Clean Up Your Temple – A Poem

If you want to hear, for one moment,
What I would advise
For maximum spiritual development
And embodied transformation
Beyond all the lofty attainment
Of non duality and advaita
It would be this

Clean up all you do
Clean up your body temple
Cleanse and nourish
Often and with vigor
Eat the rainbow and remove the toxins

Attend to the emotional body
Reinforced and supported by bodily habits and addictions
Heal old emotions, shine the light of love
On all that is held in grievance and resentment
Let it go, let it all go, for the sake of peace

Delve into mind’s rigidity and righteous beliefs
Entertain the unknown as your intimate friend
And become loose and relaxed

And seek only spiritual equanimity and love

If you attend to these fours pillars of wisdom
Body, emotion, mind, and spirit
You will see radical and fundamental change
But if you leave one pillar out
Your temple will be lopsided and incomplete.

Nervous System Overload, A Modern Malady

If you discovered that the fear
The anxiety, the grief, the rage
Were your nervous system
Crying out for support and release
For care and understanding

Would you do something about it?

Well it is

You have built an identity
Out of a complex set of responses,
Memories and perceptions
You are more a ‘we’ than a ‘me’
And the ‘we’ is trying to say something
Trying to get some attention

Grief, suppressed anger, rage,
Fear, trauma, shame
When they are denied the full flow
Of their energy
Take up residence in the energetic system
They reside in the nervous system

The nervous system
Is an energy system
Electrical and biological energy
A storage and release system
It is exquisite, but it is designed to release its energy

It is an ultra sensitive and miraculously designed system. It will not be easily overridden. But in our ignorance and our wounding and our fear we make attempts to override it. And it leads to trouble, emotional, mental and physical trouble.

Spiritual understanding alone does not necessarily touch or shift what might be ‘stuck’ in the nervous system. I don’t care whether you call it Kundalini or Nervous System Overload. It needs attending to in some way.
Sometimes simply acknowledging this, or even allowing it fully to rise to the surface, can be enough.
Sometimes full scale body/emotional release work is necessary.

It may take a moment, or a day, or a year, or ten years.

I have rarely seen it fully dissolved and released through a mental understanding or even experience of ‘awakening.’ It is one thing to have an experience of awakening but the work really starts afterwards if the old stuff is still stuck in the nervous system.

Yes, it’s emotional, and it will require voyaging into the murky world of emotions, and of course we don’t want to go there. But one way or another the fact is that if there is anything that has taken up residence in the energetic system we call the nervous system, it must be attended to, and released into freedom.

So many people are walking around with such clear understanding, but on deeper exploration we discover the nervous system is on overload, and that’s where the work is.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Everything (Including Illness) is Included in the Spiritual Journey.

I spent nearly 10 years seriously ill, from about 2004 to 2014. I had major chronic autoimmune illness. I won’t share the details but enough to say it was dramatic, not life threatening but totally debilitating, and it completely shattered my ability to live a ‘normal’ life.
I wrote a book about the experience called ‘The Power of Illness to Change Your Life.’

http://a.co/d/3ShFibv

It also invited me into the deepest inner journey of my life.
I see that period of my life as an entirely transformational one.
I cannot begin to tell you how deep it was. It was total. It took me to every part of myself, every unexplored area, every vulnerability, every attachment, every fear.

It demanded I resolve all past grievances and traumas. It urged me to accept the prospect of death, or a life of permanent illness.

It took me to rage and anger at my past, at myself, and at God
.
And of course it had a huge impact on my relationship with Amoda. She hadn’t signed up for a relationship with this. To her utter credit she just rolled with it and allowed me to have my inner journey, supporting where and when appropriate and encouraging me to dive in deeper.

I took absolutely no medication despite the frantic advice of the specialists and doctors. To some, to many, that was irresponsible. To us it was necessary. I followed nature, I followed intuition, I followed some instinct that said, ‘This will heal, you will heal.’

It was tough, warrior-like tough. I have been on my knees, on the floor. I have given it all up to god, I have surrendered my body for the peace of love and had that prayer answered.
I have embraced the human journey with all its fragility and its temporariness.

And I am not one of the spiritual ‘nondualists’ who want to deny the existence of the body and cast it aside as unimportant. I am not one of those.

