Why I chose not to get vaccinated.

   

     It feels important to me that I share this story. I want to just open up my heart and share from my own experience, not try to argue any points or try to convince anyone of anything. At the heart of my life philosophy and everything that I have learned in my healing journey is a deep believe that we all have the capacity, the right and the responsibility to get still, go inside ourselves and listen to our own internal authority and live from that place. When we learn to live that way, we also learn to respect others' right and ability to live that way as well, even if we would choose to do something different than what they choose to do. Martha Beck, who has been one of my primary teachers in healing from abuse and living a healthy free life often talks about how living in integrity is NEVER about controlling other people. 

    With that said, I just want to share my story about why I chose not to get vaccinated for covid and some of the surrounding experiences. Why is it important that I share this? There are a lot of reasons. One is that so many people who made the same choice are intimidated to talk about it and are self-censoring out of fear of getting shamed, loosing their careers, loosing their licenses, or loosing opportunities. I think we all benefit when people feel free to share openly their different perspectives. Many spaces still have vaccine mandates and I often wonder if the people in those spaces are aware that they are not hearing the voices of people who chose not to get vaccinated. I think about my own school, Southwestern College often. When people are having conversations in those in-person classroom spaces, are they aware that the voices of the unvaccinated are not present? They are not hearing that perspective. Does that matter to them? Are they seeking it out? I wonder these things. Penland School of Crafts also still has a vaccine mandate for their employees. Southern Dharma Retreat Center has one as well. These are all places that I used to be welcome in and used to participate in. When I spoke with the director of Southern Dharma Retreat Center about the vaccine mandate, she engaged in the conversation briefly but then quickly closed it down and said she had to go when I wanted to keep talking about it. This is what is happening and has been my experience. I've also had people get up and walk out of the room when I told them I wasn't vaccinated, physically move away from me, get out of the hot tub, send me a text a week later telling me that I should have given them a choice about allowing me in the car with them, inundate my Facebook profile with their perspective, shame me, tell me I am a white woman of privilege who doesn't think communally but only thinks individualistically, and tell me they want to avoid being physically near me. I know the reasons for these behaviors. I know people have been told that I am putting them in danger. But the truth is that that is simply not true. And I know that it's not true. Sometimes I wonder how people don't know this. It seems so obvious to me. 

    When covid first started in 2020, I was living at Earthaven Eco Village in Black Mountain, NC. It is an intentional community of over 300 acres of forested land and over 100 people. I shared a house with 20 people. I was also working at CooperRiis Healing Community, where I had worked since 2012. When we were told we needed to wear masks all day at work in the house, I pushed back. My experience at CooperRiis from the beginning was that it was a place where I could voice my thoughts and concerns and perspective and there was an atmosphere of cooperation among the staff that felt very healing for me. What I had gotten used to was that it was a place where my voice was heard and valued and solutions were found that would work for everyone. This had been a very healing part of working there for me because it was so opposite from the abusive environment that I had grown up in. I talked with my boss about the situation, but was told that it wasn't in the hands of CooperRiis. It was a state mandate and they didn't have the authority as a company to override it. It made no sense to me to wear a mask in a place where I literally lived, and slept and ate meals. The clients (or residents as we call them) were not required to wear masks. I researched the efficacy of wearing masks and the first thing I found was research from Japan that found that masks do not work at all to protect people from getting covid. I shared it with my boss. He suggested I do more research. 

    I quit soon after this mask mandate became implemented. The reason I quit was simply becuase it felt right. I decided to return to school where I had been taking classes at Southwestern College. Because they had put all their classes online, I was able to jump right back in and take my classes from Earthaven. In a couple of weeks, I was in school full time, doing classes from my computer. Earthaven, for the most part, just continued to live life as normal. I taught in person art classes to children and teenagers, inside without masks on, in the community building for 8 weeks. The people I lived with continued sharing a kitchen and community spaces as before. I did not feel afraid of getting sick. In fact, I felt as if there was a voice or some sort of guidance telling me to notice that I was not afraid. I searched inside myself to see if there was any fear about covid inside me and there was none. 

