To Your Immeasurable Health
Previously posted on Jan 1, 2021
I find the pressurized goal setting and flurry of self-improvement that happens on January first incongruent at the best of times. We're barely past the winter solstice, the still-point of the year, and the expansive energy of spring is months away. It's still time to rest, reflect and dream.
Nice work if you can get it.
This year has so many extra layers of complexity. How does goal setting work in a pandemic? How do we launch our shiny new selves into those best laid plans if we can't even forecast a couple of days ahead?
Things feel intense, even a little out of control.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and share that instead of getting the words CLICHÉ tattooed on my forehead last week I did the next best thing. I signed up for a weight loss app.
Yup. The day before NYE. Right after a week of delicious holiday food, which came on the heels of a year of altered eating and movement, pandemic style.
Hmmm... Control.
What could I control right now?
Looks around wildly. Touches festive holiday belly.
Dark thoughts swirl.
Money is paid for an app proclaiming health while selling a fantasy.
I can't think of a more heartbreaking waste of my time (and money!), but I also can't think of anything more understandable. The cultural norms that influenced my decision are POWERFUL.
Keep that unruly body under control... Or else.
I think and read about diet culture and liberatory body politics a lot. As a massage therapist I've had the privilege of touching a lot of human bodies and it's allowed me to experience and value diversity and to reduce my conditioned worship of supremacist ideals. I practice through a lens of trauma-awareness and body acceptance as a way of pushing back against the status quo.
This letter isn't about weight loss and diet-culture though... Not entirely.
It's about health.
You can measure weight, cholesterol, blood pressure and body fat. You can measure the amount of virus on someone's throat swab. Measurements are very useful in certain contexts. They can save lives.
But what is health?
What does that word actually mean? Can you measure it? Control it?
Our dominant culture would have us believe that—with will power—health can be achieved in the privacy of our home gym. That if we want it badly enough, we can make it happen. This version of health is often conflated with being "fit", which is usually shorthand for thin, able-bodied and youthful.
I call bullshit.
The social determinants of health, things like socio-economic status, gender, race, education and access to clean drinking water and reliable health care, turn out to be arrows pointing at complex social and political issues. For the most part the determinants of health aren't easily controlled or changed at the individual level. This means that whatever health is exactly, the more privileged you are the more likely you'll have it.
By commodifying health we become less inclined to share resources. We hoard things that were meant to be shared. We're also more likely to confuse status-quo self care with the pragmatic, creative and relational practices we need to stay resourced and live a radically disruptive and joyful life.
An early teaching of the Buddha describes four boundless qualities that can be cultivated to dissolve our perceived limits and constraints:
The Four Immeasurables are equanimity,
loving-kindness, compassion, and joy.
These teachings are still relevant today because of the way they subversively encourage us to dissolve our binary sense of self and other. We're neurologically wired to to experience things like joy and compassion collaboratively, which means the Four Immeasurables can't be cultivated alone. The energy of these boundless qualities needs to flow freely, in the context of relationship, or else it becomes constrained and stingy.
Health means more than just feeling good. It runs deeper than efficient digestion, achieving your goal weight, or having glowing skin and shiny hair. It even transcends freedom from cancer, chronic pain or the symptoms of mental illness. It's a resource, a relationship, a shared experience.
Maybe the idea of health is as ineffable as love.
I'm more inclined to believe they're actually the same thing.
However you define it, here's to your beautifully complex and ultimately immeasurable health.
