It is as though we are living the truth of “what goes around comes around.”  Heart disease is up, teenage suicide is rising, and half of our fellow citizens are on some kind of medication that is numbing some part of them.  We can no longer experience the fullness of being alive and human in this country—it is too painful!

Why?  Is it because of our diets, our sedentary lifestyle?  Is it because of our air pollution, our lack of attention to nature?  Is it because of our increasingly fast lifestyle, or our rapidly growing consumerism?

Or, could our increasing health problems be related to our inability to recognize or accept the collective trauma we’ve inflicted on millions of other people across the world—not to mention right here at home over the last two and a half centuries?  If, indeed, we are one people across the world, it would seem plausible that there’s a part of us that knows the untold horrors our national machine has inflicted on others—and the witnessing of other horrors by other national machines when we sat back and said nothing.  There’s a part of us individually and collectively that knows these things, and our psyches are paying the price of this unexpressed knowledge through our illnesses.

We as a human species are linked in ways we cannot even imagine.  We are linked to the stars in ways we cannot even imagine.  Women know this through their monthly “cycles”—in ancient days, these were regulated by the moon.  Do you think this is different today?

There are things we know that our bodies hold through illness—both physical and mental.  There’s a reason why millions of war veterans return home with post-traumatic stress disorder, and we as a nation have the same experience on a collective level that we might as being buried deep within our psyches.  Yet, it is affecting us in our daily lives through our health in ways we have not acknowledged.

We dream each other’s dream.  We think each other’s thoughts.  And we experience each other’s terrors, all on one level or another.  We are so bombarded by the physical world we have created that we don’t notice these things are happening on these subtle levels—but they are.

Sigmund Freud and his mentor Joseph Brueyer began to notice the symptoms of women in the late 1800’s who were described as “hysterics.”  The women were carrying the unexpressed trauma that had been inflicted on them and collectively. These kinds of “illnesses” have continued to be identified throughout history in various aspects in both men and women.

This brings us to our own ills, which I suspect are a collective result of unacknowledged and unexpressed actions we have taken against others by our national machine.  Being an American is in our blood, and whatever we do as a nation is in our blood.  We are not apart from the actions of this body of nation.  And, this reflects within in our psyches in both positive and negative ways.  None of this is an accident.

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