You Can’t Heal This Planet Until You Heal Yourself
By: Olya Barnett
Tags: Healing, Earth, Environment, Climate, Climate Change

I was pretty oblivious to this planet’s issues until I started doing my own inner-work. How could I possibly look at something else and recognize the severity of the problem if I couldn’t even recognize or get through my own stuff?

I’m embarrassed to say that I even went to Thailand nearly ten years ago to “volunteer” and rode an elephant because I thought it was an *amazing opportunity*. It wasn’t until the middle of that trip when an elephant was dragged into a restaurant with chains that I regretted the whole experience of why I was even there. This elephant wouldn’t be in here if I wasn’t on this trip. I was naively part of the problem even though I thought I was there to “support” the cause.

And that’s a common pattern I have noticed myself having up until now; naively being part of the problem instead of being the solution.

I didn’t recognize for a long time that burning fossil fuels created extra carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and causing an imbalance in our climate, hence why the climate was beginning to change dramatically and therefore causing drastic effects on our neighbors (hurricanes that wipe towns and citizens, the worst droughts in history, etc.,)

I didn’t recognize that animals were literally at the brink of extinction because our neighbor wants to hang an elephant’s iron tusk in his house or that walrus’ are LITERALLY falling to their death because of what WE HAVE DONE to this climate — nobody wants to watch these videos — but at this point, everyone SHOULD — especially the ‘animal lovers.’ (video below)

I didn’t recognize that we were killing our planet and our own survival rates by physically knocking down all of nature with only 35% of wilderness left (IN THE WORLD) so that we can replace it with farmlands for our crops (which, one day, the atmosphere won’t even support because we killed all the trees and there’s less oxygen for anything survive, let alone thrive).

We are taking away the CORE of what we need to survive because money and consumers (aka us) are supporting the shots of what happens such as eating more meat, wanting to get closer to wild animals, knocking down variety for consumers- and choosing one business above the rest (i.e., Amazon), the list goes on.

THIS IS NOT SUSTAINABLE.

We have been led to believe that others can solve these problems for us. That we just need to have a vaccine or a cancer treatment and that we’ll be fine. I’m sorry to say that that’s absolutely NOT correct.

That’s not what happens here, people. These climate and epidemic issues are only going to get worse. We need to start getting to the ROOT of these problems, and that doesn’t mean blaming somebody else; it means recognizing that we are the ones who are accountable as a whole.

We need to understand where these illnesses and diseases are coming from instead of finding the quick fix to every new problem that arises because, trust me, the way we are heading — they will ALWAYS arise. This is only the beginning. Ebola, Covid.. these ALL come from animals; from nature! The direction of how we treat this planet is AFFECTING the animals and mirroring right back onto us. We aren’t better than the bats that gave us Covid, or any animal for that matter. We just have a bigger brain to do something about it. And the more we blame others, the more we need to take accountability for our actions and understand WHERE and WHY this happened and search for the resolution instead of always trying to find a new solution.

Nevertheless, WE ARE THE PROBLEM.

I didn’t wake up to these issues until I started waking up myself to my own inner-problems. And once I began to solve those, I began waking up to other problems; bigger problems that now jeopardize our FUTURE, as in — you, RIGHT NOW, who’s alive today. Let’s hope we make it to our children and grandchildren because I can’t even ponder whether we’ll make it that far ahead.

We aren’t living a sustainable life. In fact, we are killing off everything natural to create a human-made world, and for what? Convenience? Some extra money in the bank account? A brand new car that reduces air quality? A fur coat that someone LITERALLY had to kill an animal for?

We live a delusional life that thrives off comparison and competition because that’s what we’ve been taught since we began school.

We aren’t living in a sustainable environment, and for every tree we kill, we tighten our own grasp to survive. We just don’t see it right now because we aren’t living it…YET. Just like if our town hasn’t been hit with a hurricane that wiped everything out. If we didn’t experience it — did it really happen? If a tree falls in a forest, and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? We can’t act like these aren’t our problems, because sooner or later these issues will escalate and will be knocking down our doors instead of tapping gently to wake us up.

I get that for some of you that this isn’t a positive article. And to be honest, it’s not supposed to be. We need to wake up to how this world is running while we are turning our blind eye and playing with our toys. We choose convenience and money over what’s right just because we don’t want to bother or it’s someone else’s problem. We need to EDUCATE ourselves and our young ones about what’s really going on around us, why, and what can proactively be done about it.

You would never show a group of people (especially children) a video of walrus’ falling and dying to their death — because nobody wants to see that; it’s absolutely horrifying. And if we watch it, we’ll feel for it, which means that we would HAVE to do something about it. So we think, ‘why me when someone else can do the job better?’ This problem is happening because of you and me, because of how we have let this get this bad. Personally, I think everyone should watch those horrifying videos, especially all you animal lovers.

I believe this is why so many people are waking up and choosing the self-development path, so they can wake up to the bigger problems that are going on outside of us before it’s too late.

And that’s the thing; we can’t solve other problems for people because most times we can’t even recognize our own. So how can we possibly solve a global one? This is why it starts with you and your healing.

When you learn how to heal through your own journey, you begin to awaken yourself and others. Then the planet. The scale increases with your awareness. But you’ve got to start with yourself.

The big companies want one thing: to be the best. That’s what we are taught our whole lives. To be the best in sports, in school, in life. But that isn’t a sustainable mindset because it separates you from everyone else, from the collective. It’s physically NOT possible to operate alone forever without having detrimental results. Plus, we all knowing working together has far more power than working alone. That’s the problem with the big companies now — we, the consumers, are the ones who are BLINDLY supporting them. Competition is not how we thrive; it’s how we die. Variety is how we thrive. Collective work is how we thrive. Growth is how we thrive individually; imagine the ripple effect of what we can do alone and then what we can do as a collective.

We have SO many issues at hand. But we can’t begin to solve them until we begin to solve our own.

Please educate yourself. Please work on YOU. Otherwise, you are only turning a blind eye to yourself, those around you, and this entire planet as a whole — whether it’s a tree, a walrus, or your child — it always starts with YOU.

I’ll leave you with this last quote,