The first thing you were given when you came into the world is your body! The last thing you will leave behind is your body!

First and foremost, if you are married to anything- whether in sickness or in health, for richer or poorer, for better or worse (and I do wish you all the superlatives) -your awareness is wedded to your body.

All healing - physical, emotional, spiritual - is a matter of becoming conscious!

Mind over matter:

The question is whether the quality of mind in operation is able to take control of and direct the available matter, or whether it is lost in and subjugated to the material (i.e., physical, emotional, mental and/or psychic).

Basically there are two approaches to health:

(1) Getting away from the problem:
- Certainly if you exist, to any degree, in a state of stagnancy, deterioration and/or degeneracy you want to alleviate the pain caused by the imbalance of a blocked flow of energy.

(2) Finding out how good you can feel:
- From a place of no deficiencies and imbalances, how much can you safely and effectively increase your vitality, stamina and mental clarity?

There are no panaceas!

The body is a logical construct of bio-energy - there is always a reason for its malfunction and breakdown.

There is no one cure all. Rather we are looking for the best way to utilize the various nutrients and techniques that will enhance and facilitate our "optimal functioning".

Your body is an "input/output" machine:

If the amount of energy taken in nutritionally matches your expenditure of energy, then you keep a balance. If not, then something has to pay for the output of energy. To keep up with your demands the body will borrow and steal from one part of its systems to feed the demands in other parts. This continuous, uncompensated drain will lead to a progressive lessening in the quality of the various tissues, which will in turn imbalance and comprise the performance of your metabolic functions.

Your body either operates as your vehicle of consciousness, taking you where you want to go; or it incapacitates as your ball and chain, imprisoning you and stifling your full range of interaction. If you compromise your metabolic integrity, your body moves from being a pleasurable energy strata vehicle for your consciousness, into being a painfully incapacitating drag on your awareness.

If allowed to persist, you will move from a state of "being at ease", to a state of "unease", to a state of "dis-ease", till the body breaks down into a set of recognizable symptoms which we call "disease".

By the time you are forced to confront disease and/or system failure, the problem has been going on for quite a while.
There must be "host receptivity" before a disease can take root in the body-mind.
- You are continuously surrounded and interpenetrated by bacteria and viruses. It is only when your immune system becomes too worn down that any of these invaders can establish their morbid beachhead on the shorelines of your health.
- You are constantly inundated with negative emotions which can precipitate internal distortion in the form of fear, doubt, confusion and anxiety. It is only when your sense of self is overwhelmed that these distressing feelings can depress and disorient you.

What you do to the body effects your emotions; what you do to your emotions effects your body!

Physical injury and/or nutritional deficiencies can cause impairment in your metabolic vitality; which in turn can disrupt your mental equilibrium and exaggerate your emotions.
Any form of inner denial and avoidance plays itself out through the visceral organs - "gut emotions" -which in turn fixates, imbalances and destabilizes your physical health.

Your body needs the guidance of a good master/mistress!

When you domesticate the animal (i.e., the body), bring it in from wild survival circumstances in raw nature, and domesticate it to a live in a mind generated field of technological engineering and sophisticated social rituals, then you must teach the animal body how to adjust and respond. Your body can and will adjust to your requirements; however, the more sophisticated your nervous system becomes, the more consciously you have to work with directing your body's adaptations.

Pain - physical and/or emotional - always indicates a blocked flow of energy.
- The blockage has caused stagnation and deterioration.

Pleasure guides your way to health!
- Pleasure is facilitated through an integrated, balanced flow of energy.
- Pleasure inter-connects; pleasure is expansive and inclusive.

Health is an art!

Modern medicine has created the best "emergency" care available- However, you don't want to always be living like life is an emergency!
Of course we want to make use of the best that science and technology has to offer.
- In a test tube, under laboratory conditions, where you can control all the variables, you can achieve constant reproducibly predictive results.
- However, in the "human crucible" where thoughts, feelings, genetic disposition and environmental circumstance flow over each other in a continuously adaptation of interactive combinations, then you have to incorporate and go beyond technological science to achieve optimal health.

Health as an art, is one of "individual application".

In health you are not adjusted to some mass statistical average.
In health you are not compared to others - your performance level may be way ahead of some or way behind others.
In health - taking into consideration how your physiological makeup, psychological integration, cultural orientation and environmental circumstances have played themselves out in your life situation -you are compared and adjusted to the "optimal functioning" of your own unique individual particulars.

The "youth factor".

From the time your are in your mother's womb, up through your early twenties, your in a state of "excessive cell proliferation".
- Over and beyond the cells your body needs to produce to take care of the basic wear and tear of normal activity, your body has to manufacture an excessive amount of cells to allow you to develop from a microscopic embryo into a fully grown adult.
This excessive cell proliferation is what has been referred to as the "youth factor".
- This extra cell proliferation acts like a "masking device". It takes up some of the "slack" that results from insufficient diet, lack of exercise and the debilitation of stress. It allows you to recover from stress and injury more quickly.

