I saw a movie once, I can't remember the name of the movie but I do remember it was very "Hallmark Special" in theme and presentation. It wasn't the plot of the movie that had my attention so much though as one of the characters. She was an elder, a medicine woman, though I doubt she would have called herself that. I associate her with that title because her methods of healing match that name better than any other I can come up with. She was a healer, a mid-wife, an herbalist and a spiritualist. As that is the type of healing I myself am most interested in, I was intrigued. The story goes that this "medicine woman" has a granddaughter who has been learning from her since she could walk, helping her with home visits and such. At one of these visits the young girl sees someone die. Being a bit young for such things the overall experience turned out to be a bit traumatic for her. Now bear in mind that this child has helped with births and with wounds and puss-filled infections, so she is no stranger to some of what the human body is capable of. Death, however is a different kind of experience for her and she seeks the council of her grandmother after seeing a person die and go through the process of what her grandmother calls “purging.” Grandmother: "When someone foams at the mouth upon dying it indicates a great back-jam of truths and desires and wishes that they never spoke, purging spills it out of 'em." Inevitably the girl gets older and by the time she becomes a young woman the grandmother dies. As she delivers the eulogy the young woman makes note of how her granny never purged. "She always said exactly what was on her mind and never regretted anything she ever did." While that might be a sound enough story to make a movie out of, especially a feel-good Hallmark vehicle that drops you off in Sunny Valley, it isn't real. By now the average person has seen or heard that there is a physiological reaction when a person dies, whether they have regrets or not. Whether they always spoke their mind or held on to secrets galore, physiology is physiology.
Of course for the totally tactless this is great news. It means you've been right all along, speak your mind without hesitation, forget about tact or respect, whether it be self respect or respect for whomever you are interacting with. On the other hand, it only takes a few test runs to see that more is achieved through conversation than through confrontation and by using tact and demonstrating respect things tend toward the conversational. In this overly cynical world full of overly sensitive people more used to communicating on screen than in person, it is more than ever before important to remember how to communicate in a way conducive to growth rather than stagnation. Accountability rather than accusation. This relates to health in my mind because it's about taking responsibility for ones own health and taking accountability for ones own destruction when necessary. Being an herbalist, for me, is a part of that. As it relates to the context here the idea is that if "purging" as the grandmother describes it were a real thing, clearly whether or not a person would purge upon death would rely heavily on how they lived their life. A big part of that is how people treat other people, how they communicate with them. If you purge because you regret how you treated people and treated people the way you did so you wouldn't have regrets there is a problem. Always saying what's on your mind can be a good thing or a bad thing depending upon how things are carried out. Being free of regret is a choice, just like holding on to regret is a choice. Does choosing to be free of regret make you a sociopath or simply a cautious person? A person who doesn't care enough to have regret or a person who thinks before they act and takes the best action, bearing in mind others as well as themselves when considering consequence. At the end of the day It's simply a matter of not doing things one might later regret, generally that means thinking before acting. Simple.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Hanna Maxwell
All knowledge starts with self knowledge. Archives
July 2021
|