Everybody (at least in the US) that I have talked to since Tuesday has given me a nearly identical list of symptoms: exhausted for no reason, feeling very fragile and emotional, generalized pain or specific flare-ups of chronic inflammatory injuries, not able to focus, brain fog from Hell, and significant changes in appetite. How about you? You doing alright?
Let’s talk about stress letdown.
The collective here in the US has just been through one of the ugliest election seasons in history. Fear was the greatest weapon – on both sides. I lost count of how many emails I received per day with somebody literally telling me it was The End and somebody or other, possibly me, was doomed. I had to unsubscribe to about twenty of the lists I’m on that generally do such good work, and it made me sad to do that, but I refuse to play the fear game, and I extra refuse to reward anybody for playing it.
It was the opposite of what we needed.
Fear triggers the release of all those yucky stress hormones that cause us to feel sick, scared, hopeless, helpless, agitated and jittery. Our adrenals go into overdrive, and our liver has to go into crisis mode to keep up with the processing, so when we’re living in this continuous fear state, our food isn’t being properly broken down, our sleep is not restful, and any inflammation anywhere in the body is triggered into overdrive. Now, please go re-read the very first paragraph of this post. Make sense?
We have been put through the wringer. And it was only a little bit worth it. Yes, huge gains were made and we can be so grateful for that. But some of the worst of the problems are still in office, and the battle is so far from over that it wears me out just thinking about the next two years – because it’s going to be constant fear fear FEAR all over again.
We must take the time to reset, recharge, and allow all of this toxic sludge to process out of our systems, and it doesn’t look like there’s going to be much time.
Here’s what I’m doing, and some of it is coming from a new book by Anthony William, Liver Rescue, which is brilliant and insightful and timely. Get it. Read it. Do it.
Every morning, start with a glass of water with some citrus in it, lime is good because it has the salts our bodies need to make magic happen. Big glass of water, nothing else for at least 30 minutes. Then fruit. I make a big smoothie with banana, mango, wild Maine blueberries, dates and sometimes a piece of ginger, with coconut water to cover. No veg, no protein bullshit, just fruit and coconut water. If I am still hungry or need a mid-morning snack, more fruit. Stick to fruit until lunch. Your body needs glucose, so your liver can recover and regenerate. If the liver burns through its store of glucose, you will feel exhausted because you are out of fuel. Eat as much fruit as you want. Fruit will not, cannot, make you fat. Ever.
Meat contains protein that comes bundled with fat, and you cannot unbundle them. If you want the protein from meat, you get the fat with it. Even if a chicken breast says “99% fat free” on the package, honey, sweetie, that’s just because they cut all the exterior fat off before they packaged it. There is a crapton of fat in the actual meat, bonded to the protein. That’s how bodies are made. I’m sorry. Fat is always gonna be part of meat. So cut out as much meat as you possibly can. Get rid of dairy and eggs and all that shit, because it is clogging up your body. And so much commercially produced meat comes with a side order of those very fear hormones that we have just been marinating in for over a year ourselves. Don’t exacerbate the problem we’re trying to overcome by eating more of it. Give up meat for a month. See how you feel. Then either add it back in if you must, or . . . don’t. Vegan is easy once you get used to it. I have no inclination to go back.
Hydrate your bad beautiful self. Hydrate like your life depends on it, because it does.
There is a recipe for Hibiscus Lemonade in Anthony’s book, and it’s like drinking a glass of the life force itself. Heaven. Simple and powerful. Seriously, buy the book. We are all chronically dehydrated, and that’s part of what causes the brain fog and the sleeplessness and the sluggishness. How are you gonna flush the toxins out of your body if there’s nothing to flush with? And I’m not talking about drinking more coffee or upping your consumption of Malbec. I am talking about water. Not commercial, gimmicky bullshit water. Actual water. Filtered and real. Get rid of the flouride and the chlorine if you possibly can. I actually drink distilled water and add the good trace minerals back in, and supplement that with squeezes of lime. But do what you can to get good, clean water into your body at clockwork intervals through the day. Eight ounces an hour from waking until around 3 hours before bedtime would be literally transformative. Yeah, you’d pee a lot more. So what? Those toxins gotta gotta gotta get gone!
And last but not least, let it go. Just let it all go. It doesn’t matter. We’ve been here before, and sane, loving, dedicated people have stepped forward to lead us out. We just elected over 100 women and a few gay men to high political office. In ‘Murka. Yeah. We did that. Those are brilliant points of light, and it’s going to have such a powerful impact. We’re going to be . . . fine-ish. Eventually. It’s not going to happen fast, and the Patriarchy is going to fight dirty and hard and with more money that any of us can even dream of. But they are a dying breed, and we just elected the future.
This too shall pass. Kinda like a kidney stone.
But it will pass, and we’ll move back toward progress and sanity for a while again.
Remember, my loves, this world was not made to be a paradise. This world was made to be a mud-fighting ring, and the baddest, toughest school of hard knocks possible. How else are we ever going to learn to be loving and gentle and wonderful? We aren’t suffering because we deserve it; we are suffering because we are in fertilizer. Be grateful for the opportunity to work through the karma and grow to the next brilliant phase of mastery, because that’s what this is all about.
Be love. Be light. Believe.
We gotta stick together. Stick around – slap your email in that bad boy below and hit that subscribe button. I’ll stick with you.