In your early twenties, when you no longer need to grow a larger body, your pituitary gland starts to slow down the amount of "growth factors" that it secretes.
- Instead of having an excess of cells, you start to manufacture enough for maintenance.
- Unless you maintain a balance between nutritional input and energy expenditure, you will progressively drain your body's reserves, tilting your body towards entropy.
- As this continues you become more and more susceptible to "the shocks that flesh is heir to"; as in progressive deterioration every ache becomes exaggerated and it takes longer to recover from injury.

Flexibility makes you feel young! Stiffness makes you feel old!

When you are flexible (physically, emotionally, mentally) you are open, receptive, interested, adaptive and you exchange more energy with your environmental circumstance.
When you are stiff, you become defensively bound, hard, prejudiced and ponderous; you exchange less energy with the circumstance while exaggerating the significance given to insignificant details.

Death...

When how you mentally image yourself becomes too different from how you actually exchange with circumstance, then you start to separate from the dynamic of life and exist in the diminishing returns of your self deluded inner world of ideas about life.

If some one places a weight upon you- an obstacle to the full expression of your potential - you essentially have three choices:

(1) Get rid of the damned thing and go about your business.

(2) Grin and bear it - fight the good fight!
- Caught in a never quite fulfilling twilight zone between disappointing failure and satisfying success, you nevertheless carry on and don't compromise your ideals.
- But the extra burden makes your life difficult and exhausting; it ages and wears you down prematurely.

(3) You refuse to deal with it and resolve yourself to dissatisfaction.
- You don't have to get out of the "shit" if you accept being in the "shit"- however, that does make your life kind of "shitty".
- In so doing you loose a range and quality of your life motion- this is bowing down on the altar of some dark god and trying to appease it by sacrificing your well being and happiness.

Beware of shortcuts that take forever!

Eventually, when you have nothing left to lose except for the pain of your frustration, you will have to confront and reclaim all the places of access that you shut down and ran away from.

Reclaiming your metabolic integrity:

Excluding assault and/or accidental injury, there are basically two ways by which we imbalance our bodies:

(1) Either we don't provide an adequate amount of what we nutritionally need to match out energy expenditure.

(2) Or we intake something that works against our systems and gum up the works.

Genetically our bodies are structured for self repair and maintenance.

When you start to give the body what it needs in an abundance that goes beyond the demands of your everyday output, the body utilizes that energy to try and clean out and repair itself.
It's not just what you swallow - It's what you can breakdown and assimilate that will determine the benefit of a nutrient's value.
- Even if you take in a good source of adequate nutrition and bolster it with state of the art supplementation, if your digestive processes are functioning below par, then your body will not gain the nutrients it needs for adequate processing - this is like starving in the midst of a feast.
- So that instead of facilitating energy, undigested nutrients can become a problem to your body, placing a further strain on your systems, which have to eliminate them as waste.

Poor elimination leads to auto-toxication of your body.

Continued failure to breakdown and assimilate nutrients in the intestinal track can lead to "gut leakage"- as a weakened and perforated digestive track can start leaking non assimilated nutrients directly into the bloodstream; lodging them in tissues and organ systems where they should never be.
Backed up, layered waste matter which hasn't been eliminated from the colon (the large intestine) can form a rotting breeding ground for harmful bacteria. In turn, the constant buildup of toxins being flushed through your blood and lymph systems can place an undue burden on your liver.
- If too busy trying to detoxify the toxins in your body, your liver's regulation of the gastrointestinal system (i.e., digestion, assimilation, elimination) becomes irregular and inadequate.
- If these auto-toxins exceed the liver's capacity, then overflow of these toxins inordinately taxes the kidneys, while mixing with bile excretions creating a tendency for gallstone formations in the gallbladder.
- Continually handling too much toxicity can detract from the numerous other enzymatic and metabolic functions of your liver.
An overburdened liver and excess toxic accumulation places an antagonistic strain on your resources, exhausting your immune system into a constant emergency state of alarm.
- Your immune system is there to protect you against susceptibility to bacterial and viral invasion.
- However, if your immune system is overtaxed then it can't perform very well on the other side of its activities which help to preserve your youthfulness and facilitate longevity.

Keys to Longevity

"Detoxifying":

Sometimes the only way to catch up with yourself is to stop chasing yourself!
When you give the body enough biologically directed, nutrient specific energy to supercede its normal demands, it goes after toxic buildup in the various tissues.
- When you feel energized, that's when your metabolism will start to dump these toxins into your lymph and blood systems.
- Suddenly your body is inundated with toxic elimination. You feel sludgy and tired.
- Your body processes out this layer of toxins until you feel clearer and more vital, then it dumps again.
- As you keep eliminating this dumping becomes less frequent and less severe, till you metabolism is back on top of things and can eliminate without having to derail the smooth functioning of your metabolism.

A "healing crisis" is just a mismanaged elimination!

