Our health is sacred

There's less joy without it.

In 2015, I took a class at Cherry Hill Seminary called Paganism and the Body. While a good deal of the class was focused on sexuality, one of my classmates did a paper on Pagan health. She did a survey, and the results included a shockingly high rate of obesity. I just went looking for any published surveys on Pagan health and found a few titles, but nothing that was accessible. [If you know of something, please share it!]

The sad thing was that I didn’t have trouble believing the results of my classmate’s survey. I expect we could do the same thing with mental health and find similar results. One of my first meaningful connections at my first Rites of Spring was with a woman who told me how the voices telling her to hurt herself stopped when she got her belly-button piercing. The conversation started with my showing her the tattooing that wraps around my abdomen. [For me, that ink feels like armor.]

Many of us are broken. Pagan religious practice give us so much. Group ritual lets us experience the connection we have not just to each other but to the world around us. To paraphrase RFK Jr. - The land connects us to 10,000 generations that existed before laptops. Among Pagans, we can rejoice in feeling the trees breathe and speak, and the singing of the stars instead of being informed that is Satan or insanity. We can acknowledge our sexuality and see our bodies as part of the sacred instead of separate from it.

This shouldn’t mean we make excuses to abuse it.

“All acts of pleasure are my rituals,” shouldn’t be a reason to binge on ice cream. Pleasure makes us glad to be in a world where tragedy can strike at any moment. But too much pleasure destroys the body, and destroys our capacity for pleasure.

Before someone starts telling me I don’t know shit about health because I’m not a doctor:

• I have a MS in nutrition and I’ve been reading studies since before I got that degree.

• Doctors get at most 2 hours of nutrition education. I got more than that in massage school.

Body positivity used to mean women not self-criticizing so hard that they became anorexic. That was good. Anorexia is a serious illness that kills. But so does thinking that people who are carrying excessive fat are actually able to be healthy. A search for ‘obese Tiktokers who died’ will get you a list.

This post isn’t about shaming anyone. What has been missing is the aspirational message that the gods want the best for us. Cutting 14 years off our lives isn’t good and it’s not aspirational. I know a lovely Pagan woman who writes the most amazing poetry. Her performances of said poetry are also amazing. She funny and expressive. She announced that she could be healthy and be obese. Not two years later, she announced she had diabetes. Nope. Not healthy.

There are myriad reasons why obesity is rampant in the US. A great many of those reasons have nothing to do with ‘self-control.’ This lovely poet had parents who had diabetes but their doctors never connected the chemistry of high blood sugar to a diet rich in processed carbohydrates. She thought her condition was genetic so she might as well embrace it.

That’s a [string of swearwords] lie and bad cultural messaging. This [expletive] garbage messaging shouldn’t be embraced or normalized, let alone celebrated.

It definitely shouldn’t be sanctified.

Ill-health keeps us from being the best people we can be; keeps us from being what the gods want for us. Ill-health keeps us from living our best lives. It keeps us from connection, and the delight and purpose of creating things - or new people. It keeps us from participating fully because we’re in pain either physically or mentally. Pagans value joy and celebration. We like to dance, tell stories, sing, and drum.

That’s hard to do if we’re sick. When I my lyme disease flared up, I couldn’t dance. I had no energy. If I had let it win, if I had agreed to be rules by a bacterial parasite, I might never have danced again. [We’d also be in a financial toilet, but that’s another story.] An elder I know, who’s filled with knowledge on Heathenism stopped attending fire circles because her feet were so riddled with arthritis. Joint inflammation is strongly affected by diet. She loved sugar and ate a lot of it.

I could go on in extensive detail about all the terrible things eating the wrong food does to our bodies and minds. I’ll spare you. That information is readily available. It’s even all over social media now! [If you really want to know, I’ve written a short book. I’ve already been writing about Pagans and food for a decade [the posts are still up on Witches and Pagans] but I’ll be updating that here over the next few weeks. But you could start here.

If we value the earth, then we will best be in alignment with those values by eating real food. Food that’s produced in a way that nourishes the soil instead of killing it. This kind of food nourishes both our bodies and minds, instead of filling us with poison that weakens and kills us.

A new year is coming. Make it a happy one.

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Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been Pagan since she was 14 [which was a long time ago] and been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. She has direct communication with her gods and they’ve always given her answers when she asks. [One does have to ask.] Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. Be warned.

Pagan Organizations

Cherry Hill Seminary

Sacred Well Congregation