Great examples of community include your neighbourhood, church or workplace and to some extent your FB page now too. Did you ever stop to think of the community you have inside? Organs, tissues, cells and moment to moment chemical reactions, who orchestrates this community?
Researchers today have demonstrated that it is no longer a question of who, but how as we now know and trust it is the central nerve system who is responsible for this harmony.
So it’s no longer a matter of whether or not we are connected, but instead, how well connected are we? Especially when it comes to share values like honesty, trust, love & respect?
Today, face book, and other social media communities are great metaphors to better understand ourselves and how our health actually works. Their rapid explosion has given even our Immunologists a new perspective about how this system works.
For years, we thought the role of the immune system was simply to differentiate SELF from NON-SELF. But recent neuroscience observations are telling us there is no such distinction. That in fact, there is no NON-SELF…only things that look on the surface to be different.
So the job of the immune system now has become not so much to destroy non-self, but instead to treat them as though they are part of the self and lovingly guide them towards better behaviour. And in fact, the healthiest communities of our world work the same way. At a cellular level, because all cells have a unique relationship to the CNS, the more we send this healthy information to our cells, the healthier the action step they can take too…whether that be dealing with an invading germ (virus or bacteria), cancer cell, allergen or for that matter terrorist too.
But how does your brain and central nerve system talk to one another? We certainly do not tell it to be afraid of germs and allergens or do we? Do you feel guilty if you do not wash your hands more than 2x/day? Do you feel you need more than an annual flu shot and or choose to vaccinate your children under the age of 2? How about when you “catch a cold”, do you blame others for passing on their germs or take more responsibility for your health yourelf. And lastly, how about family members or friend who have been diagnosed with cancer…is it just the genes or is it possible that stress from their community is a contributing factor too?
If you answsered yes to any one of these questions you are not alone. In fact I use to as well. As a teenager, I use to get sick all the time. As a result, by the age of 18, I had already been prescribed over 50 antibiotic prescriptions. (Now 42 years old and have not taken one antibiotic since the age of 21 when I first started getting adjusted).
Medical Doctor and prolfic writer Deepak Chopra describes in his best selling book of all time “Quantum Healing” that thoughts are a product of molecules, rather than the other way around. In fact it is our awareness and understanding of our environment that conceives, governs, constructs and actually becomes the physical matter.
If this is true, that those of us choosing to scrub, wash, radiate and vaccinate our germs or poor functioning cells away are actually causing more harm to onment than at any time in the history of our modern world and research is now prooving this to be the case.
Last spring, speaking to a conference of infectious disease experts in Copenhagen, Margaret Chan, director of the World Health Organization, warned that bacteria were starting to become so resistant to common antibiotics that it could bring about “the end of modern medicine as we know it”. She claimed just this year that every antibiotic (or antiviral) ever developed is at risk of becoming useless, making once-routine operations impossible and the treatment of many other poor health cases like tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS and that as of 2012, we are entering for the first time into what is being called a “post-antibiotic era”.
Of course most of us reading this understand why. That’s why we see a Chiropractor and have our kids get checked too. We understand that the community of our immune response is strengthened when we take more responsibility for our health which includes not only our spine & nerve system, our teeth & eyes, but as well how well we eat, exercise and sleep too. Learning to balance oneself is a full time job, and becomes especially more difficult the longer we pretend the responsibility belongs to someone else.
To learn more about your Immune System and it’s relationship to the Chiropractic Lifestyle … join Dr. Gus & team on Wednesday, September 26th at 6:10pm, for our next Living Well Workshop: Building a Stronger Immunity Community
The Greek philosopher Heraculutus compared the human body to a river. He said a river is very mysterious thing. When you look at a river it looks the same to you at every second of its existence, but in fact it’s not the same river. He said you cannot step into the same river twice because a new water flows in all the time.
And it’s also true of the human body. If you could understand your body as it really is, you would see that the real you cannot step into the same flesh and bones twice because in every second of your existence, you are renewing your body, changing it more rapidly, more effortlessly, more spontaneously and more easily than you can change your clothes. We can take a number of processes eating, breathing, digestion, metabolism, elimination, but most fundamentally the movement of consciousness which expresses itself as these processes, and you would see how effortlessly, how easily you can change your body and in fact are doing so all of the time.
The physical bodies you are using to sit on these chairs, for example, aren’t the ones you walked in with a little while ago. Even with one breath you take in 10 to the power of 22 atoms. An astronomical amount that ends up as your heart, brain and kidney cell, your neurons and your DNA. With each breath you breath out 10 to the power of 22 atoms. It’s an astronomical amount of raw materials coming from every bit of your body. What we know today is that you are literally breathing out in each moment bits and pieces of your brain tissue, heart & kidney cells just to name a few. Actually, technically speaking we are intimately sharing our organs with each other all the time.
The American poet Walt Whitman said “Every atom belonging to you as well belongs to me”. And this isn’t a metaphorical statement at all. It’s hard to call one’s personal body one’s own at any moment in time. Even though I try calling everything else my own, I can’t even claim a personal copyright on my own physical body if I wanted to. Right this moment in your body you have a million atoms that were once in the body of Christ, in the body of Leonardo DaVinci, Marilyn Monroe or even Whitney Houston … God rest their souls. What we know today is that you cannot separate yourself from anything physically or from anybody that has ever existed to date. At least, that’s what we think we know. In just the last three weeks, a quadrillion atoms, 10 to the power of 15 atoms have gone through your body that have gone through the body of every other species on this planet. You make a new liver every six weeks, a new skin once a month, a new stomach lining every five days and a new skeleton every three months too. Even your brain cells are still changing and growing daily and minute to minute if you are so inclined to continue strengthening them with new stimuli. So if you think you are your material body than it’s time to guess again.
This is exactly what scientists are beginning to see and that is that it is not thoughts that are a product of molecules, but rather molecules are structured out of fluctuation of information in a field of infinite information. In fact it is our awareness and understanding of our environment that conceives, governs, constructs and actually becomes the physical matter. We now know today that these thoughts are translated into very precise molecules known as neuropeptides. “Neuro” because they were first found in the brain and “peptides” because they’re protein like molecules. Like little keys that fit into very precise locks called receptors on the cell walls or other neurons, this is how a part of the brain speaks to an immune cell, not in English or with a heavy Greek accent, but rather in precise language of neuropeptides. So in fact your immune cells are constantly, like your neighbours next door, listening in and eavesdropping on your internal dialogue. Nothing that you say to yourself, which you are doing all the time, even in sleep, escapes the attention of your immunity community.
