Immune System And Life Quotes

You cannot trade the courage needed to live every moment for immunity from life's sorrows. We may say we know this but ours is the culture of the deal-making mind. From infancy, we have breathed in the belief that there is always a deal to be made, a bargain to be struck. Eventually, we believe, if we do the right thing, if we are good enough, clever enough, sincere enough, work hard enough, we will be rewarded. There are different verses to this song - if you are sorry for your sins and try hard not to sin again, you will go to heaven; if you do your daily practise, clean up your diet, heal your inner child, ferret out all your emotional issue's, focus your intent, come into alignment with the world around you, hone your affirmations, find and listen to the voice of your higher self, you will be rewarded with vibrant health, abundant prosperity, loving relations and inner peace - in other words, heaven! We know that what we do and how we think affects the quality of our lives. Many things are clearly up to us. And many others are not. I can see no evidence that the universe works on a simple meritocratic system of cause and effect. Bad things happen to good people - all the time. Monetary success does come to some who do not do what they love, as well as to some who are unwilling or unable to see the harm they do to the planet or others. Illness and misfortune come to some who follow their soul's desire. Many great artist's have been poor. Great teachers have lived in obscurity. My invitation, my challenge to you here, is to journey into a deeper intimacy with the world and your life without any promise of safety or guarantee of reward beyond the intrinsic value of full participation.

The key function of the Sanjivani chakra is to restore the life energy in the body cells. It enhances the power of the T Cells and the Natural killer cells in the body.

He told them he was testing their immune systems; he said nothing about injecting them with someone else’s malignant cells.

My immune system gets stronger each day. I lead with courage in my life. I am an unlimited genius. I am always aware of the power within me and all around me. I believe in myself. I embrace the unknown.

It would be very hard for you to live a happy life if you were covered in wiggling, buzzing tiny crabs that you could never get rid of.

The four pillars of health: healing your immune system, healing your nutrition, healing your stress response, and healing your identity.

Health is normal. The human body is a self-repairing, self-defending, self-healing marvel. Disease is relatively difficult to induce, considering the body's powerful immune system. However, this complicated and delicate machinery can be damaged if fed the wrong fuel during the formative years. ... Healthy living with nutritional excellence throughout life can slow the decline of aging. It can prevent the years and years of suffering in ill health that is so common today as people get older and become dependent on medical treatments, drugs, and surgery. Nutritional excellence is the only real fountain of youth.

At its heart, Codependency is a set of behaviors developed to manage the anxiety that comes when our primary attachments are formed with people who are inconsistent or unavailable in their response to us. Our anxiety-based responses to life can include over-reactivity, image management, unrealistic beliefs about our limits, and attempts to control the reality of others to the point where we lose our boundaries, self-esteem, and even our own reality. Ultimately, Codependency is a chronic stress disease, which can devastate our immune system and lead to systemic and even life-threatening illness.

It’s the perception that creates the thought that creates the feeling.

Let’s pause to note how peculiar this all is. The traditional view of the immune system is full of military metaphors and antagonistic lingo. We see it as a defence force that discriminates self (our own cells) from non-self (microbes and everything else), and eradicates the latter. But now we see that microbes craft and tune our immune system in the first place! Consider

I realised from quite early on in my childhood that I saw things differently from other people,' he wrote. 'But, more than not, it's helped me in my life. Psychopathy(if that's what you call it) is like a medicine for modern times. If you take it in moderation it can prove extremely beneficial. It can alleviate a lot of existential ailments that we would otherwise fall victim to because our fragile psychological immune systems just aren't up to the job of protecting us. But if you take too much of it, if you overdose on it, then there can, as is the case with all medicines, be some rather unpleasant side effects.

The stress and worry weaken our immune system,

Everything we put into our bodies — from foods and toxins to thoughts and feelings — can shift immune function at a base level.

Your gut includes the stomach, small intestine, large intestine (which includes the colon), liver, and gallbladder. The gut is responsible for ensuring that you absorb the nutrients of the food you eat, properly expel waste and toxins, and maintain a strong immune system. Yet not only is it critical for these everyday functions, your gut also holds a life force of its own. Food does not digest just from the physical process of food breakdown (a process scientific study hasn’t fully pieced together); there are also critical spiritual and metaphysical factors involved in digestion. That’s why enlightened beings on the planet employ eating techniques such as slow and thorough chewing; mindful, present eating; prayer before, during, or after meals; and becoming one with your food.

Negativity is a debilitating disease. It is a slow and painful way to experience life. It attacks the immune system, creates anxiety, and can lead to loneliness and depression. Finding your inner harmony is the quickest way to alleviate the methodical destruction of this dark energy

The link between our minds and bodies holds a well of potential when it came to radical healing — even mainstream medicine accepts that our stress levels and thought patterns, for example, can impact our physical health.

Laughter IS the BEST medicine! It’s FREE! You can overdose on it! It helps you embrace the insanities of life! It reduces stress, heals your body and relieves pain! It fights disease and cancer and strengthens the immune system! It eases your mind, it protects your heart and soothes your soul!

Your immune systems are comprised of all parts of the eco-system you know as yourself, and include not only every part of you, from your conscious and subconscious thoughts to your physical body systems, but also how you live and function in relationship with the larger ecosystems that surround you.

If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person—you already feel fortunate. An optimistic attitude is largely inherited, and it is part of a general disposition for well-being, which may also include a preference for seeing the bright side of everything. If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer. A study of people who exaggerate their expected life span beyond actuarial predictions showed that they work longer hours, are more optimistic about their future income, are more likely to remarry after divorce (the classic “triumph of hope over experience”), and are more prone to bet on individual stocks. Of

A smile can save a life. Did you know that there’s scientific evidence that smiling can boost your immune system and help you live a longer and happier life, not to mention that it makes the people around you happier too because smiling is contagious? There was a time I was going through security at an airport and out of nowhere a TSA agent smiled at me, and it changed my entire day. When you make someone else’s day brighter, it makes your day better too. Goal: Smile often—you never know whose day you will brighten. You never know the impact one smile will have on someone’s life.

Sometimes we cannot control our world and hold it too tightly without squeezing some of the life from it.

Complaining increases tension and anger. As a display of hostility, it encourages other people to act hostile in return.

Illness begins in the soul, and when a healing occurs there, the physical body then “catches up” to this new reality.

Chronic inflammation is a superhighway that runs straight to the most deadly diseases out there.... Chronic inflammation comes from how we think, how we feel, how we live.

happiness increases heart health, strengthens the immune system, combats stress, reduces aches and pains, reduces chronic illness, and lengthens our lives.

mold makes your immune system more sensitive to the damaging effects of gluten.

I love words as food. It fills up my appetite with parsley, mint, and species. It has a way of keeping my immune system stronger - my senses alert, my feet tapping, and my soul smelling the aroma of imagery.

There are enough chemical clues to convince anyone that mood, beliefs, expectations, fears, memories, predispositions, habits, and old conditioning—all centered in the mind—are critical to a person’s health.

