Where do You Hide in Your Life

The most common thing people say when asked what they could do to become healthier is to eat better and exercise. In other words improve their lifestyle, but it usually requires some traumatic stimulus like a serious medical diagnosis before a commitment to change is considered. What if you wanted to adopt a healthier lifestyle just because it felt natural and not something you had to do to survive? Your current lifestyle is an external manifestation of your internal environment. The healthiness of your nerves, hormones and metabolism determines the foods you need to eat, your level of physical activity and even the attitude you have toward social issues. For instance, often sugar cravings are derived from a metabolic imbalance not a lack of will power. Most people do not have a good enough relationship with their body to "feel" this so their mind comes up with a story to try to explain the uncomfortable desires. You know the stories; just listen to the voices in your head next time you want to do something that you know logically is unhealthy. Healthy people make healthy choices and unhealthy people make unhealthy choices. The road to health starts with a better relationship with your body so that you can "feel" its guidance. How many areas of your life do you compromise your true nature in order to fit in? Each time you compromise, you have made an unhealthy choice. In your body's attempt to provide harmony, the nervous system and biochemistry must continually compromise its function around your unhealthy choices. What is happening inside your body is directly related to what is happening outside of it. To your physiology, it shows up as external physical, emotional, mental and chemical stress. If this physiologic compromise is allowed to continue (in other words, an issue is not resolved), a pattern develops causing a new, less than optimal state of health. Accompanying this is a pattern of behavior in your temperament that supports this downward spiral. This is an adaptation, or being someone that you are not. These adaptations lower your ability to feel your body's real needs leading to more choices that distort your body's functions. This hinders its ability to communicate back to you, and the cycle of disease begins. This state of low physical awareness or not being in touch with your body allows disease and illness to go unnoticed until it becomes more serious and sometimes too late to correct. Early detection needs to start from within and not wait until it requires the use of high tech equipment. Diseases do not make people unhealthy, unhealthy people get diseases. The key to a healthier body is being able to know what your particular needs are and this requires a high degree of kinesthetic connection. Having your nervous system and biochemistry free of interference enhances this connection. Your body can then communicate to you in hopes that you will provide for it the resources needed for optimal health.  Health care intervention aimed at fixing the problem will only yield temporary and shallow results. This is typical in our health care system today. Most people go from one health crises to another and only do what was necessary to make the problem go away with as little inconvenience as possible to their lives. It is your life that the health problem is trying to get you to look at!

When you are ill or have symptoms, this is an opportunity to feel your body. Using an external agent with the intent of making the problem go away "saves" you from experiencing deeper parts of yourself. Those deeper parts have a message and the disease is just the messenger. Within this message is the key to wholeness. Needing to be "saved" implies weakness and a victim to external agents like a bacteria, virus, accidents etc. There is a direct relationship between how well you feel about yourself and how well you feel your body.

There are ways to facilitate awareness into a cybernetic loop so the body can compare the adaptation that was once necessary to the present conditions. A very precise adjustment to your nervous system or a particular herb to shift your biochemistry can provide an opening for your system to learn. But it has to be done at the precise time and with the right amount of force or the body will not accept it. This is not done by fixing the interference but rather by providing an environment to allow learning within the system. Directing the body's attention to itself allows its intelligence to undo the adaptation and who better than the body since it created it. Learning is the key to long lasting health; otherwise you will always be enslaved by the false hopes of the next miracle drug or cure that comes along. The learning I'm talking about does not come out of a book but through direct experience. The payoff for adaptations is time. By reducing our ability to feel it gives us a place to hide out until we feel powerful enough to simply be ourselves. And that is a healthy state of mind and body.