Plastic Detox on Netflix is about infertility. That story will take all your attention, and rightly so. But the film carries two more, and I do not want you to walk past them. One is the innocence of scientists, and the power that stands behind what they create once it becomes a product. The other is a woman in Louisiana who won a war against a corporation, with the help of the dead.
Perhaps here in Europe the situation is better than in the US because we have all the EU legislation that “protects us” from the harm we do to ourselves.
There is a chance your attention will stay with the central story: infertility, the sadness around it, and the difficulty of getting pregnant for the couples participating in the film, and the research. And despite my love for the field of fertility, pregnancy, and birth, I still invite you to pay attention while watching to two more strong stories and messages.
I call one The Scientist and the other The Warrior.
The Scientist
The innocence of scientists. So busy with the experiment, the invention, the idea. Not thinking, not checking what comes next, after it is invented.
The evil does not sit with them. It sits behind them. It sits in what happens to the invention once it becomes a product. A force that has no interest in scientists knowing or asking about the damage of what they develop. Because what happened in the last centuries is that a great dependency was created. Large amounts of money. The power of control in the places of decision- makers. The influence of financial groups is enormous in places like the lobby in Congress.
In the film, we meet the traumatic story of a baby who died at age two. Seemingly another private, sad story. But this story met him personally. And as a scientist, not only as a profession but because the Scientist archetype is very dominant in his soul, he could not help but go out and investigate. Maybe it is connected to the materials he worked with?
He took it as a hypothesis and went on a personal journey to correct an injustice, personal and global, that he had unknowingly been part of. The injustice is that scientists invent as if they are on a playground without rules. Without asking what happens if and when this becomes a product and actually succeeds. What happens at the end of the process? How does it affect the user, the people, the person?
The Warrior
The second story is almost invisible and deserves its own stage. I want to put the spotlight on it.
Let me open a parenthesis here. I feel this story is connected to what I teach my colleagues about the extraordinary energy channels. Energy channels in the body that you can touch and feel with the hands, with the familiarity of what is felt beneath the hands, together with trained intuition. Working with those meridians is partly working with ancestral energy. When does such energy come to support me? When does it activate me without me being aware that it activates something that brings inexplicable frustration, even from life itself?
I will give an example. You work in what your parents destined for you. You listened to them. The frustration you have today at work is because you are not working in the profession you dreamed of. If you remember what you dreamed of being when you were growing up. And I am not talking about the small child you were, but the teenage girl, the young woman. What did she dream of becoming?
So who is the Warrior and what does she fight for?
Sharon Lavigne, a Black woman from Louisiana near the Mississippi River, fights against a giant corporation. She went through a journey that, without faith and the Warrior archetype, would not have even begun.
What happened was that her close friends and family members died around her from cancer at a fast rate. The area is called Cancer Alley.
What she also tells is about faith. A strong faith in God. She turned to Him, and He answered her. He did not say move house, start again: it is too hard. She heard: fight. The feeling that she had no choice. The connection to those closest to her heart, friends and family who fell ill, and the higher truth from God, helped her in the battle.
Once this land grew sugar cane on plantations. Today it grows plastic in plants. Same word, opposite meaning. From what the earth gives to what poisons it.
In December 2019, a public records request revealed something that changed everything: the corporation’s own archaeologists had found the burial sites of enslaved people on the very land where the new factory was planned to be built. The ancestors were literally beneath the ground where the machines were meant to stand.
This was the turning point. The sacred ground of her ancestors became both a moral shield and a legal weapon. You cannot build on the graves of the dead. The discovery united the community, opened a new legal front, and gave the battle a force that went beyond permits and pollution numbers. In September 2022, a judge revoked the factory’s permit. The ancestors had spoken. They protected the living from beneath the earth.
She said her ancestors were turning in their graves, seeing that wealthy and powerful interests were again exploiting the same land and the same people for profit, at the expense of their health and their lives. Only now the power came from elsewhere, and wore a different face.
This time it was done in the shadow, as if unseen. This time they were not people who were bought, exploited, traded, and tortured in life without humanitarian conditions, with much unnecessary death. This time the exploitation seemingly had nothing to do with Black people and nothing to do with enslavement. Seemingly just another place in Louisiana.
But it was not. Who is the local population? Mostly Black. Generations back, their fathers and mothers were traded, suffered to work on the plantations. And today the plants are traded on the stock exchange at the expense of the lives and health of those same locals.
What she managed to do was not to change what already stands and poisons. But thanks to her, thanks to God and her dead ancestors, no sin was added to crime. The air she breathes will not get worse.
And us?
I hope the world will wake up and the young generation will bring a revolution, as a young generation can do. Less use of plastic, less production, and real recycling, not fake recycling.
Yes, they sold us for years here in Holland and in the world that there is real recycling of plastic. There is knowledge for recycling, that is true. But what? It is not profitable. I hope they find a way for it to be profitable, or that the fat companies take responsibility, or are legally required to recycle. And not only 10% but much more, because technically it is possible, just not profitable.
So meanwhile we swim in a sea of plastic. And nature screams from pollution.
But as I teach my students: micro and macro always simultaneously. If it is like this outside, in nature, in the environment, then it is also at the level of the human being. Inside him, physically, there is plastic in our bodies and also in the placenta. At the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual level.
Plastic symbolises superficiality. So how deep is the connection between people, between a person and nature, within the person?
The film shows this exists in the placenta and in our cells. In all of us there is plastic. So if it exists in us physically, it exists in us at the other levels too. Symbolically, you could call it.
Also in my teachings, I explain this at the level of metaphor regarding the extraordinary meridians, the micro and macro, and the archetypes.
The environment is full of plastic. The sea is full. The earth is full. Our bodies. Our babies. Our cells. The placenta.
How is it at the spiritual level? At the emotional level?
How natural are you? How much are you not plastic?
With Love,
Oda