Why would anyone want to drink a poisonous, highly addictive drug that tastes foul; a drug that will shorten your life, debilitate your immune system and impede your concentration; a drug that will destroy your nervous system, your confidence, your courage and your ability to relax? Why would you want to take a drug that will cost you about £100,000/$160,000 in your lifetime and do absolutely nothing for you whatsoever?

Holding on to resentments and anger can ruin your quality of life. The only person who suffers from your failure to forgive is you—it is not the other guy. When you stay hostile or resentful, it tears down your immune system and increases your risk of disease.

Movement is big medicine; it’s the signal to every cell in our bodies that no matter what kind of damage we’ve suffered, we’re ready to rebuild and move away from death and back toward life. Rest too long after an injury and your system powers down, preparing you for a peaceful exit. Fight your way back to your feet, however, and you trigger that magical ON switch that speeds healing hormones to everything you need to get stronger: your bones, brain, organs, ligaments, immune system, even the digestive bacteria in your belly, all get a molecular upgrade from exercise. For

If I mention my father is blind, the response is rarely one of immediate concern or pity.…. The audience in receipt of this bare fact seems always to be in need of comfort. I cannot provide comfort. He cannot see light. My life with lupus often provokes a similar response in others: the desire to be comforted. By me. The sufferer.

#96. Spend a Few Minutes Cuddling Your Significant Other/Child/Pet Physical touch is hugely important to our wellbeing. Cuddling releases oxytocin, the “happy hormone,” which can help reduce stress and even boost your immune system. Physical touch can also make the bonding process easier and improve communication between couples or parents and children.

If you want to evolve, meditation and making positive lifestyle choices are important.

humans appear to have a built-in immune system for threats to their own well-being. If we’re about to blame ourselves for bad behavior, our minds intervene with a whitewash.

Negative emotions, like depression or anxiety, have been shown to affect our immune system. Stress impedes wound healing.

If your positivity immune system is low, any exposure to a person afflicted with negativity can poison your life.

It’s important and compassionate to treat symptoms in the short term, but in the long term, you have to treat the cause of disease, which is often more hidden.

Hate is part of the immune system of your soul.

Your gut has its own immune system, the “gut-associated lymphatic tissue” (GALT). It represents 70 to 80 percent of your body’s total immune system. This speaks volumes about the importance—and vulnerability—of your gut. If the events that take place in the gut weren’t so critical to life, then the majority of your immune system wouldn’t have to be there to guard and protect it.

It’s a powerful poison and will shorten your life considerably. It is also highly addictive, will debilitate your immune system and impede your concentration. It will systematically destroy your nervous system, your confidence, your courage and your ability to relax. By the way, it tastes awful and will cost you about £100,000/$160,000 in your lifetime. What does it do for you? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

It's Friday night the city is a heart that beats alone,despite the millions of blood cells that race through its dog-legged arteries, oblivious to each other yet performing a life sustaining dance. [...] You're tired of being part of this blood dance. The immune system has been trying to excise you as diseased for as long you can remember, but you've been tenacious,clinging to the walls and floors as the torrent pushes you around.

The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen, or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected flaming ant epidemic,” he told the crowd. “If we amplify everything, we hear nothing. The press is our immune system. If it overreacts to everything, we actually get sicker … and perhaps eczema.

Optimists Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person—you already feel fortunate. An optimistic attitude is largely inherited, and it is part of a general disposition for well-being, which may also include a preference for seeing the bright side of everything. If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer. A study of people who exaggerate their expected life span beyond actuarial predictions showed that they work longer hours, are more optimistic about their future income, are more likely to remarry after divorce (the classic “triumph of hope over experience”), and are more prone to bet on individual stocks. Of course, the blessings of optimism are offered only to individuals who are only mildly biased and who are able to “accentuate the positive” without losing track of reality. Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders—not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge. They are probably optimistic by temperament; a survey of founders of small businesses concluded that entrepreneurs are more sanguine than midlevel managers about life in general. Their experiences of success have confirmed their faith in their judgment and in their ability to control events. Their self-confidence is reinforced by the admiration of others. This reasoning leads to a hypothesis: the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize.

The study showed that chronic loneliness impacts out bodies as negatively as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Not the same way, of course, just the life risk part. And there's more bad news. The article went on to say that lonely people had worse reactions to flu shots that non-lonelies (I think I just made up that word; my computer put a red squiggly line under it) and that loneliness depresses the immune system. On other words, if you're lonely, not even your body wants to be around you, so it tries to off itself.

Movement is big medicine; it’s the signal to every cell in our bodies that no matter what kind of damage we’ve suffered, we’re ready to rebuild and move away from death and back toward life. Rest too long after an injury and your system powers down, preparing you for a peaceful exit. Fight your way back to your feet, however, and you trigger that magical ON switch that speeds healing hormones to everything you need to get stronger: your bones, brain, organs, ligaments, immune system, even the digestive bacteria in your belly, all get a molecular upgrade from exercise.

Clinics and Hospitals are courts where you get accused of allowing foreign nutrients to invade your immune system. You plead guilty of the xenophobic attacks and then get sentenced to medication for your life, not knowing that healer is the ground you stand on, grounds that breeds life.

Gluten is extremely good at breaching the intestinal barrier, causing a leaky gut in the process, and then directly activating the immune system. If you have an autoimmune disease and eat gluten, I urge you to ban gluten from your diet for the rest of your life. Your body will thank you.

Questions are just as important as answers The goal is not necessarily to arrive at an absolute answer. The goal is to improve the quality of your questions. The quality of your question determines the quality of your answer. The questions we ask are the guiding light that moves us forward.

In the short term, adrenaline gives our immune function a boost to help fight bacterial and viral infections. But in the longer term, over-production of adrenaline and abnormal patterns of cortisol are linked with shorter life expectancy (Kumari et al., 2011). When adrenaline is repeatedly propping up our immune system through chronic stress and then we stop and the adrenaline goes down, so does the immune system. This is why you often hear of people who work incredibly hard around the clock for months on end and when they finally stop to take a holiday they almost immediately fall ill.

the immune system weakens, the heart shrinks because it doesn’t have to strain against gravity, eyesight tends to degrade, sometimes markedly (no one’s exactly sure why yet). The spine lengthens as the little sacs of fluid between the vertebrae expand, and bone mass decreases as the body sheds calcium.

So the best defense against porn, for every member of our family, is a full life--the kind of life that technology cannot provide on its own. This is why the most important things we will do to prevent porn from taking over our own lives and our children's lives have nothing to do with sex. A home where wisdom and courage come first; where our central spaces are full of satisfying, demanding opportunities for creativity; where we have regular breaks from technology and opportunities for deep rest and refreshment (where devices "sleep" somewhere other than our bedrooms and where both adults and children experience the satisfactions of learning in thick, embodied ways rather than thin, technological ways); where we've learned to manage boredom and where even our car trips are occasions for deep and meaningful conversation--this is the kind of home that can equip all of us with an immune system strong enough to resist pornography's foolishness.

