Strongly Held, Unpopular Opinion

If you’re an advocate of meditation, yoga, and a consciousness-based lifestyle and like to tout the scientifically based stress and anxiety reducing, immunity-boosting, inflammation-decreasing benefits of meditation and yoga practices while simultaneously attacking the wearing of masks and getting the Covid vaccine, please stop, step back and understand that these two sets of beliefs are incongruent.

You don’t get to selectively practice scientific and rational thinking just for the sake of confirming your biases. If you get excited about the research and benefits of mind-body wellness practices (as I do), great, but you’ve got to recognize that the scientific process that got us those results is the same process that tells us that wearing masks helps to reduce the spread of Covid-19 and went into developing a reliable vaccine.

I’ve recently seen more than a few of my mind/body/consciousness peers taking the conspiracy theory angle while implying (or flat out claiming) to be more aware or enlightened than the “sheep” that are wearing masks and getting the vaccine. Sorry folks, but you don’t get to have it both ways. Evidence is evidence, and the beautiful thing about this modern age is that we live in a time in which ancient practices are being verified by modern science.

But to go all Illuminati/Lizard People/Mind Control/Giving up you freedoms by wearing a mask/Microchips in vaccines with zero hard evidence to back up your claims doesn’t make you sound like someone who’s seeking the truth, but more like someone who just wants to believe what fits with their biases. And doing that gives all of us working hard to seek out the truth wherever it might take us look like a bunch of woo goofballs who rather than trying help their fellow humans, are playing a game of spiritual one-upmanship, and looking down on those who are too un-evolved to see through some sinister scheme hiding behind the curtain.

Look, I consider myself a seeker and I truly want to know the truth. The truth of how the world works, who we are, why we’re here, what it all means, and how and what this year of pandemic hell is trying to teach us. I don’t claim to have all the answers and I have gaps in my knowledge for sure. But when I have those gaps, (and there are plenty of them) I turn to the experts in those fields to help get the answers. And the experts I’m talking about typically aren’t found in YouTube documentaries spouting off crackpot theories with no verifiable evidence to back up their claims and who don’t understand the scientific method, critical reasoning, or the burden of proof.

I read, I ask questions, seek out experts when I can, and I trust the science, which has proven itself to be the most reliable model we have for understanding the universe to date. You’re welcome to your perspective; unique perspectives are what make us individuals, but as W. Edwards Deming reminds us, “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” Opinions aren’t facts, no matter how hard we want to believe them. And if we’re truly going to call ourselves seekers, then we need to get past our opinions and biases to look at what the evidence can show us and not what we’d like to believe.