Weather, Geography and Environmental Factors in Pain, Illness and Health

From oceans to mountains, humidity to desert air, and the detrimental effects of non native EMFs: the diverse outer ecologies of this planet impact the inner ecology of each unique human organism.

Dear friends,

I’m writing you today from a coffee shop in the bustling little mountain town of Durango, Colorado.

Since arriving a few days ago my body has already undergone some noticeable, welcome changes as a result of exchanging the cold, damp air of Southern California for the deliciously warm and dry summertime winds of the southwest.

When I left California, the same gray/white haze hugged the land as it had most days since I moved there two years ago. After endless months of white/gray and foggy drizzle, it began to dawn on me earlier this year that I was becoming depressed. Which is always a sign that something is very wrong with my inner and outer ecology; because I do not naturally tend towards depression. I’m typically very energetic, optimistic and oriented towards possibility with a buoyant gratitude for being alive.

This move (to Southern Cali in 2021) was supposed to give me some much needed sunshine and ease after two difficult and stressful years. Instead, it plunged me into an endless, somber darkness.

If you ever travel through San Diego, you’ll see the grand archway downtown that greets visitors with a painted metal sign depicting giant palm trees, a golden sun, blue skies, a sandy beach and the words “Welcome to Sunny San Diego.”

While I have my theories about why this normally arid, sunny part of the world is now shrouded in misty darkness most months of the year, I’ll save that for another time.

Today, I want to share my experience with weather and geography, and their impact on my physiology and psychology. This isn’t something we often take into consideration when exploring root causes of pain and disease (both physical and psychological); but we should. Light, electromagnetism, temperature, weather, geography and other environmental factors profoundly impact our health.

Some of you might remember, if you’ve been with me a while, that I almost moved (from Colorado) to Austin, Texas in winter 2021. After 4 months searching for housing amid the insane housing boom caused by a mass exodus of people fleeing blue (Democratic) cities and their draconian mandates during the Covid era, we finally found something and decided to rent it without seeing it properly due to the current tenants still occupying the house and showings that were limited to 5 minutes (with a baby on the way, they were fearful of getting sick).

A few weeks later, on move in day, I fell ill within hours. My throat closed up, nausea permeated my gut and I came close to vomiting. With prior exposure to black mold while visiting Stefan’s family in Texas a couple years back, I knew instantly what this was. A quick search of the house yielded the only evidence I needed: the kitchen had several areas of obvious mold growth. Knowing that what we can see is usually a fraction of what is actually permeating the home, we immediately re-packed the U-haul, took our belongings back to storage and went back to living out of AirBnB’s and hotels.

That’s when I chose “Sunny San Diego,” because I’d visited there in the past and its typically dry climate and consistently pleasant weather sounded like the respite my body and soul needed. I had no idea what I was headed towards.

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Weather, geography and the human organism.

Some people thrive in humid conditions.

I do not.

Some people thrive living by the ocean.

I do not.

If ever I doubted it before, I know it deep down in my bones today.

Don’t you find it fascinating that we react so differently to various ecological and geographical phenomena?

I sure do.

We react to our environment not just physically, but emotionally as well. I have friends who will never live anywhere but the beach, and others who will never live anywhere but the desert.

After the past two years, I now have no doubts: I thrive in the mountains, and I decline dramatically living by the coast (at least the west coast of North America).

As human beings, we are NOT all built alike.

What you need to feel healthy and vital may cause me to fall ill; and vice versa.

Though we have the same basic makeup from a physiological standpoint, our needs are as varied as we are. I see this as evidence that it is (at least in part) our soul and spiritual make-up that predisposes us towards certain physiological vulnerabilities and unique soul needs when it comes to the environments we live in.

Whether you believe in a spiritual realm or not, it is undeniable that we vary greatly in terms of constitution, metabolism, energy production and personal desires.