Socrates tried to soothe us, true enough. He said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born. This is not absolutely comforting either. Anyway it was natural that theology and philosophy should take the deepest interest in this. They owe it to us not to be boring themselves. On this obligation they don’t always make good. However, Kierkegaard was not a bore. I planned to examine his contribution in my master essay. In his view the primacy of the ethical over the esthetic mode was necessary to restore the balance. But enough of that. In myself I could observe the following sources of tedium: 1) The lack of a personal connection with the external world. Earlier I noted that when I was riding through France in a train last spring I looked out of the window and thought that the veil of Maya was wearing thin. And why was this? I wasn’t seeing what was there but only what everyone sees under a common directive. By this is implied that our worldview has used up nature. The rule of this view is that I, a subject, see the phenomena, the world of objects. They, however, are not necessarily in themselves objects as modern rationality defines objects. For in spirit, says Steiner, a man can step out of himself and let things speak to him about themselves, to speak about what has meaning not for him alone but also for them. Thus the sun the moon the stars will speak to nonastronomers in spite of their ignorance of science. In fact it’s high time that this happened. Ignorance of science should not keep one imprisoned in the lowest and weariest sector of being, prohibited from entering into independent relations with the creation as a whole. The educated speak of the disenchanted (a boring) world. But it is not the world, it is my own head that is disenchanted. The world cannot be disenchanted. 2) For me the self-conscious ego is the seat of boredom. This increasing, swelling, domineering, painful self-consciousness is the only rival of the political and social powers that run my life (business, technological-bureaucratic powers, the state). You have a great organized movement of life, and you have the single self, independently conscious, proud of its detachment and its absolute immunity, its stability and its power to remain unaffected by anything whatsoever — by the sufferings of others or by society or by politics or by external chaos. In a way it doesn’t give a damn. It is asked to give a damn, and we often urge it to give a damn but the curse of noncaring lies upon this painfully free consciousness. It is free from attachment to beliefs and to other souls. Cosmologies, ethical systems? It can run through them by the dozens. For to be fully conscious of oneself as an individual is also to be separated from all else. This is Hamlet’s kingdom of infinite space in a nutshell, of “words, words, words,” of “Denmark’s a prison.

Whether we can somehow listen in on tree talk is a subject that was recently addressed in the specialized literature. Korean scientists have been tracking older women as they walk through forests and urban areas. The result? When the women were walking in the forest, their blood pressure, their lung capacity, and the elasticity of their arteries improved, whereas an excursion into town showed none of these changes. It's possible that phytoncides have a beneficial effect on our immune systems as well as the trees' health, because they kill germs. Personally, however, I think the swirling cocktail of tree talk is the reason we enjoy being out in the forest so much. At least when we are out in undisturbed forests. Walkers who visit one of the ancient deciduous preserves in the forest I manage always report that their heart feels lighter and they feel right at home. If they walk instead through coniferous forests, which in Central Europe are mostly planted and are, therefore, more fragile, artificial places, they don't experience such feelings. Possibly it's because in ancient beech forests, fewer "alarm calls" go out, and therefore, most messages exchanged between trees are contented ones, and these messages reach our brains as well, via our noses. I am convinced that we intuitively register the forest's health.

All of the elements that these cells manufacture are proteins. Proteins control our immune system, digest our food, heal our wounds, catalyze chemical reactions, support the structural integrity of our bodies, provide elegant molecules to communicate between cells, and much more. In short, proteins are the expression of life (and the health of our bodies).

If you were able to observe the physiological changes that take place inside your body when possessed by such negative states, how they adversely affect the functioning of the heart, the digestive and immune systems, and countless other bodily functions, it would become abundantly clear that such states are indeed pathological, are forms of suffering and not pleasure. Whenever

The first time I met Fran, I saw her for only a second outside the department while she was talking to some friends, but I was riveted. There was just something about her. I got up my nerve and introduced myself. She was friendly and smiled. Nothing else happened, but I went home, and Fran was all I could think about. “She agreed to go out with me, and things just unfolded from there. Without warning I had become a fool in love. I died inside if she had a change of plans and couldn’t see me. I kicked myself every day to make sure it was true—I’d fallen in love with the most beautiful woman in the world.” Despite the undoubted experience of falling in love at first sight, and abundant evidence that love creates powerful physiological changes, the whole phenomenon remains mysterious.

If you want to predict how happy someone is, or how long she will live (and if you are not allowed to ask about her genes or personality), you should find out about her social relationships. Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life (more than does quitting smoking), speeds recovery from surgery, and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders. It’s not just that extroverts are naturally happier and healthier; when introverts are forced to be more outgoing, they usually enjoy it and find that it boosts their mood. Even people who think they don’t want a lot of social contact still benefit from it. And it’s not just that “we all need somebody to lean on”; recent work on giving support shows that caring for others is often more beneficial than is receiving help. We need to interact and intertwine with others; we need the give and the take; we need to belong. An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities, and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfillment.

Some people have more highly activated left prefrontal cortexes and some people have more highly activated right prefrontal cortexes. (This has nothing to do with the question of hemispheric dominance that determines whether you are right-handed or left-handed, which occurs in other areas of the brain.) The majority of people have higher left-side activation. People with higher right-side activation tend to experience more negative emotion than people with higher left-side activation. Right-side activation also predicts how easily someone’s immune system will become depressed. The right-brain activation is also correlated with high baseline levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. Though the settled patterns of activation do not stabilize until adulthood, babies with greater right-side activation will become frantic when their mothers leave a room; babies with strong left-side activation will be more likely to explore the room without apparent distress. In babies, however, the balance is subject to change. “The likelihood,” Davidson says, “is that there’s more plasticity in the system in the early years of life, more opportunity for the environment to sculpt this circuitry.

we are beginning to understand that the immune system could also be able to remember childhood episodes of assault or famine or any other severe threat to the self’s early survival. Child abuse survivors may enter adult life with their immune system set on a hair-trigger, poised to react to minor infections and social setbacks with a disproportionate inflammatory response that causes depressive symptoms.

research in psychoneuroimmunology has supported the ways in which positive emotions, expectations, and attitudes enhance our immune system. This research also reinforces Frankl’s belief that one’s approach to everything from life-threatening challenges to everyday situations helps to shape the meaning of our lives. The simple truth that Frankl so ardently promoted has profound significance for anyone who listens.

