Yesterday, as so often before here
in Ghana, I witnessed large groups of people singing, dancing, worshipping,
playing (really, all of that one piece) for four hours and was told upon
leaving that they would continue for at least four more hours. All these activities help people not only
alter their body chemistry to feel integrated in their own body/heart/ mind,
but connect them to their fellow neighbors in profound and real ways. And then
there might be many more such hours during the week. When not dancing and such,
many are working together preparing food or weaving cloth or harvesting
vegetables or building a structure. Working with their bodies and doing work
that is tangible and tasteable and wearable and practical and satisfying on the
levels of feeling needed. Most of it is done outside in company with trees and
birds and goats and chickens. And always children. Everywhere. All the time.
Now I’m thinking about the
enormous number of psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, therapists we
have in my country and the epidemic maladies we suffer from. Things like
depression, loneliness, alienation, disconnection, anxiety, stress, eating
disorders and so on. Any of us suffering from any (or
all) of the above mostly feel these as our personal problem. Why are we so
depressed when everyone on TV is having a Pepsi moment? And therapy most often
treats it personally, assuming that something is wrong with us and suggesting
long, long (and expensive) hours, sometimes adding up to years, of talk or
prescribing a dizzying array of drugs.
But what if we’re
depressed because we spend long days sitting indoors in office cubicles
staring at screens? What if we’re lonely because we’ve never in our life
danced, sung and played music with our neighbors for 4 hours? Or because we're
elders stuck in some old age home with no children ever around? What if we're
stressed because our whole culture is driven by the clock and the freeways are
jammed and the boss noticed that we didn't work overtime like our fellow worker
who will get ahead? Or we're raising children in a culture that offers little
or no support, as least short of spending lots of money on a nanny? What if we
feel fearful because Fox news and Right Wing radio keeps feeding us the images
to keep us fearful and thus, under control? What if we’re angry because our
politicians are selling our children’s futures down the polluted river? What if
we’re alienated because we don’t feel part of any group that seems to care
about us and fully accept and celebrate our unique character? What if we feel
disconnected because our work is so abstract and it’s not clear if it’s making
anyone (including ourselves) happy? What if
we’re eating poorly because our body doesn’t match what the media holds up as
the model? In short, what if what appears to be our personal problem is
actually a collective, cultural problem? What if all that therapeutic energy
were turned toward healing a sick society and we worked to actively create a culture
that supports and sustains us?
Driving back from the celebration,
I asked Kofi is there were therapists in Ghana and he just laughed. Now there
may be and they may be helping people in need, but he understood that the
things that afflict us Americans and send us into therapy are simply not
common—the things listed above: depression, loneliness, alienation,
disconnection—because the culture helps hold people up, helps them feel
connected and part of something larger than themselves.
Of course Ghanaians, like all
human beings, have issues with their mothers, feel jilted in love, don’t feel
wholly accepted by their village for who they feel they are, have conflicts
with their neighbors and there might indeed be a place for a good therapist to
help them sort out these inevitable human problems. But I suspected that it’s
rare to find hordes of people chronically suffering from stress and anxiety in
a culture that’s relaxed about work, unusual to find people obsessed about body
image in a culture that has a wider view about what’s sexy, handsome,
desirable, uncommon to find people who feel lonely amidst the constant
community bonding through music, work and socializing, difficult to find people
who feel alienated when they spend so much time outdoors in company with
nature’s bounties, unnecessary to prescribe drugs when the vibrational medicine
of dance, music, song and physical work keep the body balanced and toned and
the spirit uplifted.
And there’s more. I haven’t met
any children here that I would label ADHD. Not one. They have the natural
energy of children and plenty of outlets—like the constant game playing—to
express it. As well as the discipline to sit still. Again, we create so many of
these so-called diseases by our ignorance about the nature of children and
sticking them at desks slogging through the boring adultified curriculum.
Do you see what I’m getting at
here? It’s fine to assume some personal responsibility for our own imbalances
and seek professional help as appropriate, but I’d venture to guess that a good
80% of the “cure” can be made from living better and from helping co-create a
culture that encourages us to live better and supports us in our efforts.
So every morning, Kofi leads us in
an Africanized Zumba class called Wake Up to Life! and that vibrational medicine
does exactly what it promises. Let’s all live better and then save the
therapist for those occasional confusions that come our way. After the dance
class.
