning. She recognized my “heat” pattern and saw impaired digestion as the root of my bleeding issue, and added Shen Ling Bai Zhu Wan (参苓白术丸, Ginseng and Atractylodes Formula) to the stack. It’s a classic formula designed to strengthen the Spleen, boost Qi, and, crucially, eliminate dampness. Excellent, I finally have a combination of herbs to deal with all this Damp Heat.

Think of it like this: I am operating a manual transmission for a missing automatic organ (the spleen), balancing the need to hold Blood (immune thrombocytopenia) against the risk of accumulating Dampness (toxins in the blood). I’m using Dan Zhi Xiao Yao Wan in the morning to ease the taxed Liver heat and stagnation. Then, Gui Pi Wan at noon to build platelets when my digestive fire is at its peak, and utilizing the doctor’s addition of Shen Ling Bai Zhu Wan in the evening to actively drain the swamp and form my stool while I sleep. This medicinal tripod is fueled by easily digestible foods like congee and fish soups, while strictly avoiding the damp trap of too many coconut milk curries or the metabolic crash of fasting. When I transition to India next month, I’ll just swap the herbs: replacing the Chinese cooling agents with Mahatiktaka Ghrita (Bitter Ghee) and the builders with Drakshadi Ghrita (Raisin Ghee), ensuring I continue to cool the vessel without extinguishing the fragile fire keeping me going. Use the tools available wherever you are. This is a rather syncretic approach to herbalism, don’t try it at home without baseline knowledge of the systems.

With the networked ease of access to information, people who care about their health can easily know “what to eat.” However, in the west, only the wealthiest among us (including, unfortunately, anyone who can afford to buy and eat local+organic food in Canada or the USA), and those who are part of the neopeasantry of biodynamic farmers can eat food that is worth calling nourishing. The rest of us are just surviving. It’s a sorry state of affairs.

5. I need to stay hydrated. I ensure hydration by carrying a bottle, and drinking electrolytes in the form of coconut water or dissolvable powder added to my water. This helps cool me in hot climates. I make sure not to snuff out jatharagni by over-drinking or drinking anything ice cold. Cold water possesses the qualities of Sheeta (cold, सीता) and Drava (liquid, द्रव), which directly oppose the Ushna (hot, उष्ण) quality of the central fire. The urge to cool off by drinking cold/iced drinks is a paradox. When you drink cold drinks, you get a shot of cold, but then your body’s capacity to thermoregulate by itself is diminished. You are trading acute relief for chronic weakness.

6. I supplement essential nutrients that I may not be getting from whole foods because I cannot control provenance and quality when eating at restaurants: Brand’s essence of chicken, wheatgrass, spirulina, chlorella. I am a walking paradox. I decry the industrial food market while directly benefiting from its products each day. In a conversation with a language model, the ghost of Susan Sontag told me I am “running on a Cyber-Ayurvedic Operating System.” The AI said: “You are keeping your open system alive with closed-system logic. You call the “Jay” diet a glitch? You are the glitch. You are a biological entity that requires a global supply chain just to stop bleeding.”

Am I romanticizing the past? Sure I am. But I have an opinion based on my reading of history and my understanding of the development of agriculture since the combustion engine and petroleum-derived fertilizers; since the rise of the plantationocene, the global container-shipping industry and the trade in factory-refined food: our capacity for “choice” in rich countries has gone through the roof, but the quality of food available to all but very few people has plummeted to be worse than it was at any time except the worst decades of the early industrial revolution. And now, the poorest on earth are living with analogous food-source loss as we were subjected to in the last 200 years. Everywhere, local food sources, perennial plants, whole grains, wild game, fish — they are vanishingly few. The soil is depleted, the ocean is empty.

7. I eat fish a few times a week. Never deep-fried; ideally steamed or in soup. This pacifies Vata, ensures adequate iodine intake, B12, omegas, and complete proteins. Fish is also the only meat that will build tissues without introducing dampness. This means that it is easy to digest and will not damage jatharagni or Meda-dhatu-agni (metabolism of fat tissue), or lead to accumulation of āma. I eat ideas. I eat Agni and Vata and Omega-3s. I am not eating fish; I am eating a textbook definition of pacifying Vata. Does the fish know it is medicine? Or is it just a dead fish?

How can food be medicine in a case like this? Is it better to simply do as the monks do, to take all that is available as a gift, to be grateful that we get to eat today at all, to recognize that hunger and starvation are two different beasts, and eat what is given? Would I be better off if I just gave up my picky eating and accepted all food still existing as “prasad”, a gift from Gaïa, Mother Earth, the Goddess? Or should I take a hard-line ecological stance, and refuse to eat anything that does not meet my standards of sustainable purity, anything that did not grow within 200km of where I eat it? This is the principle of desha satmya (देश सात्म्य), geographic suitability. The food of the land is the medicine for the people of that land. It is a beautiful, coherent theory. But what happens when the land itself has changed? When the soil is depleted? And what happens when I am the variable that doesn’t fit?

I am a transplant, biologically displaced. The land of Thailand is hot, damp, and spicy (Pitta-increasing). My body is Pitta-aggravated (bleeding). By the laws of desha satmya, I should leave. I should go to a cold, dry climate, but I’m here, and I love it here. And because I’m here, I must create an artificial micro-climate inside my body using imported herbs and local foods. I’m not vegetarian anymore. I am terraforming myself, but don’t call it health, call it solitary confinement. I am playing with fire. The “local” here is a complex negotiation between tourism and deforestation. The air in Chiang Mai contains particles from Beijing. The fish in my soup contains microplastics from California. Is it better still to be vegan; to refuse all animal-derived products, but risk severe B12 insufficiency, anemia, and what TCM calls “blood deficiency”? What about the vegan reliance on industrially isolated supplements and factory-made protein replacements, wrapping virtue in petrochemicals?

8. I eat no raw food except occasional fruit. Raw is good for pacifying Pitta in moderation but difficult for Agni in the tropics, and it also carries a greater risk of bacterial infection. I minimize dairy, unless it is fermented and traditional. Even then, industrial dairy is usually mucus-forming and inflammatory. I eat the darkest chocolate I can find, and I drink rare and superlative matcha; Chiang Mai has a vibrant chocolate and matcha culture. Today I had a 100% dark chocolate and matcha oat-milk latte, and it was absolutely amazing. I love my treats, too. Mango sticky rice? Oh My God.

What matters more: ecology, or health? Am I forced to choose? The ecological imperative is to eat local, eat what is given, and reduce the carbon footprint. The biological imperative is to eat specific, imported foods, and optimize for micronutrients at a global radius. These two ethical frameworks are perpendicular and incompatible. To eat ecologically is to expose the sensitive, autoimmune-compromised body to the ravages of the degraded environment. To prioritize health is to sever the link with the local soil and hook myself up to a global IV drip of Health Food.

Any sound ecology, boasting the traditional and contemporary knowledge of what makes “health” in the human organism and the complex assemblage of the food supply chain, should be organized in such a way as to optimize the symbiosis of human and non-human flourishing, in full respect of the natural hierarchy known as the food chain, which has been the determining organizing factor in human societies for all time.

But that’s not the present reality. Small, pre-industrial cultures could and did do better, but they also fucked up at smaller scale. Civilizations and empires have always despoiled the earth. The Mayans had their polycrisis, too: drought, warfare, soil depletion and deforestation, they ruined the Central American rainforests. Cities are heat engines, they demand and facilitate a division of labour, land, and resources that will always create waste and over-consume neighbouring (or distant) territories. Ken Wilber made the point succinctly: modern technology, bigger problems, bigger potentials.

The paradox is amazing: I am intellectually disgusted by the modern food system, but I am physically dependent on its advances in nutrition science to know what to eat, and supply chain efficiency to find so-called health within the system itself. The monk walks the neighborhood, holding a bowl, and eats whatever falls into it. If it is rice, he eats. If it is poison, he eats. He has no self. Me? I have so much self. I am dripping, heavy, burdened with self.

How do I eat? Given my history, prakriti (प्रकृति, constitution), vikriti (विकृति, current state), and means (modest by western standards, but still in the global top 15%), I do the best I can to prioritize health. It’s simple. I follow these rules. Otherwise, I start bleeding. Literally. If I don’t eat right, according to the principles that I have learned through extensive study of TCM, nutrition, and Ayurveda, as well as ongoing evaluation and observation of my body’s reactions to the decisions I make day to day, week to week, month to month: I bleed. It shows up in bruises, in hemorrhoids, in my gums. I have no leeway. I cannot fuck around and find out just how totally scrumptious those deep-fried King Prawns are. I cannot just try1 what is given to me without knowing what it is. And that’s okay. It is rigid, it is artificial, but it leads my biology towards sattva (सत्त्व, goodness/purity), simplicity, ease. I am trying to treat a spiritual famine with factory-produced essence of chicken and farmed spirulina. I am eating supplements to replace a world I have deemed poisonous at the crossroads of history and science.

It’s all still just illness as metaphor. Sontag would have a field day. The monk has no fear of food poisoning because the monk has already accepted the poisoning of the world. I have not. The illness may be a metaphor, but the bleeding is real. Maybe it’s better to be honest: I’m afraid of getting sick and dying. I’m afraid of food poisoning. I’ve built an elaborate cultural theory to justify the fact that I am unable to digest pork belly dumplings. If I didn’t bleed, would I still eat this way? Or would I be deep-frying the fake shrimp too?

Health is not the irreproachable moral conduct of your nation. Health is not an ethical attainment. Health is not the sword of Damocles hanging above your head. Health is not a series of protocols to follow, a formula to repeat, or a positive affirmation to memorize and stick on the bathroom mirror as a sticky note.

Health is not your market value. Health is not the supplements in your medicine cabinet. Health is not the vaccines that are either good or bad depending on who you ask. Health is not a series of codewords. Health is not the wealth of your family. Health is not an investment property.

Health is not a long-term savings plan. There’s no retirement project that doesn’t involve the presumption of health, and health is not in itself a project. Health is not a postcard destination to send your distant relatives: “Wish you were here”.

