Experts and charlatans alike step up to dazzle the hopeful. Spin-doctored illusions show up on every front. This virus of falseness has spread to all corners of the globe. No one, it seems, is spared the plague of Spin.
Politicians, merchants, our most cherished institutions - all are infected with the Spin virus. The media feeds on Spin and propagates it until lies and half-truths have become like overgrown weeds in people's minds. Truth has become passe, unpopular, even taboo. Human values have been seriously distorted and in some situations completely lost.
Consumed by a bizarre, insatiable appetite for more, people have become obsessed with winning, profiting, hiding, surviving, and getting their way no matter the cost. Language itself has become infected with Spin. Words have turned into shields that make it possible for people to avoid feeling, to hide the truth, and to manipulate one another at every turn. People take sides and stake out their battleground using words as weapons to cover up greedy, self-serving, power-hungry agendas. True power and a confident, regal bearing are rarely seen. We have lost faith in many of our leaders and in each other.
The problem is not limited to politicians, of course. Business people, CEOs, clergymen, movie stars, teachers, diplomats, (the list gets exhausting) have raised our ire for their lack of trustworthy character. The expense is tremendous when deceptions lead to oil spills, glacial meltdown, soaring energy bills, crumbling levies in hurricane country, or mortgage foreclosures for an entire swath of the population. At a micro level, the emotional cost is impossible to measure when husbands, wives, parents and children get caught up in undeclared spin wars that tear the fabric of family to shreds. Worst of all, we've lost faith in ourselves. Look at the state of our inner lives. Anti-depressant use is on the rise and self-medication through substance use and abuse is still our favourite band-aid solution.
If we look at these symptoms and fail to address the underlying problem our effectiveness will be limited. Why keep putting out fires when evolution is calling us to rise from the ashes? If we are to become like the phoenix we must cut to the root of the problem and look squarely at this epidemic of fearful thinking, falsehood, selfish motivations, and shortsighted goals that has infected the human mind with a disingenuous way of being. What Eckhart Tolle calls 'the ego' in his best-selling book A New Earth
is a cultural as well as a personal phenomenon. At the macro level, distortions of egoic small-mindedness collect and accumulate until we can barely discern what is real. I call this shared dilemma spindoctrination
.
As an infant, you naturally lived in a state of Whole Body Consciousness; this was your primary state for the first few years of life. Vitality, curiosity, and passionate enthusiasm literally poured through your body as pure awareness. Whole Body Consciousness guided your development with a sure hand as you expanded your awareness moment by moment. Your sophisticated somatic & sensory intelligence - BQ (Body Awareness Intelligence - was instinctively and masterfully put to good use. In time, however, that unfettered awareness was compelled to narrow its focus. As you grew older, your cognitive awareness began to develop. You learned to rely less and less on body intelligence once your mental intelligence kicked in.
Most of us never learned about body wisdom, body intelligence, or body awareness in school. "Sit still and be quiet", was the rule of the day and woe to the kid who was unable to conform. What if children were taught how to manage their energy with correct breathing rather than be commanded day after day to do something as unnatural as sit still? By high school age, young people could readily learn basic awareness practices, or exercises for relaxation and stress reduction. What a different society we would have!!!!
Excerpt from "What's Your Body Telling You?" (McGraw-Hill, July 2009) by Steve Sisgold
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Biography
