The three pillars of healing
In many articles that I have written on this site I have talked about how at the age of 43 I began to have a sequence of symptoms that led me to discover a series of autoimmune diseases that were slowly incubating inside me, and in a few months, turned my almost perfect life into a nightmare that lasted for years.
Today it’s been about 7 years and my health is almost back to normal and most of the symptoms and discomforts are gone, only a few signs remain that have lasted only because of my inability to focus on resolving them. Today, I know that I have the power to heal myself and overcome anything. However, the road was not easy, I had to struggle against my own fears and my own inability to take control. We are so used to taking a pill to solve any discomfort, that to think about dedicating more time than that to heal our bodies, with all the work and obligations we have in this life, which does not stop for us for a second, it is very difficult, we have to keep working to bring home resources. But who will continue to bring them if we are no longer here?
Well, when you reach that critical point, when your normal life is no longer recovered with a pill or 20 pills a day and your symptoms go from bad to worse, and traditional medicine gives you no more options, you begin to wonder if this is really “Game Over”. Then, you have two options; give up and prepare for your departure, or simply take the bull by the horns and decide to heal.
Healing only comes when you decide to heal!
Once we make the decision to fight for our life and to heal, we are faced with a very complex scenario. On the one hand medicine no longer has a pill or surgery to heal you and you have no idea how to move forward, and on the other hand you start researching on the internet and you find an infinite amount of information, often contradictory and you enter a vicious circle that can be somewhat daunting.
Some, myself included, start looking for complementary therapies; Reiki, healing with light beings, herbs, acupuncture, Chinese medicine, meditation, hot stones, Ayurveda, armadillo urine injections, etc. And maybe with some of these therapies you can find the healing you need, however, in my personal experience, none of these therapies work if you keep leaving in the hands of others your responsibility to heal. You are the one who is sick, it is your life, and it is you who must heal yourself, you cannot pass that responsibility to another person, therapy or medicine.
It is for these reasons that after several years of permanent research, reading and analysis, I came to the conclusion that to truly heal ourselves, we must focus on three fundamental pillars. All three require a strong internal work, and as I will repeat several times, if you feel that you can not do it, that you do not have the courage, energy, will or ability to do the work on your own, seek for help, start with your closest loved ones, and if not, look for a good integrative health professional who can assist you.
Let’s talk a little bit now about these three pillars:
Awareness
After all my own trials and tribulations, I came to the conclusion that the first thing you should do, is to take a pause, sit down and ask yourself, even if it sounds silly, “Why am I living this, what does it mean, why me? At that moment, you can do the inner work alone or ask for help from a good therapist or a life coach. Because at that moment you should analyze your life and understand what is not right, at what point did you lose control of your health and let yourself be carried away by the routine of existence. Are you happy?, do you like your life?, is it the life you wanted?, are you on the way to achieve your dreams?, are you in an environment that leads you to fulfill your highest and deepest goals?.
You may think that these questions are unrealistic, that not everyone is lucky enough to dedicate themselves to fulfilling their dreams, you have to work and support your family or your status or your lifestyle. But that is meaningless if you don’t have a life to live. It is at this moment when in my personal case, I realized that there is a purpose for each one of us, it can be something simple like having a simple family life and work or something extraordinary like being a great scientist or a Hollywood star. It doesn’t matter the level of the purpose, the important thing is to be aware that you do have one, and that everything that happens in your life is guiding you to fulfill that purpose. Reaching this conclusion can be simple or very difficult depending on your beliefs, but when you analyze your life and see the sequence of events that led you to the moment in which you find yourself, you realize that at some point you got off your path.
Illness, an accident, the departure of a loved one, a job layoff, the need to migrate, these are all events that in a rather harsh way are warning you that you should get back on track, that you have gone a little off the path and that you have a chance to get back on track. The complicated thing is when you really have no idea where to go or what your purpose is. That was my case, and at that moment, by divine grace, I got my hands on a wonderful book called “The Element” by Ken Robinson. A book that opened my eyes, made me go back to my childhood and remember, what was it that made me happy as a child, because there lies some of the signs of your true purpose, your “element”.
