I was reading through the headlines today, trying to find articles to help me understand what is happening worldwide. It’s tough because of our broken system of sharing news.

Creating Clickbait

I skimmed through the headlines on one of the social media giants. Reading the headlines, I started feeling aggravated and upset. The headline words encouraged aggression like warn, blast, fury, threaten, dangerous, condemn, contagious, disease, defend, or reject. Besides using words that communicated violence and danger, the headlines targeted the use of labels and name-calling to turn people against each other. People were no longer just people. Each person was a label that misrepresented who they were. These headlines were “optimized” for clicks through negative advertising.

I clicked through a few headlines, hoping to get something newsworthy. The articles didn’t deliver on the headline. Instead, most were one-thousand-word articles wrapped around two sentences of real news. The articles communicated with the manipulative and deceptive use of language that encourages feelings of hostility and urgency.  

Getting Caught in the Web

The manipulation is sneaky. The articles target what we believe in and make it seem like our friends are attacking these beliefs and value systems. When the articles don’t directly challenge our values, they still manage to make us believe our safety is under threat. 

 

Back a few years, I was getting so wrapped up in the media and the news, I lost who I was. I had become a puppet of the giants, mindlessly clicking through the links, getting more emotionally bent with each additional click. 

The crazy part about the clicking was that the more bent I got, the more I had to click. The more I had to learn about these invented injustices. The more I felt powerless against the giants. 

Escaping the Web

Two years ago, I would have cowered in fear, acceptance, and depression at these headlines. I would have bought into the world the social media giants and news agencies created. 

This year feels unique. What’s behind the shift?

For me, it’s spirituality. There are loads of ways to explore it, and the one that really clicked for me was Taoism. I mixed Taoism with everything I picked up during my 18 years of school.

The Triangle and the Truth Connection

One of the things my 18 years of schooling taught me was geometry. I learned in geometry that triangles are the strongest shape there is. The weight placed on a triangle gets distributed evenly across all three sides. Triangles represent geometric sturdiness; no matter how much weight you put on any side, it will not break.

I’ve talked about the trinity, or triangle, of the Spiritual, Mental, and Physical in Taoism. In this trinity, Taoism uses the symbolism of a triangle to explain that we need a foundation in our spiritual, mental, and physical bodies to create balance. Each aspect is equally important to our life. 

Although I was working on my spirituality and thought it was necessary, it was when I understood the importance and strength of the triangle that I understood why spirituality was important. This piece would complete my triangle of self-awareness and allow me to “walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and fear no evil (Psalm 23.4).”   

The Missing Link in Resilence

Society discusses spirituality and pretends it’s essential, yet actions suggest otherwise. Our educational system is 12 to 18 years of teaching our mind and physical body. 

In most schools, there isn’t a class on spirituality. There isn’t a class to help us understand the difference between right and wrong or help us understand ourselves to understand empathy, compassion, and living with the world. Without spirituality, we have two points, mental and physical, which create a line. We can’t make a triangle. A line can be pushed and swayed in any direction. Our spirituality is the line that completes the triangle, creating the sturdiness so civilization can no longer unbalance us. 

It suddenly made sense. Social media, news agencies, and politics had all been able to manipulate me because I wasn’t the strongest shape I could be. They were able to put weight on any side of me and overpower me, change my course, direct my actions. 

Upsides Found During the Pandemic

Part of spirituality is correcting our compass. Taoism helped me fix my compass at a time when our compass has become distorted. We’ve codified a distorted sense of right and wrong into our legal systems and social hierarchies. We’ve enabled someone else to tell us what we want and need. Growing up in these systems and the constant pressure to accept their boundaries distorted and socialized my sense of who I am and what I should value instead of what I do value.

Something good came out of the pandemic. I noticed it first in myself and then in my clients. The pandemic forced me to pull away from the world’s noise. The pandemic did that for so long that I unconsciously submitted to it and started re-evaluating my life. 

I started learning how to do things that reconnected me with the world, like I learned how to manage a home kitchen. That meant more than cooking. That meant understanding how to shop and how to prepare leftovers. When I learned that, I started learning about where our food comes from and changing how I bought things. Until I began to engage with food, I didn’t realize how disconnected from our food I was. 

It wasn’t just food. I started reconnecting in all sorts of ways. The pandemic gave all of us time to step away from the noise and start to hear ourselves. Unconsciously, each of us began to listen to our spirituality again. 

Creating the Triangle

As my focus on my spirituality became more solid, the third line of my triangle formed. I could clarify my boundaries in ways that supported my spiritual growth instead of someone’s greed. 

As my triangle started to form and solidify, I found I could stand in the storm. The storm might aggravate me, and it will be uncomfortable, but it didn’t direct me. It didn’t change my course. 

A Collective Journey of Spiritual Growth

The more solid I became in myself and what I’m about, the more I found others on the same path. The more I realized that you are on that same path. Your internal compass has been pointing in a direction that has felt blocked for years until now. 

The more I focus on my spiritual growth, the less I focus on the world today and the more I focus on the world I want to live in. I can experience my thoughts and feelings and accept them while understanding these thoughts and feelings may be uncomfortable for the existing hierarchies. Many individuals you and I are interacting with today continue to try to deny your emotions and feelings, legislate against them, and control the world. 

Yet, the problem was the pandemic. If the pandemic had never happened, people would not be waking up. And maybe it was not just the pandemic but also the virus that has been scientifically proven to cross into the brain. Perhaps something within that action opened up a key in our brains, encouraging many to wake up.  

Holistic Pathways Through Taoist-Based Healing

You’re here because you’re waking up, and on our journey, we will need to reach out to many individuals to help us continue. One of the areas where I specialize is the use of Classical thought in East Asian Medicine to help individuals who feel their path is blocked. 

Through Taoism-based acupuncture and East Asian Medicine, I help unblock your path so you can continue your significant journey. I share information here, on my Youtube channel Bestacupuncturellc, and in HealthHUB on ancient lessons of spirituality. I use feng shui, I Ching, and Chinese astrology to help you understand the energetics you face as you do the vital work you are here to do. By addressing worldly energetics, you can identify how to move through difficult times and reform the energetics around you to support you.

Repairing Our Global Body for a Harmonious Future

Our world is going through rapid change that will continue for the remainder of this decade. It’s an emotional growth cycle that is as painful as the first time you had to set boundaries with your family of origin. The initial moment you began standing up for yourself rather than succumbing to the pressures of familial roles and expectations. This emotional growth cycle is about a family much more extensive than our family of origin yet still dysfunctional. 

The cycle is moving forward, and all you and I have to do is wake up and remember the world we want to live in. I’ve talked about my mother’s breast cancer and how she used a more complex method of macrobiotic eating to address her cancer. It was a grueling method of detoxing from all the chemicals and impurities in our food supply chain. Slowly, every cell in her body turned over and repaired itself. After three years, her cancer went into remission, and she lived cancer-free, active life for another forty years.

The world is our body, and each one of us makes up a cell in our body. Part of waking up is repairing our compass to enable us to live with each other and the world instead of in conflict with others and the world.