I say love the body. Love the life. Find out for yourself what it means for consciousness, for the soul, for the spirit, to be in the form of a temporary vessel that will inevitably perish.

Explore the link between thought, belief and wellbeing and illness.

Don’t be afraid of the body, and don’t be afraid of attending to it. It’s not the enemy of freedom. It’s not the shackle that ties us down. Thought and belief are the shackles that bind us.

I have learned to be free AND live fully in the body while I am here.

I eat well and healthy. I run, yes I run, a lot. I love the freedom and joy of movement. And when I can’t do it any more, I will see if I can love that. When old age arrives, I will see if I can open to it, I will seek to embrace the fear I have of form dissolving.

But I won’t deny the human experience as not ‘spiritual.’ Everything is included.

Thank you for reading!

Sympathy for Suffering

The last few days, in fact in recent weeks, and particularly since we visited Santa Fe which is at 7000 feet, I have been revisiting some old symptoms associated with my ulcerative colitis. It is quite an unpleasant shock I can tell you. There is no blood, which is always pretty scary, but I have had mucus and irregular bowel movement and that feeling in the belly of discomfort and distress. (Sorry for the graphic detail!)

I am not trying to get any sympathy here, this short blog is about something else.

It is about the difference between feeing well and feeling ill.

I spent almost ten long years carrying illness and slow recovery. At times both Amoda (my wife) and I thought I was either going to die, slowly, or else carry sickness around for the rest of my life. It was bad, at times it was utterly demoralizing and I have spent time in despair and depression. I have been to the edge with my body and come back to tell the tale.

And my healing journey worked. It took such a long time, and so much patience and persistence. By the time I did my long water fast I still carried some remnants of scarring and discomfort in my colon, but after the water fast that disappeared. Since then I have had various issues, including a mysterious full body rash that lasted two years, and a borderline hashimotos diagnosis (thyroid malfunction and auto immune problem), but on the whole I have been getting stronger and healthier, to the point where people remark on my vitality and glow.

And every so often something happens and I get dragged back into stuff, and I remember.

I remember how tough it is to be ill. I think it’s real tough when the cause is mysterious and vague, labelled ‘auto immune’ without saying or knowing where it has come from or what to really do with it. Without knowing how to heal and how long it might take, it’s pretty daunting. That’s not to say acute illness is any better. In fact it’s all suffering.

It is tough. And that’s my point here. It is simple. It is very hard to function fully and brightly when there is illness. I am sorry. If it’s you who has something, I am sorry and I wish you great healing, or compassion and empathy, depending on where you are at.

Not everyone heals their body.

But everyone can heal their heart.

I came to the conclusion many years ago, when I was facing ‘the ‘illness for life’ thoughts, that it was more important for me to heal my wounded and broken heart than to be obsessed with healing my body. So I endeavored to do exactly that, and I remember one night I had what now seems like a deeply spiritual experience. Let me tell you.

I went out to the local woods and I lay down, fed up with pain and hardship, and desperate for some relief. I gave myself to the ground and it felt like a fell into a hole (kind of like a grave) and I realized I had reached the end of my tether. I came face to face with my mortality, and thus with God.

I remember saying (Inwardly), ‘God, you can take this body if you wan it, I no longer care and I am sick of holding on to desperation, but please help me heal this wounded heart. Give me some peace and love, and do what you want.’

I was so willing to let go of this body something changed. I actually became aware that life is vast and mysterious, much bigger than the smallness of ‘me and my body’ and how everything that we do, think, feel and experience is held in a love more exquisite and beautiful than anything we can ever imagine. If we could taste that love, what we might call God’s Love, for a moment, we may well not be able to do anything ever again, it may render everything else meaningless.

I have never forgotten this and whenever I slip back into anxiety or fear about illness, or death, or suffering, I remember it. It brings relief and great compassion, both for myself and for others who suffer. I know, through personal experience, that suffering is temporary and is not the truth of who we are.

But it is a challenge. And I feel for those who are ill, those who are at the end, those who are scared and those children who get ill so early in life. I have no explanations but I have an open heart that longs to hold suffering close and help carry it a little when it is too heavy.

Thank you for reading, may you be blessed.

