Perfect health: attainable or not? 

The age of disease prevention 

We live in a disease prevention age.  Medical science is discovering more and more ways to test for potential and actual malfunctions in our bodily systems.  The idea is that the sooner we can find out if something is potentially wrong with us the better off we are because we can take action now before the “thing” has progressed.  Mammograms, pap smears, prostate exams, colonoscopies, DNA marker tests and list goes on.  We begin our “race to survive”.

So the question becomes first and foremost, how do you really know if you are well?  Does the absence of disease or disease markers indicate that you are well?  And does the presence of disease or disease markers indicate that you are not well?  According to Webster dictionary health is “a condition in which someone or something is thriving or doing well.”  There is nothing about the presence or absence of disease in that definition.  Another definition is that of “the condition of being sound in body, mind and spirit.”

The next question becomes can you thrive and be “sound” with disease or disease markers?  Or do you go into survival mode, with the consciousness of attacking this foreign or malfunctioned part of your body.  Most people initially gear up attack mode.  This is natural.  Their survival instinct kicks in and they go on the race to find that which may allow them more life in this body.  This is an important stage in the healing process.  It corresponds to stage 2 of SRI where we go on a search for magical cures outside of ourselves to fix us.

Magical cures are not typically what people define as woo-woo work, but instead they are things that we think will really fix us when we believe we are broken.  Most of the time they are drugs, surgeries or other procedures, but also do include alternate therapies that are aimed at restoring you instead of empowering you.  So when the magical cure fails (and they all fail at some point because they are based in an underlying false premise that you are not already whole) then a person will slip back down into suffering, stage 1 of SRI.  People can cycle between stage 1 and 2 for a very long time, sometimes indefinitely.

Beyond magical cures

Empowered health

The good news is that it is entirely possible to not suffer, however to not experience pain is unlikely.  All suffering is created when you believe that something is not supposed to be the way that it is.  Suffering is different than feeling pain (which is a physiological reaction) or experiencing feelings such as sadness and grief (emotional body reaction).  Suffering is the resistance to what is, believing  its supposed to be different or that its separate from you.  It doesn’t matter if what you believe shouldn’t be is a physical pain or an emotional pain.  If you believe it shouldn’t be, and it is, you will suffering.

Since we can all agree that death of our body is inevitable, than we can say that disease/illness of some sorts is most likely going to happen to us along the journey.  That is at least until we realize more of who we are through expanding our awareness and than can choose our exit out of this form consciously, rather than unconsciously through disease.  I personally believe that this is where we are headed.

So where do we start?  I think a better question to ask ourselves is not “can we be disease free and have idealized perfect health” and instead change it to “how can we have empowered health.”  Rather than trying to prevent “bad” things from happening to our body, can we instead be empowered in our own health processes so that whatever occurs we can navigate it, and navigate it not in fear but in trust.  This in my opinion is a much better measure of health and I call this being “innerly resourceful”.

Inner resourcefulness requires that you have the ability to observe when you go into survival mode, when you are getting hijacked by your survival instincts or by fear and your emotional body.  As soon as you observe where you are now you have choice available.  Prior to that you were simply at the whims of your physiology and emotions.  This is the beginning of empowered health care.  Now you are in charge again.  Now you can make choices and decisions that help you thrive rather than just doing stuff to survive/keep yourself alive.  Through asking yourself new questions you can begin to expand your consciousness and come up with new insights and clues.

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado