A Practical Path for a Successful Planet
If you have not read Part 1, please read it first here
If you have not read Part 2, please read it first here
20th October 2011
By Jack Adam Weber – Guest Writer for Wake Up World
To a great extent, each of us can choose what we consume, depending on the resources available to us. Certain “necessities” for coping and positively contributing to life are primarily provided by corporate monoliths (cars, gasoline, and computers, for example). Nonetheless, making self-empowering and nature-sustaining choices when we can is the obligation of every reasonable person who values life. In these critical times we need healers not product-pushers in politics and policy, business and its media.
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The talking heads of Big Business justify their mania and lack of soul by appealing to the very fear they create. Advertising driven by larger-than-life transnationals such as Coca-Cola, Monsanto, McDonalds, Toshiba and Mitsubishi does the evil work of stimulating people’s addictions, weaker selves, and unhealthy cravings. Then they feed this bottomless pit (bottomless because the filler is insubstantial and unable to truly satiate) of craving for their own profit.
Rather than promote healing, sustainability, and self-empowerment in a mutually interdependent package, Big Business promotes unchecked capitalism by promoting and glorifying this external system of insatiable desire through the cycle of acquiring more and more, the buying and too prompt burying of their cheap toys and gadgets, affording them windfall profits while ordinary folks become more inwardly and outwardly impoverished. The more they hook us on the allure of their stuff, the more we are driven to buy and the more (truly and illusorily) powerful they become. This cycle results in loss of happiness, wholeness, wisdom, connection to grace in our bodies, as well as an ongoing financial struggle to make ends meet under the burden of constant debt and compounded interest. Allowing ourselves to be bought out as consumerism prostitutes leads to depression, helplessness, soul loss, ill health, and every other symptom of self-avoidance and lack of self-care. So, next time you drive by McDonalds, reach for the non-organic milk or corn, sign the loan papers for the fancy new SUV, shut down your true feelings, courage and intuition….just don’t go there. Pull back, take a breath, give yourself and the tree next to you a hug.
Imagine if the media and advertising sectors of Fortune 1000 transnationals were annually reviewed for their moral and ecological integrity and were required to dedicate a portion of their multi-million dollar advertising budgets to encouraging empowerment and sanity rather than continually manipulating people and promoting the deification of people’s base desires.
If it is your job, or anyone’s you know, to get people hooked on degrading computer games, GMO-tainted Frankenfoods, Monsanto corn, or to engineer fabricated needs for Round-up and other herbicides and pesticides, please dig down to feel your impact on the world and make a change. Tell people the truth and encourage them to listen their own truth. By doing so, you can contribute to global sanity.
Even if we lived in a purely egalitarian society with no class divisions and no capitalistic stimulus, good work is critical for the integrity of body, mind, and spirit. When work and jobs become more and more removed from the immediate necessities of everyday life—existing in the abstract cycle of money, power, and the ability to possess rather than to nourish and satisfy our basic needs for food, shelter, clothing, art, love, and inspiration—life becomes more unnecessarily burdensome and less and less meaningful and soul-sustaining.
Too soon we find ourselves far removed from the original blessings of work, living instead a fight or flight, addictive, and ankle chained diminishment into which work and “livelihood” have been inserted. We lose the exhilarating experience of good, hard work, the simple joy of living on the beautiful Earth, and the direct and easy realization that the quality of our lives is commensurate to the health of the Earth. When we recognize and exercise this truth, we become stronger and healthier, less dependent and less interested in purchasing the junk that Big Business and mainstream media provide.
Apart from circumstances over which we have no control, we are not victims. A lesson we can learn from the greed spoiling the planet is to check our own desires for greed and tend to the underlying deficiencies that even the desire or perceived possibility to become greedy signals. We must question and passionately search for true sustenance, soulful succor that overcomes and eventually diminishes the seduction, addiction, and distraction of opulence and other forms of disenchanted pursuits at the expense of others. These pursuits include a desire for excess possessions, fame for ego, meaningless work, excessive sex or other short-lived and heart-lacking “pleasures” for their own sake, including all manner of addictions. It is time as it has never been before to dip deep into ourselves to re-imagine our place in the web of life. It is high time to channel our energies and attention to the divinity of our bodies’ wisdom and to the effulgence of nature.
The Nourish Practice
Jack Adam Weber’s “The Nourish Practice” is an easy, guided meditation-Qi Gong practice in radical gratitude and self-love. It is an Earth-based, body-centered practice — at once physiological and mythological — that is deeply relaxing and replenishing, especially for modern-day burn-out syndrome, and requires little physical effort.
The Nourish Practice “resets your nervous system” and fosters a rich inner life. You can purchase The Nourish Practice as a CD or Digital Download here.
Previous articles by Jack Adam Weber:
- Relationships: The Costs of Staying When We Should Leave
- Sex, Love and Attachment
- Emotional Work
- Choosing a Partner – How to Avoid Relationship Suicide
- Re-Thinking Love: Why Our Hearts Must Also Be Minded
- Spirituality – Reality Check
- 11 Crucial Tips for Better Digestive Health
- Shadow Work: Becoming a Sustainable Light Worker (Part 1)
- Oneness in Action: The GMO Eradication Movement
- After the Hurricane: Lessons from the Heart of Nature
- Relationships: How They Can Make Us Happier
- Heartbreak – Loving Ourselves Through Difficult Times
About the author:
Jack Adam Weber, L.Ac. is a Chinese medicine physician, author, celebrated poet, organic farmer, and activist for body-centered spirituality. His books, artwork, and provocative poems can be found at his website PoeticHealing.com. He is also the creator of The Nourish Practice, an Earth-based rejuvenation meditation. Weber is available by phone for medical consultations and life-coaching.
You can connect with Jack Adam Weber on Facebook or by emailing [email protected].
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