Health is not the food you eat, be it grown or bought. Health is not the dirt under your feet, nor the pavement. Health is not the topsoil. You cannot look at a vegetable garden and say, with confidence: “This is health.”

Health is not a guarantee, and it is not a blessing. Health is not to be trusted, and it is its own best advocate. Health is not the intravenous needle, not the blood, not the transfusion. Health is not the antibiotics. It is not the hospital bed, but it is also not the beachfront resort.

Health is not the result of some meandering spiritual quest. Health is not found in the jungles of Paraguay or the peaks of Patagonia. You cannot hold health in your hands on the temple steppe of Kathmandu nor in the Diwali celebrations of Chennai. There is no health to hold onto in the Red Sea or in the forests of Britain. Health is not a place.

Health is not a common good or private property. Health is not the public sector’s effort to reduce the spread of disease or control the population’s viral load. Health is not the herbal dispensary in Chinatown, nor the acupuncturist’s pulse-taking, nor the time spent under the needle. Health is not a deep tissue massage. Health is not the abhyanga and the panchakarma. Will health result from these things? Maybe. Only to slip away again, again, always.

Health is not a spatiotemporal orientation device. Health is not a way to look at the world. Health is not an ethical framework. Health is not the cosmogony passed down by oral tradition from ancestors to descendants over deep-time.

Health is not the stomach, the heart, the brain, and the lungs. Health is not the liver and the feet and the hands. Health is not the body in its totality. Health is not the tears shed in grief, upon hearing of yet another young friend dead too soon. Health is not the co-regulative response of the nervous system as described by polyvagal theory. Health is not the mere balance of the doshas.

I saw my grandmother today. She repeated her old refrain: “Health is the greatest good, the most important thing in life. You don’t think about it until it’s far too late, and you’re far too old—.” I interrupt: “Mamie, you know, I thought about it pretty early. I know what it is you’re talking about.”

Mamie: “Yes, well, you’re the exception. I grew up working the soil, threshing the wheat. We worked day in day out, and look at me now. [she gestures to her stooping ninety-six year old figure] People say all the time they wish they were like me. When I was taking care of my mother in law, she was 90 years old, and I had to wash her, wash her hair, she couldn’t do anything herself. Me, at least, I can still take my shower by myself, I can still put in my hair curlers.”

Health is not a home you buy. It is not the self-therapizing undertaken with the emergent empathy of large language models. Health is not the meds I’ve taken, the bone marrow I’ve given up, and it is not the prescriptions written in shorthand for the pharmacist. Health is not the hepatitis injection I received to prepare for tropical travel. Health is not the quality of life outcome of decisions made day in and day out. Health is not a series of good habits.

“Then what the fuck is it, Laure?”

I’m still trying to parse that out. I think health might be Being itself.

This has been my last post of 2025.

Thank you so much for reading me this year, and for your thoughtful responses and engagement with my process. Over my upcoming travels in Thailand and India, I will be posting once per month, or maybe slightly more. The themes and content of this blog will remain largely the same. I do not intend to blog a travelogue, but I expect to find inspiration in a change of scenery. I am bringing my Sanskrit study materials and a small copy of the Bhagavad Gita with me, as well as my ayurvedic schoolwork. I am also packing a pocket edition of Swami Vivekananda’s Jñāna Yoga.

To close, here is a list of some of my impactful reads from 2025.

Novels:

• Chronique du Pays des Mères by ​​Élisabeth Vonarburg (absolutely incredible speculative fiction, I highly recommend)

Essays & Philosophy

• Petit éloge de l’errance - Akira Mizubayashi

• Corpus, Jean-Luc Nancy

• Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta

• Money and The Souls’s Desire by Stephen Jenkinson

• The Dawn Of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow (still unfinished)

• The Palliative Society, Byung-Chul Han

• Non-Things, Byung-Chul Han

• Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, Byung-Chul Han

Vedanta & Spiritual

• Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda

• The Bhagavad Gita, translated and commented by Paramahamsa Yogananda

• Path of the Heart, Beverly Lanzetta

• Awaken Children, many volumes, Mata Amritanandamayi, compiled by Swami Amritaswarupananda

• Karma Yoga, Swami Vivekananda

• Many other essays by Swami Vivekananda from his Complete Works.

Ayurveda

• The ayurvedic course texts from the Academie Quebecoise d’Ayurveda where I am studying.

• Noteworthy source text I’ve begun to peel a bit: Vagbhata’s Astanga Hrdayam (Heart of Medicine)

• The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit (used in a course I took with Dr. Antonia Ruppel, the book’s author.) Unfinished, but an incredible resource. Also the Assimil Method’s Le Sanskrit.

It’s worth also noting the podcasts or people that I love to listen to, that have nourished me much in the last year

• Vedanta Talks by the Vedanta Society New York and specifically Swami Sarvapriyananda’s lectures on the Bhagavad Gita and the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, and

• Acharya Dr. Sthaneshwar Timalsina’s many talks on Saivism in theory and practice.

• Accidental Gods with Manda Scott for incredible and nuanced dialogue about the possibility of cultural renewal in the wake of disaster.

• Many conversations with Joanna Macy, and especially the We Are The Great Turning mini-series.

• The Emerald Podcast

• The Green Dreamer Podcast

Many blessings to you and yours.

I remember my first blood test, first needle in the arm, first IV. The walls in the waiting room at BC Children’s were blue, and heavy CRT screens hung in the corners playing cartoons. There were tables with crayons and scrap paper. Maybe 25 chairs where sat patients. A service desk was cut into the far wall, and a nurse welcomed my mother and our paperwork. A requisition had been issued to piece together the differential diagnosis puzzle. Two questions hung heavy in the air: why was my recently injured right eye still bleeding, and what were the red marks on my skin?

The spleen is an organ located in the left upper quadrant of the abdomen, protected by the lower left ribs, below to the diaphragm and behind to the stomach, in close proximity to the pancreas. By those with knowing hands, it can be palpated on the back side of the body. It serves many functions.

It was 2001, and I sat in a chair too high for my feet to reach the ground, for the first of many hundred times, and waited. That’s when we started keeping score, keeping track of the numbers representing the chemical balance of my bloodstream as the single most important indicator of my health.

Eventually, my name was called, and a woman in scrubs took us through back rooms full of recliners. She explained the procedure, showed us the vials, and eventually pulled out the butterfly needle. Seeing its translucent tube, I wept, I screamed, I tried to convince them not to do this. But the nurse and mother coaxed me through, and my initiation was complete. The pinprick pain was nothing, but the young child knew how blood matters, that the channels flow full of life.

The energetic role of the spleen is to provide rhythm and flow. It grounds you, it is the seat of discipline and concerted effort. It is related to Manipura chakra, the third energy center located in the upper abdomen, the Solar Plexus Chakra. It grounds our personal power, self-esteem, and transformation. It is fiery, yellow in color. It governs digestion, metabolism, and the sense of self, fostering confidence and purpose when balanced, but leading to issues like low self-worth or ego problems when blocked.

The test tubes went off to the lab, and we went back to the haematology ward to wait for results. My blood was quickly quantified, and found to be miscalibrated. This was an emergency. I had severely injured one of my eyes, and I was bleeding. My mother was told I was at risk of spontaneous cerebral hemorrhage. The diagnosis came quickly, the most important symptom being severe platelet deficiency, the lack of an essential clotting factor.

In the allopathic paradigm, the spleen is a filter for blood, and it stores blood to be used in case of hemorrhage. It is a vital organ in the body’s blood-production and immune system. It produces white blood cells to fight infections. The spleen breaks down old red blood cells and recycles components.

Mine was surgically removed because it had a chance of inducing remission of acute immune thrombocytopenia. The theory was that my spleen was responsible for miscalculated destruction of platelets, and haematological procedure at the time was to remove it, as splenectomy had been found to restore regular platelet counts in roughly 50% of cases.

So my mother made hard decisions and followed the doctor’s recommendations. Within days I was medicated, immunomodulated, and set for a laparoscopic splenectomy, the surgical removal of my spleen.

The procedure was common practice in the late 90s, but now the existence of new immunomodulatory pharmacy has rendered surgery an absolute last resort except in cases of splenic rupture. Not only that, but the medical consensus is now that the spleen is of vital importance for the function of the organism. Splenectomy leaves the patient at lifelong risk of infection and sepsis. To counteract this potential post-surgical infection, I was prescribed preventative antibiotics, which I took every day for 10 years.

Modern surgery found that it could restore a semblance of homeostasis in my bloodstream by removing an organ that is considered absolutely vital to the creation and circulation of blood in two other major health sciences. Whenever I’ve told a TCM doctor or a Vaidya that my spleen was removed, they’ve gasped, aghast.

In Chinese medicine, the spleen (Pi 脾) serves the functions of storehouse and digestion. The Spleen is a key Zang organ responsible for transforming and transporting food into nutrients and governing fluids, controlling blood in vessels, and distributing them throughout the body. It is associated with water metabolism, muscles, and thoughts. The spleen has a distinct channel (or meridian) pathway that runs along the inner leg, thigh, and abdomen to the chest and tongue. When the spleen’s function is impaired, you can expect digestive issues, poor appetite, bloating, loose stools, as well as excess worry, rumination, and anxiety. Loss of capacity for grounded presence.

The synthesis picture of the spleen we get with these three paradigms is this: this organ is of primary importance for the regulation and production of blood. Surgery’s solution to my blood clotting problem, which it diagnosed was potentially caused by the spleen, was to remove the organ entirely, to excise the organ traditionally profoundly linked to the function of controlling the blood. The paradox boggles my mind.

I need to pause here. I hate this mode, where I’m supposed to be the expert on my own condition, on the anatomy and physiology of 3 different paradigms. This is exceedingly difficult for me. Wouldn’t it be enough to say that removing my spleen was a medical mistake? How am I supposed to find the ground when it was removed from within my trunk? A colleague tells me I’m disciplined, to have so much drive for “wellness.” I tell them I don’t have a choice. I outsource my rhythms to my practices because my body’s drummer was excised as a “cure.”

