On the emotional component of healing

You can temporarily suppress the physical manifestation of your emotional imbalance,
commonly referred to as a “chronic disease”, through the use of various chemical substances. If
you’ve done enough research and have some faith in your own judgment, you can even try
some natural remedies. With enough patience and a positive attitude, you might achieve some
great results. If you stick to a diet specifically designed for your unique organism, stick to a rigid
sleeping regiment, stay physically active, take some potent probiotics, use meditation to access
the so scarcely inhabited present moment, and don’t allow the level of stress in your body
create a distress, you can keep all your symptoms in check.

While this particular style of treating the physical symptoms of your emotional imbalance is far
better for your organism than the one offered by the medical community (i.e. taking drugs), the
qualitative nature of it is actually not that different. Instead of addressing the underlying cause,
the focus is on fighting the symptoms of the imbalance. Again, I am not saying that all those
concrete steps outlined above are in any way harmful and should be avoided. Quite the
opposite; the less junk food you eat, the better for your physical well-being. And the same
applies to sleep, meditation, probiotics, etc. But, similar to chemical drugs, these different
components of treatment are only addressing the physical manifestation of your emotional
imbalance. You can’t expect to ever truly heal just by relying on these things.

That said, this path needs to be taken. Without temporarily suppressing the physical symptoms
of your emotional imbalance, you won’t have enough strength to face your greatest enemy –
yourself. If you have trouble walking up the stairs and can’t properly digest a single piece of
carrot, you are not exactly well-positioned to fight the battle of your life, the battle for
authenticity.

At this juncture, it is crucial to understand what lies at the core of many chronical diseases –
stress. And by that I don’t mean the usual sort of stress that everyone experiences every single
day. According to the pioneering Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye stress is “the
non-specific response of the body to any demand made upon it”. As such, stress is something
that can’t be avoided. Moreover, Selye further argues that “any kind of activity sets our stress
mechanisms in motion”.

That said, it is one thing to feel stressed when taking an important exam, which is usually a
fairly rare occurrence, and to feel stressed during almost every single social interaction. And
here I come back to the question of authenticity. Many people suffering from various forms of
chronical illness failed to pass the test of social initiation right at the start of their lives. Having
to confront their true feelings and beliefs with those of the members of a new social group,
many people come to the conclusion that their authentic ‘id’ is somehow inadequate. For many
of those people, their failure to preserve their authentic self in a large group of other selves was
predetermined by some sort of a dysfunctional parent-child relationship whereby the parent
never quite accepted the authentic version of his/her child.
Those people then spend their lives trying to figure out what sort of behavior is the most
appropriate in any given social interaction, trying to please those members of a social group
perceived as dominant. Over the course of their lives, many of these people develop a multi-
layered personality. This is a result of the constant struggle for affirmation, trying to please
someone else, to prove that they are worthy of love. In other cases, the low self-esteem in
many people can result in developing a complex of superiority. Those people genuinely believe
that they are better than everyone else. Again, that is just another defense mechanism adopted
in order to cope with the pain associated with everyday social interactions.

There are basically two options that those people have to decrease the abnormal amount stress
caused by social interactions. The first option is to permanently withdraw from society, to live
in a forest, a jungle, or on an uninhabited island. Needless to say, not many people would want
to spend the rest of their lives in solitude. The second option, and the one far more practical, is
to address the underlying cause of the low self-esteem, which causes the increased amount of
stress during social interactions.

As the Jesuits used to say: “give us the child for the first seven years and we will give you the
man.” The enormous importance of the first 7 years of life in the development of a child’s brain
is acknowledged by the mainstream science. The famous biologist Bruce Lipton uses the
expression “perceptual programming of the subconscious mind”. He argues that during the first
7 years of his/her life, a child is recording all sensory experiences. During that time, the child’s
brain works just like a computer; it downloads enormous amounts of information about the
world and its workings.

This is not necessarily a problem; many children create a “program” that is conducive to their
flourishing later in life. However, many children adopt limiting or sabotaging beliefs about
themselves. This becomes a major obstacle to these children’s healthy emotional development
as these beliefs are hard to change later in life. These perceptions form a foundation for a
future development. If you for whatever reason come to the conclusion that your authentic self
is somehow inadequate, you will try to adopt the views and patterns of behavior of those
perceived as stronger, better looking, more intelligent etc. These “role models” will change with
time and with them will change the behavior of those “worshiping” them. Over time, this will
necessarily create an imbalance between the mind and the body, as the authentic-self never
really disappears, but rather lies dormant beneath sometimes multiple layers of different
manufactured personalities.