During the last two years living in Southern California, I spent nearly every day feeling chilled to the bone (even with the heat blasting every day, including in summer). As a hot blooded Italian who is usually the warmest person in any room inside or out, this was a bit shocking. Then, my body slowly succumbed to chronic inflammation; all of my joints began aching; my face turned puffy; my eyes felt goopy and started to hurt every day, while my brain felt like it was swimming underwater; my hearing diminished and my lungs felt constantly stressed and oxygen deprived.

Alarm bells started going off in earnest when a spiritual malaise set in earlier this year.

Every morning I went to war inside my own head, and many mornings I lost the battle. I knew I needed to move; to go walk on the beach or go for a trail run; in the very least to get off the couch and walk around the block; but I didn’t want to move. My will felt paralyzed.

A love for hiking real mountains inspired me to make the trek to Idyllwild - a small mountain city two hours east with several fabulous trails. And every time I made that drive, I felt the malaise lift and my spirits soar when the dense, gloomy humidity overhead gave way to sunshine and dry air. For a few blissful hours while hiking, I felt like my usual happy self again.

Could weather really impact me this profoundly?

I was beginning to realize that, yes, it can - and it does.

Then, in late spring, Stefan and I took a short 2 day vacation to Joshua Tree to experience the Integratron - an all wood geodesic dome that claims to be built on a geopathic stressor for the purpose of harnessing the earth’s natural electromagnetic fields in a particularly powerful manner that they take a step further with singing bowl sound baths designed to induce episodes of deep healing and transformation. I didn’t experience anything that dramatic, but I DID experience some really intense vibratory (sound) energy even without the singing bowls.

Sound is one of the 5 kinetic energies, and while we usually think of sound as something we hear, it actually manifests mostly as vibration that our bodies feel. Just think of music with a deep bass drumbeat that reverberates in your body. Sculptures - whether natural or manmade, like architecture - create sound waves or vibrations that we feel in our bodies (usually subconsciously) even if we don’t hear them. Many animals like whales, dolphins and bats use sonar to navigate (called echolocation). Some blind humans have even learned to use sonar to get around cities!

I’m utterly fascinated by the health impacts of the 5 kinetic energies: light (radiant), electromagnetic, thermal, sound and mechanical. Each of the first four have profound impacts on each other, and on the 5th; mechanical energy is stored and used by our fascia, muscles, tendons and bones to produce movement.

On that trip I started to really think about the fact that mountains create distinct sound vibrations that differ from the vibrations of a desert, rain forest or beach. Like our unique taste for all kinds of weird and wonderful art and music, we will all be drawn to certain geographies because we love the way we feel when we are there. Sometimes we can put it into words, but most of the time - it’s just…a feeling.

The most noticeable change I experienced during that trip to Joshua Tree was watching my face de-puff overnight, along with my body. I finally felt like I could breathe, and my body felt delightfully unmolested - no longer suffocated by wet air penetrating my physical boundaries. I cried when it was time to go home.

Human skin is highly permeable, and we absorb our environment - from light and water to toxins to electrical energy.

When I’m in high humidity, I find it hard to separate my body from the moisture circulating around and penetrating my body; I can’t tell where I end and the world begins.

Whereas when I’m in dry air, I know those boundaries definitively, and it feels as though things are in their rightful place: I am inhabiting my body, while the air remains outside the boundaries of my lymph system (the lymph system sits just under the skin and is responsible for capturing toxins and ushering them out of the body).

Have you ever considered how climate, ecology and geography affect you and your body?

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Fear of pain vs fear of freedom.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the importance of self trust and truth, and mentioned that I was in a pretty epic battle with fear of freedom.

One year after moving to southern California I knew I wanted to leave. The only problem was, I had no idea where I wanted to move to.

In early 2023, I declared a personal “freedom to” for myself: the freedom to move. The “freedom to” process is something I’ve used with myself, my clients and online students for years in order to break through the patterns that keep us stuck. It helps us identify the real blocks, which are always internal.

Part of the “freedom to” process is to identify the obstacles on the path to the desired outcome or goal. The primary obstacle on my path was not knowing where I wanted to live. Plus, I had re-signed my lease for another year in early May. And there were some specific fears blinding me to possibility.

Two weeks ago, after noticing my mental health decline even more, I made the only decision I could make with the data I had: I needed to leave Southern California.

