Good health is freedom from illness. There are two aspects of illness – the underlying cause of harm and the series of ailments and diseases generated by it. The main source of illness is stress. Stress is how your body reacts to external stimuli, and we typically respond with anger, fear, worry, doubt, grief, frustration, low self-esteem, etc. Stress does not cause illness. When you’re angry, you’re ill at that moment. You become angry because there’s already a weakness in a particular body system.
Western medicine recognizes that stress is the cause of most illnesses. It’s the greatest epidemic in the world, but they don’t have a clue about eliminating it. Stress is the pent-up force in your body once you have inappropriately dealt with a perceived threat. This force remains pent-up because it is an emotional response (i.e., increased blood flow to the muscles of the extremities, increased breathing rate, etc.) that equips you for a physical action in a situation that does not require one.
Although stress is your physiological response to a challenge, it is NOT the situation itself that is “stressful.” The chief cause of stress is in the mind (i.e., wrong thinking) and secondarily, in the brain, and not in the events classified as “stressors.” Stress damages all vital functions of the body, including your brain and impairs your health and vitality.
The true cause of illness is your self-image. The human self-image lays the foundation for reacting emotionally in life. The human believes it is natural to behave emotionally. It is the acceptance and perpetuation of negative emotions that cause illness. If you indulge in these emotions several times per day, your body cannot rejuvenate itself and can make your health worse.
If you’re going to heal yourself, you have to know something about biology, specifically psycho-biology. Emotions are a diagnostic tool to show you how the energy is flowing within you. They are expressions of erratic irregular, devitalized, excessive, or deficient flow of the life force. When you’re emotional, certain chemicals are activated – namely adrenaline and cortisol which stimulate the fight or flight response. Blood flow is redirected from the vital organs to the muscles. You are reacting as if you’re being assaulted. That shortage of blood flow and vital energy (chi) is what makes you sick since you’re depriving your vital organs of blood and nutrients.
If you observe someone behaving emotionally, show some compassion
because they need to be healed.
The opposite of stress is peace. Peace protects your health. Our natural response to adversity and challenge is peace! Peace in the midst of a challenge promotes mental clarity, improved performance, and better health.