The good news is that your body has the natural ability to repair itself, to maintain homeostasis
by using a large number of coordinated chemistries, an enormously complex system that the
French physiologist Claude Bernard called milieu interieur. This function of the human body
helps you to recover from almost any injury caused by the external environment. However, it
can’t help you to resolve deep-seated imbalance between your mind and your body. This
imbalance necessarily leads to an unnatural amount of stress, which, in turn, results in the
inhibition of some of your vital bodily functions. As Selye put it: “it will largely depend upon the
accidental conditioning factors whether the heart, kidney, gastrointestinal tract, or brain will
suffer most.”

So, the bad news is that your body can’t do the job for you. However, it will send you signals,
certain indications of what has gone wrong. Your only job is to learn to truly listen to your body,
to be fully attuned to its signals. This is by no means an easy process, it requires a lot of time
and patience. The reason why it is so hard to access that fully conscious part of yourself is that,
most of the time, the conscious mind is inactive. In fact, recent discoveries in neuroscience
have shown that the conscious mind provides only about 5 percent of less of our cognitive
(conscious) activity during the day, with many people operating at just 1 percent consciousness.

In other words, the vast majority of our everyday actions, decisions, emotions and behavior are
derived from the 95 percent of brain activity that is beyond our conscious awareness, meaning
that anywhere between 95 to 99 percent of our life is determined by the programming in our
subconscious mind. The good news is that the programming can be changed. In fact, the new
science of epigenetics has claimed that our genes are controlled and manipulated by the way in
which our minds perceive and interpret our environment. Formerly, it was generally believed
that it is our genes that predetermine the trajectory that our lives take. The new paradigm
completely reverses that “belief”. In practice it means that we can actually change many things
about the way we conduct our lives, including our health, by changing the way we interpret the
world and our place in it.

The goal is then to access the conscious mind, where you are truly authentic, to gain the key
insights you need to understand in order to begin the process of slowly changing your
“programming”. There are many ways in which you can go about doing that: from meditation,
to a concentrated focus on a particular memory, or even the use of some hallucinogenic
substances.

While this path is available to everyone, it is by no means an easy process. It requires a lot of
patience, discipline and hard work. Moreover, as you begin to make progress, you may actually
get worse, first mentally and, as a consequence, physically. This is because changing your
deeply-seated perceptions of the world and your role in it can’t happen overnight. As you begin
to withdraw from your prevailing paradigm, you enter a ground-zero sort of dimension. In that
place, your learned ideas about the world and all these layers of your personality and defense
mechanisms you’ve developed to cope with it no longer apply. This can be truly terrifying as
you lose all the reference points you’ve been relying on to get through life. I would compare it
to an enormously powerful earthquake resulting in a seismic shift in tectonic plates. You may
find yourself in a position where you begin to question every single aspect your life. The key
thing is that, to use the Matrix terminology, “after this, there is no turning back.” You simply
just can’t continue to live your live the way you’ve been doing it till that moment.

At that juncture, it is extremely important not to panic and persevere. It may seem to you that
you can no longer do all these things that you have been doing. You might want to quit your
job, end your relationship, or move somewhere else. In some cases, a major change in your life
is necessary, as the unhealthy relationship or that stressful job is suddenly identified as a result
of leading an inauthentic life not in line with your true values and beliefs. In other cases though,
a change in attitude will be sufficient. For example, you might find out that you have been
doing the right things (i.e. things natural for you) but maybe for the wrong reasons.

This all might sound extremely complicated and demanding. That’s because it actually is a very
difficult process which requires a lot of self-awareness and, potentially, some major changes in
your life. This is why most people will rather go for the more conventional method of simply
taking pills, and possibly even undergoing surgeries, with the hope that their “dis-eases” will
somehow disappear by treating their symptoms only. Some people might be even able to
manage their diseases, slowing down its spread to other body organs. However, I believe that
without addressing the underlying cause, you can never achieve a lasting change for the better.