The work is very personal and that is why I always recommend finding a good therapist or coach who can help you with this process. Becoming aware of our life and our true purpose helps us understand why things happen to us, and the changes we need to start making. Do your homework, take back control of your life, and even if it is difficult and slow, start making the necessary adjustments to get back on track, your body is asking for it, there is no more time, you already had two or three warnings, this is the last one, it is now or never.
Food
“Let thy medicine be thy food, and food be thy medicine.”
Hippocrates
You are already aware of your life and why these things are happening, these diseases, you have already decided to heal, but how do I continue? Regardless of the disease that is affecting you, the body gets sick when it is no longer in balance (homeostasis), some tissue, an organ or a process of one of the systems of your body stopped working properly. Maybe you already know, because you went through a series of doctors who asked you for a hundred tests and you have a diagnosis. Well, whatever that diagnosis is, the most important thing is to focus on bringing your body back into balance.
Today, science is beginning to give credit to the words of Hippocrates because today we know, more than ever before, the damage that certain foods can cause. I am not going to go into detail with this, I have a post dedicated to this topic, you can read it in this link. The important thing is to be aware that anything we put in our mouth can do us good, bad or very bad. The modern western diet usually makes us really bad. Most of the food we eat in the “modern world” causes us some harm, little by little, everything is full of toxins that slowly but relentlessly poison us.
Learning how to feed and nourish our body correctly plays a fundamental role in any healing process. Just as a diabetic cannot consume sugar and a celiac cannot consume gluten, whatever our disease, it is critical to know what is good for us and what is not. Learning to read our body and be attentive to the signals it gives us every time we consume something is essential to discard from our diets everything that alters our digestion and balance.
The mother of all chronic diseases that afflict us today is “inflammation”, keeping our body’s inflammation at bay is key to improving any type of disease. While there are many factors that can cause inflammation, food is probably the most important one, and the easiest to control. We are all different, with different genes and different environmental situations, so something that is good for me is probably highly inflammatory for you.
I always use the example of the enzyme “CYP1A2” which is an enzyme produced by the liver that is responsible for degrading caffeine among other things. My liver must produce a lot of this enzyme, because I can drink five cups of coffee a day and nothing happens to me, but a friend of mine drinks one sip of coffee, gets sick, cannot sleep and walks around shaking all day. The same thing happens with all foods, we all react differently to each food we eat. People who do not produce enough enzymes, bile, gastric acid or do not have a healthy intestinal flora or have problems in the intestinal barrier or have an overgrowth of pathogenic bacteria in the intestine, often react with inflammation and pain when consuming certain foods.
Today we know of several foods that are highly allergenic and inflammatory for many people; dairy, soy, gluten and sugar are the most common ones, and then a number of other foods such as seafood, nuts, eggs, and many others you couldn’t even think of. As I said, we all react differently, and it is important to pay attention to our body to avoid consuming foods that cause inflammation, because this permanent and chronic inflammation leads us directly into the zone of the disease.
Why would you insist on legumes if every time you eat them you get bloated?. I know they are delicious, but if they make you feel sick, take them out of your diet, at least while you solve your health problems. I stopped eating a lot of foods for a long time. After cutting out gluten, dairy and sugar, I did an “Elimination diet” to identify the other foods that were causing me discomfort and I was surprised by more than a few of them.
Learning to properly nourish our body with healthy and nutritionally dense foods is of utmost importance for a healing process. If you do not know about nutrition you can get advice from a nutritionist or a book, there is a lot of literature. I recommend you not to go to extremes and not to follow a particular author, but always focus on what your body asks for and how it reacts to each food. Our body is wise, it has thousands of years of evolution and knows perfectly well what it needs and what it does not need. When something doesn’t agree with it, it will let you know.
Connection
You are already aware of your situation and you are eating healthy so that your food is your medicine. The next step is to “connect”, but with what? Well, we are not isolated entities, we live in a society, in a family, in a place on this planet, in a solar system and in an infinite universe.
We must understand that healing does not only depend on one or two things, but on an infinity of interconnections, like a matrix. If you ever saw the movie “The Matrix”, you may remember that the main character saw everything as green lines of binary code interconnecting all things. Well, the reality is something similar, we live in a completely energetic environment where everything affects us directly or indirectly, even the negative thoughts of the person next to us can have a negative effect on our life and our health. If your partner or your parents or your brother has a strong character that every time he explodes makes you shiver or gives you a stomach ache you will understand what I mean.
