As important as it is to have health practitioners on your wellness team, it’s just as important, if not more, to have yourself on your team. So the first question to ask yourself is, are you on your own team? Or do you work against yourself?
24/7, you live in your body and with your mind. No one can get to know your life, or have the points of reference and context of what’s going on within, better than you. No one can know how you respond to stress, why you respond in certain ways, or understand the philosophies you live by better than you. These all factor into your wellness.
This means that so much of your wellness depends on you, not your doctors. Please don’t misunderstand, doctors of all modalities are invaluable. They are our wellness partners who can shed light on what may be going on with us, ask us questions that hopefully send us home better able to connect the dots and empower our own healing abilities, and give us guidance on what courses of action to take next. We have the ultimate authority, and we make the final decisions on what to do for our wellness. We can decide to focus on just the symptoms, pull disease out from its root, or ignore it altogether. We get to decide what to believe, what not to, get second opinions, give our power away to everyone else, or harness our power and take the lead. The moment we accept what others say as truth (versus dialogue) is the moment we have lost our part in the partnership.
Our part is activated the moment we understand that every decision we make, and what we accept as truth, adds to or takes away from our well being and our ability to heal at the mind, body, and soul levels.
How to activate your natural healing ability.
Let’s begin with the more obvious ones, with some less-than-obvious thoughts around them:
Get enough sleep. Ideally not too much, not too little. You’ll get more from the hours of sleep before midnight than you will after midnight. Getting to bed no later than 10 pm and up by 6 am is the most ideal. You can necessitate less than the 8 hours by having an earlier, lighter dinner, sticking to natural, unprocessed foods, refraining from caffeine or alcohol, exercising and, here’s the big one, keeping your mind unburdened. You will necessitate more if you are sick.
Exercise. For it to count as exercise, you don’t have to go to the gym or run outside. Move your body throughout the day. Get your heart rate up; use the stairs instead of the elevator, walk instead of drive. Stretch in between all of your sits or after all your moves. Challenge your body, 10 minutes a day. A little bit of stress, not too much. Enough to feel accomplished, not enough to never want to do it again. Consistency. Your body loves it.
Eat food when hungry for food. Make sure you’re not hungry for something else; if you are, feed that hunger accordingly. As for food, you don’t have to have 3 meals a day if you’re not hungry 3 times a day. Breakfast is breaking the fast, and that can happen at noon if that’s what makes sense for you. What’s more important is how you break the fast. Sugar, caffeine, or a food bar is not it. Just as morning meditation sets the tone for the day, so does how you break fast. Think savory (instead of sweet), fibrous, and healthy fats for substantive energy and mental clarity. They translate into a better functioning mind and body.
Drink enough water. Ideally, your water is room temperature to hot. Ice-cold water disrupts your digestion and metabolism (yes, it can boost it in the short term, but slows it down over the longer term). Sip throughout the day instead of chug all at once. Chugging dilutes the enzymes in your body, which negatively impacts your digestive health. The health of your digestion is foundational to the health of the rest of your mind and body.
The not-so-obvious ways to activate your inner healing powers:
Breathe correctly. Your breath in itself has the power to heal many ailments. Your breath is literally your life force, and the depth and breadth in which you breathe can determine the functionality of your entire bodily system. Conscious breathing also brings you into the present moment, which is where you access joy and clarity of mind, which are necessary for a strong immune system, healing, and growth.
Meditate. Regular meditation has the power to bring you back to wholeness because it brings you back to you. A fractured mind-body state creates disease. Union of mind-body-spirit creates wholeness. Meditation is all about conquering the mind to honor the deep intelligence that is within your body and your gut, which is commanded by your soul.
Pay attention to what you choose to believe. Your body takes you literally, and it becomes the physical printout of your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. So be careful what you feed it. Notice how you feel in your body when you judge yourself and others. Keep going a certain way long enough and your body will reflect it. Watch what you think about aging. It is fully in the realm of real to believe that disease is NOT a part of aging but a part of something else (discord). Ayurveda calls disease the mistake of the intellect. There are parts of the world that show that aging and disease do not go hand in hand.
Trust yourself. This is a vital part of wholeness.
All of these: conscious breathing, meditation, sleep, nourishment, hydration, movement, and your beliefs are vital to healing. You get unlimited opportunities throughout your day to add to or deplete your sense of wellness. Your body has perfect cellular intelligence, and it continuously repairs you and keeps you well. It begins to malform when you worry. Instead, learn to forgive, laugh, love, see the beauty in things, and appreciate your mind, body, and spirit.
Stress as opportunity to activate your healing
Stress is often looked at as a bad thing.
Toddlers experience pain when they teethe, but they need teeth. Tweens experience growing pains when they grow, but they need to grow. When we lift weights, we put stress on our muscles to create tone or bulk. For better endurance, we put stress on our cardio-system. When we move through stressful situations, we become stronger and more mentally agile.
Stress is necessary. How we deal with it is a different thing. It becomes chronic when we don’t deal with it. When we delay, it lodges itself deeper in the tissues of our body, and in the crevices of our mind, creating dis-ease in body and mind.
We often mistake stress to mean that we should do what would make us most comfortable in that moment; that that is self care. While sometimes this may be appropriate, many times, this mutes our true calling. And by that, I mean what you’re meant to do in a larger sense, and also I mean how you are meant to express yourself in that moment of stress. The smaller callings inform our larger ones. Pay attention to what it’s telling you. You can choose to see stress as a message to respond to and transmute the thing that’s stressing you out into something that will make you feel more alive and strong. Through stress you can step into your next most amazing version of Self.
Remember: When it’s freezing cold out, you don’t ignore it and suffer through the conditions in a t-shirt and shorts, nor (hopefully) do you take a couple of shots of whiskey to numb the cold and then go out in a tee and shorts. A healthy response would be to put on a jacket, hat, and gloves, and to walk briskly. Same with the stressors that come up in work and in relationships.
Additionally, pay attention to the unnecessary stress you expose yourself to: too much news, social media, drink, gossip, negativity, etc. Do not engage in them to fit in, this will only create discord in your mind and body. And certainly your spirit.
Stressors prompt you to do what you need to do to take care of yourself and to find ways to express yourself in the truest way possible. The practices I mention above: meditation, breath, nourishment, etc - they are what spinach is to Popeye: your superpowers to help you harness stress, guiding you towards good health and your best life.
Love, Savitree
Thank you. Aging is not a disease🙂. Also the importance of what we feed our mind, news, for me especially, it has been scrolling the news feeds. This was great.