The Wisdom of COVID-19: How to Rejuvenate, Reclaim Hope, and Heal in the New Post-Pandemic World

By Karyn Shanks MD

What is your COVID-19 story?

Have we been sitting ducks to a spectacular, random, terrible, and escalating global crisis we had no control over, waiting for the “experts” to save us?

Has our only recourse to the pandemic been crisis-care and survival-oriented living?

The Wisdom of COVID-19 offers you a new perspective—one that illuminates the root causes of the pandemic and opens the way for us all to heal—ourselves and planet Earth.

We’ll see how COVID-19 emerged from a global ecological catastrophe and loss of human immune resilience due to chronic disease—factors we can control.
But we need a new narrative.

We must reckon with our trauma.

We must answer the Earth’s call to create a new equilibrium of resilience and successful living even in the face of a virus that would claim us as its niche.

Internationally recognized physician, teacher, and author, Karyn Shanks MD, takes us on an extraordinary journey to regain our most precious resource during one of the greatest challenges of our collective and personal histories: control of our own lives.

Drawing from the sciences of planetary ecology, human immunology, neuroscience, and the new science of Directable Human Potential (epigenetics, neuroplasticity, core Functional Medicine systems biology, and transformational psychology) Dr. Shanks shows us what COVID-19 reveals about our world and ourselves.

How COVID-19 has emerged from the global crisis of ecological catastrophe and loss of human immune resilience due to chronic disease.

And how within this knowledge we find our roadmap. For saving us. For saving our beloved planet Earth. For recreating a resilient and vibrant human community.
She tells us the true story of the untapped potential within our Earth and within each one of us. Potential that’s only accessible if we accept our beautiful Earth’s assignment: to heal.

Where we’re headed in this book:

•Our Beautiful Earth’s Assignment: The Earth’s urgent call to heal.
•Community: Who we are (the web of life).
•Vulnerability: Where we are (diminished biodiversity, emergence of dangerous species, depleted vital resources, immunological catastrophe).
•Resilience: Our call to action (should we choose to accept it) to create personal and collective immune resilience through planetary and self-care.
•Our Reckoning: To heal, we must overcome our trauma and the locked in stories that keep us sick, suffering, and stuck.

In The Wisdom of COVID-19, we’ll move quickly from the deeper story of a global viral pandemic, to the Earth’s assignment put before us, and the action steps we are being asked to take—to rejuvenate, reclaim hope, and heal in the new post pandemic era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Karyn Shanks MD
• Release date: Jun 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781733917643

Karyn Shanks MD

Karyn Shanks MD is a physician-healer-teacher-writer who lives and practices in Iowa City. Her work is inspired by the science of Directable Human Potential—epigenetics, neuroplasticity, core Functional Medicine systems biology, and transformational psychology—and the wisdom gleaned from the healing journeys of thousands of clients over her thirty-year career. She approaches all of her work through the Unbroken philosophy and framework—that we all have vast untapped genetic, biological, psychological, and spiritual potential.She is the founder of the Unbroken Academy, creator of the Unbroken Workshop, and author of HEAL—A Nine-Stage Roadmap to Recover Energy, Reverse Chronic Illness, and Claim the Potential of a Vibrant New You, as well as numerous e-books, articles, and weekly emails offering readers knowledge, encouragement, and support on their healing journeys. See her work and become a subscriber at KarynShanksMD.com.You may also follow Karyn on Instagram and Facebook. Or join likeminded seekers of truth and healing in her private group, Grit and Grace.Karyn is a graduate of the University of Chicago, Pritzker School of Medicine, completed a residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Iowa, and is board certified in Internal Medicine, Integrative-Holistic Medicine, and Functional Medicine. She founded the first center in Iowa dedicated to a Functional Medicine whole-person approach to healing in 2001. She most loves her two grown sons, husband of nearly thirty years, three dogs, books, gym companions, and Nature playgrounds.

Book preview

Foreword

Many of us work hard to become awake to the truest truths of our lives. But we see how that gets tricky. What is truth anyway?

Sometimes truth is the stickiness of the same old entrenched stories we’ve told our entire lives. We call ourselves woke to justify our position, sometimes to lord it over those who disagree with us.

But there’s also a waking up to how our brains work to organize our life’s facts. There’s a waking up to the cautious, precarious beauty of knowing anything at all. We begin to see our truths as stories and stories as the interwoven bits of how we understand ourselves and our world.

We, as individuals, families, and tribes, often lock in our truths without awareness of having made a decision to do so. This is how we learn as children at the feet of our earliest caregivers. We adopt the first stories of our families and the cultures into which we are born. We learn to identify ourselves as the selves reflected back to us. This is an essential function of our brains to formulate our identity, our sense of value, our safety networks, and our earliest understanding of where, and to whom, we belong.

Many of these origin stories get locked in. It’s simply how it is and how it has always been.

We also lock in our stories in the face of trauma. When we’re scared, our biology gets to work instantaneously and beyond our conscious control to keep us alive. It makes powerful decisions for us about the truth of things. It locks us in to keep us focused on what we must do to survive.

The rustling in the grass is the tiger we instantly jump out of the way from. It is the tiger. That’s our truth. That’s what saves us.

But sometimes the rustling in the grass is not a tiger. It’s a soft bunny or the blowing of the wind. That’s the price for survival.

We’ve seen this very same phenomenon in the COVID-19 pandemic, haven’t we?

We’re scared and overwhelmed. Most of us have never experienced anything like this in our lifetimes. People are very sick and dying. Suddenly we’re catapulted into survival mode. We try to manage it rationally, but our brains on trauma will have their way with us. All of us. Including the experts. Including me.

Early March 2020, when it became clear there was a serious problem of a global viral crisis rapidly affecting all of our communities, I began scanning the news and scientific literature daily, sometimes hourly, tracking events, and trying to make sense out of them as both a responsible citizen and scientist.

At that time, the CDC formally recommended that all US citizens wear cloth masks in public, in addition to handwashing and social distancing, to stay safe and prevent the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Intrigued, I scoured the CDC website for the scientific references that supported their large-scale recommendation. There were none.

What was the strength of their claim that masks would help?

As it turns out, very little.

I went to the scientific literature myself and did an exhaustive search of all studies that looked at any kind of mask wearing to prevent infections. In all the decades of hospital-based mask use for infection control and experience with prior pandemics, I was surprised to find just a few small studies from which no strong recommendations could be made.

There were no studies looking at mask wearing in the public domain for its effect on any outcome.

So, how could the CDC, a science-driven organization, make an official recommendation for the mass use of face masks to prevent spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus without discussing the lack of scientific evidence to do so? Surely some of us would be looking for it.

Mask wearing rapidly became politicized and polarized. Media commentary about the virtues and evils of mask wearing became rampant.

Wearing a mask became associated with caring for others, being smart about the obvious benefits, being liberal, and voting