Visceral Hypersensitivity: An Optimistic Angle

If you are unfortunate enough to already know what visceral hypersensitivity (VH henceforth) is, then maybe the spin I put on it can leave you feeling fortunate, or relieved for those close to you that have the condition. A viscerally hypersensitive person feels every bodily occurrence more (the brain not necessarily being exclusive from the body in this “feeling” regard either, I’d argue). As far as I understand, the criteria for the VH condition were generated out of a need to group and explain real somatic symptoms that people with digestive discomfort experience, but I think there is a lot more to VH than gastro doctors—or the medical community at large—have had the fancy or need to delve into, and certainly a great deal more than I can suggest here. Still, I wanted to offer the following as explanations, conjectures, and “symptoms” (or compliments) to VH.

We Who Are Viscerally Hypersensitive:

– are not suffering from a “modern disease” or neolithic condition (though in the context it would be defined as such), rather we have VH as a result of evolutionary pressures that made it fit to arise in humans (or it has always been in homo sapiens and probably larger groups, and we with VH have not devolved out of having it). Our hypersensitivity generally manifests most noticeably in our bodily reactions to a wide range of supposed foods. VH is our bodies saying, “don’t eat that shit, that offers no nutritional benefit and it’s full of toxins and anti-nutrients that we don’t have the enzymatic capabilities to handle.” Our bodies have a vigilance that makes them smarter than our eyes that just see sugar and salt coated non-food and throw it in our mouths; our bodies do what they do best and evacuate that non-food before it has a chance to do as much damage. With VH a person’s body which seems to be the torturer, is actually the teacher that points to the torture coming from something much larger and much more distilled: agricultural products and byproducts that aren’t at all healthy for human consumption.

– have quicker reflexes to prevent an imminent accident from occurring, precisely because we are so tuned in to the present (in a non-meditation sort of way) and the momentum of which toward physical things are tending. I have often stopped a water from spilling that I had just accidentally knocked in to, so I am very attuned to my own clumsiness and in its own damage control.

– tend to have some premonitions of the future as in a visionary, but we often end up being false visionaries in the eyes of others because we may preclude the bad event from occurring by being aware of its presence. This may sound like I am loading on a mystical element to VH, but I think it is something completely embedded in the total intuitive awareness that in general has been dulled by a birth into a prefabricated world. We are the canaries 2.0 that can warn ahead of time that the mine is dangerous for all living forms, especially to ourselves; we don’t want to die a martyr, we want to live smarter!

– are more aware of the feelings of life (or lack of life) “in the air”. Speaking of air, we don’t appreciate it when others attempt to dilute an unpleasant odor by spraying Axe all over it, because then we just smell the synthesis of Axe and awful, which is a new amplified awful (this is why as a paleo eater of cow liver, I don’t attempt to “hide” the liver in a larger recipe, but eat it plain and don’t want to drag the process out by mixing it with other diluting foods).

– are more acutely affected by seasonal affective disorder and we sense the malice in the season’s changing and the joy in an oncoming change for the better.

– seem to amplify bodily sensations. This may be true to some extent, but the larger overlooked “normalized” reality is that most others are more extreme in the opposite direction in that they dampen their sensations of pain and discomfort to a detrimental numbing level.

– have a very porous, open chakra, in that we feel other’s pains and joys and take onto ourselves lots of emotions and experiences that would seem to be other.

– tend to be of the O blood type (this is pure conjecture). To elaborate a little on why I am bringing up blood type, it’s not that I think type O blood is itself determinant for a wide range of generalizations about a person, but blood type I think can be used as a marker for a larger milieu of systemic and genetic entities that make VH arise in an individual. Blood type is correlative, not causative.

Some more information/viewpoints on VH:

https://marthaandmayo.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/im-sorry-you-said-visceral-what-what-is-visceral-hyperalgesia/

http://thegirlinyogapants.com/2014/11/06/low-fodmap-diet-ibs/

https://ibsimpact.wordpress.com/2013/11/08/15-common-misconceptions-that-shouldnt-exist-about-irritable-bowel-syndrome-ibs/

https://visceralhypersensitivity.wordpress.com/

https://sensitivepepper.wordpress.com/

https://abominableabdominal.wordpress.com/

https://mastopedia.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/ketotifen-decreases-visceral-hypersensitivity/

and probably many more!

