(From Handbook For Humans)
Our body has evolved powerful and elaborate systems for staying in balance. It’s constantly regulating temperature, mineral levels, hormone levels, neural signals, sleep cycles, breathing, heart rate and thousands of other things in order to keep us stable and functioning.
If the body gets too hot, it sweats. If it gets too cold, it shivers. If we run fast, it pants to restore oxygen. If we cut our finger, the body heals it. It does these things and countless others automatically; it’s a natural organism. We don’t have to tell the body to stay in balance, because it’s constantly striving to do just that.
Anything which lowers the body’s overall harmony can be called a stress. In groundbreaking research earlier in this century, Hans Seyle proved that the body basically responds to all stresses in a similar way. That is, each stress that occurs to us not only causes its own unique response from the body, but also produces an energetic general response which is the same from one stress to the next—and which forces the body to lower, temporarily at first, its overall level of well-being.
The list of potential stresses is extremely broad and includes being too hot or too cold, being underfed or overfed, positive or negative feelings, exhaustion, food contamination, water or air pollution, vitamin/mineral/enzyme deficiencies or excesses, smoking, alcohol, drugs, radiation, burns, cuts, bacteria, viruses, parasites, lack of sleep, and so on.
Because such different stresses all affect the body in generalized ways, we can say that they affect the body’s overall life energy, its overall harmony. When the body encounters stresses, its life energy lowers. If the stress is large the energy can lower rapidly, as in acute illness. Steady, chronic stress also lowers life energy over time, and manifests wherever the body is weakest.
However, the body is superbly prepared to deal with the average stresses of life. The damaged cells created by various toxins, for instance, are routinely identified, destroyed and carried away to be excreted. Bacteria and viruses are routinely neutralized; hormonal excesses caused by strong emotions are routinely rebalanced, and so forth.
Though it costs the body a certain amount of resources to deal with everyday stresses, the body is ready to pay the cost. As studies of long-lived peoples demonstrate, the body is normally prepared to generate abundant energy and balance for a century or more. It has evolved through eons of time in those ways which best allow it to do so.
When stresses become too large or persistent, however, the body’s life energy goes down. On the other hand, when a stress is removed or lessened, the body automatically strives to rebuild a more optimal harmony. If we lower excess fats and proteins in our diet, for instance, the body will automatically switch to cleaner-burning metabolic pathways.
Because the body forever strives to achieve its natural potential, it will always attempt to raise its overall balance if given a chance to do so.
The thing to notice is that the body automatically does this. It will always make better choices if it can. This being so, often the most effective thing we can do in raising our life energy is to remove impediments to the body’s own natural efforts in that direction.
The body itself, then, is the real healer when we’re ill. Anything we do, anything anybody does, can only assist it in that process. Just as consciousness or love is not put together but rather uncovered, so also true health is not something that we fashion but rather something that we allow—by removing obstacles and stresses of various kinds.
© 1997 by James Sloman
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