“The inner fire is the most important thing mankind possesses.” 

Edith Södergran

Energy of life

What is vitality? Pause for a moment…what do you think? Perhaps like me, you know it reveals itself when it’s there, but is also known by its absence.

Some dictionary definitions include:

• energy and enthusiasm
• liveliness, animation
• the ability to sustain life, vital power.

In other words, vitality is about the energy of life and how it expresses in the world.

One last breath

The day my Dad died I had a very intimate encounter with vitality. As he departed this life I saw what little vitality he had left, leave completely. In one last breath, just like that, it was gone.

A few hours later I sat opposite my Mum and sister in a taxi. We were all subdued of course, shocked and stunned at my Dad’s sudden death, but one thing was very evident.

“You’ve got it.” I said. “You’ve got it and Dad doesn’t anymore.”

Their vitality was palpable, a phenomenal life force, vibration or wave moving across time and space to connect with me. I sensed it with every cell in my body. 

A continuum

There is a continuum of vitality along which we all live. We can be full or depleted, in other words it is measurable. I invite you to assess yours now. On a scale of 0 to 10 where 0 is no vitality and 10 is the most you could have, where are you today?

Part of nature

This life force runs through all living creatures on our planet. We evolved and developed aligned with nature. Her rhythms were our rhythms but modern life tends to separate us from these patterns. Sadly the further we stray the greater the distress it causes.

Modern living fills our bodies and minds with toxicity.  We don’t sleep, move, or eat well. Stressed, stretched and struggling to cope our life force suffers.  Add in unresolved personal, collective or ancestral traumas with their accompanying coping strategies, and our energy is sapped even more. The greater this dampening of our vital force the poorer our resilience to further life shocks.

A choice

By understanding the impact that different activities and circumstances have on our vitality we have a choice. We can live in a way which enhances it or a way which drains it. We can support our life force or we can diminish it.

 “Vitality and beauty are gifts of Nature for those who live according to its laws.” 

Leonardo Da Vinci

Living out of alignment with nature makes us vulnerable. Our ability to withstand further disturbances to our physical, emotional and spiritual systems weakens, and our wellness threshold is lowered. With every assault on our vitality our susceptibility to dis-ease increases.

Coronavirus situation

Very tragically we are seeing this play out right now all across our planet. Those whose vitality was already depleted have become the most vulnerable to the Coronavirus situation.

For some the virus itself may have breached their resilience threshold. For others the shock of a diagnosis, fear of the virus, the lack of treatment for existing conditions or the emotional stresses caused by the lockdown itself, may well have tipped their vitality into a more precarious position. 

This assault on an already frail or fragile system may indeed have been sufficient to completely drain what little vitality some had left.

It astounds me that this is not at the forefront of discussions about how we move forward. The vitality of those who are vulnerable should, in my opinion, be uppermost when reviewing this pandemic. 

Thresholds

There appears to be little to no effort focused towards helping those who are vulnerable increase their resiliency. We each have a vitality threshold which can be breached. This results in the onset of ill health, physical or emotional.

We can only stand so much before something gives. The straw that breaks the camels back, the damn that is breached, call it what you like the affect is the same, we become ill when our vitality level is so low it cannot withstand another onslaught.

Finding a fix

Now, rather than prompting health and helping people to build resilience and vitality, the whole focus is on finding a “fix. The great saviour being a poorly tested vaccine which may indeed add further toxic load and stress to already weakened systems.

Illness and dis-ease are not and never have been the result of a lack of medication or vaccination. They are because our system is out of balance and something is affecting our vitality.

Whilst medications and treatments can help, concentrating on these alone completely bypasses discussions about the root causes:

• Why do we have so many people with underlying health problems?

• What has happened to create these high levels of illness in our population?

And takes the focus of the answers:

• What will make us healthier, happier and more resilient to dis-ease?

• What can we do to improve our vitality?

Sickness industry

Instead of bankrolling corporations who create and profit from a sickness industry our Governments could, instead, invest in the health of our nation. They could see this as an opportunity to value collective wellbeing and its importance in terms of creating a sustainable future for all of life on earth.

Currently we rely on a medical system which largely focuses on containing, suppressing, or worse still poisoning, cutting out or burning to manage illness. Little is done to understand and address the root causes of our national ill-health epidemic. 

Shocks and traumas

Ill health is our bodies way of expressing imbalances and an inability to cope. Our bodies are talking and we could be listening to understand what they are trying to tell us.

Our mind, body and spirit exists within the context of our social and environmental relationships. When there are shocks or traumas to this interconnected system dis-ease can occur, especially if our vitality and therefore resilience is low. A medication or vaccine will never address all this.

In our hands

Our health is in our hands. We cannot wait for the current system to change. If we want a strong, resilient healthy level of vitality it is up to us. By choosing a life more aligned with the rhythms, routines and richness of nature we can begin to build healthier happier lives.

Healthier happier people create a healthier happier world, something we surely need.

Emotional issues

If realigning with nature, eating, sleeping and moving well do not suffice we may have to address deeper issues.  Often intense emotional experiences from the past live on. They affect how we operate in the world.

In my work with clients I often come across people who have “tried everything”. They’ve had the pills, taken the treatments, been to umpteen alternative practitioners and still the condition persists.

What they have not done is address the underlying causes of the stress and emotional issues in their lives.

Not an issue

Sometimes these are known but often people are unaware of the affect such experiences are having on their physical bodies. Commonly people believe that because something is in the past, they are “over it”, or should be and it no longer affects them. This may not be true.

Often with some gentle exploration we find that there is a whole heap of emotion still attached to past experiences. Alongside this we uncover beliefs and behaviour patterns which although helpful at the time keep us locked into limited and often stressful ways of being in this world.

Release

When we learn to release and free ourselves from these emotional chains our vitality increases and our bodies are able to complete disease processes. META Health is a fantastic tool which uses the biological intelligence of the body to help unravel the root causes of what ails us.

With support you can design your own plan to build vitality and create better health. This places you firmly in the driving seat of your own self-healing journey. No longer dependent on outside practitioners to fix you, you instead utilise their expertise as part of an overall strategy to increase vitality and build resilience.

Radical Self Care

We can practice a form of self care which recognises and respects the interconnectedness of life on our planet. This improves not only our own vitality but also contributes to a more vital world for all.

Radical Self Care is about creating simpler, calmer, more deeply connected lives. It invites us to change, to reconsider how we live and to choose a more natural path which reflects who we truly are – creatures of planet earth. By practicing Radical Self Care we can change the world.

What choices could you make today to enhance your vitality?

“If you go against nature she’s going to take your vitality away because she is the one that gives it to you in the first place.”

Georgina Stones