Before the Wave of Fear Floods Health

When speaking about waves in the ocean, some say the biggest is the ninth wave, a kind of natural rhythm. The Ninth Wave is better known as a painting by Ivan Aivazovsky, a world-famous Russian mariner of Armenian descent. It pictures the sea after a strong storm and people who suffered a shipwreck trying to escape the wreckage of the mast. Surfers are waiting for it - the biggest wave. And as in the ocean and in real life, the waves can purify us, lift us up, move us, or drown us. If we are on the threshold of the fourth, it is possible that another two and a half years will pass until the cycle passes (in case it has something to do with nature).

The most difficult thing today, however, is not the size of the waves, but the ocean of semi-truths, false and contradictory information. This ocean gives birth to waves that even experienced surfers cannot overcome. So I want to try and help as much as I can.

The fourth peak of the pandemic is already coming and the information related to the mental health of the people remains out of focus. In the three waves that we have passed through, when it is mentioned that someone is very sick or has died, there is talk only of concomitant illnesses, but not of the mental and emotional state. "Here - they say - a healthy, strong person, without any disease but passed away!" - such statements only bring fear and panic and fail to mention that the person in question was in mourning at the time, or had an extremely stressful job, or his relationships were toxic, etc. In the twenty-first century, we still do not understand how important are our emotions and feelings (very material, measurable, biochemical reactions in the body). These biochemical reactions are like a medicine that we take regularly. If you drink aspirin or vitamin C every day, it changes your condition, doesn't it?! If every day you get angry, afraid, torn by internal conflicts, grief overwhelms you - does it affect you on a physical level?! Most medicines have a period in which they are taken and a period in which it is good to rest in order to have balance and not to accumulate too much of a substance. The dose makes the poison (dosis sola facit venenum). This does not occur to us when it comes to our behavior and emotions, we are so identified with them that we do not think about resting from our usual mental behavior. Health in a broad sense means flexibility, the ability to adapt, which means that the situation leads us and not some fixed principle or model. For example, if we eat the way our grandparents ate while living at completely different times, this cannot be appropriate.

Health has yet another name - wholeness - in Old Slavic healing, caring has its roots in the word whole, healing means making whole. We are fragmented today, we are separating, while at the same time are striving for more understanding. Almost everything is fragmented - gender, family, identity, information, …

Diseases are broken connections, broken or destructive communication, which leads to cracking, tearing. Even in the treatment itself we are torn - we treat piece by piece, and do not look at the whole picture. We can still be one, we can still be sapiens, we can still remember.

I have been observing the development of the pandemic from the very beginning, through my contacts with people, I work first-hand information when I try to come to a conclusion. I rely on the empirical combined with the analytical. And you know what I notice, people who suffer mentally, suffer physically - what a surprise, eh! I discovered the wheel! However, in the news they do not talk about it, they say - with or without accompanying diseases, but with or without accompanying mental suffering they do not say. His condition worsened, but he exercised every day, but he was hellishly lonely. She kept to a healthy diet, but was in mourning for a loved one. Without additional diseases… depression does not count. Quite a healthy person, and he got worse just in a few days, but was full of internal conflicts. Accompanying (I wonder who they accompany - the virus or person) diseases are materialized mental sufferings with some history behind. And it is precisely these companions, however, who are the unwanted guests, guests whom we did not invite at our table, but on the contrary - we chase them as far away as possible. And so we are torn, and a torn man is a good ground for disease - divide and rule. It is the same - on a physical and mental level.

I will never get tired to share the truth that I see with my eyes every day, the truth that heals because it restores the big picture. The other name of healing is love – it accepts, sews together the differences, glues the broken pieces with gold (like that Japanese art of kintsugi – mending with gold dust). Today we need mental kintsugi to be healthy!

In this sense, in order to deal with the difficulty, it is necessary not to invest the main energy in ideas on how to kill the bacilli (I have nothing against vaccines and medical attempts to advance in dealing with the disease, so as not to misunderstand me, any effort to better health is worthwhile). But how do you improve your immunity? And immunity depends very much on our state of mind. The prophylactic of modern man has several pillars - diet, breathing, movement, behaviour (thoughts, feelings, emotions). We need a large-scale global government policy aimed at improving health, instead of producing medicines and laws that make us sicker. Unfortunately, most of those in power are carriers of partial and sometimes severe psychopathology. But this is not an apocalypse, we just need organize ourselves. There is no fairytale where wisdom and goodness do not overcome evil (unawareness). People say that one swallow does not make a summer. I became convinced of the opposite, sometimes you need one bird that is persistent enough, we have our revolutionary Vasil Levski as an example.

The most basic pillar of mental health is relationships - with yourself and with the environment. I sincerely urge you to invest your energy in these two directions. It is especially important today to invest energy and time in our relationships, in our ties, because whatever happens at the end of this situation, love will remain. And it stays when there is someone to reflect on it or to remember it.

Irina Kiryakova