The times, they are achanging. Windows of possibilities are opening in how we live, work and die. We see a kind of fork in the roads being traveled today as we make this paradigm shift. Machine ways that have dominated for so long are losing their appeal as we learn how they have subjugated living energy to ideas of control, separation, isolation and fear. Many are sensing that the machine-ways have had control long enough.

Coming home to the miraculous living beings we are may, at first, feel like a giant upheaval. Moving from the machine-like controls of rules and tools that increasingly have kept us isolated and compartmentalized in everything from birthing to work to social inter-actions to foreign affairs and now it’s changing. We’re coming home to our living-ness and it’s quite a leap.  

And it’s only a shift in focus.

Over the past several months, I’ve experienced probably one of the most difficult periods in my life.  Every challenge imaginable has come my way from Norm’s health and communication with the medical system in all its marvels and its deep shortcomings. But through it I’ve really gotten how life presents us with both challenges and the means to help us meet those challenges to grow and evolve.  

Each day with new challenges, sometimes I’d feel like I was entering darkness, a place where nothing I knew or had known was applicable. And yet, I reached for all that I knew and had learned about my own body, living process, and what it could offer me as guidance. As I focused more and more on the moment and what I needed to keep going, there was a kind of greater knowing within me that seemed to be having a conversation with me. At such moments, a friend would offer a much-needed comfy room to sleep with a warm meal, and a gentle hug. I would be restored. The sun came out. I would sense that Norm was going to be OK although there was lots of evidence to bring that into question.  

Everywhere we went we met ambulance drivers, nurses, Certified Nurses Aids (and by the way, many are true angels in disguise), and doctors who spoke our language of a possible new world. But they couldn’t imagine it just yet with all the rules and tools they were burdened with in the medical system.  

As days turned into months of too little sleep and the tension of caregiving and advocacy for Norm, I became aware of something trying to push into my consciousness... TLC, In-c. softly whispered within me. The tender loving care we received from little rays of sunshine angels throughout our experience became ever increasingly loud, as we needed it more and more. Just when it seemed I was at the bottom of my resources and reserves, this ray of light would appear in the form of a gentle being offering a willing smile, kindness or witnessing that we needed at the moment. I realized that TLC doesn’t just mean tender loving care, it means tune in, listen, and care and that we were all in this life together, in-cooperation. The timeliness of the light that came seemed other-worldly because it was exactly what we needed to lift us from the darkness and we had not asked for it consciously. It was a need being met like a mother soothing a crying child with just the right touch, or loving distraction. Often as the CNAs would come into the room to provide the most basic needs for Norm, their energy would carry with it that TLC, In-c. When the caregivers were not awake to this gift they had available within them, the energy carried into the room could be rough, robot-like, providing the service, but not the real connecting, healing presence so needed. Then serious mistakes would occur.   

I kept thinking do I have to get this tired to be receiving all this insight? The answer was yes. I had learned this once before when I was ill with pancreatitis many years ago and hospitalized. Helpless with pain, I found myself in a state of bliss totally harmonized at some level in which my every need was being fulfilled without me even having to ask for it. I had a sense of how all life worked. I remember I was constantly in tears at the time, as my heart was touched over and over again by this awareness. Ordinarily, I get so busy, consumed with doing, and trying and focusing on stuff of ego needs that this lovely knowledge of my connectedness gets lost.

And so it seems many of us are being given wake-up calls that help us release the “stuff” so we can shift our focus to the home place in which we are benevolently carried, provided for and connected.

We’re in the middle of the awakening, I believe. And it isn’t easy.

Up-close and personal, Norm and I got to both witness and experience the machine-ways we’ve all been engulfed in for many long centuries, and how the tools and rules originally created to help humankind have increasingly become traps and non-sustainable. And we get to choose again only now with greater awareness of the “wholeness” of our beings and our connectedness, the oneness of life, our living-ness.

Just as Norm’s and my journey are awakening us, life’s value intelligence within and throughout is awakening us all to the wisdom/logos of our living organism energy and amazingly, it feels like coming home to a warm welcoming peacefulness.   

We all know it, it’s just that we need to more fully name it and share what we know with one another.

A vital step will be seeing the machine-ways and letting them change to more effectively support our living-ness process. Here’s some of our insights about healthcare, one of many arenas where machine-ways have been dominating.

Choosing Health-Care again.