The two researchers collaborated on a pilot study.32 What they found was that loneliness reprogrammed a person’s genes in the same way that fear of being outed altered the genes of closeted men. Loneliness changes the immune system. Specifically, feeling isolated turns on genes for inflammation—which are the first responders to tissue damage or bacterial threats—and it puts the brakes on genes that stop inflammation

The three conditions without which healthy growth does not take place can be taken for granted in the matrix of the womb: nutrition, a physically secure environment and the unbroken relationship with a safe, ever-present maternal organism. The word matrix is derived from the Latin for “womb,” itself derived from the word for “mother.” The womb is mother, and in many respects the mother remains the womb, even following birth. In the womb environment, no action or reaction on the developing infant’s part is required for the provision of any of his needs. Life in the womb is surely the prototype of life in the Garden of Eden where nothing can possibly be lacking, nothing has to be worked for. If there is no consciousness — we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Knowledge — there is also no deprivation or anxiety. Except in conditions of extreme poverty unusual in the industrialized world, although not unknown, the nutritional needs and shelter requirements of infants are more or less satisfied. The third prime requirement, a secure, safe and not overly stressed emotional atmosphere, is the one most likely to be disrupted in Western societies. The human infant lacks the capacity to follow or cling to the parent soon after being born, and is neurologically and biochemically underdeveloped in many other ways. The first nine months or so of extrauterine life seem to have been intended by nature as the second part of gestation. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu has called this phase exterogestation, gestation outside the maternal body. During this period, the security of the womb must be provided by the parenting environment. To allow for the maturation of the brain and nervous system that in other species occurs in the uterus, the attachment that was until birth directly physical now needs to be continued on both physical and emotional levels. Physically and psychologically, the parenting environment must contain and hold the infant as securely as she was held in the womb. For the second nine months of gestation, nature does provide a near-substitute for the direct umbilical connection: breast-feeding. Apart from its irreplaceable nutritional value and the immune protection it gives the infant, breast-feeding serves as a transitional stage from unbroken physical attachment to complete separation from the mother’s body. Now outside the matrix of the womb, the infant is nevertheless held close to the warmth of the maternal body from which nourishment continues to flow. Breast-feeding also deepens the mother’s feeling of connectedness to the baby, enhancing the emotionally symbiotic bonding relationship. No doubt the decline of breast-feeding, particularly accelerated in North America, has contributed to the emotional insecurities so prevalent in industrialized countries. Even more than breast-feeding, healthy brain development requires emotional security and warmth in the infant’s environment. This security is more than the love and best possible intentions of the parents. It depends also on a less controllable variable: their freedom from stresses that can undermine their psychological equilibrium. A calm and consistent emotional milieu throughout infancy is an essential requirement for the wiring of the neurophysiological circuits of self-regulation. When interfered with, as it often is in our society, brain development is adversely affected.

Humans are not biological robots. We live for meaning, for the personal value of every experience. The body metabolizes our experiences and sends the message to every cell, while the mind, in its own domain, processes experience in terms of sensations, images, thoughts, and feelings. Nothing fuses the whole-system effects of love and non-love like the human heart, which needs to be understood as more than a physical organ.

Recent research is showing that we actually have three “brains” — the head brain, heart brain, and gut brain — and our health and development depend on keeping them in balance and alignment.... Some signals begin in the gut, or the heart, and flow upstream to the head brain, while others cascade from above. In this way, our thoughts and emotions have both instant and long-lasting effects on all our biological systems: nervous, endocrine, immune.

Top five tips to support your immune system Eat fermented foods, which contain helpful probiotics. Eat foods rich in a variety of prebiotic fibres, such as leeks, onions, artichokes, cabbages. Eat foods rich in polyphenols, such as colourful blueberries, beetroot, blood oranges, and nuts and seeds. Eat foods that dampen any inflammation after meals such as green leafy vegetables. Reduce consumption of meat and non-fermented dairy to occasional meals.

Honest concern for others is the key factor in improving our day-to-day lives. When you are warm-hearted, there is no room for anger, jealousy, or insecurity. A calm mind and self-confidence are the basis for happy and peaceful relations with each other. Healthy, happy families and a healthy, peaceful nation are dependent on warm-heartedness. Some scientists have observed that constant anger and fear eat away at our immune system, whereas a calm mind strengthens it. We have to see how we can fundamentally change our education system so that we can train people to develop warm-heartedness early on in order to create a healthier society. I don't mean we need to change the whole system—just improve it. We need to encourage an understanding that inner peace comes from relying on human values like love, compassion, tolerance, and honesty, and that peace in the world relies on individuals finding inner peace. —HIS HOLINESS, THE DALAI LAMA

The First 5 in 5 × 5 × 5: The Health Defense Systems There are five health defense systems in your body: angiogenesis, regeneration, microbiome, DNA protection, and immunity. These systems maintain your health in a state of perfect balance. When mild disruptions occur in your health, the systems adjust themselves to take care of the problem and continue functioning behind the scenes, so you don’t even notice—that’s what you want your health to be like your entire life.

They may not even realize that they are being verbally abused nor how it is impacting them. A person who has been slammed with verbal abuse may feel like giving up, like dying. Their emotional pain and mental anguish may be so great they self-medicate with drugs or alcohol. They may have had no name for what they suffered. 4. Over time, verbal abuse compromises the immune system of anyone it targets. Any illness brought on or exacerbated by stress can lead to an early death.

Dr. Richard Selzer is a surgeon and a favorite author of mine. He writes the most beautiful and compassionate descriptions of his patients and the human dramas they confront. In his book Letters to a Young Doctor, he said that most young people seem to be protected for a time by an imaginary membrane that shields them from horror. They walk in it every day but are hardly aware of its presence. As the immune system protects the human body from the unseen threat of harmful bacteria, so this mythical membrane guards them from life-threatening situations. Not every young person has this protection, of course, because children do die of cancer, congenital heart problems, and other disorders. But most of them are shielded—and don’t realize it. Then, as years roll by, one day it happens. Without warning, the membrane tears, and horror seeps into a person’s life or into the life of a loved one. It is at this moment that an unexpected theological crisis presents itself.

Hugging is healthy. It helps the immune system, cures depression, reduces stress and induces sleep. It’s invigorating, rejuvenating and has no unpleasant side effects. Hugging is nothing less than a miracle drug. Hugging is all natural. It is organic, naturally sweet, no artificial ingredients, nonpolluting, environmentally friendly and 100 percent wholesome. Hugging is the ideal gift. Great for any occasion, fun to give and receive, shows you care, comes with its own wrapping and, of course, fully returnable. Hugging is practically perfect. No batteries to wear out, inflation-proof, nonfattening, no monthly payments, theft-proof and nontaxable. Hugging is an underutilized resource with magical powers. When we open our hearts and arms, we encourage others to do the same. Think of the people in your life. Are there any words you’d like to say? Are there any hugs you want to share? Are you waiting and hoping someone else will ask first? Please don’t wait! Initiate!

#96. Spend a Few Minutes Cuddling Your Significant Other/Child/Pet Physical touch is hugely important to our wellbeing. Cuddling releases oxytocin, the “happy hormone,” which can help reduce stress and even boost your immune system. Physical touch can also make the bonding process easier and improve communication between couples or parents and children. Cuddling doesn’t have to be limited to romantic partners—you’ll get the same effect from hugging a friend, a child or even your favorite furry animal.

