Stress Can Be Good or Bad:
Defeat the Excess!

Stress is a HealMobile Target. Health disparities between different American groups can be traced to a difference in the identification, diagnosis and care of seemingly "small" irritations in life or challenges to daily functioning. These small things make the body-mind-spirit vulnerable and sensitive, and the body gives signs of the toll that the build-up of small things is taking on the mind and emotions/spirit. Strainings of your energy can grow out of control and become illness that affects everything in your life, causing profound dis-ease.

For many different reasons, people of color and African descendants are less immediately responsive to stresses that would prompt others to go right to the doctor.

Mental pressures may be good or bad according to psychologists; the good reflecting the stress needed to compete in sports or to meet job-related goals. The bad stress, however, can fool the mind into thinking it is good stress, because meeting the goals important to family, work and friends are good goals. Mental stress outshines your ability to listen to the voice that says SLOW DOWN, and your self-talk is an endless loop of goal-setting and achieving objectives. As I point out in the page on depression, Terrie M. Williams describes the conflicting emotions around being frazzled and depressed in her book, Black Pain: It Only Looks Like We're Not Hurting.

The flip side of this is the slowed down response to the pain of loss of a loved one, job, or other beloved person, place or thing and this response is stress turned into a depressed state. You don't know what your body-mind-spirit really needs if you have experienced sudden loss, even of self esteem. This is the loss that grows out of difference in treatment at work or in public, such as that experienced by Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos/Latinas and, often, immigrants of color who may be mistaken for these groups.

TRAUMA

Sometimes bad treatment is meted out by people of pitiful character who would do wrong to anyone who crosses their path. Yes, they have a problem. But when you are a person whose people have experienced a past trauma such as slavery, Jim Crow, or mass removal from your property, and you grow up experiencing the effects of bad treatment on generations before you, this means you are still affected by a legacy of inhumane treatment and this is known among Jewish and Native American scholars as historical trauma.

The popular, grass roots terms for this condition is post-traumatic slave disorder for black Americans or generational or historical trauma for indigenous Americans. Dr. Joy Degruy writes about the former condition in her book, The Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome. Society will only realize how much it is losing as the whole people grow in their awareness and aspire to Be Whole, and to be respected as Whole and Not Less Than Anyone by society and the world. Native Americans have a movement along these lines, it is called, "making a people whole." They have designed a conference on this theme and ways long-standing trauma may be healed which is a version of The HealMobile intention.

The trade-off is continuing susceptibility to illness of a vulnerable mind-body-spirit weakened by constant societal disapproval and inhumane treatment.

The solution? Surely a spiritual focus, which is exactly what most "underdogs" choose. This only feeds part of you, though, and must be combined holistically with body-temple nutrients that feed the heart-brain (emotions-mind), and body while the spirit is also being fed.

Good nutrients are found in fresh and newly dried herbs and barely cooked and raw foods and juices. Today most supermarkets have whole food or organic sections where fresher fruits, vegetables and herbs and unpasteurized or organic milks and juices are offered. Do the macrobiotic thing and purchase items for balance, choosing those that are grown and harvested in your region for best results. If you have been mostly eating meat and usually shun vegetables, you know what to do.