We—my mother and my 5-year-old self—knew nothing of the efficacy of herbalism as practiced by TCM and Ayurveda. We knew nothing of acupuncture, Abhyanga, marma, or Tuina, so many techniques used to balance the body’s vital forces. The knowledge was simply not available to our cognitive map of medicine in Vancouver in 2001.

My mother let the doctors do what they could. What would you do for your sick child? Would you gamble with their life, just because you have a bone to pick with vaccines, pharmaceuticals, and surgery? Would you say “Oh, no thanks, we’ll keep the spleen and visit the homeopath” ?

I am working with material that was shattered from the outset by misguided and highly technical interventions of a “healthcare system” that knew nothing about how to treat me, and did more long-term harm than good. I accept my changing body. I accept that my childhood and my 20s were spent entirely on “fighting illness” to “get better.” I accept that I’ll never know what it’s like to be healthy, to have in my bones the full vitality of youth.

The truth is, we do the best we can with the information and resources available to us at a given time. When a crisis comes, we react. We do whatever seems right based on all the experience gathered until that point.

No matter how much “better” my health outcome than anyone would ever have predicted, I am a product of my time. The supercrips overcoming illness and returning to work for the banks have missed the point entirely. It’s not that I am sick or you are sick: the whole pattern has been poisoned, and we are living the results.

What if the crisis is eternal? What if it is present all the way down, and began centuries before your birth? What if you were given consciousness because the crisis pushed your parents together, and all you can do now is witness, accept, and move forward?

Autoimmunity (to get to the point of this blog) is the global polycrisis in microcosmic form, existing within the human body. The breakdown of normal life functions in response to the profound dysregulation of the social-ecological patterns between humans, the earth, and the cosmos. The rupture of the covenant. The unravelling of Logos, bios, and zoe. The loss of cultural memory. The poisoning of the water table. The generations of concerted ethnocide. Autoimmunity is all of these events, over and over again.

Are you taking someone else’s word for how you feel? Are you outsourcing your blood as much as we’ve outsourced horticulture? Are you in a hurry to move beyond sickness or injury so you can get back to living? Are you letting someone else do the work of grieving your loss? What if Nietzsche was right, and this life is meant to eternally recur? How would you do it, what would you do, if you had to do it forever?

Do you long for health because it is your perceived birthright? Do you think, have you been told, you deserve to be healthy? Did the numbers on the screen tell you you aren’t? Did you find out on your own? Did the blood in your stool point the way? The ache in your joints? The haze in your eyes? The fire in your guts? The swelling of your limbs?

Is there such a thing as ideal health? According to who? For what? When? Where? How do you know what health is and how do you know you don’t have/are not it? It is superstition to spout theory about protocol, to say: “Well, this influencer says that if I just do this and take that, I’ll be healthy.” It’s imperial religion, all over again.

That is why there is no cure. That is why I’ll be sick for the rest of my life. My symptoms and the destructive actions of the industrial society exist in complete enmeshment and can never be without one another.

“Okay, great. Thanks Laure, that’s awfully depressing. Now what?”

I can speak only for myself and my actions. I seek truth and joy. I prioritize being of service to projects and people that have a net positive social-ecological impact. I consume little. I practice the recognition that I am a small strange attractor in a much larger series of embedded systems, and I welcome dialogue that changes the way I perceive reality. I set boundaries, and I respect my own limits. I love my family, my friends, and the people I meet. I look people in the eye when we speak. I get help with my trauma and my symptoms. I attempt to recognize when I have done wrong, and learn not to repeat my mistakes.

Renouncing health is the only way to find it. Is life merely the productive development of competencies? Why? To what end? Why desire health? Health is more beautiful for having been lost. The cracks are where the light gets in. Contradiction: knowing illness brings you closer to knowledge of health. How can this be?

Health precedes all signs, symptoms, and pathologies. It is the underlying experience of joy emerging with aliveness. The experience of health is an expression of your relationship to yourself and your world. By that definition, health is available to you in the wake of all disease.

I’ve learned that to know health, I must live in my own body. Health is, simply, a felt sense of unimpeded vitality. What I mean is health is the internal experience of self/body being alive without restrictions. But what if restrictions are about how I relate to the world, rather than my physical body? What if health is about accepting my situation?

In the present moment, still, I am reliant upon the medicine of the plants, and the careful tongue analysis of my doctor. I am reliant upon my habits. I am the picture of health, but it is an illusion.

If I had critics, they may accuse me of simplifying the solution, of encouraging people not to “get better”, as if accepting their illness were enough to find peace. But acceptance is broad proposition. Even in my revulsion, I accept the broken food system; it exists. I accept that I was once dependent on synthetic pharmacy, and my quality of life was quickly improved by a pill; that happened. I accept that I was subject to a now obsolete surgery which leaves me vulnerable for life because my spleen was removed; it is true. I can’t do anything about the past but witness.

To know a state, one must know its limit, its boundary, its end. A fish knows water, but not its end. It takes water for granted. Maybe we should ask the fish what it thinks of immersion. Health is often defined in opposition to illness. What of its flourishing? I am “healthy” now, thanks to the modern applications of traditional medicines. But can health be true if it depends upon global supply chains, farms in China, and shipping infrastructure? Can I call myself healthy merely because I have energy today? Is health the control of symptoms and the tendency towards balance? Or is it the long tide, the quiet below the storm?

I suppose this project is an effort to share what my years of sickness and health are teaching me. The learning is infinite, more than I’ll ever have time to write. If you’re reading and you’re sick, know this: illness is solitary, but you are not alone, and it is the social fabric which has failed, not you.

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In Byung Chul Han’s Palliative Society, he meditates on pain today. In Han’s words: The palliative society is characterized by an unlimited permissiveness. [...] Boundaries are removed. Thresholds are torn down. The immunological resistance to the other …

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They wanted to know: “How can I know if what I’m doing for my child’s health is helping, beyond the effects of the medication?”

A classic of Ayurveda dating to the time of Late Antiquity, the golden age of the Gupta Empire in India, describes health this way:

“One who knows health is one whose elemental forces, bodily tissues, appetite, and elimination are balanced; one whose mind, body, and spirit are filled with simple joy.” (Suśruta Samhita, sutrasthana (vol. 1), 15:10)

How do you know if what you’re doing is helping? Take stock of yourselves each day, and measure how close you are to the above statement. Insofar as you are experiencing various degrees of balance, you can learn to sense how your daily life, habits, consumption, medication, practices, and disease are faring.

In Ayurveda, the fundamental concepts for measuring your state of balance are termed prakriti and vikriti.

Your prakriti, constitution, is an epigenetic heritage. It is ancestral. You are gifted with what your forebears had to give, and life’s own intelligence moves through the generations. Ayurveda teaches that our prakriti is determined in the first years of life. You may be predominantly Moveable, Fiery, or Stable. You may be prone to anxiety, bloating, diarrhea, sluggishness. Discovering your constitution is a quest for self-knowledge. Prakriti is stable. It is set in early life, and then the lay of the terrain is set. You have to walk the territory and get oriented.

The present moment is defined by vikriti, your current state, which is subject to change.

Sometimes, you’re so far from your point of origin that you don’t know what you need at all. Why are you sick? Why is your body on fire? Why can’t you digest bread? Why are you bloated after every meal? Why are you anxiously insomniac? Why do you flare to rage at the drop of a hat?

Vikriti is a formula. It is your prakriti layered with everything that’s accumulated over your lifetime.

I might think of myself as an angry, hyperactive person, but what if I’m just performing a state that has been applied as a mask on top of my being? Culture took me as a child and did what it could. I’m left picking up the pieces and puzzling out the pattern.

How do you know if what you’re doing is helping?

Well, in theory, all of us have the same solution: follow a set of principles described by a system such as Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, Integrative medicine, macrobiotics, intuitive eating, yoga, siddha medicine, naturopathy, bioenergetics, and on, and on, and on until your head spins. The theories are rife with contradictions, and they disagree between themselves, and anyway, maybe you don’t live in south India, or northern China, or Japan, or the Mediterranean.

In practice, our lives are different, and your actions will be uniquely yours. You live on a world that is changing every day, and the practices described in the ancient traditional texts on health and longevity may seem all well and good, but entirely inapplicable to your daily life.

You have your own unique path to attain your happiness. You cannot reach your desired goal through another’s path, even if it is a good path. What works for me won’t necessarily work for you. Your experience is a fresco; there’s no isolated stroke that explains the effect of the whole.

But you have to ask yourself what you’re actually looking for. Is it health? Is it safety? Power? Control?

The only way to answer any of these questions is to live true to your own self, unchangign and stable from birth. The path to wellness involves learning how to manage circumstances, always evolving with what is accruing over the years. The way to heal profoundly is to heal the cosmos, to repair the fabric that weaves humans to each other and to the earth.

So how do you know if what you’re doing is working?

Ask yourself, inside: are your elemental forces, bodily tissues, appetite, and elimination balanced? Is your mind, body, and spirit filled with simple joy?

What do you need in order to move towards each of those things?

That depends entirely, uniquely, on who you are.

If you are sick, the land is sick. If you are sick, and doctors can’t help you, it is the culture and the doctors that are disabled, not you. The vital flux of your body is a cycle of waxing and waning. You have done nothing wrong. You are living the results of a traumatized culture. You are the sunrise, the sunset. Your state of being is a shifting river. You cannot grasp it, you cannot control it, you cannot push it to hurry up.

Are you trying to heal? Stop, just for two minutes, don’t put any force of will into changing anything. You are not a home improvement project. The self-help and self-improvement cult will not save you. You do not have to work on yourself.

Your body is a fulcrum among billions of people, plants, and animals who are beset by systematic exploitation and extraction.

Are you trying to heal? Stop it. This whole endeavor is not a project to manage, nor is it homework. There is no such thing as health, that imagined perfection is a burden, the weight of hyper-productive consumerist culture. All it takes is a bit of momentum, and suddenly you’re trying to do it all. It’s too much. You’ve sacrificed all leisure at the altar of work.

There’s nothing to grasp, no fixed, solid state to remodel. Your body is not a fractured marble statue in need of restitution.

