For the past week I have dived into a snow-balling movement that is going on right now, which for me means a revolution in medicine. Reading wonderful authors like Debra Greene, listening to amazing enlighteners both back home in Estonia through radio and also the inspirational figures Bruce Lipton, the cell-biologist who is now an educator in the new development in genetics called epi-genetics or (beyond) genetics, and Lissa Rankin who is also an educator as to the role of stress, our belief about stress and the role of doctors in healing.
It has been an astounding journey where most of my biological base knowledge taught in schools has been over-thrown. Genes don't control us, its the signals and the quality of intent from the environment which through the membrane of the cell can either trigger genes or leave them silent, but genes can do nothing on their own and after removing genes from the cells, the cells still function in a normal way. The placebo effect is perhaps the main reason why people heal in conventional medicine. We are self-healing mechanisms. The last part was not new to me at all, but it was the mechanism and the reasons behind that was left somehow unclear.
Biology and medicine are finally tuning into the recognition that consciousness is the most important part of an organism. I find myself doing my happy dance on the inside!
Religion on its own failed because people needed proof. We experience the world through our senses and these receptors to the outside can see, taste, touch, smell, hear- of course we couldn't be satisfied when that part of experience of life was left out of the equation. And yet science ie looking for proof is not complete on its own because there are phenomena that it just cannot explain with looking at the physical aspect only, many things just don't make sense.
Evolutional psychologists know the importance of a faith system for human beings, without something to believe in, to trust in, and to have hope in we are living in fear. We simply do not do well with the proposition and thought-system that it is an alien, hostile universe out there that acts without cause or reason in a random way and can threaten us at any time. Perhaps this view-point is also important at certain periods of life, it can propel us through existentialism towards many dissolutions of things we do not need, but in the long run it is a non-sustaining world-view.
When we banned religion and turned solely towards science then at first that worked quite well, there seemed to be definite laws and reasons about the outside that we could figure out and then control and we had a heightened faith in ourselves.
Of course it turned out that nature still acts unpredictably and besides that there were a lot of cold mechanical philosophical implications coming out of science like Darwinism and random competitive evolution, or the Newtonian clockwork model of the world that alienated us to a feeling of a lonely isolated machine. Still in the mercy of the unknown.
Even in modern science the more we know about the proven facts the more crazy the universe seems, especially with the rise of the modern sciences like quantum physics etc.
In my opinion, though people do protest this of course- science in fact IS the new religion or has turned into one. There are many things coming out from research now that show that many of the accepted "facts" of science are based on nothing but an agreement of the majority of the scientists in the past who presented it to the public as facts, and it caught up in the whole collective consciousness perhaps in the old model of faith, which ironically it was rebelling against in the beginning- perhaps a habitual track for us too strong to fight against, the path of least resistance. Really these "facts" were either partial findings to begin with or almost not researched at all, for example vaccines, aids, blood transfusions to name some.
If you listen to the most passionate advocates of science, you will often find people who refuse to even question many dogmas of science, who ridicule people who want to seemingly put the whole thing to question which we already take solace and comfort in, by simply doing additional new research or to look into alternatives to these, as would be scientific-minded really. The only conclusion is that science simply took the place of religion in a way.
But times are changing now, as soon as scientists started tackling the role of the mind and consciousness, in the after-advent of the discovery of the quantum world, and in the advent of a cyber-connected world of the modern era also.. there is a union happening among the open-minded and progressive scientists. Different fields of science are in fact coming to the same conclusions, conclusions that perfectly match old spiritual wisdom that the highest achieving researchers into the predecessor system for looking for answers found.
Spirituality and science together make a perfect marriage, something that I have been hoping for for a long time. By spirituality of course I do not mean organized religion, following dogma, blind faith. I mean the lessons that ancient cultures gave us, which we simply wanted to throw away like throwing the baby out with the bath water- those of feeling like an integrated part in our own deeply respected world- like shamans did. Those of coming to contact with the higher intelligence, knowledge about the life-energy that makes our hearts beat and lungs breathe, knowledge about the essence of life, the spark that is sacred, knowledge that because everything is connected we are all tiny parts of the process but we form a whole and there is love, there is meaning- like the the core of all religions did. With remembering these discoveries of the spiritual paradigm we can establish materialism also as the yang to the yin, with creating the perfect balance.
The new research into the placebo effect and stress has developed these understandings in short about what disease is and how we heal..
Stress turns on the fight-or-flight program in our body, the sympathetic system. Our brains, through the secretion of stress hormones trigger the following actions in our bodies- the blood flows into our limbs, involved in self-protection, away from our brain and torso, leaving less oxygen and energy there, lessening our immune system. In a longer period of stress of course the bodies respond with disease. It seems that disease is the body's crying out to us- no! We are starved and need attention. Often it happens that people over-work and over-stress and its only when they get sick then they allow themselves to take the time out and heal themselves so in other words the body's response with disease is the only intelligent decision it can make.
Our cells renew constantly, every few years our whole cellular body is completely new. So it is not a problem for the body to heal at all, it doesn't seem to need anything from the outside for that. Yet we have more and more prolongued and debilitating and chronic disease. This can be firstly because the stress factor remains and the body remains in the sympathetic system instead of going into the parasympathetic relaxed healing system. These signals are coming also from our emotional and mental bodies. If our cells get the signal from our thoughts- I cannot get better, there is something wrong, or our emotions- I am afraid, then the cell responds in the same way, it doesn't distinguish between perceived threats or actual threats, there have been many experiments proving this.
Or the second signal, that dr. Lipton has talked about as well, is the unconscious programming we have been receiving from the people around us since we are very little- you have to go to the doctor, he will make you better. You may be an open-minded person with awareness of the bodys self-healing powers at times, but without the full realization on the experiential level perhaps also- the deep-rooted programming will take charge and the long-established conviction- only a doctor can make me better, I have no knowledge or power really to do that- will block the body to actually go to the self-healing stage, the signals for relaxation are not there! It is the same with people who go on a self-developing road through meditation for example. It takes a very long time for the set habits to allow our minds and bodies to fully and deeply go into the practice, even though we understand and know that it works and is good for us.
Once we go to the doctor the obstacle for healing is dissolved, belief activates the relaxation which in turn will allow us utilize our own innate healing mechanism.
It is a question for me- whether it has any effect at all what the doctor does to you, whether he gives you a pill, gives you a placebo, or does nothing. As long as he does not upset the release of the healing program, (which unfortunately of course happens all the time and doctors even do harm constantly by causing diagnosis shocks in a patient), but performs his function of providing allowance for you to do your thing, supporting you and making you feel protected, then there is nothing wrong with going to the doctor of course. This is until we reprogram ourselves to truly believe in our own bodies, then going to the doctor, unless it is an accident and our bones need to be set, or any other assistance like for giving birth- becomes obsolete.
So I have been thinking for some time- are doctors necessary. For those with the belief in their own innate ability to heal- they are not. But now I realise that for those still with the belief that it is the doctor who heals them- they are important. And for those who believe that alternative doctors do the best healing- these doctors are the best ones. It really boils down to our own belief-system and who do we trust, who can get us to the state of parasympathetic response. Is it you? It can be you! But many will perhaps always feel more comfortable with a support system outside them who they can rely on and who comforts them. Whatever works! Create the positive atmosphere however you like, but its that state of trust and well-being, relaxation, which is the real doctor for all of us, and there are many things we can do to increase that, including thought exercises, emotional healing from the past, meditation, yoga, healthy nutrition, exercise, falling in love with someone or better yet- being in love with life, universe and everything, including our own tiny expressions of that beautiful energy that are our bodies. Possibilities are endless! :)
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