Chronic / autoimmune conditions draw a line in the sand: what is health and healing?

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(Image by Tim @ Photovisions Nebraska)   Details   DMCA

I find that serious autoimmune conditions or chronic conditions sort of draw the line in the sand for us by upping the ante of what good health means because as we age our immune systems are compromised more easily than when we are young and things can snowball. Our DNA kicks in at a certain age, and we are confronted with imperfect genes that we inherited. But thanks to new research into the microbiome and the real role of the heart, we can mitigate those conditions so they are not as serious or debilitating, but that can call for profound life-style changes, especially for people who have bought in to the American diet but there is always more to learn, and when we experience a serious health issue when we are into the last third of life, we come to that line in the sand. Nobody (no one person) can life-coach us so we know what to do when we experience a health crisis, but I can tell you this, the gut is key and the information for how to maintain a healthy gut is readily available. In general, good health = not eating foods that damage the gut or contribute to inflammation or stress. And it means getting good sleep (circadian rhythms) , drinking fresh water, breathing clean air, getting good exercise, maintaining flexibility (body and mind) cutting way back on sugar and processed food, eliminating mainstream produce, reducing consumption of red meat, learning about what probiotics we need (individualizing this is the key, because all our guts are unique), consuming prebiotics (roughage), eating organic and local produce (so we introduce local gut microbes and bacterias), and taking care of all five of our "bodies": 1) our physical / chemical body, 2) our emotional body, 3) our dream-body, 4) our light body (chakras), and 5) our karmic body.

A word on the five bodies: This is one of my favorite topics and it is not philosophy or psychology, these are very real! Our physical / chemical-body is self-explanatory. Our dream-body is the easiest to heal. Our dream body can have cancer (in a dream) one night, but if we work with that dream, our dream-body will be cancer-free the next night! What is cancer in a dream? That depends on our personal associations when we work with the dream. It could be a foreshadowing of real cancer but more likely it is something else, but the fact that the dream makes it show up as cancer means it is serious. The karmic body is the body that carries the imprint of traumas or issues that we inherited, that down-loaded into our psyches at birth (in the womb), that we best deal with. (This can come up for some folks as a reliving of fragments of previous lives.) Our emotional body carries the imprint of this-life experiences that affect our heart and our gut, as well as our brains. Healing the emotional body can be approached through dreamwork or any kind of deep therapy or counseling that is heart-centered.) Healing / cleansing the chakras (light body) is vital but harder to discuss because chakras are energetic vortices that western medical science does not recognize or have any use for, so most of us have a hard time opening to the reality of chakras, but trust me, they are real! (If you think of chakras as metaphorical or esoteric you are missing out and I recommend doing your own research, or working with an energy healer or someone whose expertise includes healing the light-body.