Are you trying to get better? Why? Who are you trying to please? Who do you think you’ve disappointed by needing care and rest?

If you had to ask the future a question, in its greatest depth, what would you like to know?

Healing is not an end goal, it is a process. It asks of you to remain present to yourself today, practice active hope for what the future may hold, and be ready to accept the changes that your daily actions bring about.

Things will change. It is the nature of reality, time, inertia, and momentum will bring about an evolution in the world. What if it was enough to collaborate in its dynamic unfolding?

Others are dangerous. They are not to be trusted. They are intruders, they are invaders, and oh no, turns out, they are in my body, they are my body itself. In the human body, so it was explained to me when I was a toddler in the oncology ward, my immune system’s job is to defend myself against those invaders. My body was a warzone. My body’s defenses have troops, barracks, garrisons, and fields of battle. My body, in fact, is the other, is the danger.

Just writing those few sentences is exhausting. What a tired story. Maybe you’ve heard it before.

Autoimmunity is not embodied civil war. It is a response to aggression; it is self-defence. What’s the use of fending off the outside world when it constantly permeates everything already? Defence is a boundary, a cell membrane, but it is not a barricade.

Self-defence implies, of course, that there is an assault happening, preparing to happen, having happened. The unfortunate reality is that violence is, in fact, directed at each of us. Your body, all our bodies, are fighting a toxic environment which is a byproduct of ecologically irresponsible resource extraction and industrial production. I’m not saying anything new.

Your body is constantly in combat against the 40-hour work week. It is in protest against the treatment of animals and industrial farming. Your body is raging at the loss of your connection to its ancestry. It is struggling to reckon with the collapse of cultural threads and narratives held in collective memory since the dawn of time.

All our bodies are caught in a skirmish that began many generations before we were born, long before the word autoimmune took on its medical meaning: “disease caused by antibodies or lymphocytes produced against substances naturally present in the body.”

The situation is untenable, the body says no, but who knows what it is refusing? The suffering is too much to bear, but where do you begin to untangle a mess that has roots dating millennia?

To better understand autoimmune diseases, which often involve chronic illness and pain, let’s explore different models for conceptualizing disability, drawing from the field of disability studies.

The medical model of disability, applied to chronic illness, operates from a normative standard. It views a difference in body or capacity—be it mental, autoimmune, or physical—as an inherent, isolated pathology. This lens diagnoses the individual as “abnormal” and frames the problem as residing in the person, with the solution being to either “fix” them with medicine or accept that they simply don’t fit the established mold. It places the burden of correction squarely on the individual, to make the person conform to society’s expectations. The purpose of medicine is thus to shape individuals into their expected shape, and the onus of cure is on medicine.

The moral model of disability, at times referred to as the religious model, interprets disability as a direct reflection of an individual’s or family’s character, actions, and overall morality. This perspective is deeply rooted in various cultural and religious traditions. For instance, in some Abrahamic beliefs, a disability may be seen as a divine punishment for sin, while in Hindu tradition, it might be understood as the karmic result of misdeeds from a past life.

This model can manifest in two distinct ways. On one hand, the moral model can cast disability in a positive light. It can be viewed as a symbol of honor, a test of faith, or a testament to an individual’s strength in overcoming immense life challenges. This globally prevalent model is frequently reinforced in media, with portrayals ranging from using physical disability to symbolize evil to celebrating individuals with disabilities who achieve extraordinary feats that surpass typical human limitations.

On the other hand, it often leads to significant stigma, shame, blame, and distrust of disabled individuals. This is especially prevalent when a disability is linked to conditions where personal actions are perceived as a contributing factor, such as addiction. In these cases, the condition is viewed as a moral failing rather than a systemic issue.

In sharp contrast, the social model of disability accepts the reality of diverse human capacities but shifts the focus entirely. It asserts that the body isn’t the issue; it’s the environment and the structures we build. Disability, under this model, is a product of systemic barriers and a failure of the social framework to accommodate the sheer variety of human experience. This is crucial because it allows us to see the experience of varying ability as a structural, social, and even ecological phenomenon—not just an individual affliction. This understanding immediately forces us to consider the ecological impacts that trigger systemic illness, providing a direct lens for examining autoimmunity.

What I’m proposing, the practice I’m upholding, is a social-ecological view of autoimmunity, which takes for granted that the large and nebulous category of diseases currently labelled “autoimmune” are caused by systemic factors, and must be treated by healing one’s relationships to systems as well as the systems themselves. This is akin to the social model of disability’s overall view that the variety of human abilities is a structural, systemic, and ecologically complex set of phenomena, and that human society has a responsibility towards its members to adapt to their capabilities.

The presence of auto-antibodies is not a sign that your body is wrong or dysregulated. It is a sign that the hegemonic death cult of predatory capitalism has seeped into your cells, and your body is struggling to save you. Autoimmunity is your body defending itself against the accumulation of toxins in the biosphere in your blood, bones, breath, and brain.

When the medically standard definition of autoimmunity mentions “substances naturally present in the body,” it does not recognize the entangled life of the biosphere. The naturally occurring cells of my body are always born and always dying in relationship with the rest of the earth. My biomatter has been exposed to poison, and my body is defending itself.

The prevailing metaphor that depicts autoimmunity as a fierce civil war, where the body has turned against itself, is a fundamentally flawed narrative that demands to be dismantled.

That perspective, while dramatically evocative, misrepresents the true nature of the “self” that is being defended. It is not the physical body, nor is it a constructed social identity that is at stake.

Instead, the “self” we are truly endeavoring to protect is the deeply grounded self, as illuminated and thoroughly explained within the framework of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy.

In IFS, the Self is seen as an inherent core of wisdom, compassion, courage, and clarity that resides within every individual, untouched by trauma or life’s challenges. It is an unburdened, resourceful, and healing presence that is always accessible, though often overshadowed by our protective or wounded parts. The journey of self-protection, from this perspective, is not about shielding a fragile ego from external threats, but rather about cultivating a deeper connection to this innate, powerful Self, allowing its qualities to lead and guide our internal system towards healing and wholeness.

Alternatively, it can be understood as the essential Self, a core concept within the philosophical tradition of Vedanta. This is the subtle, whispered confirmation that resonates persistently, residing beneath and beyond the cacophony of everyday noise and external distractions, simply affirming its existence with the profound declaration, “I am.”

Alternatively, this concept can be understood as the essential Self, or Atman, a core tenet within the ancient philosophical tradition of Vedanta. This Self is not a fleeting thought or emotion, but the subtle, whispered confirmation that resonates beneath the cacophony of everyday noise. It is the profound and simple declaration, ‘I am,’ an affirmation not of ego, but of an inherent and unchanging nature. In Vedanta, this individual Self, the Atman, is ultimately understood to be identical with Brahman, the ultimate reality of the universe, suggesting a profound unity between the individual and the cosmos.

Autoimmunity is your body saying: “No, I refuse this situation. I refuse to play the game. I refuse to have my dharma stripped away so that I may run after individual gain. I refuse the imperative of the imperial dream. I refuse to be a productive citizen of the mono-culture, the trauma culture. I refuse the narrative that pins me as only a cog in a machine. I refuse a life prescribed within the entrails of a decomposing leviathan.”

I am, and you are. Our bodies matter, intrinsically, because they have been born. To be sick, to suffer, is human, and it is right that those who need care receive it.

Your body, all our bodies, are lodging loud, perhaps unclear, screaming complaints against the current state of affairs. This isn’t about who’s in power, or about the wars, or about the economy — though it includes all those things — this is about the systemic accumulation of social-ecological wrongdoing that has accumulated over the last few thousand years, and the resultant impact left in your earthly living flesh.

Transience? The human body is a focal point of change. Moving through space and time, never adhering to a place for long. Shifting, liquid states of being. Not so different from a river. Remember, the human body’s cells are always dying and birthing.

The idea that the human body completely regenerates every seven years is a popular myth, but it is not entirely accurate. The rate of regeneration varies significantly among different cell types. Your skin moults and renews in full every 2-3 weeks. Your gut lining is replaced every 3-5 days. Your red blood cells have a lifespan of around 120 days. Your fat cells may be around for up to 10 years, same for your bones. Your heart’s cells mostly last your whole lifetime, and your neurons decline over your lifespan. The human body replaces approximately 330 billion cells each day. While the average age of cells in the body may be around seven to ten years, this does not mean that all cells are replaced uniformly within that timeframe.

And in their mitosis, cells copy their memories to the next generation. The cloning is inexact; it is an interactive, evolutive process. What I was not taught, what I had to learn through trial and error, is that each cycle of cellular renewal is an opportunity for greater sickness or greater health.

The memory passed across the cycle of cell death accounts for all the learning that occurs in the meantime. Each passing lunation, how is my relationship to to my present and my past evolving? What have I integrated about my trauma and my success? How have my prayers changed? What is the same, and what is different?

It’s not that it happens once every 7 years—the cycle of birth and death is the constant, ongoing reality of my body, and yours.

I was surprised to learn taht the words “holy” and "health" share a common Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root, *kailo-. Its likely meaning is "that must be preserved whole or intact, that cannot be transgressed or violated." This root led to Old English hal (from which "health" is derived) and Old High German heil meaning "health, happiness, good luck."

After the Anglo-Saxon conversion to Roman Christianity in the late 6th century, "holy" was used in Old English for the Latin sanctus. I wrote last time about the word sanctuary, which we got from sanctus: the sacred, inner space. In Middle English, holy was also used for pagan gods, the Hebrew temple or tabernacle, and in the Quran and Muslim doctrine.

Holy refers to what is unbroken, which is whole at the source of life.

Transience is an unassailable fact. For all the cultural attempts to behave as if things are eternal and static, there is nothing but change in this realm. The monadic, advaitic God is All that Is, and is therefore also Elohim Chaim, the Living God, who is the force behind and within decay itself. God is change.

On this late summer day, I sit in Mooniyang surrounded by wasps, harmless in their buzz. The island holds the weight of transient culture, with all its beauty and diversity, with the millenia of growth and change and decay, the impositions of the forces that took this land and bulldozed it over generations for us millions of humans from across the globe to eventually settle here and make what home we can, in this momentary existence.