You were burning in the middle of the worst solar storm our records can remember. (...) Everyone else fled. All your companions and crew left you alone to wrestle with the storm. “You did not blame them. In a moment of crystal insight, you realized that they were cowards beyond mere cowardice: their dependence on their immortality circuits had made it so that they could not even imagine risking their lives. They were all alike in this respect. They did not know they were not brave; they could not even think of dying as possible; how could they think of facing it, unflinching? “You did not flinch. You knew you were going to die; you knew it when the Sophotechs, who are immune to pain and fear, all screamed and failed and vanished. “And you knew, in that moment of approaching death, with all your life laid out like a single image for you to examine in a frozen moment of time, that no one was immortal, not ultimately, not really. The day may be far away, it may be further away than the dying of the sun, or the extinction of the stars, but the day will come when all our noumenal systems fail, our brilliant machines all pass away, and our records of ourselves and memories shall be lost. “If all life is finite, only the grace and virtue with which it is lived matters, not the length. So you decided to stay another moment, and erect magnetic shields, one by one; to discharge interruption masses into the current, to break up the reinforcement patterns in the storm. Not life but honor mattered to you, Helion: so you stayed a moment after that moment, and then another. (...) “You saw the plasma erupting through shield after shield (...) Chaos was attempting to destroy your life’s work, and major sections of the Solar Array were evaporated. Chaos was attempting to destroy your son’s lifework, and since he was aboard that ship, outside the range of any noumenal circuit, it would have destroyed your son as well. “The Array was safe, but you stayed another moment, to try to deflect the stream of particles and shield your son; circuit after circuit failed, and still you stayed, playing the emergency like a raging orchestra. “When the peak of the storm was passed, it was too late for you: you had stayed too long; the flames were coming. But the radio-static cleared long enough for you to have last words with your son, whom you discovered, to your surprise, you loved better than life itself. In your mind, he was the living image of the best thing in you, the ideal you always wanted to achieve. “ ‘Chaos has killed me, son,’ you said. ‘But the victory of unpredictability is hollow. Men imagine, in their pride, that they can predict life’s each event, and govern nature and govern each other with rules of unyielding iron. Not so. There will always be men like you, my son, who will do the things no one else predicts or can control. I tried to tame the sun and failed; no one knows what is at its fiery heart; but you will tame a thousand suns, and spread mankind so wide in space that no one single chance, no flux of chaos, no unexpected misfortune, will ever have power enough to harm us all. For men to be civilized, they must be unlike each other, so that when chaos comes to claim them, no two will use what strategy the other does, and thus, even in the middle of blind chaos, some men, by sheer blind chance, if nothing else, will conquer. “ ‘The way to conquer the chaos which underlies all the illusionary stable things in life, is to be so free, and tolerant, and so much in love with liberty, that chaos itself becomes our ally; we shall become what no one can foresee; and courage and inventiveness will be the names we call our fearless unpredictability…’ “And you vowed to support Phaethon’s effort, and you died in order that his dream might live.

James Pennebaker, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Writing to Heal, has done some of the most important and fascinating research I’ve seen on the power of expressive writing in the healing process. In an interview posted on the University of Texas’s website, Pennebaker explains, “Emotional upheavals touch every part of our lives. You don’t just lose a job, you don’t just get divorced. These things affect all aspects of who we are—our financial situation, our relationships with others, our views of ourselves, our issues of life and death. Writing helps us focus and organize the experience.” Pennebaker believes that because our minds are designed to try to understand things that happen to us, translating messy, difficult experiences into language essentially makes them “graspable.” What’s important to note about Pennebaker’s research is the fact that he advocates limited writing, or short spurts. He’s found that writing about emotional upheavals for just fifteen to twenty minutes a day on four consecutive days can decrease anxiety, rumination, and depressive symptoms and boost our immune systems.

Other anatomical changes associated with long-duration space flight are definitely negative: the immune system weakens, the heart shrinks because it doesn’t have to strain against gravity, eyesight tends to degrade, sometimes markedly (no one’s exactly sure why yet). The spine lengthens as the little sacs of fluid between the vertebrae expand, and bone mass decreases as the body sheds calcium. Without gravity, we don’t need muscle and bone mass to support our own weight, which is what makes life in space so much fun but also so inherently bad for the human body, long-term.

How long will the Gilgamesh Project – the quest for immortality – take to complete? A hundred years? Five hundred years? A thousand years? When we recall how little we knew about the human body in 1900, and how much knowledge we have gained in a single century, there is cause for optimism. Genetic engineers have recently managed to double the average life expectancy of Caenorhabditis elegans worms.12 Could they do the same for Homo sapiens? Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes.13 A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely). Whether or not Project Gilgamesh succeeds, from a historical perspective it is fascinating to see that most late-modern religions and ideologies have already taken death and the afterlife out of the equation. Until the eighteenth century, religions considered death and its aftermath central to the meaning of life. Beginning in the eighteenth century, religions and ideologies such as liberalism, socialism and feminism lost all interest in the afterlife. What, exactly, happens to a Communist after he or she dies? What happens to a capitalist? What happens to a feminist? It is pointless to look for the answer in the writings of Marx, Adam Smith or Simone de Beauvoir. The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism. In its more poetic and desperate moments, nationalism promises that whoever dies for the nation will for ever live in its collective memory. Yet this promise is so fuzzy that even most nationalists do not really know what to make of it. The

It’s true, organic food is more expensive to grow, and we have to be willing to pay for it. Some people see that as a luxury. I always come back to the same question: Would we rather give our money to the farmer or the pharmacist, the grocer or the doctor? Do we want to spend a fortune in the future trying to fix the damage being done today? Once we compare the potential risk and reward, the extra cost of eating clean food may seem worth it. Eating is the single most important thing we can do to stay healthy. If good, clean food isn’t worth our money, what is? Organic blackberries cost double the normal kind? How does that compare to the price of chemotherapy? How does burning out your insides with toxic chemicals and destroying your immune system and puking out your guts and losing all your hair stack up against spending three dollars more on that organic produce? Your body responds to what you put inside it. It’s simple. How could anything else be possible? You’d accept that if we were talking about your car. Why not your body? Clean also means food that contains no genetically modified organisms—GMOs. This is the really scary stuff, and it’s in the news every day as the big corporations fight every effort to label engineered foods. The fact that the industry is against truth in labeling tells us all we need to know.

Journal Writing Keeping a journal is an extremely valuable practice. Right now, your mind may be racing with anxious thoughts and worries. Writing them down helps you sort through your problems and come to a deeper understanding of the issues in your life. The benefits of journal writing may be more than just psychological. Dr. James Pennebaker, a researcher in Texas, discovered that when people write about difficult experiences for twenty minutes at a time over a period of three to four days, their immune system functioning increases. This indicates that the simple act of writing about emotions has a direct impact on your body’s ability to withstand stress and fight infection and disease.

The raw-foodist Dr. Norman Walker had two series of six colon cleanses done every year in the second half of his life—he lived to be at least 109 (some say older). I’ve found that one colonic every four to six months has been effective for me—although I am sure that more would do me good. I always recommend starting with a series of four to six sessions even if you think you do not need it. The primary goal of colon hydrotherapy is to empty the bowels completely in order for the lymph system to drain. The secondary goal is to remove encrusted mucus (which feeds unwanted parasites and poisons the system) from the inner intestinal lining. The third goal is to allow the liver to flush and release.