Distortion in your Energy Field

Any distortion in your energy field may result in some illness or other. 

What does this mean?

It means that the river of energy that comprises your life, and all life, is flowing naturally and effortlessly from source into manifestation and back again.

Some elements on this level of reality are anti-life, toxic to nature, and disruptive to that natural flow. When they interfere with the river of (divine) energy they create a distortion in the flow. This can cause any number of problems.
The one we are concerned with here is ill health. Not just physical illness, but all perceived illness, including mental and emotional illness.

So what distorts the flow?

Here is where it gets interesting.

On the physical level things like some viruses and heavy metals, chemicals, wifi frequencies, and of course GMO produced foods. In fact anything that is made by man has been largely created artificially. It may feed us but it’s a (sometimes subtle) energy flow disruptor.

Let’s talk about the mental and emotional level.
Thought has incredible power. More than we imagine. Consider the fact that EVERYTHING that humanity has built, created, destroyed, and manufactured, started as a thought, and was then thought into life. If you don’t imagine that same thought turned inwards against yourself can have the same power, negatively, then you need to reconsider.

Thought can create, and thought can destroy.
It can also severely disrupt the energy flow within your finely tuned system.

Negative thought, toxic thought, grievous thought have an impact, and they distort nature.

Truth, like love, has a natural flow to it. Goodness, positivity, compassion, self love, joy, all these qualities, if they are true, are benign and even beneficial.

But toxic emotions create toxic thoughts. Old, unhealed wounds still exist in the energy field of your body mind system, and they distort the natural flow of energy.

That’s what I mean when I say distortion in your energy field may result in ill health.

We are way more mysterious than we currently understand. There are infinitely more things that affect us than we know, ranging from the gross to the ever subtle.

So many forces shape our lives, our wellbeing and ill health, and we are scraping the surface to understand. We like to think that our science is a long way to understanding the complexities of the human being, and that modern medicine is on the path to solving our health issues, but is that really true?

Chronic illness is out of control. Cancer is out of control. Depression is out of control. There are more people alienated by life now than ever. Something is patently not right. Most medicine doesn’t heal, it hides. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of science and medicine. When it’s used with discretion and wisdom. Sadly most medicine, and most doctors, are lost in the superficial paradigm that has no wisdom or depth in it. 

The greatest thing to know about pharmaceutical medicine is the discretion when to use it, and when NOT to. It is not a magic bullet.

They would laugh at what I write and what I say. But I stand by the truth of my experience. They said I would be on the meds for ever. I never took them once. They said surgery. I have no symptoms at all. What?

I resolved all my inner distortion, old conflicts, toxic thoughts, removed heavy metals, and enabled the natural flow of inner divine energy to flow again in my life and gradually healing happened. I chose not to take pharmaceutical medicine as I believe they are toxic, and you have to pay for the short term gain of symptom suppression. It is not good for the liver that is already burdened by the illness. But I am radical and have alternative beliefs.

It took years, and a life changing spiritual, emotional and mental deep dive into the very nature of my existence. I surrendered everything, battled hard, trusted deeply, hit rock bottom, got up and kept on going, and put one foot in the front of the other. Oh, and I never actually believed I had a disease. 

Go figure.

Heal the distortion.

With great love and (hopefully) inspiration – Kavi

Don’t Let Your Diagnosis Define You – Untether Your Mind

I have listened to many people talk about their health condition, diagnosis, or injury. I have met a lot of people who have healed, many who have defied their diagnosis to do so. And I have met many who have believed their diagnosis and somehow resigned themselves to it, and it has become their reality.

And what I have learned is this:

The mind is VERY POWERFUL, more powerful than we generally believe. It has a power beyond the accepted paradigm, and can be a phenomenal assistant in healing the physical body.

And belief itself, when fully activated, can unleash the mind’s potential to change reality.

Now, at this early stage of the discussion I want to say one thing: There are no guarantees in this life. You may have a disease and do everything in your power, follow all the best diets, harness your mind, live in total peace and love, and still you may not recover. Or the opposite.

There are no guarantees, because life, death, and everything in between, is shrouded in mystery, and we don’t really understand it at all.

But to blindly accept what comes towards you as ‘the truth,’ or fact, when it comes to your illness, or your life, can imprison you and deny you great opportunities.