There are beings among us on this earth whose lives span mere months, whose purpose is only to gather sweet nectar. There are ancient trees with centuries of youth under their belts. There are mountains, whose earthen skin of rock is infantile when compared to the age of carbon. There are eternal stories of rise and fall, of flood and harvest. Holiness is a profoundly religious word. It is perfection, beyond human intervention. Holy is the realm of the gods. But I’m suggesting that natural events—birth, death, renewal, decay, the movement of the tectonic plates, the rise and fall of mountains—are holy precisely in that they are supremely inevitable and true. Truth is a phenomenon before its interpretation by the judging mind. Holiness is perfect and needs no validation by a human institution.

My bones are in the shape of the earth. The minerals in my water result from the sewage here. The ancestral dreams of hearth and kin were realized and lost, and many songs have been forgotten. This little life of mine longs for a context unfractured, yet accepts that I was born of fragments. The transience of my body is holy, because it lives and breathes with the tides. The rhythm of storms come and gone, the aquifers filled and emptied.

My transit through the years is a great chance. It is an opportunity to be changed, to witness the transitions in the cycle of life. The seasons of civilization are as consistent as my body’s, with its hiccups and sputters. Nearly as predictable as the seasons, even in this disrupted ecology, with climate collapsing everywhere I look.

Not one thing in this world is permanent, and I am no exception. It’s intelligence of a scale beyond reckoning, one that takes no quarter nor plea. That I may be born and bleed for years is only the gift of this life for me. Nothing more or less is asked, that I may learn what is to be learned. It’s a dance, this ephemeral art of living, a great prayer sung to the winds. All I ask is to decompose gracefully, to return to the soil in peace. Maybe when we’re all composting, the next culture will be flourishing at last.

When I wake up, as the transient dreams are departing, If I listen closely they are full of lessons. I may be different each new waking moment, forever changed by my here and now. What if this isn’t to be mourned or bemoaned? What if instead, it’s an opportunity for rapture? If you listen closely, the transience of the body is holy.

I was wondering about the word’s journey through time and language. It began as a word for a sacred place, something sanctus—consecrated and set apart. It evolved to mean a place of true refuge, offering immunity and safety to those who sought shelter within its bounds.

It’s not an external place you escape to, it’s an inner realm where you find the resources to nourish yourself.

My partner Shanthi and I are offering our third somatic nervous system regulation retreat this fall, and we’ve named it Sanctuary. But why the name?

At its heart, the word contains the sanctum, the 'holy of holies'—the sacred, inner space. The original Hebrew root of that idea, qodesh, קֹדֶשׁ, doesn't just mean holy; it means to be set apart for a sacred purpose. Its form as a verb, qiddesh, קִדֵּשׁ‎, means to sanctify. This is an act, and it is an internal process. The sanctuary I believe we all carry within us is not a place we run to, but a part of ourselves where we find resource.

Much the same, Bayo Akomolafe wrote recently, Sanctuary is not a place. He says that in these times when the very pillars of our world are trembling, perhaps the definition must evolve once more. He writes that "we will not merely claim sanctuary, we will make sanctuary." He suggests that perhaps, in the midst of it all, we will learn that "sanctuary is not a place, but a practice, a way to become-with a world that is never not broken.”

The theme of our retreat, Sanctuary, is nervous system regulation through yoga, qigong, and somatic practice.

Polyvagal theory highlights how our physiological states profoundly influence our environmental perceptions. Safety is as much an internal perception as it is an external reality. Safety is a perception, as much as it is or is not an external reality. To make sanctuary, to practice it, means that no place will be a true sanctuary if our own systems perceive danger everywhere. The practice, then, is to learn how to come home to ourselves, even when the world feels loud and our inner sanctuary feels distant.

This is where true self-regulation begins, in the moment-by-moment act of shifting our internal state back toward balance. Not to fix ourselves, but to remember what it feels like to be safe, resourced, and truly at ease in our own skin, so we can take what is present and move into the next cycle.

It is with this intention that my partner Shanthi and I are designing this retreat, a somatic journey home to yourself, from December 5th to 7th, 2025, at the beautiful Centre Arc-en-Ciel in Sutton, QC.

This retreat is an opportunity to deepen. I come away from each one with a renewed sense of purpose. This is an invitation, if you’re longing for quiet. For a reset. To get in touch with the theory and practice of listening to what your whole system needs. It is for the heart that craves more than just a break, but is looking to let go of old patterns and return to a more grounded, vibrant state. It is an invitation to come home, and make sanctuary with us.

One of our last participants said this: “[The retreat] Dégel was very meaningful for my personal journey and fit perfectly with the therapy I have been doing for several years now. I now feel confident that I can take action, step by step, to get myself out of my rut.” -I.S, Spring 2025.

We wake to the quiet autumn stillness of the forest. Greet the morning with an invitation to a silent walk in near the river. Transition through gentle Qi Gong and Yoga, soothe the body, and appreciate the connection of self and other. Shanthi leads us through the unique weightlessness of warm water aquatic somatics, releasing layers of tension that we may not have even realized we were holding. Oh, and there’s a sauna, along with fully cheffed meals.

If these words resonate with a quiet knowing inside of you, we would be honoured to hold this space with you. The circle is intimate, limited to fifteen participants, to ensure a supportive and deep experience for all.

To reserve your place in this circle, you are invited to read more details here, or reply to this email.

Blessings,

Laure

I was taught to be that person by the systems that shape this reality: my family and its epigenetic heritage, cultural context, economic class, the formal education that I received, the friends I had as a teenager, the internet content I consumed.

The whole imbroglio makes my patterns and habits.

There's a lot of talk about habit, discipline, and regularity in wellness circles. Some may go as far as to say that habits rule your life. If you don't have a process for consciously choosing and shifting them, then you are on autopilot, running someone else's program.

There are hundreds of pop-science and spiritual books on making and breaking habits. Even the Brihat Trayi (Great Trinity), the classical manuals of Ayurveda1 offer a simple methodology. The idea is tangible, incremental change.

The principle is this: simultaneously and progressively reduce an undesired habit while replacing it with a desired one. It’s so simple that I asked an AI to generate a graph of how it works.

But systemic patterns aren’t something that we can map them to an X-Y axis.

There is no way that I can forcefully will myself into reducing my habit of addictive behaviour, or my habit of long-term chronic autoimmune illness, by replacing it with a “healthy” habit. There are major patterns of disharmony at play here, and they are much bigger than you are.

Do you know the old story of Sisyphus?

He calls out the abduction of a river spirit by Zeus, thereby incurring Zeus' wrath, and is punished in his afterlife. In the underworld, he must push a great boulder up a hill. At the very moment he reaches the summit, the stone rolls back down to the bottom. His struggle is endless, and his labor is meaningless.

This archetypal story is often used to describe frustrating, borderline futile attempts to make progress. We try to change a habit, but right when it feels like it’s settled into our daily rhythm, the boulder rolls right back down the hill. But what if Sisyphus changed his strategy? What if, instead of pushing the boulder, he sat at the bottom of the mountain and got to know his burden?

If Sisyphus’ boulder rolls down the hill, does it crash? What if he lets it? What if the King of Corinth took his predicament in stride?

Imagine that instead of repeating his task focusing purely on his goal, the outcome, the boulder sitting atop the mountain in Hades, he got curious instead about how he’s doing his task. Our friend could learn to examine his posture, the way he stands, the gait of his walk. He could learn who he is in relation to his overseer, Queen Persephone. He could use the mirror of his days to ask himself: is this true? Is this really who I am?

Each step could be an opportunity to re-examine the most fundamental aspects of how he shows up physically, a process that dovetails into a new way of showing up emotionally and psychologically.

There's another crack in the myth of Sisyphus' endless labor.

The poet Ovid imagined a moment when Orpheus descended into Hades and sang a song of such impossible beauty that it stopped damnation itself. In that instant, the mechanisms of the underworld paused.

And Sisyphus, arrested by the music, stopped his struggle. He didn't push. He didn't strain. Ovid writes, inque tuo sedisti, Sisyphe, saxo—"and you sat, Sisyphus, on your rock."

In that pause, no pattern is so entrenched, no curse so eternal, that it cannot be interrupted by a moment of presence. It suggests that even Sisyphus could choose to sit with his burden rather than endlessly fight it. Sisyphus' self-image could change, even in the midst of his accursed circumstance. He saw himself as greater than the sum of his parts, how he perceived himself to be, and what he could imagine was possible for his (after)life. He simply sat on his rock to listen.

—

Perhaps this metaphor seems trite, too wordy, or too vague. The key point is this: it can change. Nothing has to remain the way it is now. All ways of being, all habits, all patterns, can fade away with time and a life lived to that effect.

I’ve been wondering lately about my own capacity for change. It’s one thing to change, it’s another to accept that change within myself, and it’s an entirely different affair to live that change in relationship with other people. Any change undertaken internally will invariably defy the expectations of the people around me. At a given moment, how many people see me for who I am? If I don’t see myself for who I am, how can I expect it of anyone else?

For any change to stick, you first needed a visceral understanding of why. Why did I stop drinking coffee? It was wrecking my digestion. Why did I stop drinking alcohol? The hangovers were no longer worth it. Why did I stop using pornography? It was destroying my relationships. The motivation had to be real and deeply felt before the management of the habit became possible. What’s more, I had to admit I needed help, and seek it out.

Shifting a pattern is a long game. Embedded in my experience are all the systems that shape me, as well as my traumas and my beliefs. Patterns become deeply entrenched because I once relied on them to protect me, but now they're overcompensating and causing more harm than good.

The process of change itself is a deep neurophysiological adaptation. The body is entrained to repeat certain behavioral patterns and will repeat those patterns because they serve some perceived function. To change it requires more than just willpower; it requires disruption and a new direction.

The habits of the body, mind, and heart are a woven fabric. A tug on one thread affects all the others. Any desire to change will be most effective when it is supported by well-balanced actions in all realms of daily life.