    I moved back to New Mexico at the very end of 2020 and into the intentional community where I had lived before in 2019, The Commons on the Alameda. There was a very different atmosphere regarding covid, not just in the community, but in the whole Santa Fe region. People were still wearing masks outside and inside when I arrived and there was a community agreement that we would do so. The vaccine was just starting to come out. For me, what I felt was just a lack of interest. I didn't really think that much about it. I just didn't feel the need for it. There are a lot of things like this in our society where there is a lot of hype about something that I'm just not that interested in and this was no different honestly. I just continued to go about my life. 

    Then the classes at my school started to go back in person and I wasn't able to attend because I wasn't vaccinated. I was in a supervision group with a supervisor who I liked and I was the only one in my class who had to join a different group with a different supervisor instead of continuing in the same class. This is when I started to consider getting vaccinated. I felt a sting during this time. It really felt to me, in my body, like discrimination. It felt hurtful and it did not make sense to me. I began to look into researching the vaccine. For me, this is just how I roll, I realized. When there is a decision to be made that is as big a deal as injecting something into my body, I don't just go and do it because the authorities tell me to. It's just not in any way how I live my life. I go inward, I listen to my inner voice inside my body. I get still, I feel inside myself for my inner guidance and I also do research. To me this just makes sense. I want to hear all the different perspectives and I want to decide based on that in combination with my inner guidance. I have spent so much time and energy cultivating and healing my connection with my inner guidance system. This is what gets severed when we experience abuse. When this connection gets severed, it is like we're lost at sea. We are easily manipulated, we loose track of what we want to do with our life and how we want to live and we loose our connection with our own joy. This is the fundamental building block of healing and health. This connection. It is essential. Without it, we are living someone else's life, not our own. 

    I got on my computer.  I remember the moment distinctly. It just was so obvious to me that I was not going to find what I was looking for there. Every single message was the exact same. There was no variety of alternative perspectives. For me, this is an obvious red flag. It's just not real. It's not. I knew one person who had sent out an email to our community with an alternative perspective. This person also happened to be the only doctor in our community. I sent her an email asking her if I could meet with her and talk about her thoughts on the vaccine. She had always been friendly to me and very approachable, so I thought she would welcome this. I imagined we would just chat over a cup of coffee or something and I could hear a different perspective. I was surprised to receive a somewhat closed off sounding email in return. She shared that because I was not a patient of hers, she could not advise me about anything. She also shared that there were people getting injured from the vaccine and that these injuries were under-reported. I didn't understand what she was talking about and the vibe of the email seemed very out of character for her, so I didn't press her any further to meet with me. 

    I called my supervisor and talked with her about the situation and she told me that even if I got vaccinated now, her class was already full. I started to wonder why I was choosing not to get vaccinated. I hadn't really thought that much about why I had not wanted to. After sitting with it for awhile, I realized that there were two main reasons that I think were influencing my decision. One was my experience with western medicine and one was my experience with manipulation. 

    I'm going to try and briefly share a summary of my experience with each of these things. When I was just out of college as an undergrad, I had a bronchitis-like cold. I thought it would go away on its own, but it didn't. It persisted until I realized I needed to get some help with it. I went to the doctor. This was the first time that I was not on my parents insurance and I didn't have my own. I walked into the doctors office and explained the situation to her. She looked into my mouth with a popsicle stick for a while. Then she told me she didn't know what to do or how to help me. She offered me some free pill samples that she had in her office. I don't remember what they were. I took them and they didn't help. Then I got a bill for over a hundred dollars. The visit had lasted about 15 minutes. I was so confused and shocked by the whole experience. At that time, a hundred dollars seemed like a completely ridiculous amount of money for the visit that I had had with her. I felt so upset that I actually wrote a letter to the doctor complaining. She wrote back and defended herself saying that she gave me free pill samples. 

    I didn't know what to do so I just lived with the cough for 12 years. It sometimes got worse and sometimes got slightly better, but it never totally went away. At its worst, I was unable to take a full breath. I would breathe and there was a rattling sound in my chest. It was very scary and uncomfortable. I just had absolutely no interest in going to the doctor again. Then I moved to Asheville, NC, where there are two herbalism schools and lots of herbalists all over the place. It is integrated into the culture here. Eventually, I decided to get help from one of the herbalism schools. I was matched with an herbalist. I also went to an integrative medicine clinic at the same time. They suggested I go on a dairy free, gluten free, sugar free diet. So I did that for three months while taking herbal medicine. My experience with both the integrative medicine clinic and the herbalist were so radically different from my experience with the doctor. The herbalist took time with me, asking me lots of questions. We met up twice and did two different rounds of herbal medicine. The whole experience was beautiful and healing and intimate and lovely. At the end of three months, nothing had improved with my cough. I got fed up and started eating ice cream again. Then, almost immediately after I had given up my diet, the cough went away. completely. 