Double pneumonia and an overscheduled life can happen to anyone, of course, but for Little, it was the result of acting out of character for too long and without enough restorative niches. When your conscientiousness impels you to take on more than you can handle, you begin to lose interest, even in tasks that normally engage you. You also risk your physical health. “Emotional labor,” which is the effort we make to control and change our own emotions, is associated with stress, burnout, and even physical symptoms like an increase in cardiovascular disease. Professor Little believes that prolonged acting out of character may also increase autonomic nervous system activity, which can, in turn, compromise immune functioning.

Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori). H. pylori is frequently accused of contributing to the development and progression of autoimmune disease (and is also one of the best-understood persistent infections). As mentioned in the previous section, H. pylori is a bacterium found in the upper gastrointestinal tract of approximately 50 percent of the population and is known to cause stomach ulcers in susceptible individuals. It also modulates the adaptive immune system through a very complex interaction. In fact, the interaction is so complex that acquiring H. pylori early in life prevents immune and autoimmune diseases. By contrast, acquiring H. pylori as an adult (which is more common in Western countries) increases the risk of immune dysfunction.

It was a fascinating hint that flu might have a heritable component, but other studies failed to replicate the finding. Then in January 2011, in the midst of the annual flu season in France, a two-year-old girl was admitted to the intensive care unit of the Necker Hospital for Sick Children in Paris, suffering from ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome). Doctors saved her life, and one of them, Jean-Laurent Casanova, sequenced her genome. He wanted to know if it held the key to why an otherwise healthy child had nearly died of a disease that most children shrug off. It turned out that the girl had inherited a genetic defect that meant she was unable to produce interferon, that all-important first-line defence against viruses. As a result, her besieged immune system went straight to plan B: a massive inflammatory response similar to the one pathologists saw in 1918.

It’s hard not to let negative emotions take over and leave their mark, but it seems that our lives depend on it; the reality is that stress kills. When it goes unresolved, stress can lead to chronic disease, causing premature death. The elevation of the stress hormone cortisol lowers immune system functioning, increases blood pressure, and cholesterol, and increases the risk of heart disease, cancer, and various other diseases. However, grief doesn’t last forever, despite how devastating and all-encompassing it can be. With the right help, support, and outlook, recovery will bring the body and mind to a new place of healing. We will never be the same again, but we will be stronger versions of ourselves. It’s important to remember to approach recovery with some level of gratitude for the beauty of life—it’s important to always express, accept, and learn from ourselves.

If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer. A study of people who exaggerate their expected life span beyond actuarial predictions showed that they work longer hours, are more optimistic about their future income, are more likely to remarry after divorce (the classic “triumph of hope over experience”), and are more prone to bet on individual stocks. Of course, the blessings of optimism are offered only to individuals who are only mildly biased and who are able to “accentuate the positive” without losing track of reality.

Yes. This gradual walk toward not taking human suffering seriously anymore is something we experience in context-dependent ways already, and when you think of the global implications it’s scary to consider how malleable our experience might be. I’m thinking of a few local cases, like how surgeons and ER doctors need to inure themselves to the constant evidence of other people’s suffering, because otherwise they can’t get the job done. And every parent knows what it’s like to understand that the suffering of one’s three-year-old who bursts into tears over a lost toy is not something that needs to concern you as much as an adult bursting into tears over something else, and yet that suffering is no less vivid for the child. You can imagine that kind of immunity to the evident pain of other, seemingly conscious systems, growing over time. Life could seem more and more like a video game where everyone else becomes a prop.

With time, the ‘wheat bargain’ became more and more burdensome. Children died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows. The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realised what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done. Paradoxically, a series of ‘improvements’, each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of these farmers. Why did people make such a fateful miscalculation? For the same reason that people throughout history have miscalculated. People were unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions. Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work – say, to hoe the fields instead of scattering seeds on the surface – people thought, ‘Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won’t have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.’ It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan. The first part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children. Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases. They did not foresee that by increasing their dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing themselves even more to the depredations of drought. Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty.

It may seem paradoxical to claim that stress, a physiological mechanism vital to life, is a cause of illness. To resolve this apparent contradiction, we must differentiate between acute stress and chronic stress. Acute stress is the immediate, short-term body response to threat. Chronic stress is activation of the stress mechanisms over long periods of time when a person is exposed to stressors that cannot be escaped either because she does not recognize them or because she has no control over them. Discharges of nervous system, hormonal output and immune changes constitute the flight-or-fight reactions that help us survive immediate danger. These biological responses are adaptive in the emergencies for which nature designed them. But the same stress responses, triggered chronically and without resolution, produce harm and even permanent damage. Chronically high cortisol levels destroy tissue. Chronically elevated adrenalin levels raise the blood pressure and damage the heart. There is extensive documentation of the inhibiting effect of chronic stress on the immune system. In one study, the activity of immune cells called natural killer (NK) cells were compared in two groups: spousal caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and age- and health-matched controls. NK cells are front-line troops in the fight against infections and against cancer, having the capacity to attack invading micro-organisms and to destroy cells with malignant mutations. The NK cell functioning of the caregivers was significantly suppressed, even in those whose spouses had died as long as three years previously. The caregivers who reported lower levels of social support also showed the greatest depression in immune activity — just as the loneliest medical students had the most impaired immune systems under the stress of examinations. Another study of caregivers assessed the efficacy of immunization against influenza. In this study 80 per cent among the non-stressed control group developed immunity against the virus, but only 20 per cent of the Alzheimer caregivers were able to do so. The stress of unremitting caregiving inhibited the immune system and left people susceptible to influenza. Research has also shown stress-related delays in tissue repair. The wounds of Alzheimer caregivers took an average of nine days longer to heal than those of controls. Higher levels of stress cause higher cortisol output via the HPA axis, and cortisol inhibits the activity of the inflammatory cells involved in wound healing. Dental students had a wound deliberately inflicted on their hard palates while they were facing immunology exams and again during vacation. In all of them the wound healed more quickly in the summer. Under stress, their white blood cells produced less of a substance essential to healing. The oft-observed relationship between stress, impaired immunity and illness has given rise to the concept of “diseases of adaptation,” a phrase of Hans Selye’s. The flight-or-fight response, it is argued, was indispensable in an era when early human beings had to confront a natural world of predators and other dangers. In civilized society, however, the flight-fight reaction is triggered in situations where it is neither necessary nor helpful, since we no longer face the same mortal threats to existence. The body’s physiological stress mechanisms are often triggered inappropriately, leading to disease. There is another way to look at it. The flight-or-fight alarm reaction exists today for the same purpose evolution originally assigned to it: to enable us to survive. What has happened is that we have lost touch with the gut feelings designed to be our warning system. The body mounts a stress response, but the mind is unaware of the threat. We keep ourselves in physiologically stressful situations, with only a dim awareness of distress or no awareness at all.