I have journeyed from a self-image of a sickly, dejected, depressed, and angry person—collapsed and hunched-over, defined by the fundamental thought, "I am sick."

My experience shows me that change requires three things:

1. Recognize and accept my situation as it was, to the best of my ability.

2. Desire change—not necessarily "I want to be better," but simply, "I want to be different."

3. Learn through trial and error what works for me and what doesn't.

So where does one begin?

Right where you are, today, by asking yourself “who am I? What moves me to pause?”

It is no longer an accurate description of my daily life, if it ever was. It was already a record of the past when I collected the essays. It stands as a record of life lived, one that struggled to record and narrate experiences I've had.

Those of you who've read it may recall most of the entries are dated 2019-2021. The contents of the chapters reach deeper still into my past, to describe a child's experience of pharmacy and medicine, of so-called chronic immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) from 2001 onwards.

Today I find it to be a strange, angry book. So much of the text was scrawled furiously as an ongoing attempt only to decipher my own experience. I was not writing for an audience, only looking for grammar describing reality. That experience was, and is, wholly indebted to the cultural ecology that I was born into.

This life is nothing if not a record of entanglements. So the book talks about those entanglements to describe my felt sense of having a bloodstream that spans the globe.

The project accomplished what it was meant to do. It was an initial plowing of the field, meant to reveal the major themes of my work. The visceral experience of writing, editing, designing, and self-publishing was a process of claiming my own story.

Being a medical patient for my whole early life had left me without a sense of self or purpose. I was "the sick kid." That book is a rendering of the soul work that was required of me to honour that child while preparing for the next phase of my life, now unfolding.

It was an alchemical project: elevating my daily suffering into something resembling art. By that act, I was able to be present to the beauty and awe in the story and prose.

It is not an easy read, and it makes no concessions to its reader. It was meant to be for me. That it has prompted any response at all is a welcome gift and a surprise, in return for having given of myself to its making.

Since the book’s release, I have begun my therapeutic bodywork practice. I've gone to Kerala twice. I still haven’t been to an allopathic doctor, but I lean on Chinese and Indian medicine to nourish my body/soul, and trend towards health.

My studies are ongoing. My practice of qigong and somatic movement has gone nearly uninterrupted since 2019, with many intensives and deep-dives, notably with Andrew Harwood and Nita Little in Contact Improv, and Ethan Murchie, Oamsin Termpaiboon, and Zhang Mingliang in Gongfu and Qigong.

My foundational training in Tuina body-therapy and Chinese martial arts and medicine at the Montreal Gongfu Research Center was an intense 2 year period of training, 2023-2024.

My writing is, I hope, a testament to my love of learning.

I've been teaching and facilitating, since 2022. It started with Contact Improvisation and somatics. It has grown to be a Qigong and Focusing based somatic education approach that I share in 1-on-1 sessions.

With my partner Shanthi Minor, I co-teach yearly Coaching Your Nervous System retreats. Shanthi’s an osteopath and long-time yogi, with a passion for polyvagal theory and practice. We make a really strong team, and our testimonials bear witness.

"I want to express my heartfelt thanks for everything that made the Cocoon retreat one of the best experiences of my life. From the moment I arrived, I felt surrounded by such warmth, care, and positive energy. Since the retreat, I’ve been practicing the techniques we learned, especially those that help me relax and center myself. Thank you for creating such a transformative space for us. I truly hope our paths cross again one day.

— M.H., 2024 participant

December 5-7 2025, we’ll be leading our third Nervous System Retreat, Sanctuaire, in Sutton, QC. Stay tuned, I’ll announce it more formally. Read about it here.

Last year I helped design and publish SASSY – Sensibiliser, autonomiser, soutenir et s’entraider : SexEd by and for 2SLGBTQIA+ and/or neurodivergent people, a community-sourced comic book project now distributed to over 300 public libraries across Quebec, available in 5 languages. I'm very proud of the work we accomplished.

Since 2024 I've been working with the Académie Québécoise d'Ayurveda. This is also the school I’ve chosen for my own studies in Ayurveda. Now, that work is scaling up, and I'm glad to be an integral part of the team.

I'm preparing for my next trip abroad. With Shanthi, we're leaving in January 2026 for Chiang Mai, Thailand, to do immersive Thai Massage training, then heading back down to Kerala for continued spiritual education.

I've been blogging the whole time. My personal website has an archive dating back to 2019, way more than this newsletter, and you can read Auto-Immune Heresy there online free of charge. It is a messy work in progress, the result of many platform migrations. It lives over here: www.mxmarin.ca

In 2025, I want for nothing. My whole working life is spent helping to spread traditional and holistic views of health and the body. My needs are met. No more, no less.

All I ask is to continue my work and my training, so that I can share freely with anyone who cares to practice. I have shelter, food, and partnership. I can pay for the herbal medicine I need, see the healers who help me move forward, and afford continuing education.

I can go to Asia every winter and come back each spring. I can use hours of my waking life each day to practice being in a body, connecting to what is sacred and alive, and I sleep soundly at night.

τίς εὐδαίμων, "ὁ τὸ μὲν σῶμα ὑγιής, τὴν δὲ ψυχὴν εὔπορος, τὴν δὲ φύσιν εὐπαίδευτος"

Who is happy? One who has a healthy body, a resourceful mind and a docile nature."

(Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, BOOK I, Chapter 1. THALES circa 585 B.C.)

I was recently in a Qigong seminar with Master Zhang Mingliang, the 14th generation lineage holder from Mount Emei in Sichuan Province, China, the highest of the Four Sacred Buddhist Mountains of China. When asked what to do about the buzzing Qi sensations in one's body, his answer was simple.

"Think of a river," he said. "When the water flows calmly, it is silent. You only hear it when it encounters rocks." The noise, he explained, is a sign of obstruction. The goal isn't to chase the sensation, but to remove the obstacles and return to a state of quiet flow. This applies as much to our internal energy as it does to our daily lives. My long project list, my cluttered kitchen, my scattered attention—these were rocks in my river. The answer isn't to manage the chaos better, but to remove stones and cultivate the tranquility that allows unimpeded energy to flow.

The core of this reset has been about tidying up, both externally and internally. It is a practice of unifying the visible, tangible body and the invisible, volatile spirit. In Qigong, a primary goal is to anchor the wandering mind in the home of the body. When they are separate, we experience a kind of fragmentation. By methodically organizing my physical space—terminating projects, changing what doesn’t work, donating clothes, sorting my books, installing shelves, clearing out what no longer sparks joy—I am creating a stable, coherent home for my spirit to settle into.

This process of simplification mirrors the very essence of Qigong theory. Master Zhang teaches that there are not 40,000 complex forms to master, but a few essential principles of movement to understand. All of Qi, the substance of the universe, moves in four primary ways: up, down, open, and close. These are the seasons of our energy. My slowing down in the midst of summer's ecstatic burst is a conscious engagement with these movements. It is an act of "closing" and "collecting inward" to protect and concentrate my energy.

This is a transition, I'm preparing for autumn. By letting go of extraneous commitments, I am creating the space needed to truly open to the projects that matter, to descend into a state of rest, and to allow new things to rise in their own time.

A complete Qigong session has three parts: a warm-up, the central practice, and a closing. We often neglect the closing, but it's as crucial as the beginning. It is the moment we store the Qi we've cultivated and ensure a smooth transition back to our day. This life-edit feels like that closing sequence. It is a conscious act of storing my energy, of fluidifying stagnations, and preparing the ground for what comes next.

I've been so obsessed with doing more. Have I written about this before? What these few weeks have been showing me is that it's futile, useless, unnecessary. I can just.... enjoy, and focus on the basics.

When my friend Nick read my draft, he recalled the phrase "shallow as a puddle but wide as an ocean" to describe that sense of feeling scattered. He said to me: "You're going wide as a puddle and deep as an ocean."

I'm not sure, but I hope that to be true. It makes me think of a feeling I've been grappling with for many years. There's a pang in my heart, a sharp pain that’s as narrow as a razor blade, and infinitely deep. I haven't found the bottom of this sensation. It lives in my chest, it is my teacher. I wonder some days whether it is in fact the wound of collective suffering.

I am choosing to treat my body and life like a precious instrument, to tune it with care, and to play a clear, resonant score. The music that results is a life lived with less noise and more flow, a life that is not just full, but fulfilled.

The goal of Qigong is to harmonize with the cosmos and succeed in daily life. It’s not an escape, but a way of experiencing the governing principles of life more directly. By choosing to give up on some projects, I am not giving up on ambition; I am focusing it.

Self-trust is one of the fundamental metaphysical questions underpinning my theories on autoimmunity. (3 weeks ago I wrote about trust and faith — related, but different. Read it here.)

“Autoimmune” is defined in biomedical science by the presence of 'auto antibodies': white blood cells that misrecognize some part of one's own body. The modern sense of the word autoimmune means that there is a dysregulated immune response to specific bodily cells and tissues.

It's theorized to be a fundamental failure of the adaptive immune system's ability to distinguish "self" from "non-self." Lymphocyte cells are meant to recognize the body's own tissues, a process known as "self-tolerance". However, it's believed that this tolerance can be broken, often triggered by an environmental factor like an infection.

I feel passion rising, and I want to angrily denounce the stories of autoimmune disease that depict it as some kind of heroic enterprise or victim-centered narrative. How often do people with autoimmune signs and symptoms, maybe with a diagnosis, maybe without, turn their trust over to outside authorities that know nothing more than what their scans and charts have to say?

Patients are taught that their bodies are not trustworthy. Over and over again, allopathic medical discourse drills the point home. I want to stress this point: “autoimmune” is a medical theory, an idea attempting to diagnose some group of phenomena using logic in order to pursue medical treatment. Sometimes it works, but often it is completely off track.

If you're chronically ill—particularly with autoimmune signs and a diagnosis—there is a high chance you have been told that your body is dysfunctional and is attacking itself. The metaphorical language of the immune system is a language riddled with warfare. The textbooks talk about "misdirected attacks", "attacking one's own body", "fighting infection".

What would it look like for the language of medicine to be a language of peace-making?