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Tame To Save: Turning Innocent Fire Dancing Into Religious Ritual

Fire dancing is a lively example of the childish—childish as a term of affection, not as one of derogation—creative capacities that are usually suppressed and repressed in our modern culture. If one mentioned people dancing around a fire with scant clothing and hypnotic drum beats, what would probably pop into your head is something akin to this:

Common commentary would be that this dancing is somehow related to a specific religion (which it may very well have been in the first, but no westernized modern interpretation could do it any justice) and is occasioned by spiritual other worldly concerns. However, what wouldn’t be admitted, or even conceived of, is that the fire dancing may have—in its original conception—been completely related to living in this world, and enhancing the time that these humans were having when they lived here. This thus turns us to consider the childish immediacy of experience that isn’t naturally concerned with death and an afterlife as an end in its own right, an often overlooked point. If nothing good and lucidly enjoyable came in this world, why should a people even create after-life as a concept? What out of this world could have originated the notion of a perfect and beautiful afterlife if there wasn’t something good and perfect occasioning this world from which to conceive of it? Perhaps what follows from this is a situation where specific geographic locales with an especially austere environment, breed atheists who flourish there because the idea of anything good or perfect is so alien to the entirety of their experience. Their cold living space has so colorblinded them to sketching a blueprint for an afterworld, for how could they never having had any exposure to the blues?

There must have been some original sacredness to this world (that I don’t think is beyond redemption) that could have allowed the original childish enchantment durable to be fully embodied by the full grown adults likewise—I think here specifically of Columbus’s description of the Arawak Caribbean Natives. The originary non-religious necessity of fire-dancing that I am positing is also given support as a default as by the question: could humans have even wanted to conceive of an extension beyond death in a state of lived sacredness? This is my thinking at present, which may regress or evolve to argue with myself if you, dear reader, don’t beat me to it.

Jumping back into our own time, the fire dance could only survive modernized adult ridicule if it was to be ensconced in ritual. The ritual aspect protects the pure creative joy of fire dancing that was the immediate enhancement of experience, by both a vital warmth and the visual dance of the flame, an intensely differentiating allure taking place at the very most complex mereol level of our day—the chemical. In possibly a beta iteration, what I’m saying is that these ancient people who wanted to protect the childish vitality of their world and their very existence, put a ritualistic air around such an act as dancing around a fire. Possibly what they thought in so doing was that this was the best way to weather the siege of increasing seriousness as humans “aged” out of innocence into civilized rigidity.

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I have a great need of haste as the ideas for posts pile up and the demands of the civilized worlds draw me away from this blog, not to mention dilettantism in our complicated world spreads one very thin. So, to that end—and you may see the connection as I do to the rest of the above post—I will dump, rather uneloquently, as is not my wont, a Tonka meme that speaks to modern adults embodying the negative connotation of childish (and maybe you’ll catch my vibe that I fucking hate shiny misused trucks):

A Genealogy of Analysis

We cannot take for granted the human mental activity termed analysis, that is grouped, tightly or loosely, with rationality, logicality, and often Procrustean binarism. Where did such violent patterns of thought arise from to be a mainstay of the modern human experience? Thought patterns that have a curious mind pondering, and ultimately encouraging a body—or many bodies—to enact such blood spilling dissections of the natural world. To get at a plausible answer, I believe we must use another mental activity still afforded us (i.e. imagination?) that can have us walking in some earlier, less or even pre-analytical time. Perhaps if we use such an imaginative temporal transportation adequately, we can see the peculiar analytical flap of the butterfly’s wings that rippled into the hurricane of analytic violence that so consumes the human psyche and the wider world we have today compacted.

The Stark Natural Impurity of Purities

Purities are the fruits ripest for a mind to cling to and ponder to develop an analytic binary: that which is the pure thing, and the impure milieu defined as a background to surrounding the pureness. To get at such pure fruit, we could take our imaginations back temporally to the experience of an early migratory human in a forest gathering tinder for a fire. Such an activity is not unimaginable though it probably displays a crude understanding of paleolithic life; nevertheless, it will serve as a starting point.

