Your Body – A Gateway to Health

Yesterday I wrote about my experiences with depression, one of which I noted was alcohol related. Addiction patterns surface in many ways, but one of the most obviously unhealthy manifests through substance abuse. Moving through these illnesses has deeply connected me to my health.

In my life, health issues are self-created…but then because I have come to see them as opportunities, I believe that most health issues are. So today I am writing about creating health out of health issues based on a technique I used to climb out of alcoholism and depression.

For more information on why we may choose illness to elevate our consciousness, I refer you to fellow blogger and medium Vera Nadine. Her guides do an excellent job of explaining this in her article Manifesting Mental Illness for Goodness’ Sake.

Body Intelligence

In Bruce Lipton’s book the Biology of Belief he explains that medicines are inferior to the innate intelligence within our bodies to heal because our bodies are made up of the same simple proteins used in a variety of ways. When you take a medicine it distributes a chemical throughout your entire body that has been identified to have the desired affect on the area in which you have a problem…but then it also has an undesired effect in many other areas because the rest of the body reacts differently to that same chemical.

When your body heals itself, it uses a precise delivery system…affecting only the area which needs to be healed and nothing else. Bruce, being a conscious biologist, challenges Western Medicine to notice the intelligence within the body’s systems and look for new ways to cooperatively engage it. From frightening statistics in his Death by Medicine section to examining the effects of antidepressants verses placebos in clinical testing…he provides a large body of evidence supporting the need to develop a new kind of drug-free medicine.

Considering all of this information and my own experiences…I feel that people heal by pulling their minds, bodies and spirits into alignment.

My methods for dealing with alcoholism and depression were natural…but that was also my approach to childbirth so I guess that says something about me . The idea of using drugs to heal didn’t make much sense to me…somehow I knew I had to do it on my own. Deeper still, I believe that there is no questioning the body’s intelligence; the mind has not yet been created that can bring forth a complex human form from a single cell. The body is definitely capable of healing itself…the key lies in cooperatively engaging it with mind and spirit.

The Roots of Disease

My personal experiences with depression and alcohol stemmed from a similar set of circumstances. The problem usually began as wrong thinking. The wrong thinking would then absorb more and more of my mental resources, until it had effectively blocked my spirit and body connections. With my mind now in the dominate position…the wrong thinking was able to use all the energy available to gain momentum and to grow in size and strength.

With the door to illness open; irritability, tiredness, depression, addiction and all other types of problems can now arise…this is simply because the energy balance is no longer in place, one area alone has monopolized all the resources available and so the imbalance shows in physical decline, the inability to renew one’s energy and the inability to properly use the mind (which has to be infused with spirit in order to be healthy).

However, there is an easy way to temporarily dislodge the wrong thinking; strenuous physical activity.

Using the Body to Get Free of the Mind

By the time I decided to quit drinking, the addiction directed my thinking. I was a victim of the impulses and in essence was not in control of the situation at all. Only the realization that I was killing myself provided me with any power over it, but that was limited and fleeting. I felt awful all of the time…constantly at odds with myself.

Then one day I awoke still full of sleep…the familiar voice of the disease had not yet fully awakened. As I enjoyed its absence, the air pressure around me changed, my mind’s eye was flooded with light like dreaming while awake and I clearly, vividly saw myself running the darkness that had taken hold of me out of my system…literally flushing it out with lots of water and a bit of fierce activity.

All day long I was haunted by this vision, so I mustered together the strength available to me and put it into place. After backsliding and failure after failure, I was done with feeling this way. I wanted my life back, so I went running. I ran for as long and hard as I could…reliving the strange dream I had the previous morning and visualizing that I was pushing the darkness out of myself with every step that I took.

On the walk down to the track where I ran, my head was possessed by the voice of the addiction, depression and the unhealthy self that I had created but when I ran I could literally feel new energy course through me…created by the vacuum of the expenditure. My mind would clear and the visualization kept me focused on my goal. By the time I stopped I could notice the beauty of the field around the track and my body felt healthier than it had in years…I actually felt good!

Granted, this effect would wear off…and I would be back in my mind again struggling. But every morning I freed myself from it and that feeling kept me going. Soon, I was gaining in health and the attention I took away from my mind would last a little longer, and a little longer until the disease was something I struggled with only when when someone offered me a drink (which wasn’t very often as I learned to avoid those situations).

Eventually, alcohol had absolutely no hold on me whatsoever. I didn’t know what had made me successful in this endeavor at the time…as I did not see life from a spiritual perspective back then but it is obvious to me now.

The Real You Under the Disease

The mind is a great resource when it is balanced. It has to be trained, developed and directed. When I ran, I took energy away from it and channeled it elsewhere. The wrong thinking or the addiction voice inside of me used that energy like a spinning wheel. It constantly needed a push in the form of my attention to keep it going. When it lost some of my attention on a regular basis, it weakened.

My place of focus (health and feeling good) became stronger until eventually I regained some measure of control over my thoughts though I was far from proficient at determining their direction or turning them off altogether…at this point in certain circumstances I had learned to redirect them to anything slightly more positive and I wasn’t particular about what, but that was a start.

When I look back on this experience I realize that it gave me some basic techniques and provided me with contrast in my life. This period of illness created a deep appreciation for the aliveness within me, this in turn motivated me to discover new ways of connecting with that aliveness.

In the pit of alcoholism…I discovered a doorway to the real me under the disease; now a well trodden path to balance and wholeness that I access time and time again using various mind, body and spirit practices

Comments

By Vera Nadine on August 6th, 2007 at 7:35 am

Hello my dear friend.

I hope that all is well with you!

This is just a quick note to let you know that the URL for my blog and for the article Manifesting Mental Illness for Goodness’ Sake have changed.

To maintain unbroken links please take a moment to change all instances of jarofspiders.com/veranadine to VeraNadine.com.

Thanks, keep in touch and have a lovely day!

Blessings,

Vera Nadine