RECIPE FOR HEALTH
What is health?
What is health? Most people would say that the absence of disease or the “properly” functioning physical body equals health. While that is a pretty limited definition of health, let’s just go with it for a moment as that is what most people who perceive sickness feel is the answer to what ails them. They believe that if their body would function differently than it currently does, they would be well. Maybe? Maybe not? Perhaps a body that functions in a particular way, that we’ve learned to label as health, equals health and maybe it doesn’t. Maybe our sickness has nothing to do with the body at all even when the body is expressing what we would call disease, dysfunction or pain. Perhaps sickness is a disharmonious relationship with and to life rather than a physical tangible “thing”.
We must ask the question, is health a state of functioningor a state of being? We all know plenty of people who have “well-functioning” bodies that we would typically label as healthy, who are completely unhealthy. They consume toxic foods, are filled with negativity or regurgitate the same disempowering thoughts over and over. Yet we call them healthy because their body functions in a particular way. We all also know those people who have “not-well functioning” bodies as we’ve learned to label it, yet are happy as a clam, on purpose, in service to others and are filled with empowering thoughts and emotions about life. Yet we call them sick because they have a physical condition. Something doesn’t compute here. This is not to deny that sometimes things occur with the physical body, they do, but what is sickness really? Maybe sickness is health, meaning perhaps sickness is the body’s response to create harmony within the body when the body is subjected or exposed to different elements and influences. By attempting to get rid of or fix these responses are we actually creating sickness rather than stopping it? Seems to me that this creates the perfect conditions for what we currently call chronic illness.
I would say, and mind you this is simply my perspective and not fact, that health is a relationship. A relationship we have with our body, our thoughts, our emotions, our external environments including the people in them, and with nature itself. We can’t heal or fix a relationship by trying to get the other side of whatever we are relating with to be quiet. Rather we have to inquire, be curious, be open and listen. We have to work with rather than try to conquer the other thing as if we need to control it. We all know how well it goes when we try to control someone else that we are in relationship with, not so great. Same for anything we relate to. CONTROL the body, good luck my friend, it’s going to be a constant war of symptom suppression, always fighting the expressions of the body and wanting them to be different. RELATE with the body, now there is a dialogue, a conversation and a working with. This leads to harmonious interactions rather than war. We wonder why we have to much chronic inflammation and auto-immunity going on, meanwhile we are all at war with ourselves. Hidden in plain sight is the obviousness of the “problem” and how to shift ourselves in relationship with it.
HARMONY
Zooming out to the whole
This all seems simple enough, yet why is it so hard? Why does harmony seem to be the enemy rather than the obvious solution to our health? Well first off let’s look at how challenging it is for people to relate with other people in their lives. We could say that most relationships have a fair share of disharmony, particularly relationships that are closest to us. We might fight with others where the disharmony is obvious, or we might be quiet and isolate ourselves from others because we are unable to relate inside of conflict. We avoid rather than confront. Both create disharmony even if one looks peaceful. Also look at our world at large. War seems to be the answer we choose to “resolve” conflict. War with other countries, war about land, war about who is right and who is wrong, war on cancer and diabetes and heart disease and on and on. It’s just like one big fat war and the only way we know how to be with life is to fight it, suppress it or hide from it.
No wonder we are at loss when it comes to harmony and our body. Our first “logical” yet likely unconscious response is to fight the invader, but what if there are no real invaders? What if everything has the right to exist as it is and therefore we must learn to relate with it rather then get it to get out of our way. We think what’s here in our body shouldn’t be and therefore we go to war. We think we can’t have the life, the feelings, the stuff, the rights, the purpose, the joy, and on and on, if said “thing” is present. What if the symptoms, the diseases, and the pains have nothing at all to do with how you get to experience your life? How absolutely liberated you would be. Would you be ready for that amount of freedom? The truth is that most of us aren’t. We will take the projections of our power as the truth over the ownership of our power almost any day of the week.
Nature teaches us harmony, yet almost no one is listening. While we humans are busy destroying and dissecting everything we can, nature is busy just being. Nature finds ways to survive and thrive until the time its form is ready to dissolve into another form. The sun, the trees, the ground, and the animals are all in communication with each other. All interwoven. This is how nature always has what it needs, that is until humans mess with it thinking they know better. Flowers don’t fight with other flowers who grow on the same bush. They just grow together and share resources. Each flower instinctively knows that the harmony of the entire bush is health itself.
Somehow we humans think that the answer is in the smallest element and if we just find that smallest element apart from all of the other elements and consume it, then we will find health. Never mind what that will do to the harmony of the entire body. We are so absolutely disconnected from the whole and overly obsessed with the parts that we are missing the big picture. We have also lost touch with our adaptability and resourcefulness stemming from our projection of our power onto the things of life and our conviction in our own disempowerment.
We need to zoom out from our hyper-focused, separate centric lens and see the larger organism that we are part of. While we operate as a separate cell (self), we are absolutely not separate. We co-exist whether we like it or not. Our health is dependent on the health of every cell (self) that we part of, as ours is to them. We have the responsibility only for our part, yet we need to take responsibility for our part. If we don’t the entire organism is affected. This is why to heal one’s self is to heal all. Health is to harmonize, it is to have right relationship with, it is to recognize that war with another is war with yourself, and that love with another is love with yourself. Until we arrive here inside of this awareness we will just be busy fixing parts of ourselves, trying to find the right pieces. The piece we are looking for is peace.
Only you can end the fight. When you do you will realize that everything you need is here. You will wake up to a harmony that you’ve been keeping yourself separate from. Here health will not be an experience of the body and the sensations or symptoms that it does or doesn’t have, rather it will simply be what you are. When you ARE health that is all you can experience.
Dr. Amanda Lalita Love, Network Spinal Chiropractor, Somatic Energetic Integration & Subtle Energy Healing, Boulder, Co
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