2. 3 Pillars of health
Most if not all ailments or diseases are caused by an obstruction of the natural flow of a substance in your body. Consequent degeneration of an organ or systemic function shows itself in the form of symptoms. When untreated, the ailment starts to affect surrounding areas, spread out as a disease and ultimately cause severe systemic breakdown. To get you back on track, you have to focus on 3 domains, inseperable from each other.
A theory of energy
The magic of genuine energy & vitality lies in the rebalancing of the 3 major pillars of health.
1- Your mind and soul spirit: this is the more esotheric part, containing your thoughts, choices, belief systems, awareness/consciousness of yourself, others and your environment, the perception/understanding of interconnectedness
(= holism) and universal truth.
2- Your physical health: this includes all your body functions, like digestion, respiration, your nervous system, blood circulation, lymphatic and urinary tracts, bones and joints and your skin.
3 - The quality and support of your environment: meaning your family, friends, the safety and comfort of your home, your local culture, the relationship and connection you have with nature, your work perspective and context, pollution etc
This if of course not so easy to accomplish, since there are so many parameters to take into account and they all influence one another. This means that if you treat or want to suppress only one symptom, you will probably end up encountering a new issue soon or realize that you only have been moving the problem from one place to another.
A key element to get a better grip on a certain imbalance or obstruction, is trying ‘relate’ to it. Try to define the region or the expression of the symptom as specific as can be, whether it be in your environment, your brain or body. The more awareness or consciousness you create regarding your responses, your behavior, what kind of pain you feel, the emotion involved, the localization, the triggers that worsen or improve your condition,… the better you can communicate with others about it (if you can’t solve it yourself) and thereby improving your own chances to get it back in place.
Your Mind & Soul
By now, most people realize the enormous impact our thoughts and emotions have on our own well-being. Negative thoughts lead to negative emotions and negative behavior/responses to these emotions.
As an adult you have formed you own frame of reference for looking at/responding to things and people through your education and later work and life experiences. The older we get, the more we tend to tighten up these patterns and become more rigid, outspoken, sometimes even radical in our judgements. A personal opinion is the opposite of an open mind. An open mind means you always consider both sides of a story and then suggesting things or setting an intention, giving the ability for others to respond without feeling threatened or submitted. This also counts for situations you put yourself in: instead of complaining about something or allowing yourself to get passive or ignorant about it, think about possible reasons for why you ended up in it and what you could possibly do to overcome it. This doesn’t mean that everything is always your fault, things can occur just because things evolved in a certain way, but the key difference is in how you respond to good or bad events. That is the thing you can change.
It is my personal belief that everyone needs to believe in something higher than himself.
The reason for that is we as humans have a history of suffering through major life-threatening crises throughout our evolution (think of glacial eras, mass extinctions, self-destructive wars, climate changes etc.) This has lead to a human condition that shows symptoms of trauma and inherent fear. We have a hard time not getting overly worried about one thing or the other. This implies we are kind of anxiously and permanently on the look out for bettering our current situations and in that we kind of lose the connection and trust within ourselves. This level of insecurity, which is not equally present in every person, makes us want to flee or attach to something outside ourselves. The combination of this unrest, escapism and the hope and/or expectation of being rescued can be described as a ‘religious’ belief system. Religion in its purest sense means ‘connection’ and most often with something larger than ourselves. It makes absolutely no difference, whether it be Christianity, Islam, Hindu, Buddhism or just the cosmos or nature as a whole. Even when you say you are agnostic or even atheïst, you believe in that itself. You can believe in ghosts, angels, previous lives and spirits, as long as you find relieve and meaning into it.
So might look at it like this:
- your sensations: feeling, hearing, seeing, smelling and tasting
- your emotions: these are our sensations linked to memorized life experiences
- your mind is basically the set of thought patterns you have acquired and put into practice
- your soul is the blend of your emotions with your inner ‘knowing’ or intuition, which are basically your learned and memorized experiences formed into sub- and unconscious thought patterns
- your spirit is your believe system is your connection, or even relationship with something higher or greater than yourself and that you link to your soul through your senses
Also here, you can imagine these things are inseparably connected and influencing one another. Again, you should approach all these things as a whole, a fluid moldable mass that is in constant motion and that will never cease to change into another form. Accepting infinity helps greatly in opening up your mind and allowing synchronous energy to come in. This is what we call ‘being in tune’.
Your Body
We all have our DNA, our genetic make-up, which we received from our ancestors. It has long been believed that it was fixed for life. But now it became quite obvious that the way your genes express themselves can vary and is basically in constant motion. It’s called epigenetics. This means you can have an impact on the processes happening in your body if you make the right changes.
Furthermore, you can look at your body as an immense bunch of living cells and organisms, having their own certain characteristics and behaviors that all combine metaphorically into one big city with sewers, public transport, different personalities moving and interacting in many different ways. It is the overall management of this (your own) city that determines your health. Are you in control of it, is everything running smoothly or is it out of whack here, there or everywhere?
The comparison to a city and its population is not so stretched. Imagine you’re stuck in a 10-mile long traffic jam for hours, where you have to wait and wait and get more and more nervous, because you have your family or a friend waiting for you, while dinner is getting cold and your missing sports class that evening. You see how all these things interconnect and form a whole. We could make it worse: imagine that you’re stuck in that jam not for hours, but for days, weeks, months or even years. Can you feel what it would do to your whole ecosystem: your supportive network, your health, your brain,… Exactly the same thing happens organically in your body when you’re experiencing unbalances, ailments, disease. It is an obstruction of some sort, whether it be blood, bile, toxines or thoughts that can’t pass because something is jammed, slowed down or even destroyed (by an accident, due to longevity or longterm neglect).
