(First published on March 5, 2010. Revised July 5, 2011)
I was fortunate to witness nature at work at a friend’s home where we had gone for an overnight stay. My friend’s dog was looking rather listless and even as we watched, it literally crawled across the backyard sniffing at the grass. Having found a particular patch of grass to his apparent liking, he proceeded to pull out a lump of grass with his jaws, chewed it and then crawled under a chair. The animal slept soundly over the next three hours or so after which he got up, walked out and vomited everything. Much to my amazement, the not too long ago sick-as-a-dog dog was jumping all over the place as if nothing had happened. Remarkable, one would say! But routine stuff for all animals – except us humans, I should add.
All animals, especially the ones living away from human contact, have this divine intelligence and know instinctively what to do when they are unwell. I have heard that even lions and tigers that live in the wild eat grass when their bodies so require. I do not know how much of this is true, but the fact is that I do not find it very hard to believe and accept.
The knowledge is now somehow lost to mankind. Human beings seem to have forgotten that the Human Body is nature’s finest creation unmatched in power, capacity and adaptability. The fact is that the body is a self-cleaning, self-healing and self-maintaining entity if allowed to do so.
Humans today are unhealthy, simply because we are not allowing Nature to do its work.
Consider, for example, that an average human heart beats a little more than one hundred thousand times every twenty four hours (72 times per minute x 60 minutes x 24 hours) pumping about eight tons of blood every day, week after week, month after month, year after year over the network of approximately sixty thousand miles of blood vessels (more than twice the circumference of earth) without missing a single beat or taking a moment’s rest. Over the lifetime of an individual. On the other hand, when we put a mechanical pump through a much lower work load, the tremendous amount of heat generated causes it to breakdown frequently. The fact is that the human body's temperature is maintained at 98.6 degrees constantly without any inputs over the lifetime of any individual! Not only that, the heart keeps on pumping continuously and on the rare moments that it complains, we generally do not listen.
The biggest organ of the body i.e. the outer layer of the skin is made up entirely of dead cells. However, over four million pores in the same skin constantly act as a cooling system for the entire human body for the optimum temperature to be constantly maintained.
The digestive and metabolic systems have the remarkable ability to convert the food that we eat into healthy bone, blood and the cell structure of all the various organs that together make up the human body.
The lungs succeed in supplying oxygen to the blood and at the same time remove the carbon dioxide while carrying nutrients to the individual cells and removing waste products too.
The skeletal system provides the supporting framework which allows the body to go about doing its daily functions easily and almost effortlessly. The skeletal system in turns works in perfect harmony with a complex muscular system that allows locomotion and other activities.
The human body can reproduce itself completely from a single fertilized ovum. The wisdom and the knowledge required to perform this act of converting a single fertilized egg to a fully grown human being is beyond human comprehension and acquired intelligence.
To completely understand how the five human senses work will stun any intellect.
At the top is the brain which is overseeing all the miraculous activities, making sure everything works with precision and perfect co-ordination.
A single human cell is so small that it can not be observed without a microscope, yet its size is about one billion times the size of its smallest component! A single cell is the site of more chemical reactions than those in all the chemical factories in the world combined. There are thousands of components in a single cell: chromosomes, genes, DNA, mitochondria, enzymes, hormones, amino acids and thousands of various other chemicals. Yet each of these smallest components is individually responsible for the overall well being of the human body. The force behind the functions and the activities taking place in a single human cell is beyond the comprehension of a normal human mind. In short, the inbuilt intelligence of the human body is much more sophisticated than the normal thinking minds.
This can go on and on. The point I am trying to make it that such a complex entity could not have been created without any kind of mechanism in place which would have allowed it to keep on functioning properly on its own.
But most of us find it difficult to believe and continue to live in ignorance.
The problem:
According to me, the problem lies in the fact that we humans have been trying to create everything, including better health, through the mind. Maybe, we are putting too much of our minds in trying to attain better health! Can a mind create what it knows almost nothing about? I think not.
Agreed that we humans, thanks to the research being conducted over the recent decades, today know much more about the human body and its various components, than ever before, but the basic understanding of Good Human Health is something that still eludes us.
We are exposed to the knowledge about a number of Diet Plans with claims and counter claims being made about which diet is better. For instance, there are experts who advocate that milk is good and then there are experts who state exactly the opposite and have gone to the extent of stating that all milk and milk products should be banned.
Women are told to drink more milk during pregnancies so that their own yield improves when required. Yet the fact remains that milk producing animals do not drink more milk to produce more milk. They just eat grass and other green stuff and it seems to work for them – all the time.
Then there is a lot of talk going around for feeding our body supplements, vitamins, iron, calcium etc. Will this help nature to do its work properly and in a more efficient manner? I have my doubts.
In the middle of all this vast amount of information and misinformation, ordinary humans are suffering. Good health still eludes most. Even the medical doctors are not spared. Logic dictates that allopathic practitioners in general should be the healthiest of all humans as they know so much about the human body. But is it the truth?
The problem, in my humble opinion, is that we are not allowing our bodies to come back to the state of good health in a natural way. The divine intelligence to enjoy good health is there within all of us, yet it is not filtering through because we humans have lost our ability to listen to the voice within.The conditioned programmed human mind interferes.
After struggling with my own issues of health after a few years of trying to do what the doctor(s) ordered, I decided to take a call and listen to this inner voice and not the programmed mind. This was not easy to start with because of the constant chatter in the mind. This chatter was inevitable but regular practice of going into extended periods of silence helped me listen to the voice within.
The journey was not easy because I had to overcome a lot of fears that cropped up every now and then. The miracles that kept on happening because of my vocation of being a healing facilitator helped strengthen my resolve in my dark moments.
I am now absolutely certain that all the health issues that I have will ultimately be taken care of. Of course, that is something that only time will tell.
In the meantime, my own journey continues…
And so it is.
SP,
ReplyDeleteLet me first congratulate you on your efforts and say that I am deeply interested in the subject.There is no denial of the fact that our bodies are amazing and do posses capabilities of self healing. However, the dependence on self healing techniques to cure one's illness has lost it's primacy and continues to detoriarate as a credible and dependable form of therapy in the present world where a number of new forms of deaseases and ailments requiring alopathic and surgical intervention for survival of the body have cropped up. Unless both the sciences for healing of body are made to converge, self healing techniques will unfortunately remain as an alternative method of therapy. I belive more scientific efforts are required in this direction to provide human being a combined holistic health solution.
Bijan
Bijan,
ReplyDeleteI do agree with your observations regarding the allopathic method of treatment and the great advances made by the scientific community. But the fact remains that there are many situations when even the best of Physicians and Surgeons can not do anything for certain individuals for reasons that they can not explain. For example, joint replacement technology is wonderful but does not seem to work for everyone. Who do such patients turn to? Similarly, self-healing is also not for everyone...as it does not work for everyone.