Tag Archives: health
Science is pretty clear on this one: love brings healing and wholeness. Fear, anger and doubt bring compromised immune function and unhappiness. So for your sake, why not add more love to your life in the New Year? 
We know from lots of studies that living in a state of peace and love and happiness strengthens our body’s ability to fight disease. The research is so consistent and prolific that most accept it now as common knowledge.
But we forget. We get politically fired up, or fired up on a basketball court, or fired up at a co-worker or neighbor. This is where the research can be a bit tricky to understand.
Research seems to suggest that getting “fired up” or angry isn’t a bad thing. However, if we blow a gasket on a daily basis, or if we hold our anger in and act like everything’s great all the time, then our bodies can pay the price. So it’s not anger itself that’s bad for us. It’s explosive or suppressed anger that will cause physical problems.
Same for sadness and fear. We all have regular occasion to be sad or scared or doubtful. These emotions are part of life. Problems arise, though, when we completely avoid these more difficult emotions, or when we get stuck feeling one for long periods.
Sure, there are times in all our lives when we seem to get angry a lot, or we just can’t shake the blues. But the healthier we get, the less fear, anger, doubt and sadness linger.
All emotions deserve a place at the table. Just make sure it’s you sitting at the head.
With practice, each of us is capable of naming individual emotions as they rise up. And mastery comes when we see each emotion simply as a wave that has splashed up from the ocean of our minds. We remain in peace as each feeling crashes the surface of our thoughts, knowing that soon it will return to the deep and quiet ocean it came from.
Our job is to watch these emotion waves rather than become them. When we become each individual wave or emotion, we can get tossed about. However, when we simply watch each wave, we stay calm like the ocean deep; like the deep waters of the still mind.
When we practice this emotional witnessing, we return more quickly to the peace and love always available to us and in us.
So to help add a little love to your New Year, consider trying one or two of these:
- Put your hand on your heart, and feel your own heart beat.
- Feel your lover’s heart beat.
- Make a donation.
- Get a massage.
- Give one.
- Send a card to someone who could really use it.
- Build something; bake something.
- Commit to doing something special next week that you really enjoy.
- Laugh hard.
- Sing.
- Let someone love you in a very specific way.
- Say, “I love you,” with conviction.
- Send loving thoughts to someone you don’t understand.
Here’s to more love, peace and joy in 2016.
Thanks to Oprah, gratitude journals were all the rage a while back. And while most wouldn’t peg me as a hipster, thanks-giving has real appeal. That’s because the simple act of gratitude can upshift our immune system. And the on going practice of giving thanks can actually change us at the level of our DNA–maybe more.
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Cell biologist, Dr. Bruce Lipton, has a great DVD presentation called, “The Biology of Perception.” In it, he outlines some fascinating fundamentals about how we function at the cellular level, and how that translates to the way we are in the world at large.
In his presentation, Dr. Lipton wonderfully explains the notion that our bodies are always operating in one of two basic modes: growth or protection. Always [and only] one mode or the other. Never both. This paradigm overlays perfectly with the work of Gary Zukav who says we constantly move between two inner states: love or fear. Dr. Lipton describes love to be the number one ingredient for supporting growth in humans. Gratitude is love: love for someone, love for something, love for someplace, love for some belief. All gratitude.
This is where it gets interesting. Our body’s general mode of living or being in the world begins at the level of perception. For example, I love racing motorcycles. Therefore, no matter how many others perceive racing as dangerous, when I race my systems kick into the growth mode since I perceive racing as awesome. When we are in growth mode, our immune systems are bolstered. That’s because when we are in a state of love or gratitude, healthy blood flow is maintained to the gut where the immune system is born. That’s unlike the mode of protection or fear, by which blood is forced out of the gut, to the arms and legs. For me, racing motorcycles establishes a state of love, born of gratitude, which produces growth or health in my body. That’s assuming, of course, I “keep the rubber side down.”
But that’s the thing. What do you think happens to the immune system of someone who cares about me, but perceives racing as dangerous, when she watches me on the track? That person’s body will go into protect mode. In protect mode, the body squeezes blood out of the gut and core organs, and sends that blood to the limbs, readying for fight or flight. Because this fear state robs the belly of blood, the immune system living in the gut of that person watching me race takes a hit. At that point, that spectator is far from a mode of gratitude. And this interrupts growth. All of this gets reflected in the hormonal and nervous systems. And all this has the potential, according to Dr. Lipton and others, to literally redo DNA. (Remember The INNERnet?)
We have the same external event, a motorcycle race, producing a growth response in one person and a protection response in the other. What creates the difference in responses? Not the race. It’s each person’s perception of the race. Think of the implications of perception, beyond a race. How often do we protect simply because of a perception? And what might happen if we had a growth response instead?
Here’s the last and maybe most interesting of Dr. Lipton’s points. This basic love/growth versus fear/protection process begins at the cellular level. He tells us that if you lay a single human cell in a petri dish, and put some form of nutrient near that cell, the cell moves toward the nutrient and grows. But if you put that same human cell in a petri dish and place a toxin near it, the cell moves away to protect itself.
Now multiply that basic process by trillions, the number of cells in each human being. Then multiply that by billions, the number of us on the planet. Dang, that’s a lot of cells and humans either growing or protecting. Nonstop, all of us are either growing or protecting!
So, gratitude and love expand us. Fear and protection contract us. What would happen if all the cells of all the people in the world expanded in gratitude at the same instant? It all starts with perception. Do we look out at the world and see good, or something else?
With that, the prescription for the health of our species comes into focus. When we all find reason for gratitude, the human race grows in love.
Happy thanks-giving.
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