Key Underlying Health Issues & Core Principles of Healing

5 Core Health Issues

We find people in modern societies who are suffering from imbalance emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually.

People may be experiencing any number of symptoms or “diagnoses,” but the underlying cause of dis-ease is typically an imbalance resulting from one or more of the following:

1. Chronic stress
2. Unhealed trauma
3. Chronic inflammation and/or microbiome imbalance
4. Chronic pain
5. Addiction / distraction / disconnection (from body, emotions, inner wisdom)

By becoming familiar with these core subjects, you’ll access vast bodies of knowledge that can explain how dis-ease manifests, and how and why people heal and balance their physical and energetic bodies.

4 Principles of Healing

Learning factual, verifiable information about the following subjects can bring powerful inspiration to the healing process.

#1 Genes don’t determine health. (And neither do germs or other pathogens.) Lifestyle choices do.

• Genetic determinism was completely disproved in 2003. Diseases may run in the family, but not because of genes. As it turns out, only a teensy-tiny percentage of diseases are actually “caused” by a genetic defect.
• The other 99% have manifested due to “the environment.” The environment is our lifestyle, most especially our levels of stress and the nutritional profile of our diet.
• The environment is quite similar to what is called the “terrain” in the terrain theory of disease and health which explains why some people exposed to the same pathogen don’t get sick when others do, and why holistic treatments such as yoga and nutrition heal chronic disease.

#2 The body’s capacity to heal and regenerate is miraculous.

• We witness this every time a wound closes and heals or we recover from a cold or flu. But it’s happening constantly in ways we don’t typically realize.
• “On a molecular level, every cell in your body is undergoing a constant process of coming into and out of being, much like the flicker of a flame, and doing it so perfectly that we only experience ourselves on a macroscopic level as immutable, relatively unchanging organisms. Yet there are trillions of changes and microadjustments occurring every moment in each cell, completely regenerating damaged and diseased tissue. On the most basic level, regeneration follows from removing what the body does not need and adding back what it does.”— Sayer Ji, Regenerate: Unlocking Your Body’s Radical Resilience through the New Biology  

#3 Chronic stress halts the body’s natural healing process. Balancing the nervous system restores it.

• Activating the parasympathetic nervous system restores the body’s natural healing processes.

#4 The immune system is adaptive, and the majority of the immune system is in the gut. Chronic inflammation and microbiome imbalance overwhelm the immune system. Relief restores its capability.

• The immune system is adaptive and creates synergistic relationships with microbes.
• A great amount of immune activity begins in the intestines where the health of the tiny life in our microbiome is key to the body’s health or disease.
• Physiologically, this is activated via the gut-brain axis, which relies (as do all systems of the body) on nervous system balance.
• Inflammation is an indicator of the body’s immune response being activated, but chronic inflammation overwhelms the immune system. Chronic inflammation indicates a need to address the cause (as opposed to suppressing symptoms). It’s an indicator of imbalance that needs to be addressed, not suppressed. The tremendous power of the body’s regenerative capability is unlocked when chronic inflammation is addressed at its root.

Where people get their information has a tremendous effect on their belief systems, and therefore the quality of their lives. How different would our world be if most people had been taught life-supporting information such as that of the power of the nervous system; microbiome vs genetic determinism; and the terrain vs germ theory? Simply through empowering students with yoga techniques, you can serve as a model and bridge to support others in freeing their mind (and life) from the hopeless, helpless victimhood stemming from false paradigms, awakening their interest, perhaps, in discovering such truths for themselves.