I’ve been taking some time to get some extra sleep the last few days. I thought I was about to get sick and was waiting for the fever, but it never came. I’m going back to my regularly scheduled activities and if I do come down ill, I’ll deal with it then.

Everything is really yellow and orange and red here in Montana. The skies have been clear the last few days and the sun is out but it’s colder. I’m bundled till about noon. I have some anxiety about the incoming cold. Everyone keeps saying it’s bad and that’s usually the worse thing for me to hear. I’m good at just being put in the game and figuring it out, but when someone wants to give me my odds before it even starts, I get shaky.

Tylenol

What’s the harm in not taking Tylenol? That’s what I find really bewildering with everyone who’s outraged about Tylenol. Is the, I guess, desire, to take Tylenol so strong that you’re just like fuck anyone that says I maybe should question taking it? It’s never been good for you, so why is any link (causal or not) to autism a reason to just not take it?

I don’t take Tylenol if I can help it, as it is. I don’t buy pain medication. There are a lot of drugs that dampen your senses, dampen the connection to the body, and for that reason, I’ve already been off them for years. The pain is telling you something. I trust that I just need to listen to my body when I get that, and that I can handle any suffering. A small pain isn’t going to kill me. The fever is needed for healing.

The same thing goes for birth control and hormone therapies. Birth control has disconnected so many women from the natural rhythm and cycle of their own hormones. It is a profound experience to listen to your body and be in tune with what is going on with it, so much so, that you know when you’re ovulating. You don’t need some external test, babe. You just fucking know because you know what’s going on with you.

It’s a spiritual issue

I’m not going to go into what I think about the Tylenol thing. I already did enough above. But I do want to explain why this is another spiritual issue. And it is, even if you don’t want to see it that way. Or let’s assume you don’t know why it is.

Spiritual issues become cultural ones. It’s the way we live our lives and why. When we have some kind of disconnect for how to live our lives, you can be pretty positive there’s an underlying spiritual and philosophical question prime for conversation.

And with what’s going on right now, the real question here isn’t “Does Tylenol cause autism?” The real question is: why are we so desperate to blunt our sensations? 

Why are we so quick to outsource our discomfort to a pill? Pain is not only a biological signal. It’s also an invitation—an invitation to pay attention, to learn something about our own bodies, our own limits, our own unresolved grief or stress or environment. When you immediately silence that invitation, you’re not just treating a symptom. You’re also refusing a relationship with your body, with your intuition, and with your spirit.

Sensations are guides. The body has all the wisdom. Remember that line because it is the key to unlock life.

It’s why, as an asthmatic, I have to listen when the environment I’m in gives me asthma. It’s why I’m a sensor for mold, for dust, for toxins you might not even know we’re in your home. My asthma is the reason I got out of a house with toxic mold in it. And, I tried for about 8 months to dampen the asthma. To get rid of it. To take the meds to try and resolve the symptoms rather than listen to what is causing it. Eight months later and a total of 1.5 years in a home with toxic mold, I finally listened, got the test (no thanks to the roommates who lived there with me and refused to pay for it), and got out.

That’s why this issue as spiritual. Because spirituality at its core is about relationship and attention to God, to nature, to the world, to our own inner life. When you numb your inner world, you lose the feedback loop that teaches you how to be whole. When you medicate every twinge, you miss the opportunity to ask, Why am I hurting? And how might I solve this? What is my body trying to tell me? What have I been ignoring and why? That’s not just health; that’s discernment. That’s the same skill you need for prayer, for meditation, for living with integrity. And the same one that gets you to deal with your health.

Unfortunately, birth control, hormone therapy, and painkillers they’re all part of the same story. The story of a culture that prizes convenience over connection. Efficiency over wisdom. Quick fixes over self-knowledge. It’s not about being “anti-science” or “anti-medicine”. It’s about recognizing that medicine can sometimes act like a spiritual bypass. 

And when you bypass pain, you bypass the chance to mature, to learn, to become more fully alive. I am not so weak that I can’t go through some suffering. That’s a big part of this. You have to be able to handle some suffering and that is a spiritual issue. That is only something you get through maturity. Spiritual work matures us.

If I had listened to my asthma earlier, I would have said fuck you, roommates, I’ll pay the $1K by myself to get a mold test and just make sure because my health matters. And I would have been out of that house earlier, and I would have been limited by toxic mold exposure, and I would have gone through that portal to grow into a stronger intuition with my body and my life sooner.

Public health

And just to give you a little more: This study, which was not part of the recent news but came out in 2019, found that acetametaphin lowered a users’s empathetic and positive response to another individual. That's spiritual fucking warfare.

I’ll just give you the first few lines of the abstract, because it’s wild:

“Acetaminophen – A potent physical painkiller that also reduces empathy for other people’s suffering – blunts physical and social pain by reducing activation in brain areas (i.e. anterior insula and anterior cingulate) thought to be related to emotional awareness and motivation. Some neuroimaging research on positive empathy (i.e., the perception and sharing of positive affect in other people) suggests that the experience of positive empathy also recruits these paralimbic cortical brain areas. We thus hypothesized that acetaminophen may also impair affective processes related to the experience of positive empathy.”

If that’s not cause enough for a public health crisis, I don’t know what is. That’s a drug that’s hurting the social foundations of belonging, connection, and harmony.

So yes, the Tylenol issue is a spiritual issue. Because it’s not only about a chemical in a pill; it’s about what it does to the social posture of life. It’s about whether we see ourselves as beings to be managed and subdued, or beings to be known and respected. It’s about whether we believe the body is sacred and wise, or just a machine to be silenced when it beeps. That’s the spiritual and philosophical question no one wants to ask.

Horse and rider

There’s an ongoing practice of connecting with the body. It’s not easy in a world that teaches us to ignore it. But I’m going to give you an exercise that might help. Try it. It’s called Horse and Rider.

In the exercise, you will take two postures. One from being in the mind and one from being in the body. You’ll let each have an opportunity to speak to eachother.

So try this:

1. Stand. Get into the mind. Probably the easy part. Talk to the body from the mind. Do this for 2 minutes.

2. Then, switch roles. Get into a new standing place. Talk to the mind from the body. What is the body wanting to say? Wanting to do? You can move and do whatever. Just let the body speak.
   
   ^{Exercise taught by the International School of Temple Arts.}

This might be hard to do without an example. If it is, and you’d like to try it, hit me up and I’ll share a video with you.

And so next time you get a pain too, try and listen. Try and suffer. Try and feel. Start and go for as long as you can. What is your body telling you? Do you need rest? Do you need water? Nutrients? Maybe you do need to go to work, and you can’t follow what the body is telling you. But just try and see how much you can do when you just listen. It’s a profoundly spiritual issue of our time to come back into connection with your body. How connected are you?

Love,
Val

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