Creating Health

To take responsibility for creating health you will have to start thinking outside our cultural box.

Many people go about life feeling at the effect of numerous and often overwhelming, seemingly "outside" forces. When illness strikes, you might wonder "why me?" Our culture trains us to believe that we do not have power to protect ourselves from diseases that appear to invade at random from rogue genes or micro-organisms.

From a holistic perspective, we seek to understand physical disease as a representation of dis-ease of the spirit. From a philosophical spiritual perspective, humans primarily experience dis-ease as a result of activities of the mind which distort and conflict with reality. Wrong views of reality lead to emotions and actions that generate pain and suffering.

Most illness arises from an incorrect self-image. Basically, our culture teaches us that we exist separately from all nature/reality, as finite and relatively impotent individuals. In fact, in your essential nature, which consists of pure awareness, you are infinite, abundant, and eternal. As an organism, you exist interdependently with all other organisms. Health arises when you realize your true nature and actualize it in your thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

From a holistic perspective, disease comes to you not as an enemy, but as a teacher, guiding you to learn how you are out of harmony or alignment in body, mind, or spirit. To create health, you may have to overhaul your entire life.

For example, if you hate the work you do for a living, this wears down your spirit. As you lose spiritual power, your immune system weakens, and you contract repeated respiratory infections. Therapies may help you overcome each infection, but until you resolve the disharmony between your spirit and your livelihood, you will continue to express the disharmony in your physical susceptibility to infection.

In other words, very often, the outer (physical) expresses the inner (psychical). To address the inner causes requires inner work.

The first step consists in accepting that your physical ailments may actually manifest distress generated by harmful patterns of thought and emotion. Some of these you accepted from the culture as a child, when you had no choice; others you developed as results of insults, traumas, and events that occur in childhood when you have immature responses. Rather than creating health, these create dis-ease.

These negative thoughts and ideas - many of them unconscious until you do inner work - generate emotions which generate release of very powerful chemicals in your body, such as adrenaline and cortisol. These in turn affect all the systems of your body. When out of balance, these hormones can initiate or cause physical disease.

When creating health you take the same path but in the opposite direction, following principles used for hundreds of thousands of years by native healers known as shamans, and later incorporated into various spiritual paths. By adopting various practices that can induce altered states of consciousness - such as affirmations, prayers, visualizations, drumming, dance, laughter, fasting (physical or mental), vigorous exercise, and meditation - you can stimulate the release of chemicals that have profound healing and rejuvenating effects for the body.

If you simultaneously start to dismantle all the negative conditioning you received from the culture surrounding you and also start transforming your life so that it becomes a Path With Heart, getting rid of activities, relationships, and things that bog you down and steal your innate power, you will experience true healing from within, while you may also use acupuncture, herbal medicines, and nutrition to integrate and support the inner healing journey and realize its fruits in physical health.

I recommend Dr. Tracy Minton, DOM as another guide to greater spiritual understanding of your disease and creating health from the inside out, top down. She offers a variety of services that can help you release toxic beliefs and other psychic gunk that prevents you from realizing your true nature and experiencing high energy, joy, and health. You may wish to visit her website, Your Awakening Heart .

Steps to creating health

Click on the links to learn things you can do to enable you to create the life you want.

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