Health balance: the art of listening to your body
You get an idea. Immediately your brain sends coordination messages to your body. Each organ, muscle, joint… complies and then just as lightning fast, sends back its acknowledgement of “all done, sir.” This is a perfect world, body in health & balance.
But what about those non-compliant answers like “we’re not getting up yet” or “oops, I missed”; or status messages like “ouch! that smarts!” (a consequence of noncompliance) or “Captain, she can’t take much more” or “could I get a little more oxygen?” or “I’m thirsty.”
We don’t think about our organs much, we allow our “command central” to coordinate them in a mostly-automatic way (controlling hormones, immune function, digestion, etc.). Our conscious direction tends to focus on movement, executing ideas. When you decide it’s time to get out of bed, for example, you direct your body through your morning routine, and (hopefully) without any more conscious thought, your nervous system switches over from its restful overnight state to “get up and go,” providing the energy it needs for your body to comply with your wishes. This is one side of health balance.
When you rest for the night, the automatic functions of your nervous system direct the flow of nutrients, immune factors and more so that all the wear and tear of your day is rebuilt. Healing and repairing occurs at night. That is one reason why sleep is so important. This is the other side of health balance.
The third side of health balance is all-important: meaningful work, relationships, and other activities. Without purpose and goals, what’s the point?
Listening to your body’s health balance
Perfect health to your body means all of its parts work in perfect coordination. If there is some little wobble or “uncoordination”; this is disease; your body is not properly healing and repairing. Your body has become imbalanced.
At first, you may feel just not quite right. Or maybe you assigned it to getting older. But if this continues, you’re soon likely to experience painful symptoms.
Your body is a carefully tuned electrical machine monitored by your nervous system. The slightest alteration to this communication network will cause health problems and pain. This is your body’s way of saying “pay attention!” and “help.”
Listening for health balance is easy when viewed as balanced coordination. You don’t always need expensive diagnostic tests—sometimes you do, but often the first signs are subtle and well before a diagnostic test will show anything. This is when you should listen—and act.
Listening to corrective care
Corrective treatments aimed at restoring health and balance also need to be coordinated. It can do your body more harm than good to have a bunch of “uncoordinated” health actions or take random remedies; these just create more imbalances.
Unfortunately most corrective treatments are not balanced, they do not take into account the whole body, and are almost always too severe. A pharmaceutical or nutraceutical (synthetic vitamin) will bypass your nervous system to create an effect. They do this by over-stimulating organs or systems and creating new imbalances. For a minute, the effect may be what you or your doctor is trying to achieve. But because the remedy fails to take into account balancing all your systems, ultimately it creates imbalances.
Usually there were underlying imbalances waiting for the straw to break the camel’s back. So for a minute, you have forced a portion of your body to do something, and just changing that alone will make you feel differently, but is this balance? No. Will it last? No. For any correction to be permanent, you need to fix the imbalance is causing your body to communicate that something’s wrong (symptom).
Health Balance:
- enough of the right genuine building blocks
- not so many stressors
There are three main categories of stress: physical stress (injury and trauma), chemical stress (toxins in the environment and our diet), and emotional stress (thought). Leave any one of these uncorrected and you get only temporary relief. And if the main culprit is not addressed you get temporary relief or no relief at all.
How long your investment in healing lasts depends on how thoroughly you address any imbalances. Some of us are better at listening to our bodies than others, with all the noise in our world and day-to-day activities, even the good ones, we often don’t take enough time to step back and listen when the signs are subtle. We wait, we put it off.
Whichever group you belong to, please take a minute to make sure your healing and health decisions are aimed at restoring and then maintaining balance. This restores the miracle of everyday healing. Miracles are expected.
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