Your body is a finely tuned instrument developed over millions and millions of years of ruthless evolution. It is designed to help you. It is designed to help you survive, reproduce and thrive. Our ancestors have painstakingly and at great cost, figured out many solutions to what makes the body more healthy. They couldn’t properly explain why what they did worked, but they knew it worked.
Science is us trying to figure out why it works the way it works. But in the name of science it is an absolutely juvenile idea to think you can just dispense with ancestral wisdom and override millions of years of evolution with some pharmaceutical drug or dismiss it because it hasn’t been proven by some clinical study. Science only exists since a couple hundred years.
Who has more experience? A couple hundred years of science or millions of years of evolution?
Your body is always protecting you.
Your body never does anything that is not meant to protect you.
Your body is the ultimate adaptation machine.
Disease is the body trying to solve a problem.
A basic principle of ancient medicine is that disease is caused by some kind of obstruction of flow.
Obstruct the airways, you die. Obstruct blood flow, the deprived part dies. Obstruct waste product flow (intestinal, urinary tract and bile ducts) you get sick, then die. Obstruct electrical flow, you have neurological disease. Obstruct the absorption of any element, you develop lack in one area, overdose in another in an attempt to compensate (diabetes, nutritional deficiencies …). Obstruct emotional expression, you get psychological problems. Deprive someone of food, water, air, physical contact, social interaction, emotional support, you die.
No one kills themselves unless they believe they are all completely alone in the world and can do nothing to change it ( = devoid of social interactions).
The body works. It is designed to work.
Pain is a self-preservation mechanism. If you did not feel pain you would probably be long dead. Pain keeps you from doing stupid stuff. As Sadhguru said in this interview, everywhere you do not feel pain you mess with it and you call it fashion. People cut their hair in many different ways because it doesn’t cause you pain. But you don’t peal off your skin or cut off body parts in the name of fashion. That would hurt.
Any pain is a self-preservation mechanism. Whether it is physical, mental, or emotional. If you understand all three. You can minimise the amount of pain you experience. If you differentiate between pain and suffering, then you can live fully.
Everything your body does is to serve you. Now it is possible that is doesn’t make sense to your rational mind why your body would do certain things. We don’t understand how everything works. There is too much information. In fact we can’t ever know everything. How is cancer, auto-immune disease and infection the body protecting itself? You don’t need to know how a bike works to ride one. Any kid will tell you that is self-evident.
You don’t need to know exactly why the body does what it does to use it properly. Assume it is actually doing something good for you. Because it is.
No healthy apple rots. Only overripe or disease ridden fruit start to rot. Bacteria just help decompose it. Infection can be seen in the same fashion. If your cells are weak, unhealthy and filled with toxins, then it would probably be best for your body to get rid of them to naturally select for the healthy cells in your body. Thus making your body stronger.
The most important aspects to living a healthy life are to understand that your body is the product of the infinite interactions it has had and continues to have with its environment. Your physical, mental and emotional environment affect you deeply.
On a physcial level, whatever you are in contact with affects you. The air you breath, the things you touch, the food that decays in your gastro-intestinal tract all day long. All of that is outside of your body. Yes, your intestines are not actually part of your internal body. It is just a continuous tube from your mouth to your anus.
That is physiology.
On a mental and emotional level, you have created mental constructs based on how you interacted with your environment as a child and who you continue to interact with. Your primary care givers and influences shaped the way you developed your personality. Your personality is just an amalgamation of the behaviours and beliefs that kept you safe and alive as a child. Your personality develops due to the process of fragmentation. If the stress you experience is abnormally high, you will experience different degrees of this process and develop serious mental disorders. This again in an adaptation.
It is a healthy normal physiological response to the environment you grew up in. In fact, if you didn’t have what we call a mental disorder after going through such fucked up shit, then we could call you weird or abnormal.
That is what psychology is all about.
Everyone is healthy. Your body continuously seeks to maintain that balance, that homeostasis. It does everything it can to do so. When it no longer can, you die.
If you get sick, that is a good thing. It’s your body dealing with unhealthy parts in your body in a healthy natural way. The more you try to fight nature the more hurt you’re gonna get. Try standing still when a 100 foot wave comes crashing over you. You can try. But nature always wins. Why not go with the flow?
It is time we start to see things the way they really are. Too much of modern medicine thinks it has good solutions when sometimes it just exacerbates the problem by omitting the fact that your body is always reacting in a healthy manner. Your body is designed to help you. If you resist it, it will continue to try to do everything it can to help you. Sometimes death is the only solution that is left when the body is completely exhausted and has done its best.