Can you trust that your body is wise, and is behaving according to an internal logic designed to keep you alive? Can you trust that each of the symptoms carries a message?

What if there is a process that unfolds outside of your control? What if something true is trying to happen and your experience is its medium? What if there is an innate intelligence in relapse and remission?

Yes, there is such an experience as illness. Yes, there are systemic, structural, cultural, and epi/genetic factors contributing to the development of disease. Yes, it is real. It is hard. It is misunderstood by 99% of all people you will ever meet. Yes, talking about it will most often bring about sympathetic "Oh, I'm so sorry" responses rather than anything resembling empathy.

Despite all that, can you learn to trust that this is important? What if illness were wise and necessary? Would it lead closer to the truth if you got out of the way? What if the narrative was different, and you could trust that illness is not your enemy?

The thing is, I have no way to know for sure that writing about this journey will help us get any closer to solutions, to change, to cultural evolution, or to an experience of health, but I can use these words like the proverbial finger pointing at the moon to help us get an idea of what the body may have always known.

I’m not here to be a hero, or to sell you a magic bullet. I’m not here to shill a story about how I was sick, and now I’m doing great, and you can be too. I’m writing in an attempt to share my own version of trust in this unfolding process.

What if there is a creative process at play in the midst of all the struggle? And what would it be like to be honest about what's happening? What if healing is a side effect of honesty and trust? What if, for just a minute, we weren't trying to fix, improve, and make it all "better"?

All I’m doing – the writing, the monthly peer group, the hours of qigong a day, the professional bodywork, the ayurveda study, the nutrition, the contact improv dance, the voyages to Amritapuri in south India, to name a few – are just experiments. I’m researching entirely, 100%, on my intuition. I have no plan, no masterful scheme, no framework, no guarantees. Only my own experience, and the couple of things I’ve learned so far, whatever that’s worth.

The questions are frustrating, because they’re important, and there are too many of them to really give each of them the time it deserves. But they keep coming. The questions outnumber the answers 1000000:1. We’d best get used to that.

My partner Shanthi and I were in Thunder Bay, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, in the long shadow of Animikie-wajiw (Thunder Mountain), nestled on Gichigami (Lake Superior, The Great Sea in Ojibwe).

Thunder Bay is nestled 49 degrees north, the same latitude as northern Gaspe. The beauty of this place has been nourishing me. In the language of Ayurveda, Pitta dosha needs beauty—the enduring kind. Beauty soothes my rakta pitta imbalance. I realized the source of this nourishment and ease is a profound aliveness.

But what is that sense of aliveness?

It's greater than the sum of its parts. I can name the wind, the ancient stone, the whisper of the trees, but are these external to me? Here, beauty is about feeling alive, the give-and-take responsiveness of a place. Does it breathe? Is it awake? Am I in relationship with it? How?

This beauty stretches beyond the aesthetic, which is a human-centered definition of beauty that appeals to contemporary standards of desirability. While cultural tastes change, the factor of aliveness remains the marker of long-lasting beauty.

Beauty is a process. It’s the unfolding that happens within me as I witness. I find beauty in what is most alive. I am stunned, awestruck by the stones, the forest, the water. Billions of years old, these stones of the Laurentian Plateau are some of the most ancient rocks on the planet. Here, a great sleeping giant of a peninsula lies across the water—a form the Anishinaabeg know as Nanabijou.

According to Ojibwe story, Nanabijou is the Spirit of the Deep Sea Water, turned to stone after he warned his people not to reveal the location of a rich silver mine at his feet. When the secret was betrayed, a great storm raged upon the lake, and when the waters finally calmed, Nanabijou was frozen in his current form—a dormant guardian of the bay.

The aliveness I feel comes from this meeting of geological time and mythic story. I feel this the same way I felt the death of my friend, as a rattle in my bones beyond my mind's comprehension. Aliveness is part and parcel of life's complexity; its antonym is not death, but numbness.

Death and aliveness are partners. Dying can be welcomed as an alive part of life, or it can be shunned. A personal and cultural set of conventions shapes whether my relationship to the event is one of aliveness or numbness. For those with chronic illness, this becomes painfully clear: there's trauma in the event, and there's retrauma in the social refusal to acknowledge the event's reality. Is a symptom or diagnosis received as a sentence, reinforced by this social dismissal? Does it define all future happiness and misery? Or can I, despite a diagnosis, take the process of being in a body to be a continual series of discoveries?

If I can orient my experience with a sense of curiosity, even when the cycle seems trite and overdone, then the process remains alive. This is the ground state that practices like Taiji and Qigong train: creating the conditions to hear one's inner voice by enforcing a context that quiets everything else. This is the medicine for what is wrong, culturally. It is the cultivation of an inner warrior, a training in integrity.

Beauty and aliveness are easy to find when we turn our minds to aliveness. This kind of beauty is not transactional, not a form ready for consumption. It is a principle, a force; it is a power operating at all scales through all the senses I am capable of feeling. The relationship required for the experience of beauty flows from a wellspring of aliveness. I can follow the aliveness to its root and find beauty there.

You are free to find different aesthetics pleasing, but beauty itself is fundamental. A smile. The ocean. A sunrise.

My associations with the ocean will be different from yours. I remember growing up near the North Pacific, on the Salish Sea. As a descendant of settlers, the ocean held the promise of a better life for my ancestors, escaping the 16th Century toil of old Europe. For others, the ocean is a visceral link and reminder of the transatlantic slave trade. For others still, it represents the shores escaped to when fleeing war. Or memories of near-drowning, of losing a lover to a storm.

These stories are real. They weigh heavily on human life and history, and they do not diminish the intrinsic beauty of water, of tides, of the crest and trough of the waves, of the cycles and their inextricable ties to the moon and the stars.

In my own life, I remember evenings spent building sandcastles and having picnics by the waves. Out east, I remember the long stretches of pebble beach in Gespe'gewa'gi and the cold frost of Kaniatarowanenneh, the St. Lawrence River.

The ocean is beautiful and it holds all these stories. Its sheer immensity is an eternal reminder of my finitude, showing me that I am small. It reminds me of human folly and keeps my priorities in check.

What, then, is the point of this meditation on beauty? It keeps me grounded. My sanity, and therefore my remission and recovery, depends on my remembrance of our interdependence. Beauty and aliveness are the portal. They are the salt and the mercury, the catalyst for the alchemical process.

Beauty is a story we tell ourselves and each other about what we value. If I believe that gold chains and brand names are beautiful, that the aesthetic they convey is powerful, then I am living the story of a certain culture with a certain value system. If the beauty I want to access is material, I will prioritize money. The way I perceive beauty will directly determine my daily priorities and how I use my time.

But if beauty is a felt sense of aliveness, then I don't need anything external to access it. I can just receive its presence. My days and years don’t need to be ruled by material accumulation. I'm trying to live that way: meeting baseline needs while placing the highest value on the beauty I can feel by tuning into my sense of aliveness, here and now.

That’s what I practice. That’s health.

Ayurveda, Indian medicine, takes the phenomenon and teaches that each person has a unique prakriti, translated as constitution, which crystallizes during the first years of life. Your individual prakriti is an epigenetic heritage; it is ancestral. You are gifted what your grandparents had to give, and life's own intelligence trickles down across generations. You may be predominantly Moveable, Fiery, or Stable. You are a combination of elemental aspects. Discovering your constitution is a quest for self-knowledge. Who am I? Who are You?

Why wasn't it explained to me as a child that I can learn who I am? That knowledge will help me live well, make decisions about daily life, figure out my needs, and find ease. I was never told the story of my ancestral karma. It turns out, if my inner life is chaotic, it is not only my fault. If I am susceptible to rage, it is the anger accumulated over generations of violence. If I am susceptible to addiction, it is the tendency acquired over ages. The state of my ancestors determines my prakriti.

I have learned so much about how I ought to behave, but Ayurveda explains how to be who I am, as I am. Sometimes I deny my prakriti, too. I find myself wishing I had been born different. More stable, less erratic. From another time, or another place. Steadier, with a regular rhythm. I’ve long wished I was someone else.

Prakriti forms through Earth's slow transformation in relationship with culture. The prakriti of anyone alive in the 21st century, of anyone reading these words, carries within it the stories of capital, of empire, of colonies.

My Prakriti accounts for how my Jewish ancestors were nomads without a home; it accounts for the cruelty of my European settler forebears. It is history, reality, plain and simple, the thing I am trying to accept.

If I can surrender to it, then I may learn to live at ease, expending no useless effort. I can slowly sort between the true and the false. Does this anger, this fear, come from myself, or from my grandparents, their habits, and the millenia of culture that I inherit?

Culture took me as a child and did what it could. The outcome is vikriti, ( विकृति ) my current state, subject to change. Vikriti is a formula. It is my prakriti, constitution, layered with all that accrued over the years.

Last Wednesday, I had a really stressful, painful day. I got up after a night of fitful sleep, was angry all through my Qigong class, felt heavy, resentful, and finally had to cancel evening plans. I sat down, felt the intense pain in my heart. Light dawned on some facets of my life I'd been repressing and refusing to look at, but the pain still felt unresolved when I went to bed. I learned the next morning that a friend in India had died on Wednesday.

Thursday morning, a mutual friend called me. We processed grief and I felt relieved to let go. I had been waiting for the news. I was not shocked or surprised. I felt it from across the planet 24 hours before an SMS delivered the facts, the time of death. My body had been holding and processing the loss of a loved one, the loss of a teacher. It knows what it felt, and I understood once my mind caught up with the news.

It's hard to sit with that loss. My impulse is to pull out my phone, turn off Airplane Mode, hope for a notification, and scroll the network for a quick hit of Current Affairs. But my friend's moved on. I won't hear his laugh again, I won't hold his hand again.

The systemic confusion, the abuse of prescription antibiotics, the ineffectual surgeries, the complete lack of personalized healthcare. The layers of life lived, years of toxic behavioural patterns learned as if they were the only way to live.

