Sonia Barrett | Deprogramming From Disease, Restoring Natural Longevity
Sonia Barrett is an activist, author, filmmaker, and all-around hustler for human health. Check out her 2017 documentary The Business of Disease, which this conversation is largely about. Be the keeper of your own mind, body, and spirit.
Plus+Full episode · 2h 34m
InnerVerse Plus+Hear the full 2h 34m episode
71 more minutes of this conversation, plus the complete Plus+ archive, premium video and a private podcast feed for your app.
Cancel any time.
Get tuned with Chance
Tuning forks find where energy is stuck in the field around your body and bring it back into flow. Sessions over Zoom, recorded for you to keep.
30 Minute Consultations
Have something to look at, or looking for guidance? We can consult oracular tools, read your chart, or just talk through whatever you choose.
In this episode
Core themes
Pink Ribbons and the Language of Symbols
Barrett traces The Business of Disease to an October around 2010, when she kept being asked to donate at the store and felt she was watching a marketing of breast cancer, more promotion than cause. She argues that symbols are our first language, likening the pink ribbon to the brown of a delivery truck or a car badge that carries a whole concept, and recalls pink on everything down to toilet paper. She offers her account that pink was once for boys as an example of how quietly beliefs get switched. Chance calls the familiar red spiky ball image an artist's rendering that stirs fear in some people.
Who Governs Your Own Body
Barrett argues that people are conditioned to believe someone else knows what is best for them, which is why it seems strange to say you have no doctor, and why categories like career, church and provider decide who we value. She calls the body its own country and territory, uniquely yours to govern, and says the system is built to make people doubt they can. For her, information moves you away from fear rather than into it, and she says she never uses fear to sell anything. Chance hears in the word evaluate a taking and eating of someone's energy, and says we are verbs rather than nouns.
Illness as a Signal, Not an Identity
Chance recalls a time when some families paid a doctor a subscription fee for monthly checkups and owed nothing when someone fell sick, and calls today's reversal a value flip. Barrett argues that allopathic medicine fragments the body and that dis-ease is the body looking for ease, an extreme signal sent after subtler ones were ignored. She contends that emotions can matter even more than food, and urges listeners not to take ownership of an illness as who they are, but to look at themselves honestly, without shame, and give themselves new instructions. Chance adds his view that pain is a signal, and that ignoring it makes it louder.
Nature Without a Safety Net
Barrett hikes every day without a phone, arguing that the device breeds a false sense of security and cuts people off from tuning in to where they are. Strip away every building, she says, and the human race would carry on, because nature provides what is needed and, in her view, the body is designed to fix itself under the right conditions. She hears home alarm commercials and insurance ads as fear programming. Chance agrees there is no safety net in nature and argues that technology is art, which only serves us when it follows nature instead of exploiting it. Barrett replies that nature is the original artist.
Feeling at Home in Your Body
In his closing reflections, Chance returns to what he calls the first hour's thread, unmanaged stress, and says it matters to get real with yourself about how you feel in your own skin, like a pack-a-day smoker who cannot know how bad it feels until they quit. He argues that much of the world's trouble comes from people not feeling good in their bodies, a short step from body hate, which he links to religions that call the world a prison. He says we were conditioned, from the family table to cartoons, to think what is bad for us feels good, but that you can align with nature's healthier aspects.
Quotes
“The cure is in the body, not in the business.”
“In my understanding of mind, body, spirit, it's kind of a hierarchy where spirit guides the mind, and mind guides the body. But if you take spirit out of your entire equation, you become two-thirds.”
“You're uniquely tied to your body, so it is absolutely yours to govern.”
“We're not anything that's a noun. We're nothing static. We are an expression in motion in the present moment.”
“Having your cellphone, it completely disconnects you from truly being bonded with the healing powers of nature.”
“Feeling good is its own reward. I just wish that we hadn't all been conditioned to think that stuff that's bad for us feels good, and that stuff that's good for us feels bad.”
“Nature is the original artist in what is being created and continues to be recreated. We are a work of art.”
“Reality is just much more incredible and expansive than what we've been sold.”
Sonia Barrett is an author, filmmaker, and radio host known for bridging science and spirituality through her work on mind-body health. She is the executive producer of the documentary The Business of Disease and has authored several books on health and personal transformation, topics central to her InnerVerse conversation on deprogramming from disease.
See all Sonia episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