    I moved to Ireland soon after that and I found that the cough seemed to be coming back a little bit. So I found another herbalist in Ireland and did some more herbal medicine. The cough went away. So, it was a process. There have been moments since then that it felt like the cough might be coming back, not very much, but a little and enough to make me feel a bit worried, but I always turn to herbal medicine now. The cough has been gone now and I have been healthy since 2015. It is amazing to be able to take a full breath easily and smoothly. Something we often take for granted. 

    The other theme, manipulation, is an even longer story. There is too much to say about this to say everything. But I will summarize by saying that healing from abuse has required me to understand and identify manipulation and to come home to myself rather than being bullied by it. What I have experienced in my life is that when I am bullied into making decisions that I don't want to make, I loose myself. I loose my joy, and my whole life flies off track. When the vaccine came out, it was very obvious to me that the messaging around it was extremely manipulative. It was aggressive and it was shaming of people who didn't want to get vaccinated. This is not something I'm into. It was a turn off to me. 

    This pressure was not only from the media, but it came even from personal friends. I don't want to be friends with people who act this way. There was a moment when I wondered if I was choosing not to get vaccinated in part because I was pushing back against the manipulation, which is just another form of being controlled. So, I really intentionally got quiet and meditated to find out if I was making my own decision or if I was just reacting. It was very clear. It was crystal clear to me that in my inner self, there was a clear "no" to getting vaccinated. If I had denied this, I would have cut myself off from my own heart. We are not encouraged to live this way in our culture because we live in an abusive society, but this is how I have learned to live if I want to feel free. 

    I felt settled in my decision. There was peace inside me about it. Then the hate speech started. At first it was outside my community and then it found its way inside. I felt my whole entire self require me to speak up and I did. What happened next changed everything for me going forward.

    I love that community in Santa Fe, The Commons. It feels like the family I never had. I feel so loved and supported and embraced by them, and I know that had I not felt safe enough to speak up, I never would have. There needs to be a certain amount of emotional safety in order to disagree with people. I am so grateful to this community that they are a space where I could do that. I was never able to do this in my family growing up, which is why I am now estranged from them. 

    I spoke up, and the others in the community who had also chosen not to get vaccinated and I decided to have a meeting and form a group. This is when I became exposed to all these crazy things that are going on. There's Kyle Warner sharing about his vaccine injury. There's Dr. John Campbell reviewing all sorts of studies and putting them in layman's terms. There's funeral director John O'Looney talking about how people who died from getting run over by a car have "covid" as the reason for death on their death certificate if they tested positive at the time of death. Tess Lawrie, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, and the list goes on and on and on. There's too much to list here, the point is that this was the moment when I started to become exposed to all of this information. 

    I think I'm going to end this here, at least for now. It's long already. Those were my initial reasons for not getting vaccinated. I trust my body's guidance. Whenever I do not trust it, I regret it. It doesn't matter what it is. I believe that whatever people chose to do, if it was coming from a place inside them that felt like the right choice for them, then it was. 

    The mandates were the hardest thing for me and I still firmly believe that they are discriminatory and unethical. But I also believe in a Spiritual world, and that everything exists to be our teachers in this Earth School we are in. I have learned a lot from the mandates. I have had so many insights that I've never had before and I feel like a wiser person now because of them. I'm grateful for this. 

    I also believe that we are in the midst of what is being called a Transformation of Consciousness. Perhaps this is all part of it. I believe so. People are waking up to all sorts of things. I personally feel that I am peeling away layer after layer of lies that are integrated into our culture. The more layers of lies we peel away, the more free we become. I'm grateful for this too. 

    I'm grateful for human kindness, for people who meditate, for people who have a true spiritual life, for people who live in their integrity, for people who tell the truth. 

    The end. 

    Thanks for reading, 

    Suzanne.