Sometimes, we're so far from our point of origin that we don't know who we are at all. I might think of myself as an angry, hyperactive person, but what if I'm just performing a vikriti that has been applied as a mask on top of my prakriti? How much pain have I perpetrated by unconsciously repeating patterns inscribed into my lineage?

We are a woven fabric. These technologies affect me and highlight the connection. Knowing about genocide has a direct impact on my mental, emotional, physiological state. But sometimes it's more subtle. My state is volatile and always changing. It depends on the state of the world.

If I am subconsciously affected by one death, what is the world doing to my state right now? The suffering of all beings registers with the faculty of the body to perceive its environment.

I depend on the Earth, and I am a product of the Earth. I am engaged in production and consumption. The food I eat comes from industries spread all over the planet. The metals and plastics that are part of my daily life are processed by a global supply chain. The electricity that powers my devices allows me to tap into the infinite information flow from all recorded history, and whatever is happening. Live. Subconsciously, energetically, my body knew already that my friend had died.

The cruelty enacted on people, on forests, on animals… it changes everything. It affects me, my mind, my mood, and my physiology. I am in this world, I am of this world. IF I am sick, the world is sick.

To return to the prakriti, all the accretion of vikriti has to be digested. The road is long, and it is simple. It starts when I accept that I am a certain way. Then, I can start deciphering what that is. The only way to heal is to heal the cosmos, to repair the fabric that weaves humans to each other and to the Earth.

I credit food with being the primary factor in my remission, but the way that I eat is determined by the context into which I was born. Growing up, most people around me ate the standard American diet that included a great deal of meat, fat, protein, and refined industrial foods. I don't recall knowing a single vegetarian until I was a teenager.

Although my mother tried her best to feed me vegetables, from the time I started feeding myself I did what the people around me did, and I ate anything I could get my hands on. Fast food, fried food, liters of liquid sugar. Multiple coffees a day for years. Pizza and poutine at 6am after an all-night alcohol binge. You name it, I ate it, but that's not how my mom raised me. It's how my cultural context socialized me. I consumed that way to fit in and fill a void left by a fragmented social fabric.

I was born to a mother who loves food. I grew up to the scent of soups simmering and seasonal jam preserves by the dozens; blueberry, blackberry, peach, and strawberry jam to last through winter. My mother was a hippie and is to this day a lover of good food. When the organic food movement hit its stride in the 80s, she was in the thick of it. In her kitchen, I grew up eating brown rice, organic chicken breast, potatoes, boiled root vegetables, artisanal sausage, bakery-fresh bread, and steamed broccoli. As a sign of the times, I also grew up with Nutella and white bagels.

Seeing my mom cooking from scratch in the kitchen gave me a predisposition that made learning to feed myself much easier. There were years when I saw her turn hundreds of kilos of fruit into preserves to sell at Vancouver's markets. I don't think about it so often, but to have been shown that care, labour, and love for food really shaped me. I asked her recently how she learned to cook. Her answer was, "I taught myself."

My grandmother cooked a lot, but she never taught her daughters. Mamie didn't have time to teach, but my mother also grew up in a household with an active kitchen, so she knew what cooking looked like, smelled like, sounded like; the passionate fury of the stove with four pots on it, the oven welcoming dozens of meat pies, the sizzling of onion and garlic in fresh butter. My mother didn't learn how to cook from her mother, but she learned that cooking was possible, and she passed that on to me.

My mother grew up eating post-war homegrown meat and potatoes, fresh caught fish, carrots, turnips, cabbage, and preserves stored in the house by her mother. Mamie fed the whole family while holding down a job doing customer service at the Hudson's Bay Company in Murdochville. She had grown up on a farm, churning butter by hand. My mom's childhood in the Gaspe was one of local food, not out of choice, or because of some received idea that "local organic food is better for you," just because it was the only option.

In the 50s, the mining economy gave the family the ability to buy anything they needed, and my grandmother had never wanted to be a peasant farmer anyway. She became a modern wife holding down a house and a job. No one else cooked, but at least she didn't have to plow the fields and tend the cows. The family's dairy came from the grandparents' farm; the meat and vegetables came from producers known to Mamie.

She could use the money she and Papie earned in Murdochville to buy a house, car, sugar and milk in bulk, and all the ingredients to make what her mother, my great-grandmother, had shown her how to make. Before the organic food industry had lobbyists, the idea of organic vs conventional agriculture didn't exist.

Industrial imports became available as the years went on, and at first, the difference in the quality of the ingredients was barely noticeable. The taste wasn't quite the same, but it made life so much easier, simpler, and less labour-intensive. Time was still scarce, but it was easier than Mamie's mother had had it. Instead of 12 kids, she only had 3. Instead of the farm, she worked at the department store.

She still used her time cooking and working. She boiled 'baboche' (moonshine) regularly because there was no liquor commission nearby. When the liquor store moved in, she stopped. Over time, she barely changed how or what she cooked. Fresh fish and meat pies, boiled potatoes and root veggies, all seasoned with industrial butter, margarine, iodized salt, and Red Path sugar.

I don't hold too romantic a view of homesteading. It's a painstaking, constantly backbreaking labour that keeps one beholden to place and to weather. It is really, really hard work. But the fact is that as a child, my grandmother ate better than her children did, and much better than most of her grandchildren's generation.

All I know of that reality comes from Mamie's stories and from the food she cooked for me when I was growing up. She's eaten fresh-caught Atlantic fish her whole life. Now, she doesn't cook for herself, and the fish have nearly run dry. She fed her kids the same way she had eaten. The ingredients just kept getting worse over 90 years. Distant industrial farms now supply everything Mamie's family used to make, grow, and buy locally.

I was recently in an Ayurvedic nutrition course, and one of my peers in their 30s was clearly uncomfortable in the kitchen. The teacher encouraged us to share our knowledge and coach each other in cooking techniques. And she was right: it's only by sharing what we know, whether across family or friends, that it becomes possible to make new choices, should we want to make them. The fact that my mother, grandmother, great-grandmother (etc) all cooked, and that I was lucky enough to be born into that lineage, makes food a comfort zone for me.

I began a dietary transition in my mid-20s towards the whole foods plant-based way that I eat now. My extended family of origin eats nothing like I do. They're still on the standard American diet, and they seem happy enough. I was forced to examine my food habits for recovery, and so I changed. Force majeure wouldn't have it any other way.

In 2017, my staunch, angry, teenage atheism started waning. For a decade I had been angry at the world, at myself, at the doctors. I started practicing mindfulness with an app, to help my insomnia and anxiety, but not to connect to spirituality. It was the beginning.

That year I was travelling with a friend. One night, they were praying with their tasbih prayer beads in silence. I was curious, but didn’t dare approach. They waved me over, and shared simple wisdom: God loves company.

The seed sowed before my birth, long dormant and buried by the secular nihilist culture of my upbringing, had just received a drop of water. The strict minimum needed to germinate.

By 2019, I was conducting little rituals. I’d realized that writing and poetry are magical acts. I composed poems and recited them to a thunderstorm. I prayed to the clouds. That year I finally cried tears I had not let flow in all those years of internalized spiritual repression, and I was utterly confused. I thought that spirituality wasn't for me because the religions of my grandparents didn't suit me.

I did not yet know that the essential centre of spirituality is simply the longing for union. For me, it's about having faith in the process of trial and error, getting up and trying again. There are a million formulas to learn for spiritual growth: "stand here, do this, think that, and all your problems will be solved."

But there’s no barometer for measuring and quantifying faith. It's my experience that any instruction for solving my problems doesn't work unless it comes from my heart, from faith in my own capacity to love life.

In the depths of failure, when all illusions of control over my life are trampled by the chaotic dance of my body's dysfunction, there is nothing to do but accept. If I refuse, then I am ignoring reality and rendering all further action moot. It becomes useless because it does not have a sound premise. So I must accept if I am to proceed.

Acceptance is how we get to the root. Only self-knowledge that comes from surrender can provide answers to my suffering. No one will ever know its source except you and whatever higher power you choose to put your faith in.

But that kind of faith in oneself takes courage, and it takes time. It takes being ready and willing to develop all the skills to discern what is helpful and what is toxic, to sort between them, and to act accordingly. The strength to carry on is found in faith.

I’m cultivating trust in my body to speak the truth. If I only listen to it, it’s a reliable source amidst all the noise. But my body is not a private territory; it began as, and remains, an open territory subject to intervention from the time of my conception. My body is not separate from your body. The same systems of governance and control have shaped us both. We're byproducts of Empire.

My body is larger than the skin that envelops my organs. It is composed of the earth from which the food I digest grows; the migrant labour precariously tending the soil. My body is the struggle for self-determination, the pain of countless patients subjected to involuntary "care" over centuries. My faith accounts for the plasma donors selling blood in the USA. How can I hold their sacrifice with gratitude? I’m starkly aware that they likely were thinking of how the $60 helps them make ends meet, rather than me and my illness, in some far off and distant land.

When no system can be trusted, where do I place my faith? It is not a tool, nor an instrument with which to surpass my own body and its limits. Faith is moot unless it is joined with acceptance of reality. The process is engaged. The fire burns powerfully in the heart of hearts, where infinite passion resides. That is, love for all that is, was, and will be.

I have found that I can trust the earth, if nothing else. I can trust the sound of the wind blowing through the leaves. I can place my faith in the weight of gravity and the act of breathing. Faith belongs in the world. It's an anchor for staying tethered, keeping myself from spiraling into insomniac despair. The felt sense of faith is a vibration in my cells akin to the hum of a honeybee. It is imperfect, and I would still never return to a life without it.

Faith is my trust in that automatic, unconscious wisdom that carries me through life. It bubbles up when coincidence puts me in the right place at the right time with the right people. It is also my buoy when life challenges me, has me questioning why I was ever born, seemingly surrounded by all the wrong people in a place I can't bear. But then, I'm still breathing. Life is still happening.

Trust arises spontaneously when life demonstrates that it has an intelligence many orders of magnitude greater than any thinking mind. The breath, coursing through the lungs of my body, breathing by itself, will always do a better job of it than any attempt on my part to control its action. I need faith that I can, and will, keep breathing. The breath flows, and I carry on with my day.