So I made arrangements with my landlords to be completely out of the apartment by September 30th, packed some hiking gear in my car and headed to Colorado - the only place I’ve ever felt at home, and somewhere I never thought I’d leave. The reasons I left are too numerous to elaborate today, but the primary thing keeping me from returning to Colorado (Boulder, specifically) were/are unhealed social wounds from the past that I have not known how to face.

Fear of pain keeps us grasping for relief by any means.

I rarely experience fear of pain anymore. I’m good at “being with what is;” I know my body in and out and nothing it does scares me. I now feel like I have a solid understanding of when my body is reflecting me to myself (bodies reflect our fears and desires, and our patterns of holding on vs letting go, among other things), vs when my body is responding to toxins, vs responding to something I’ve eaten, or to geography, or EMFs. I have a solid database of knowledge to draw from today in order to categorize what I feel on a daily basis.

My real work lies now in facing my fears of freedom.

Freedom, for all of us, requires that we confront whatever it is we’re actually afraid of most. These deeply rooted fears are usually social, or existential. Fear of pain is a clever distraction designed to prevent us from pursuing freedom. Whereas fear of freedom is about running a personal gauntlet towards whatever it is our soul and spirit longs for. Freedom is represented by something personally meaningful and emotionally risky.

What I fear most is not physical pain - it is social pain. Which means that, to my soul and spirit, true freedom (for me) lies in the social realm.

So here I am, running my gauntlet.

The happiness I feel being back in Colorado is undeniable. This is me after a 5 hour hike up to 11,000ft elevation, sitting at a regenerative farm and restaurant listening to live bluegrass music playing on the lawn.

This was my view when we reached to top of the hike:

Though I’ve only made it to the southwest corner of Colorado, where there are no social risks, I feel liberated already.

I burned the boats.

There is no going back to California (except to pack and move).

I have a few weeks to figure out if I will move back here or not, and on Tuesday I will arrive in Boulder…where some very real fears will no doubt surface. They’ve already been whispering at me. Readiness is an illusion, so I won’t say “I feel ready.” I can only say that, after 5 years, I’m done capitulating to these particular fears.

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A note about non native EMFs (electromagnetic fields):

Last night I finished reading Arthur Ferstenberg’s book The Invisible Rainbow. I highly recommend reading it if you want to get an uncensored history of electricity, and the impacts of non native EMFs on human health.

We are electrical beings, and we are profoundly impacted by electricity of all kinds.

Some of you reading this have told me you are extremely sensitive to EMFs. Some of you, I know, are curious and interested to learn more. Some of you may believe, because we’ve been conditioned to, that EMFs pose no health threat whatsoever and whoever thinks so is a conspiracy theorist. There are mountains of evidence to the contrary, for anyone willing to spend time reading science papers and historical documents. This is something I’ll be writing about a lot in the near future (when I feel like I understand the science better).

I bring this up because there was a very big 5G tower a few blocks from my apartment in California, and all of my symptoms correspond to those of EMF toxicity.

I’ve heard (from Jack Kruze) that there is a 3rd - manmade - Van Allen radiation belt over Southern California.

Maybe it was a perfect storm of high humidity, low lying thick white misty clouds, lack of sunlight for months at a time and exposure to EMFs that caused my symptoms. Maybe I’ll never know for sure. But one thing I do know is that, even with 5G towers here in Durango, I feel like myself again.

Maybe I need the electromagnetism and sound vibration of the mountains. Maybe it’s mountain culture. All I know for sure is that I feel good here.

Please share any stories you have of geography, weather and ecology on you and your body.

By sharing these stories, we will normalize our unique needs for specific environments, and how specific environments - natural or manmade - induce illness in some people.

Pain and illness are not a sign of defect in the body - they are the body’s way of communicating to us that our inner and/or outer environments are unhealthy for us in some way.

Our job is to pay attention, and take the necessary action to create healthy ecologies - within the boundaries of our own skin, and out there in the world.

With love from Colorado,
Elisha

Stefan says hi, too :)