We should pose the question: what in that forest environment was pure enough to stand out from the rest that she would take particular note to develop a discourse to pass on to others? The only “thing” that I can think of (but perhaps your imagination will afford you a better example) that is pure and startling enough to wrench her from her gathering task would be her stumbling upon a recently dead body of another human. Such a drastic encounter would probably force her, after much emotional processing, to conceptualize death as something other than life. The purely differentness of death from daily living would stand out to any having their first encounter. From this simple life-death binary it is possible that if she didn’t suppress the whole experience out of a traumatic response, that she would then be opened to seeing death in non-human entities as well, such as a fallen tree, animals she might eat, and so on.

This life-death binary is a possible beginning to the analysis we have inherited mentally, culturally, institutionally today, but I would like to problematize that such an event could actually have had the staying power to grow into the scientific and philosophical knives with which we currently dice up reality. I don’t think a single concept—even one as shaking as death—could pull a migratory people into developing a particularly divisive language and an educational culture dedicated to replicating such ideas in the minds of their children and grandchildren. I see such primal occurrences, if they happened at all, as likely to be ripples that returned to the ocean; carcasses left behind to decay as the migration pushed forward, away from a previous locale.

The Relaxed Acceleration of the Western Analytic Mind

The particular analysis we of the westernized world have inherited must have an origin of sorts, and one place I would posit as distinctly possible is in the Pre-Socratic philosophizing of ancient Greece. A sea such as the Ionian (or Aegean) offers itself as such an analytic purity to the mind of one not interested in empiricism, who is not attuned to the subtleties of catching fish or other nautical pursuits. Thales—a name for a thinking (wo)man or group of thinking (wo)men—was just such a person who had a privileged position, including the leisure time to gaze at water and conceptualize it as a purity. After finding this pure fluid mixed in with other substances—not least of which would have been fruit—Thales went on to posit that this purity of water was what made up everything. Though no documentary evidence exists, it is quite possible that among a small group there was a fervor of thought and activity exploring this idea that water composed everything, and there were many fruits and animals slain (blood would be evidence), and wells dug, in the search of proof of waters omni-presence. This idea of a purity certainly impressed itself on the minds of these specific characters, and their bodily actions were sure to complement their thinking patterns. Out of Thales came other ontological originary elemental positings (air, fire) by the Ionian school that favored different purities for different reasons.

Thus oneness was posited in the minds of a particular place that would genealogically endure, and a few generations later “twoness” would arise from Plato and any proto-Platonists on the scene. Again, empiricism is sheltered out for it is damaging to the rational categories so constructed by the philosopher. History tells us of a marching forward of these ideas that would not be stamped out by the Persian Empire, nor defeated by the Carthaginians, nor permanently lost to the middle ages. We are the inheritors of such a tradition, but we are also those who could freely choose a different path, and to let go of analytics if we so dared, not using paths blazed before us that direct our activities forward.

There is an ontological, non-historical explanation for binaries/analysis which is forthcoming.

Appendage of Scattered Notes/Ideas:

modern work doesn’t enable an excess of leisure, being of a particular class of efficiency that we can have leisure as a byproduct. No, it was during leisure time that modern work tasks were codified in the mind and then later put into practice that now have us all toiling in varying degrees.

analytics are not created/initiated in the brain. They are purities in the external world, like “blueness”, straight edges, create the idea of analytics. Comes from purities, from a lack of sensitization; but if we are just open to our senses…

violent slashings create an idea of objects and geometry that must have been somewhere available in the greeks. They must have been looking at the sky too much.

Vision Tunneling: Dimensional Blindness and Other Human Deficiencies Created by Modernity’s Lack of Depth

Let’s See…

This is a writing in which I wanted to investigate the possible misusing of our human visual capabilities as they would have been evolutionarily intended. A parallel critique of human misusing of memory in the modern age was published previously and fits as a nice counterpart to this piece (as does the “neolithic injuries” writing).

Consider three things, the two pictures below, and, thirdly, your active gazing at these two pictures:

Our two eyes, separated on our heads enough to give us subtlety different viewing angles of perception, allow a sense of three dimensional depth where both eye focuses overlap, which is typically right in front of our faces. Having this depth perception is certainly useful, and in the context of our mammalian origins is a gain that is paid for in sacrifice of a wider panoramic view that would be afforded dogs and other animals that have their eyes turned laterally outward much more.