Toxic relationships can make us sick. If you live in a house that has moisture leaks and mold in the walls, you are exposed to toxins that can make you sick. If you live in an apartment and your neighbors make constant noise and do not let you sleep, if the city you live in suffers from smog pollution, if the water in your city is contaminated with heavy metals and other toxins, if your country is in crisis, if the economy is bad, etc, etc, etc. Do you follow me? All these factors influence your state of health.
We are beings of planet earth and this planet is built with all the elements of the periodic table and we and all the plants, minerals and animals that inhabit it are composed of the same elements. That is why we consume the water of the earth, the air of the earth, the plants and minerals of the earth and unfortunately also the animals of the earth, we live in a symbiotic circle, the earth has everything we need to be well. When an animal is sick, if you let it loose, the animal will go and look for the plants and herbs it needs to heal, they have that active wisdom in their DNA and they are connected to it. We have it too but at some point in time we forgot it (or it was deliberately blocked, I think).
It is important to connect with our environment, do I live in a good environment, do I have a supportive and good partner or family, do I have a good group of friends with whom I socialize and enjoy my free time, do I enjoy nature, do I get enough sun, do I do enough physical exercise, do I have a pleasant and healthy sex life, do I drink enough clean water every day, etc.
Learning to be aware of our environment and how we connect with it is extremely important to discover if there are other factors perhaps unthought of that are damaging our balance and ultimately our health.
Now, let me move into a slightly more personal and holistic topic that you may or may not agree with. I leave it up to you to connect or not with this information, I like to talk about this because for me it was fundamental.
We are in an infinite universe full of energy and infinite vibrations, for me those lines in “The Matrix” expand into the whole cosmos. That life purpose does not come from nothing, it comes from a higher being or higher frequency of existence, it comes from connections to multiple levels of consciousness, you can call it God, cosmic consciousness, higher self, your soul, your spirit, how you interpret it will depend on your level of acceptance of these beliefs based on your own experience of them or your particular faith if you follow a religion or spiritual movement. I do not intend to indoctrinate in any particular belief, but only in that of believing that there is something beyond the reach of your sight and senses.
If you believe in any of this and that life does indeed go beyond this particular human experience, don’t you think it would be important to connect to that source of our existence as well? Well I think so, and there are many ways to do it, you can do it through your faith in a religion and accept that everything that happens to you is for your highest good according to the divine plan, or you can simply close your eyes, connect with your breath, with your heartbeat and let those energy lines that surround everything connect with your own energy lines and experience the cosmic consciousness on your own.
These practices may take a while, but as you connect with them and connect with the whole, you become more and more aware of who you are, what you came here for and what your true purpose is and why you are living what you are living.
As I said, this may be perhaps the hardest part, but if one or more of the things I’ve talked about in this article have resonated with you, you lose nothing by trying this last one. Remember “Connect” is the third pillar and it is the most difficult task because the interconnections are endless. It is your job to analyze each of them and see which ones are good and which ones need adjustments. I recommend you make a list, which you can update as you think of other interconnections. And take the time to analyze each one, see how they affect your life and how you can improve them. You will be surprised how these factors can be fundamental to the proper healing of your body and perhaps your spirit as well.
Feel Better Lab.
I started going through all these processes several years ago, and I’m still going, it’s a long journey of learning. Finally after several turns, I realized that what resonates with me and makes me happy is to be able to share these experiences with other people who are going through the process of illness/healing and who are looking for the same answers that I was looking for 7 years ago. That’s why I started creating a healthy food workshop, unfortunately it was not the right way, there were things missing, but I learned a lot from it. Now I’m on another turn and maybe just sharing the information will be the right way, at least I hope so. I called it “Lab” because this is a real laboratory where we are testing and learning about what works for us. Some things work and we can incorporate them and some things don’t work. So we are testing how to heal in different ways and sharing with whoever is interested in this information. We are experimenting to feel better and recover our health, our life and our path in this existence.
