How Do We AWAKEN People?
TRUTH. How do we awaken people to the truth?
There are some days, increasing exponentially, when I want to shout from the rooftop: “PEOPLE… PLEASE WAKE UP!”
Please STOP:
Blaming yourself for anything bad that’s been done to you. The world can be a harsh place and the vast majority of us simply sweep those emotions away – until they come roaring back. We need to rethink everything we think we know about trauma and healing.
Eating dessert for every meal… which is what you do when you have cereal, juice, and bagel for breakfast; Subway sub and iced tea for lunch; and frozen pizza and a Coke/beer/wine for dinner. Mass-produced food products have mega quantities of added sugars and other dangerous chemicals.
Buying mass-produced meats, eggs, vegetables, and fruits. This type of farming has ruined our soil and made these foods lacking in nutrients while inundated with toxic chemicals. Buy the majority of your food from nearby farmers and ranchers (or buy Organic at the store).
Believing the claims of your doctor or the many pharmaceutical companies claiming you can lead a better life with a simple pill or injection. So many health conditions can be reversed with diet, exercise, and lifestyle changes.
Listening to the advice from many of the big governmental agencies that were originally designed to protect us… but have now been compromised by power and money – the FDA, USDA, CDC, etc. Do your own research on all matters of life, health, and healing.
Watching the mainstream news, which all deliver a narrative that is often outdated or far from the truth. Again, do your own research rather than blindly believing what you see/hear.
If you want to live your best life – one free from doubt, anger, fear, sadness, regret, chronic illnesses – the only way to do so is to WAKE UP to the TRUTH around you.
If you are self-medicating (with alcohol or other drugs, food, pharmaceuticals, gambling, shopping, sex, porn, etc.), then you are NOT okay -- and I strongly encourage you to keep reading about the truths you may be unaware of.
What are these truths?
1. Trauma. The vast majority of us have lived through trauma in some form. Trauma here is defined as the unprocessed emotions from either experiencing a painful and overwhelming event or not receiving expected love and acceptance through actual or perceived neglect. Trauma can result in lasting emotional, cognitive, and physical pain and discomfort.
If you have ever overreacted to a situation, trauma likely caused it. We call these situations triggers because they activate a memory of the past traumatic event and which result in emotional and behavioral reactions, such as anger, fear, panic, or agitation.
Phrases like “Time heals all wounds” and “people are resilient” just don’t cut it anymore. Do you really want to live the rest of your life with this pain? Maybe you feel you deserve to; perhaps you think you were at fault… but you need to awaken from that negativity and forgive yourself.
If you are still unsure about whether you are affected by past trauma, take this assessment.
We don’t need to take one or more pills to “forget” or “manage symptoms” of our trauma – as in the case of antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds. We need to integrate those unprocessed emotions back into our full selves… we need to integrate these things and become WHOLE again. Masking symptoms simply leads to more frustrations and more trauma.
Forgiveness of yourself and the perpetrator of the trauma are definitely good starts – but to truly break free, you need to go on a healing journey – and awaken to a life of peace, love, and joy.
There are many techniques for dealing with your trauma – and the key is finding the ones that best work for you. I call these “healing modalities” and cover them in great depth in my book, HEAL! Wholeistic Practices to Help Clear Your Trauma, Heal Yourself, and Live Your Best Life. These healing modalities include:
Psychedelics
Spirituality
Nature
Nutrition
Somatic/Body
Breathwork
2. Food/Diet/Nutrition. The vast majority of us eat like crap – or CRAP: Chemically-enhanced, with added Refined sugars, Artificial flavors and ingredients, and Preservatives. Why? Because three-quarters of the typical grocery store and almost all conventional fast foods are not real food – these food-like substances have been manipulated (labeled ultra-processed) to remove fat and fiber and replace those with added sugars and lots of unrecognizable ingredients (the chemicals and preservatives), and in the process, making these foods addictive – leaving you wanting to eat a whole lot more.
What’s wrong with these fake foods? I hope you didn’t just think that, but if you did, it’s for several reasons. First, these fake foods offer little nutrition (even with the “added vitamins and nutrients” claims); they are truly empty and dangerous calories. Second, you are ingesting some very questionable chemicals, artificial flavorings and colorings, and preservatives. (Remember how Twinkies had a shelf life of 10+ years? And we ate those things! Yuck.)