Here is a case in point from my life. Some of you may have heard me speak of this incident before. It was when I was diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease in 2005 through tests, and I had an appointment with a chief consultant in the University College Hospital in London to go through it. I had no idea what to expect. 

The consultant was absolutely 100% certain and utterly convincing in his approach to me. He told me I had this ‘major disease’ and I was going to have it for life, I would be on medication for life starting on steroids to ‘get it under control,’ and if nothing else worked I would have to have my bowel (or some of it) removed. He delivered this message as though it was standard procedure and nothing out of the ordinary.

I was bewildered and shocked.

And then I woke up and decided to ask questions about what alternatives I had. “None,” came the reply.

I argued for Ayurveda and Chinese medicine. He laughed both off as useless and even dangerous. He said it had nothing to do with diet. They had no idea what caused it. He was amused by my questions and desire for alternatives, and it was easy to see he was totally convinced he was in the right. He would be, he was a consultant with years of practice who had seen this condition time and time again.

But I had one trick up my sleeve. He had never seen ME before. He had never met anyone quite like me. Even he admitted that. I was alert, aware, inquisitive, and I simply wouldn’t accept ‘as truth’ what he said.

I decided that the only thing I could do was sign myself out of their care and ‘go it alone.’ He thought I was utterly mad and wrong, even irresponsible, but he couldn’t stop me. I remember his withering look that said,

“You will be back.”

I NEVER RETURNED.

I NEVER TOOK ANY MEDICATION.

I NEVER HAD ANY SURGERY.

AFTER A LONG JOURNEY HEALING I NO LONGER HAVE ANY SYMPTOMS AT ALL, FOR YEARS.

Let’s face it, its gone. Healed.

If you do your research, you will find that my story is common. I am not unique. So what is this all about?

I just didn’t believe what he said. But I didn’t just dismiss him and do nothing. I listened to him, I took it all very seriously, and then I chose to take other action. I will not have someone define my reality, not when it comes to something as mysterious as my health. Science is a reliable tool for measuring and testing but it doesn’t define reality. There are too many anomalies when it comes to the body: Miracle healing. Placebo effect. Nocebo effect. Spontaneous healing.
All these things actually happen, and as long as they happen, it means they CAN happen. And as long as they CAN happen we must allow for the possibility.

BUT I return to what I said earlier:

The mind is VERY POWERFUL, more powerful than we generally believe. It has a power beyond the accepted paradigm, and can be a phenomenal assistant in healing the physical body.

And belief itself, when fully activated, can unleash the mind’s potential to change reality.

If you are going to follow your own path, if you really want to harness the power of the mind, you have to work hard, you have to get into your mind’s weaknesses and doubts, the self sabotaging, the erroneous beliefs.

You can’t just dismiss the beliefs of the current arraign with looking for something deeper, wiser or more intelligent to replace them with.

That is where the true journey takes place. That is the spiritual journey. But first you must untether.

I hope this speaks to you. I would love to hear from you about your experience. Comment below and tell me whats going on!

Love Kavi

 

Real Healing means Healing EVERYTHING you can

During my first Panchakarma treatment in India in 2004 I was a mess.

Physically I was all over the place and pretty desperate. I had rosacea all over my face (eczema) my liver was aching and, by all accounts, under serious stress, I had high levels of toxicity from years of chemical abuse, I was exhausted and sick.

Mentally I was a mess, I had permanent frown lines between my eyes and I was highly charged, nearly always frustrated and angry, and anxious.

Emotionally I was still carrying all the baggage of the unresolved past. The bags were heavy but I carried them anyway, I guess I didn’t know there was a choice to put them down, we don’t get that truly until we have put them down. I just couldn’t let go.

Spiritually I felt no visceral connection with God, the divine, natural intelligence or anything. It was all conceptual at that stage of my life, and no amount of ‘beliefs’ helped me.

Can you see how everything in my life was reflecting everything else?

There was a deep holding on to the past on all levels.
That toxicity was deeply embedded, both in my psyche AND in my body.

When I understood this connection it almost didn’t matter where I started the journey of release and renewal because I was going to come up against everything anyway. That’s what happens in real healing.