Consider, as a nurse pointed out, “How do I describe in words from the categories from which I must choose on the computer what I see when I look at a new patient, when what I would say is, he doesn’t look right?”  Undoubtedly that the patient doesn’t “look right” might be of immense use to the doctors as the nurse shares his/her wisdom from years of experience seeing ill patients. So how is the wisdom of this nurse captured by the computer-questionnaire required of the nurse as patient is admitted to her care? How does the holistic ability of the nurse’s knowing get put into a computer model that is typically compartmentalizing and reductionistic?  

We suggest the answer is not getting better and better at capturing the “parts” in an isolated manner, nor having a data mine on each patient to save all in one place. Today with the way data is collected in the hospitals, and doctor’s offices, the patient is pushed into a category, a statistic, a narrow picture that never, and we say never, adequately captures the whole of the patient. That said then, what can be done to use the computer tools better in service to doctors, patients, and the system? It’s a fork in the road as it were. Now, in this paradigm transition how do we choose? This is where values come in.

Knowing old paradigm values can help us
move away from them.

With our living, inherent, value intelligence awake, it reveals the ineffectiveness and non-sustainability of machine-like approaches. Machine ways are producing fatal errors and lost revenue and “hospital recidivism.” How much of the cost of medicine is due to hasty diagnosis, emergency fixes that go unaltered until the return visit due to a worsening condition? If more time were given in using the resources of the hospital and alternatives to fully comprehend imbalances within the patient instead of categorizing and treating part of the problem, we would see an immediate shift in health care benefits to all. As the “bottom line” has been highest in our focus, we’ve gotten a system where money making comes first and helping sick people—second. The system has quickly become about making money by keeping people sick and dependant on medicines indefinitely instead of helping them to fully recover to health with less dependency on so many medicines. Also, how much of the current health care system time, money and effort is consumed by doctors having to defend and argue for their choices of medicines, or tests or treatments to insurance companies, (Medicare) due to national policy requirements, laws and restrictions? Also, how much of the data collected from patients by providers is to protect providers from litigation instead of providing better care for patients? Hasn’t the “let’s sue” and “let’s pass a law” to control behavior seen its limits in keeping us safe from practitioners’ and providers’ mistakes? What we choose to value ultimately determines what does or does not work for living-ness.

Yes, technology, regulations, medicines and money all have a role to play, but we suggest that first, of higher value is the holistic abilities of living doctors and nurses who can evaluate what is fully going on in a patient. Question underlying assumptions (values) of approaches developed over the years of disease categories, statistics as grounds for treatment choices etc. We can choose again. What do we value most; making money, efficiency, data collection without the human integration considerations, or can we put the value of the living beings we are in higher regard than that of machines and money making? Maybe what we really want more is health, lasting wellness and wellbeing and that might come about with a little less primary focus on machine-like efficiency and money making.

Finding effective action for our living-ness requires all three dimensions of our inherent value intelligence with living-ness being the highest. You may recall from previous articles; intrinsic (all living possibility), extrinsic (the metric) and systemic (systems of order).

Money can and should be made from people’s efforts, and also we need regulations and laws that enable, not restrict us to better do our jobs. As Arie de Geus, author of Living Company, points out there is an analogy between oxygen for living organisms and money for companies. To support life, we need oxygen to breath; but breathing oxygen is not our purpose. Similarly to support continued operation, companies need to make money and profit; but when this becomes their sole purpose for existence, they become money machines; rigid mechanisms unable to adapt and learn and people become unhealthy.

Coming home to our living-ness moving away from machine-ness just might feel good about now; so simple, so elegant, so radical.  

With life-style values that pressure humanity to be ever increasingly more machine-like instead of being caring, connected beings in which we sense one another, have empathy and realize the insights that come from such as TLC, In-cooperation, we will just keep creating suffering, making more and more money for some reason we’ve lost sight, and producing growing feelings of helplessness. But now we can choose again.

This is the miracle of life as I see it. It’s not reaching a fixed nirvana and living-happily-ever-after that’s emerging but a world of TLC, In-Cooperation. Life keeps growing us to receive her infinite wisdom and clearly she/he is doing so as we make this shift. Good-bye old world controlling machine-ways. I’m coming home to my living-ness. And that’s a world that works for everyone. More on that another time. Let us hear from you how you are making the shift from machine ways to living-ness.