These obstructions occur in the bodies’ functional systems: the respiratory tract, the digestive tract, the urinary tract, the lymphatic system, the nervous system, the skin and your bones and joints. Whether your body is stockpiling external or internal toxines, caused by pollution, bad food or habits or whether some cells lack the right fuel for them to function properly, at a certain moment it is very possible that your body functions turn against yourself in the form of auto-immunity, stagnation, leakages, intoxication, cell decline and/or modulation, under-or overgrowth or even stop functioning at all…
So how do you avoid obstructions? Stay fluid, anticipate before problems arise, practice self-care and self-healing, study/learn/become more aware of your body and how it works, your thoughts and your environment, move/be active, eat the things your body cells need to thrive, diversify everything you do, overcome fears, be brave, steady and trustworthy and focus on developing more focus.
Your Environment
Don’t ever underestimate the power and impact of your surroundings. From when you were born you were raised by your caretakers, and you as a helpless and innocent child were surrendered to the way they nurtured and educated you. In other words, for a large part, you become a reflection of all conscious and/or subconscious patterns of thought and behavior of your ancestors. In these early stages you don’t have any impact on that, just because you’re not conscious yet to understand what’s going on around you.
When you grow up, you gradually start to be able to think more independently and develop a certain sense of your own perceptions of reality, you start to determine how you look at the world and choose whether or not you want to change any of your own learned dispositions.
The choices you make at certain key points towards and in adulthood direct your path and so called destination. The more self-control and focus you have, the better the outcome will be. At home, in school and in other social activities, you create bonds with family members, far or close friends, a potential lover, your kids and later on you could find some comfort at work with good colleagues. This supportive (or destructive) network has a huge impact on your sense of security and trust, which leads to healthy (or lacking) self-esteem, opportunities (or not) in life, privileges etc, that lead to a positive (or negative) feedback loop (better gets better, worse gets worse).
A very important aspect here is the relationship you develop with yourself. Do you love yourself? Do you take care of yourself (or are you neglecting/ignoring things for yourself)? Do you hide yourself behind a computer or are you hooked to the smartphone screen? How is your bed arranged, or your fridge? How’s your hygiene? And do you plan your days or do you just live through them randomly? The way you look out for, treat and take care for yourself determines how you treat, look out or take care of others. So when you have problems with that, it’s best to focus on and be honest about your relationship with yourself and to improve it all along the way.
This also means creating comfort, beauty and peace at home, for instance nurturing some plants, have a pet you take good care of, or only allowing things in your house that add to your sense of well-being or are supportive towards your goals. Also take a look at the culture you’re living in: do you like the mindset of the people in your village or city? Or at work? Can you relate to them or do you consider interacting with them more or less of a burden? Do you like the sun or prefer the beauty of changing seasons? Do you mind eating on your own or do you prefer the sharing of meals? All these external things can be as blocking as your physical psychological health and are often neglected or undervalued. Learn to observe and feel what every interaction with the outside world does to you.
I also suggest to become more aware of the energetic forces the sun, the moon and planets have on us. You feel the heat of the sun, do you? You know the heightened energies of a full moon or its ability to shift the tides, right? Even Mars and Venus, influence us in more subtle and refined ways than you would realize at first. And have you heard about cosmic universal laws at play, like the law of attraction or the law of compensation? You can study astrology to know more about these things and you’ll start noticing ‘global’ energy patterns that influence the whole population in different ways over time. Very fascinating and eye-opening indeed.
The melting pot
So when you start combining all of these factors, some things appear more clearly than others. Focus on the most apparent one only, since your brain can only focus on a very limited amount of things at once. Also realize that it’s an unlimited trajectory, it’s like an onion: if you peel one layer, you’ll discover the next one underneath. You could perceive that as disappointing, even to the point that you ask yourself if it is even worthwhile starting or continuing the journey at some points in time. But you have to realize that every step is an improvement on the next one. Gradually and step by step, you’ll start to feel better and better, you become more wise and more resilient, since you’re driven to overcome every pullback you will inevitably encounter on your path. These pullbacks are signals that you’re touching the things that your body struggles with. Your body initially resists these changes, because it did its best to maintain the balance, even when you were feeling sick. The key here is persistence, allow your body the time to adapt to the new situation and it will respond finally with a better response that makes you feel like you overcame the issue, which is actually very true. You have to show your body and brain the way to balance and they will automatically try to maintain it themselves. So you see it’s basically an interplay between the automated functions of your body/brain and the way you guide, manage and care for it.
The more you’re able to remove toxic waste and obstacles in your body, mind and environment that prevent free-floating fluids and energy, the more you’ll feel vitalized and the more active you become. Activity does not necessarily mean productivity, which is often confused in these modern times. You can basically choose whether you want to put effort to support achieving the things you might wish for. It will speed up the process (if you don’t overstretch yourself), but it’s not essential to acquire fulfillment and gratification. For instance, monks don’t necessarily work extremely hard and still might feel completely satisfied with their lives.
Epilogue
So to come back to the essence of this article, detoxifying and rebalancing your energies in all 3 aspects of your life will gradually give the right fuel to get back into shape and flourish as possibly never before. It is your personal preference as how far you’re willing to walk the path to this feeling of unity and vitality. Some consider it as a necessity or a life’s task, for others it’s more like a complementary trajectory, next to their already active or fulfilled lives. It is not a competition, nor a must. I believe you just need to arrive at a point of genuine joy and self-acceptance and feel the automatic, unforced urge to share it with the world, your peers and your surroundings.