Fearing death - neurotically manifested as a fear of “failure” or being needy in American culture - we slavishly pursue “success” as it is defined by the surrounding culture. Even more troubling, we become hostile toward out-group members who call our hero system into question. The great problem in all this - a problem we need to face before concluding - is how God and religion undergird and support the cultural hero system. Cultural hero systems and religion are deeply interconnected - in fact, they are generally synonymous - with our “God” or “gods” providing the warrant for our way of life. Recall that in order for hero systems to confer immunity in the face of death, they must be experienced as immortal and eternal. And there is no better way to create that sense of immortality than to baptize and sacralize the hero system, to fuse our way of life with the way of God. What this means is that “God” and religious institutions can become as enslaved to the fear of death as everything else in the culture. The church can become as much a principality and power as any other cultural institution. And if this is so, service to “God” and “the church” can produce satanic outcomes as much as, if not more so, any other form of service to the power of death in our world. In biblical terms, this is idolatry - when “God” and religion become another form of our slavery to the fear of death, another fallen principality and power demanding slavish service and loyalty. Idolatry is when our allegiances to the faith-based principalities and powers, and the cultural institutions they are wedded to (e.g., the nation-state), keep us enslaved to death, bound to the fear-driven cycle of sin as we become paranoid and hostile toward out-group members. It’s not news that much of the hostility and violence in the world has been rooted in religious conflict. Idolatry, then, is the slavery of God where “God” and “the church” become another manifestation of our slavery to death, another form of “the devil’s work” in our lives.

These genetic malfunctions are unlikely to produce schizophrenia in an individual unless they are stimulated by environmental conditions. By far the most causative environmental factor is stress, especially during gestation in the womb, early childhood, and adolescence—stages in which the brain is continually reshaping itself, and thus vulnerable to disruption. Stress can take the form of a person's enduring sustained anger, fear, or anxiety, or a combination of these. Stress works its damage by prompting an oversupply of cortisol, the normally life sustaining “stress hormone” that converts high energy glycogen to glucose in liver and in muscle tissue. Yet when it is called upon to contain a rush of glycogen, cortisol can transform itself into “Public Enemy Number One,” as one health advocate put it. The steroid hormone swells to flood levels and triggers weight gain, high blood pressure, heart disease, damage to the immune system, and an overflow of cholesterol. Stress is likely a trigger for schizophrenia.

When humans began cultivating the land, they thought that the extra work this required will pay off. 'Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won't have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.' It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan. The first part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children. Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases. They did not foresee that by increasing their dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing themselves even more to the depredations of drought. Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty.

I guess you’ll have to try to do something with F’s moon now. Presumably it’s dead. Or even try E.” He looked up at it, big in the blue sky. “Well, no. It’s too big. Too heavy.” Two minutes later: “Maybe you can just keep living on the ship, and stock up on whatever you run out of, from here and from E. Terraform F’s moon if you can. Or maybe you can resupply and get to another system entirely. I seem to recall there’s a G star just a few more light-years out.” Long silence. Then: “But you know, I bet they’re all like this one. I mean, they’re either going to be alive or dead, right? If they’ve got water and orbit in the habitable zone, they’ll be alive. Alive and poisonous. I don’t know. Maybe they could be alive and we live with them and the two systems pass each other by. But that doesn’t sound like life, does it? Living things eat. They have immune systems. So that’s going to be a problem, most of the time anyway. Invasive biology. Then on the dead worlds, those’ll be dry, and too cold, or too hot. So they’ll be useless unless they have water, and if they have water they’ll probably be alive. I know

In a healthy body, this synchronicity is perfectly regulated. Healthy people are firmly locked into these rhythms. When disease occurs, one of those rhythms has gone awry. Stress is the biggest disrupter. If you’re stressed, if you’re feeling hostility, your body’s balance gets thrown off. Stress breaks our nonlocal connection with everything else. When you are experiencing disease (“disease”), then some part of your body is beginning to get constricted. It is tuning itself out from the nonlocal field of intelligence. There are many emotions that can cause a disruption of the electromagnetic field in the heart, but the ones that have been most precisely documented are anger and hostility. Once this synchronization is disrupted, your body starts to behave in a fragmented manner. The immune system gets suppressed, which leads to other problems, such as increased susceptibility to cancer, infections, and accelerated aging. This effect is so strong that animals can pick it up. If a dog sees a person who is harboring hostility, it will bark and act ferocious. Wherever you go, you are broadcasting who you are at this very intimate level.

Viewed in this light, life itself appears as a dynamics of integration that is equipped with auto-therapeutic or 'endo-clinical' competencies and refers to a species-specific space of surprise. It has an equally innate and - in higher organisms - adaptively acquired responsibility for the injuries and invasions it regularly encounters in its permanently allocated environment or conquered surroundings. Such immune systems could equally be described as organismic early forms of a feeling for transcendence: thanks to the efficiency of these devices, which are constantly at the ready, the organism actively confronts the potential bringers of its death, opposing them with its endogenous capacity to overcome the lethal. Such functions have earned immune systems of this type comparisons to a 'body police' or border patrol. But as the concern, already at this level, is to work out a modus vivendi with foreign and invisible powers - and, in so far as these can bring death, 'higher' and 'supernatural' ones - this is a preliminary stage to the behaviour one is accustomed to terming religious or spiritual in human contexts. For every organism, its environment is its transcendence, and the more abstract and unknown the danger from that environment, the more transcendent it appears.

Emotions also directly modulate the immune system. Studies at the U.S. National Cancer Institute found that natural killer (NK) cells, an important class of immune cells we have already met, are more active in breast cancer patients who are able to express anger, to adopt a fighting stance and who have more social support. NK cells mount an attack on malignant cells and are able to destroy them. These women had significantly less spread of their breast cancer, compared with those who exhibited a less assertive attitude or who had fewer nurturing social connections. The researchers found that emotional factors and social involvement were more important to survival than the degree of disease itself. Many studies, such as the one reported in The British Medical Journal article, fail to appreciate that stress is not only a question of external stimulus but also of individual response. It occurs in the real lives of real persons whose inborn temperament, life history, emotional patterns, physical and mental resources, and social and economic supports vary greatly. As already pointed out, there is no universal stressor. In most cases of breast cancer, the stresses are hidden and chronic. They stem from childhood experiences, early emotional programming and unconscious psychological coping styles. They accumulate over a lifetime to make someone susceptible to disease.

AN ALKALINE DIET The pH level measures how acid or alkaline something is. Your blood is slightly alkaline, with a pH between 7.35 and 7.45, and your stomach is very acidic, with a pH of 3.5 or below, so it can break down food. Most of the foods we eat release either an acid or an alkaline base in the blood. Acidified body cells become weak, which can lead to unhealthy conditions and diseases. They are robbed of the oxygen and energy needed to support a strong and healthy immune system. I incorporate alkaline foods into my diet every day, and I feel like my energy is soaring. Food literally acts like a battery for the body. Every living thing on this planet is made up of energy, and this includes your food. This energy can be measured in megahertz. Chocolate cake only provides 1 to 3 MHz of energy, while raw almonds have 40 to 50 MHz and green vegetables have 70 to 90 MHz. So if you need 70 MHz of energy on a daily basis to function and you live off junk food and soda, you are creating an energy-deficit crisis in your body. People say it’s expensive to eat healthily. Here’s how I see it: you’re going to pay either way. Either you’re going to pay now for the good foods and feel alive and have a clear mind. Or you’ll save some money now and pay for medicine and hospital bills later. I used to make excuses: I’m getting older, that’s why I feel so tired all the time. But now I know it doesn’t have to be that way. You have to make the conscious decision to nourish your body. Value yourself enough to eat well.