But the biggest reason not to eat these fake foods is the added sugar, mostly in the form of fructose, which is a wonderful sugar in the actual fruits, but extremely dangerous when stripped of all the fiber and added to everything in the grocery store – from cookies and crackers to condiments and sauces to breads and frozen pizzas. The same is true for the breads and sauces at fast food restaurants.
Scientists have made the CLEAR connection between the massive amount of added sugar in our diets to weight gain (and obesity), diabetes, gout, hypertension, heart disease, and cancer. These sugars ramp up chronic inflammation in our bodies, leading not only to chronic physical health issues, but also mental health issues.
Your pantry and refrigerator are probably full of toxic, fake foods… food-like substances. Please take action for your health – and that of your loved ones. Read the labels for all the hidden sugar; the food industry has more than 100 names for sugar to purposefully confuse consumers… but remember that there many things missing from the label, such as the use of glyphosate and other dangerous chemicals.
On a side note, it has now been proven (even though we have always known this), that fat is NOT the culprit/cause of heart disease or any other conditions – when you are eating HEALTHY fats.
Because of all the fake foods we are eating, which all use cheap, toxic vegetable oils for the fat, we are overloaded with harmful Omega-6 fatty acids and deficient in healthy Omega-3 fatty acids. Besides the fat imbalances, look into how these seed oils are manufactured industrially – they need both chemical solvents and bleaching before being made shelf-stable. Disgusting.
Finally, we have to wake up to how far our food supply has been broken by the industrialization of farming and ranching. We have allowed these Big Ag farms to spray toxic chemicals (such as glyphosate) into our fields while at the same time depleting most of the nutrients in the soil by over-farming, as well as genetically adding poison right to the seeds, and we allowing the injecting of toxic chemicals (such as hormones and antibiotics) into our animals, including adding these toxic elements into the feed.
Our soils are extremely depleted, and our store-bought animal meats are toxic from the use of feedlots. Our focus and support should be on smaller, regenerative farms and ranches that grow produce without the use of chemicals while working to enhance the soil and raise animals humanely in fields and pastures, as they are meant to be raised.
3. Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals. While our political leaders often say the United States has the best healthcare system in the world, that is far from the truth. The reality is we have the best sick-care system in the world. Our focus is purely on triage and patching up. We are great at emergency care, but absolutely lost on getting to the root of the problem... and let's not forget the completely horrible drinks and foods served in hospitals and other healthcare facilities -- sugary, nutrient-weak drinks, snacks, and meals.
In the U.S., we spend about $12,555 (and rising) per capita on healthcare – double the average of other Western countries (which come in at $6,651). We have massively spiraling healthcare costs – with fewer benefits. Part of the reason for these rising costs and limiting benefits is Big Insurance, which now often dictates the treatment you will receive, more than your healthcare provider.
Furthermore, our healthcare system is great at providing pills – and more pills – to help you manage almost any symptom you have. Don’t believe it? Turn on a television streaming commercials and see all the many conditions that can be MANAGED ONLY with a pill that may have more side dangerous side effects than the thing it is supposed to be managing.
I’m not blaming our healthcare professionals, many of whom truly care about helping people. I am blaming medical schools, which spend more time talking about pharmaceutical drugs than they do nutrition… where the focus is more on treating symptoms instead of solving the underlying cause. And I blame health insurance companies, which have turned U.S. healthcare into the biggest joke, forcing diagnoses (so they can be coded), limiting the amount of time doctors spend talking with you, and moving people to use urgent care centers and emergency rooms instead of seeing their primary doctors.
But the biggest TRUTH is how far the pharmaceutical industry has fallen. We can look at the opioid crisis as just one of a LONG line of questionable (some would say abominable) practices and drugs brought to market that have resulted in billions and billions of dollars of PROFIT to the pharmaceutical companies. These are the companies that have convinced so many of us that all we need is a magic pill (or maybe 5 or 6 magic pills) to live our best lives. Sadly, many of these pills barely even manage symptoms, just effective enough over a placebo to get FDA (Food & Drug Administration) approval. We should change the spelling to HARMaceutical companies!
Many people could taper off the vast majority of these inefficient (but often costly) drugs by simply making a few changes, including changing diet, exercising, obtaining better sleep, reducing stress … taking a healing journey.