If you start on the physical level it’s going to bring you face to face with yourself, your stuff, your past, your beliefs, your defenses and your grievances. Your task is to meet everything even though it hurts.

That’s detoxification. It is powerful but deeply transformative.

And if you are in any doubt, just keep going, one step at a time, bit by bit, little by little.

Here I am at Ayushakti in Mumbai, 2004

Worrying about things that don’t happen – is catastrophic for the body

I just wrote this post on Facebook and it was my most popular! Is everyone suffering from this?

Worrying about things that don’t happen is one of the chief causes of adrenal stress, immune compromise and nervous system meltdown.
It is not only a spiritual issue. It is a mental and emotional issue, and very much a physical one.
There you have it, a truly holistic experience!
I know this syndrome intimately as I have been very vulnerable to it most of my life and have now largely ‘tamed’ it. It comes with a ‘vata’ disposition, according to Ayurveda. (The vata dosa, or body type, is prone to anxiety and fear)

Worrying about things that don’t happen is a fixation that must be met with openness and willingness to face the fear. We feed it the fuel it wants by turning away from it or being overly reactive to it. We lose our discernment and become hyper anxious.

That hyper anxiety hits the body hard, and is ultimately useless and destructive.

I recently returned from a trip to the east coast of USA. We accidentally got my name wrong on the flight booking, and that caused me considerable anxiety. I imagined they wouldn’t let me on the flight. I actually became quite stressed about the whole thing. Add to that I thought our luggage was over weight, and we didn’t have enough time to get everything done and I was all over the place!

Guess what? It was a big lesson.
a. They didn’t care about the name and changed it in a moment.
b. The luggage was fine.
c. We had loads of time and were still at the airport early.
d. I stressed over absolutely nothing.

Luckily I have learned not to take out this anxiety on anyone else, particularly loved ones. I keep it to myself as much as possible.

But the point I’m making is I worried about things that didn’t happen. And it began to screw around with my body.
Acute anxiety or chronic anxiety, it doesn’t matter, it still degrades the body integrity and must be met with softness and love.

The effect of this unnecessary worry on the body can be catastrophic. From adrenal fatigue to ramped up immune system, to liver tightness, high cortisol levels, risk of heart attack, rashes, and serious digestive problems, this is not some minor issue. Even cancer may be fueled by major worry.

It is a chronic and societal problem that must be faced individually and collectively. 

What can you do?

You can do so much to reduce this heavyweight problem.

All endeavors will help. Here are some ideas that I use.

Meditation. Spending time in nature. Exercise. Relaxation.Visualization. 
Spiritual inquiry. Healing old wounds and traumas. Understanding one’s mind and belief systems.
Magnesium. Detoxification. Nourishment with healthy and organic vegetables and salads.
Decreasing acidic and stimulating foods and drinks. NO COCA COLA!
Love.

Let me know what you think, or whether you worry about things that don’t happen and what strategies you employ, if any, to help reduce it’s damaging effects.

And thanks for reading!

Reactivity in Auto Immune Conditions and Inflammation

Please do not take this as scientific proof. If you are looking for modern science you probably wont find it here. This blog and website is only about ideas that might be possible.

As I always say in my blogs and posts, find out for yourself what is true. Believe nothing unless you truly believe it deeply inside. And if you don’t know, be ok with not knowing and make your inquiry into healthy living and illness come from an unknown perspective.

Basically, develop discernment and inner wisdom, it will serve you for life and help others who also don’t know.

My conversations are speculative and holistic. I’m trying to connect dots that medical science doesn’t want to, or can’t, or won’t, connect. Mainly that means exploring the connection between matter and thought, or body and mind you might say.

I want to look at patterns, beliefs, language, energy fields, that sort of thing. I truly believe we only have a small bit of the puzzle of being human. Most of the rest of the puzzle will not be found in science or conventional medicine.

But the puzzle and the mystery is where the exciting stuff is. That’s where I like to dig around. I am an investigator and explorer.

So I have been contemplating the nature of auto immune conditions, described by conventional medicine as ‘self attacking self,’ and decided to talk a little about how our emotional mental ‘reactivity’ to life, thought and situations may play a very big part in perpetuating the suffering of self attack.