In rallies like those in Johnson’s Ohio tour, friends, neighbors, colleagues and family members who do not conform to the ideology are gradually dehumanized. They are tainted with the despised characteristics inherent in the godless. This attack is waged in highly abstract terms, to negate the reality of concrete, specific and unique human characteristics, to deny the possibility of goodness in those who do not conform. Some human beings, the message goes, are no longer human beings. They are types. This new, exclusive community fosters rigidity, conformity and intolerance. In this new binary world segments of the human race are disqualified from moral and ethical consideration. And because fundamentalist followers live in a binary universe, they are incapable of seeing others as anything more than inverted reflections of themselves. If they seek to destroy nonbelievers to create a Christian America, then nonbelievers must be seeking to destroy them. This belief system negates the possibility of the ethical life. It fails to grasp that goodness must be sought outside the self and that the best defense against evil is to seek it within. When people come to believe that they are immune from evil, that there is no resemblance between themselves and those they define as the enemy, they will inevitably grow to embody the evil they claim to fight. It is only by grasping our own capacity for evil, our own darkness, that we hold our own capacity for evil at bay. When evil is purely external, then moral purification always entails the eradication of others.

Can a reasonable man ever truly question the nobility of the heat engine he calls his body? What option does he have but to heap praise on his form, to self-adore, to admire, and to hold it up as the greatest statement of beauty in a beautiful garden? What, though, is to be admired in such a frighteningly fragile machine; a perilously needy contraption laced with kilometres of liquid and electrical conduits prone to leaks, rot, clogs, and short-circuits? What is there to be proud of in a machine that has an eight hour battery life and is predetermined to spend half its existence in a defenceless, catatonic coma? What is to be revered in a mechanism let loose in a sealed off room where almost everything—including its single source of light and warmth—makes it sick, but whose immune system functions by late entry crisis-response imitation? Where is the awe in a contrivance that freezes and dies if placed a little over here, or overheats and dies if placed a little over there? Where is the wonder in an instrument that is crushed to a pulp if dropped a little down there, or boiled away to nothing if lifted a little up there? Where is the marvel in an appliance where three-quarters of the planet’s surface will drown it, and three-quarters of the atmosphere will asphyxiate it? What is there to be cherished in a machine born innately greedy and so utterly useless that it has to wait three years for its neural networks to hook-up and come online before it even begins to get a hint of who or even what it is, and only then can it start to relearn absolutely everything its forebears had already bothered to learn? Where is the artistry in a thinking engine whose sweetest fuel can only be embezzled from other thinking engines?

The Western medical model — and I don't mean the science of it, I mean the practice of it, because the science is completely at odds with the practice — makes two devastating separations. First of all we separate the mind from the body, we separate the emotions from the physiology. So we don't see how the physiology of people reflects their lifelong emotional experience. So we separate the mind from the body, which is not something that traditional medicine has done, I mean, Ayuverdic or Chinese medicine or shamanic tribal cultures and medicinal practices throughout the world have always recognized that mind and body are inseparable. They intuitively knew it. Many Western practitioners have known this and even taught it, but in practice we ignore it. And then we separate the individual from the environment. The studies are clear, for example, that when people are emotionally isolated they tend to get sick more quickly and they succumb more rapidly to their disease. Why? Because people's physiology is completely related to their psychological, social environment and when people are isolated and alone their stress levels are much higher because there's nothing there to help them moderate their stress. And physiologically it is straightforward, you know, it takes a five-year-old kid to understand it. However because in practice we separate them... when somebody shows up with an inflamed joint, all we do is we give them an anti-inflammatory or because the immune system is hyperactive and is attacking them we give them a medication to suppress their immune system or we give them a stress hormone like cortisol or one of its analogues, to suppress the inflammation. But we never ask: "What does this manifest about your life?", "What does this say about your relationships?", "How stressful is your job?", "To what extent do you lack control in your life?", "Where are you not authentic?", "How are you trying to work so hard to meet your attachment needs by suppressing yourself?" (because that is what you learn to do as a kid). Then we do all this research that has to do with cell biology, so we keep looking for the cause of cancer in the cell. Now there's a wonderful quote in the New York Times a couple of years ago they did a series on cancer and somebody said: "Looking for the cause of cancer inside the individual cell is like trying to understand a traffic jam by studying the internal combustion engine." We will never understand it, but we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year looking for the cause of cancer inside the cell, not recognizing that the cell exists in interaction with the environment and that the genes are modulated by the environment, they are turned on and off by the environment. So the impact of not understanding the unity of emotions and physiology on one hand and in the other hand the relationship between the individual and the environment.. in other words.. having a strictly biological model as opposed to what has been called a bio-psycho-social, that recognizes that the biology is important, but it also reflects our psychological and social relationships. And therefore trying to understand the biology in isolation from the psychological and social environment is futile. The result is that we are treating people purely through pharmaceuticals or physical interventions, greatly to the profit of companies that manufacture pharmaceuticals and which fund the research, but it leaves us very much in the dark about a) the causes and b) the treatment, the holistic treatment of most conditions. So that for all our amazing interventions and technological marvels, we are still far short of doing what we could do, were we more mindful of that unity. So the consequences are devastating economically, they are devastating emotionally, they are devastating medically.

in Part III. Here you’ll find helpful trackers, templates, and other tools to support you through the process. I highly recommend you use these to keep you motivated and help you stay on track during the program. A Holistic Approach A happy, healthy lifestyle requires more than eating a healthy diet or being active. It requires that you address several aspects of life. To illustrate, let’s take a look at Diane. A few years ago, Diane was suffering from tension headaches and migraines, and frequently resorted to a dark bedroom to alleviate the pain. Her immune system was weak, causing her to frequently get colds and sinus infections. And she felt sluggish or too tired to engage in any kind of activity. She was desperate

It earns its keep. As it digests HMOs, B. infantis releases short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) that feed an infant's gut cells - so while mothers nourish this microbe, the microbe in turn nourishes the baby. Through direct contact, B. Infantis also encourages gut cells to make adhesive proteins that seal the gaps between them, and anti-inflammatory molecules that calibrate the immune system. These changes only happen when B. infantis grows on HMOs; if it gets lactose instead, it survives but doesn't engage in any repartee with the baby's cells. It unlocks its full beneficial potential only when it feeds on breast milk. Likewise, for a child to reap the full benefits that milk can provide, B. infantis must be present. For that reason, David Mills, a microbiologist who works with German, actually sees B. infantis as part of milk, albeit a part that is not made in the breast.