If you try to detoxify your body without having a sufficient amount of vitality and/or if your systems of elimination are impaired, you will stir up the toxins and feel lousy. In such an environment your body can become susceptible to infection, which can make you sick and plunge you into an even more toxic state.

Detoxifying the body is not a linear equation.
- Some aspects of your metabolism will release and realign easily.
- While some aspects will be more recalcitrant and harder to bring back on line.
- Part of the "art" is knowing when to ease up on one aspect and fortify other aspects, so that further detoxifying can proceed smoothly on a deeper level.
- Sometimes, before successful elimination can be facilitated, it is necessary to first rebuild the strength of your various metabolic functioning.

"Rebuilding":

You don't know how tired you are till you stop running the race!
As our excessive cell proliferation slows down, and we take more out of our bodies than we're replacing, we try to compensate.
- We discipline our activities forcing our bodies to perform.
- We overstimulate ourselves draining our physical reserves.
- We sedate ourselves to mask the discomfort caused by our depletion.
As a result, the performance output of some organs become exhausted and metabolically inadequate, while other organs become overly strained and erratic.
Depending on the present condition of your body and the situational demands on your time and energy, it may be necessary to nutritionally re-energize the hormonal and enzymatic functions of your metabolism before any substantial detoxifying can safely and effectively proceed.

"Rebalancing":

When you have an abundance of vitality it is just as easy to hit the accelerator and move into high gear, as it is to put on the breaks and idle in neutral.
- Some people remain in a lethargic state; their vitality is too depleted.
- Some people will force themselves into activity, running on already depleted reserves. In nervous exhaustion they are too spent to unwind from their efforts; so they remain overly wound up like a wire that's been pulled too tight.
- Either of these states indicate imbalance and insufficient vitality.
There will never be a time when the upkeep of your body does not require maintenance.
- It takes a considerable effort to stop a degenerative pattern, cleanse yourself of its negative effects, and rebuild your vitality into a robust state of health.
- However, once you've regained your vitality only a moderate amount of effort is required to maintain it.
You have an animal body, not a vegetable body - your body is designed for locomotion!
- Whereas your heart pumps the circulation of blood throughout your body, it does not pump "lymph".
- Your lymphatic system takes dead cells and accumulated toxins from the tissue areas and transports them to the blood for elimination. Your lymphatic system also helps transports proteins, fats, hormones and anti-bodies to their appropriate tissue destination.
- Your lymph system is activated through bodily motion. If you are too sedentary, the toxins tend to stay lodged in the tissues, weakening them and to some extent blocking the efficient delivery of blood and oxygen to these tissues - this is like stewing in your own juices.
When you aerobicise your system by exercising to where the heartbeat and respiration exceed where they would be if you were just lounging about, you facilitate the cleansing movement of lymph flow throughout your body.
- If you are going to lounge about relaxing and partying in a tropical paradise, you certainly have different energy demands on you then if you're going to be constantly on the go in an modern megatropolis.
- With exercise, as with all other considerations in the "art of health", it is a question of "individual application"- considering all facets of your life and finding our what is most effective to facilitate your "optimal functioning".
Regardless of how much modern conveniences allow you to regulate your environment, your body is still cued into the environmental aspects of seasonal change and topography.
- The changing of the seasons activates different emphasis on various organs and glands in your body.
- In turn, this metabolic shifting creates different needs as to what kind of nutrition, exercise, activity and rest well best facilitate your health.

Also, every age of life has its interest, its beauty, its eroticism - its appropriateness.

Once learning to stand and walk was a monumental task. It took all of your energy and concentration to master that ability. However, you can't learn to walk forever. When you know how to walk you go someplace different and learn how to do something else.
- What fascinated you at five years, wasn't wrong at ten; it just wasn't all that interesting to you.
- What fascinated you at twenty you may be able to do just as well or better at fifty, but it probably doesn't hold the same interest for you and will be utilized in a different way for different reasons.
When the maturation of your body forces you to grow, you pay attention and make appropriate changes. The need for such adaptation is unavoidably noticeable. When your body has reached it full growth, the need for continued change is not so obvious and may elude you.
- In misguided idealism, too many people live out the decades of their thirties and upwards, trying to do a band-aid, patchwork extension of what they thought they were supposed to be when they were immersed in the extra cell proliferation of their body's youthful development.

"Regenerating"

"Entropy": On a purely biological level, you are a shell to produce seed to produce other shells.

The electro-magnetic cohesion which bonds energy into material form will eventually exhaust its attract-ability to stay organized in a material form, and will eventually dissipate back into random energy displacement.

Left to its own devices, the body will go the way of all flesh- dust to dust...

"Syntropy": Applied Spirit- awareness consciously focused -transcends and can refocus the range and motion of your biology.
- The organizing principle of energy is "conscious intent".
- As consciousness focuses it accumulates more energy into the material realization of a serviceable form and function.
- With knowledge and intent it is possible to slow down, stop and reverse the deteriorating effects of aging.