The key here is to understand why reactivity, particularly over-reactivity, is happening on the mental, emotional level, and to attempt to ease it down and relax it. In my world awareness and understanding is fundamental in the healing.

Reactivity tends to come from fear. That fear can be fear of danger, fear of lack of safety, threat to life, violence or extreme vulnerability. Fear is an existential issue we all have somewhere deep within. People with trauma, childhood wounds, acute sensitivity (sometimes from birth trauma) and unstable childhoods are prone to this fear more than most. This fear is visceral, it’s not simply emotional or mental. It becomes physical, make no mistake. And that physicality we now know (through science and biology) can affect our gut microbiome, digestive process, gut permeability, ‘fight or flight’ mechanism, and adrenal glands, as well as the whole body. Every physical effect I have just stated impacts the immune system.

The deeper trouble with this is that it sets up a chronic pattern that may lock us in for life. If these things are happening in childhood and youth we learn them as survival mechanisms and repeat them every time something real OR IMAGINED reminds us of the old trauma. It doesn’t have to be a real threat, it can just be the thought of it or something similar. In fact much of this reactivity will happen IN ANTICIPATION of trouble THAT ACTUALLY DOESN’T HAPPEN.

This has been one of my ongoing life stories revealed to me over the years through various body work therapies, deep inner exploration and more recently chiropractic testing. I developed a secret inner part of me that was always alert to danger, always on the look out and hyper vigilant, whether I was asleep or not. The consequences of this are serious and disturbing, both physically and mentally. Physically it means being always in reactivity mode and high alert, and never able to get into deep restful delta sleep where healing and renewal comes from.

It means immune system and nervous system are on constant alert to danger. It began in my early teens during my parents slide into acrimonious divorce and my slide into ‘out of control’ drug taking chaos. It has lasted a lifetime (the effect not the drugs!), and been mostly hidden from view but had massive repercussions on my relationships, purpose in life and most important on my physical health. Specifically on my immune health, gut health, and now thyroid health. It also resulted in addiction problems.

So what does this say?

Well I actually see this reactivity, this over active ‘fight or flight’ mechanism, at play in many people I work with, and almost always with those who experience some form of auto immunity. And it can disguise itself in many ways. Being over critical of self or others is one way, being self hating (remember the ‘self attacking self’ phrase at the beginning of this article?), being extremely resentful, being highly anxious, fearful, angry or depressed are all permutations of the same thing, reactivity.

This blog piece is just the beginning of a much bigger conversation about mind and body and trauma, and about how the immune system gets over activated when we are young.

If we accept that reactivity might be an issue both physically and emotionally it gives us knowledge and insight, and puts us in a greater position to be able to take action.

What action? I am going to discuss this next time.

I would love to hear from you what you think, as I really don’t have all the answers, but thousands of questions that I love exploring.

And the next piece I think will be how to turn our unhealthy reactivity to a healthy and calm responsiveness so we can maintain calm in our inner world.

Thank you so much for reading, and please please comment and add something to the conversation. And share this is you feel moved to.

Brain Health – It Matters More Than You Think

I have come to believe that our brains are probably the most overlooked organ in the whole body, until they go wrong!

We are more likely to notice, or get tested, or even feel, an issue with, say, our liver, kidneys, or thyroid, than our brains.  Because our brain and our mind are so entangled our experience is always totally subjective, which means we have no real way to tell if something is up, until it reaches the critical zone.

But maybe some of our ill health, stress, and mood inconsistency has more to do with our brains and what they are doing, or not doing, than we think?

Ask some chiropractors and they will say,’ Almost all imbalance (disease) comes from the brain-body communication system going wrong.’ Brain connects to nervous system in a bio-feedback relationship. It compensates and regulates. It operates via your conscious mind but, more importantly, via your unconscious mind. You have billions of processes, actions, complex activities taking place without any awareness from you whatsoever. Yet you are not a machine as such. You are a bio-electrical-organic-organism that interacts with the environment, constantly making adjustments and changes in order to survive and thrive. Everything that happens below the level of conscious awareness still depends on some aspects of its environment to help it. It is as alive as you are, and always adapting to its environment. That environment is you, your thoughts and beliefs.

What does that mean?