We aren’t making use of this valuable depth perception when we are focusing our vision on framed two dimensionalized planes that we’ve been normalized to—a computer screen or a flat boring road outlined by a car windshield are just such examples. These two separate phenomena oddly share in common a great deal of black background and then depend on a great deal of light (often artificial) to illuminate; both are also oddly related to transportation, as screens transport images that aren’t otherwise readily available, and cars transport human cargo. We are under using (and misusing) our eyes and may be losing visual functionality (through eye and/or brain atrophy) if they aren’t getting enough proper three dimensional exposure.

The modern world has two dimensionalized so many of the visual encounters we habitually have, and that might be having profound effects on our eyes, but also on our larger interactions with the world. We may be unthoughtfully seeking to make more of the physical world fit in with this simplified relation to visual space, because we would literally have headaches or other discomforts were we to accept and cultivate more dynamic three dimensionalized space. Perhaps we are even becoming three dimensionally blind? This two dimensionality may “stimulate sleepiness” (an oxymoron?), as a two dimensionality is encountered naturally during sleep when our eyes are resting to a darkened eyelid. Or one of the many inversions of this could be true: this could be a contributing factor to widespread insomnia epidemics due to not having gotten enough three dimensional visual exposure during our waking hours, and our brains aren’t ready to shut off when they need to.

Maybe the drawing of humans evolving more kyphotic (hunch backing) needs to include a single cyclops eye… Homer was prophetic!

*I was going to entitle this “The Planed Middle And The Voluminous Borders” as a way of describing the framed picturesque view of the world many of us might be artificially accustomed to, but I thought that might hint (and confound) towards a metaphorical exposé about how marginalized radicals at the margins of society are actually more dynamic and more alive. I welcome you to take your mind there and use this as a leaping off point, for that is an exciting use of thought to tackle the new levels of mediocrity that make our world less livable, literally in every sense.

His and Her Paleo Water (Sole)

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                   HIS                       &                 HERS

Sole water—which I am rebranding here as paleo water—is purported to have wide ranging health benefits. This is due to its balanced offering of all (or most) of the natural minerals that historically would accompany basic sodium chloride (table salt), and be balanced in all animals (including humans) eating a proper pre-agricultural diet. There is a recipe for making sole in the link above and many similar methods can be found on the web and youtube.

The purpose of this post is to point to two of the most popular types of sea salt used to constitute the sole water: Celtic and Himalayan. The most noticeable difference between the two being the color difference between the Celtic (grey) and Himalayan (pink). The reason is that the Himalayan salt is much higher in iron content, which would make it much more appealing to those who are lower or deficient in iron (generally menstruating women) than those who might have adequate or even too much iron (men).

I could add a larger theory of cultural whereby cultural norms like women wearing pink is a function of natural necessity, and the reason that pink is feminine is because of their need for naturally occurring pinkness (namely iron constituency) because of a particular mineralogical need, but I don’t want to flesh that tangent out any farther here.

For those of you interested in cleanses and the flushing phase of a detox, you can drink a higher dose of sole to naturally flush your system and restore some balance.

Neolithic Injuries

Just as the paleo community has arrogantly—but I believe correctly—labeled a plethora of diseases “neolithic” (such as the whole category of autoimmune diseases, many different cancers, many mental health afflictions, livestock borne illnesses), I believe the same logic can be applied to many modern injuries, one of which I will speak of here.

Turning one’s ankle is the acute injury that easily impairs a neolithic human when one encounters a root elevated suburban sidewalk, or an unforeseen ditch or hole. Such traps are not uncommon in artificial topographies, but they are occasionally overlooked by the absent-minded, body unaware people we have become. This is one relative weakness we probably have as compared to our migratory ancestors, who would have had to be much more aware of pitfalls waiting beneath a bush or alongside a stretch of valley, as their entire livelihood would be at stake if an accident did befall them. Perhaps more importantly: such a scabrous and cattywampus landscape that hadn’t been preformatted for large machines and human walking alike would have toned paleolithic man’s joints—especially ankles, knees, and hips—to easily absorb the occasional indent or misstep without any major bodily response such as inflammation.

I’m sure there are many other acute injuries that occur as a result of the imposed and supposed neolithic lifestyle that we endure.

A tangential aside: as in the case of a swollen ankle or other acutely injured joint, isn’t the bodies response of causing the swelling something that should be left alone, not padded with the artificial invention of frozen water? I am no expert on these matters obviously, but I have learned to put a certain amount of trust in the body’s processes.