For example, research with psychedelic substances is showing amazing promise (if the person is willing to do the work involved) for getting to the root of trauma and helping people overcome depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, and more. And psychedelics do NOT replace the pharmaceuticals, but replace the need for most other daily meds.
4. Government. It’s been said, we get the leaders we deserve – and given how SICK we are as a society, it’s not surprising that the U.S. has only two major political parties, both of which are broken beyond repair. Our political leaders care more about getting re-elected and lining their pockets with contributions than they are with the VOTERS and with making real, much-needed changes.
Example: The FDA, which primarily focuses on the drug part of its mission, has been a revolving door with pharmaceutical industry personnel… making it no surprise that so many questionable drugs have received approval. MONEY talks – and we suffer for it.
Example: The USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) lets BIG AG companies self-report on food safety issues while being much tougher on smaller farms and ranches trying to raise food the right way. They also created and maintain our “Food Pyramid,” which has been completely wrong since its first iteration, placing too much emphasis on breads, cereals, and grains (created with industrially produced grains and chemically processed by Big Food.)
Example: The USDA publishes the “Food Pyramid,” first developed in the 1990s, but based on decades of bad nutrition advice. The food pyramid shuns fats and meats, pushing people to eat many more servings of breads, cereals, rice, and pasta – the mostly overly processed foods, pumped with chemicals and added sugars from industrially-harvested grains that are CAUSING our obesity and health crisis.
5. Mainstream Media/Social Media/Big Tech. Unfortunately, the mainstream media loves to follow the old narrative – even beat it into us – so if you’re just watching CNN or FOX, reading Time or Newsweek, you are never going to learn the truth. These media companies love following a strategy called “agenda setting,” influencing and playing a pivotal role in shaping the issues that affect the public, governments, and international organizations. And the same holds true for many government and business websites, such as WebMD or the Mayo Clinic, which strictly follow the conventional model and often post articles “debunking” the real truth posted by holistic and true healing practitioners.
And if you’re getting your information purely from social media, there are multiple issues. First, as long as you are following the approved narrative, it seems people can post just about anything. The problem arises, and we saw this especially related to the pandemic, when voices with the truth are censored and labeled “misinformation” or “false information.”
Who are the censors of social media? The Big Tech companies that own them. Social media seems like such a wonderful tool for sharing information and highlights, but they are not accepting of free speech; there is no free speech on social media. When people post something that goes against the “accepted” (false) narrative, these companies shut the post down or put a notice on the post that it was “deemed unfactual.” Who gets to decide these things?
In some cases, you will need to find the names of the people speaking the truth and go directly to their websites and/or watch and learn from them on podcasts.
Final Thoughts on the TRUTH – and Seeking YOUR Truth
I encourage you to do your own research – it’s that important. Your life literally depends on it.
Seek out the TRUTH for yourself. Our SICKCARE (Big Disease) industry is a MULTI-TRILLION dollar business that is impacted by Big Ag, Big Food, Big Chemical, Big Tech, Big Government, and Big Pharma... and WE pay for it all.
When we AWAKEN, we can rise above these broken systems – maybe even try to fix or replace them – so that we can live our BEST and HEALTHIEST lives.
It’s not about longevity – though you will likely live longer when you become AWAKE – but it’s simply about living the life you always envisioned for yourself… it’s about having HOPE again.
People to Follow to Help With Our Awakening
Here’s a list of people on LinkedIn you should follow. (There are others on other social media sites, but LinkedIn is my go-to.)
Additional TRUTH Resources
Dr. Randall Hansen is an advocate, educator, mentor, ethicist, and thought-leader... helping the world heal from past trauma. He is founder and CEO of EmpoweringSites.com, a network of empowering and transformative Websites, including EmpoweringAdvice.com.
He is the author of the groundbreaking Triumph Over Trauma: Psychedelic Medicines are Helping People Heal Their Trauma, Change Their Lives, and Grow Their Spirituality and the well-received HEAL! Wholeistic Practices to Help Clear Your Trauma, Heal Yourself, and Live Your Best Life.
Dr. Hansen's focus and advocacy center around true healing ... healing that results in being able to live an authentic life filled with peace, joy, love. Learn more by visiting his personal Website, RandallSHansen.com. You can also check out Dr. Randall Hansen on LinkedIn.
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