It means that if you carry trauma and constant stress, or pent up anger or fear, it affects some of your primary systems, namely your nervous system and immune system. Thoughts affect reality, and they affect matter. That interprets as, your thoughts, concepts and beliefs affect your body on the deepest levels, and the effects may well, over time, begin to impede the function of some of the unconscious actions that must take place for health and wellbeing.

That is where brain will become imbalanced and the bio-feedback relationship between body and mind may begin to break down.

If it’s not at ‘optimum’ then its always in ‘compensation’ mode.

In my opinion, by the time some of the very dramatic brain meltdown diseases happen, there has already been serious fragmentation of the brain-body relationship, but it has been hidden from conscious view.

That is why I favor a strong argument for brain and body detoxification, and a program of relaxation and sleep reprogramming, meditation and spending time calming down. If we take responsibility BEFORE things degenerate we may save ourselves a lot of trouble and money.

The bottom line is help your brain to maximize it’s ability to regulate and communicate. It will serve you well as you age. Here are some ideas.
1. SLEEP. This is probably the most important. In the deepest of sleep, known as ‘delta‘ sleep, the brain detoxifies. Your brain has lymph nodes in it and when this state of sleep is reached the channels of detoxification open and the brain is effectively ‘cleaned.’ It needs to happen regularly. The problem is most of us are living lives that are way too stressful and over active, and our sleep patterns are all over the shop, exaggerated these days by the amount of cell phone and computer use before bed time. Think of delta as the battery recharge time.

And it is not just sleep hours that matter but when you sleep. Ayurveda suggests that for optimal wellbeing we need to go to bed when the sun goes down and get u when the sun rises. Most people I know go to sleep very late after eating a big meal in the evening. For myself, I go to be about 8pm! and get up at at least 5am. That rhythm works well for me. And yet still at times I have to deal with erratic sleep patterns. So I use visualizations and sleep programing visualizations to help with it. They work. In the next few weeks/months, I hope to be able to offer you a new brain entrainment system that will help. I have been trying it out and so far it is working well. Stay tuned!

2. RELAXATION. When you relax, really relax, it has a profound impact on your body and brain health.  Just as sleep helps heal you, so does relaxation. We are designed to be relaxed, to deal with stress, and to return to the relaxed state as quickly as possible, like most animals. But as modernization has enveloped us we have lost the sacred and natural art of deep relaxation. So we spend much of our time in a hyper vigilant state. That means our ‘fight or flight’ mechanism is always switched on and we are prepared for danger. Unconscious mind can not tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined, and so it responds to anxious thoughts, thoughts of the future, thoughts of the past, fear of imagined events, in the same way.

What I am saying is that most of us don’t reach true relaxation even when we are asleep. So we have to create ways to help us. Get off your phone and get outside into nature. Meditate. Breathe. Do yoga. Do nothing at all. Practice stillness and just silently sitting. 

3. EXERCISE. A vital component of brain health ad mind body wellbeing is exercise. Just a little regularly keeps the whole system active and moving.
‘One project found that women over 65 who walked 30 minutes a day slowed their cognitive decline. When measuring mental acuity, the researchers found that the people who exercised appeared several years younger than those in the control group, who did not exercise at all.’ Huffington Post.

4. HERBS, SUPPLEMENTS AND DIET. Fruits and vegetables, anti oxidants and Omega 3 fats from natural sources are all helpful. Heal your gut and it will heal your brain. Stop processed food and toxic sugars. Here is a good article to help you:
https://drjockers.com/the-3-most-important-steps-to-boost-brain-function/

The purpose of this short blog is not to give you the definitive answer to this issue but to prompt you to think about it some more and to begin your own investigation. Believe me, it matters. The brain is not as fixed as we think. Research now is suggesting that it can be repaired, that is is much more ‘plastic’ than we imagine, but we need to really take care of it else we begin to lose function. We have seen the rise of dementia and alzheimers, motor neuron ailments, nervous system related problems, depression and insanity. We don’t have to go down that route, but we must intervene and take responsibility for our own brain/body health.

Most doctors are not going to help with this. They are symptomologists and will only respond to what you present. It is really up to you to dive into this area and figure it out.

Sorry to end this early but I really must go and relax in nature! Thanks for reading!