Immune System And Love 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.

I love airports. I’m fascinated by how an airport runs seamlessly as one huge well-oiled machine, and to watch how, when things go wrong, as they do all the time, all those little crises are fixed by people running around like the T-cells of a mammalian immune system dealing with infections before they have chance to get out of control.

The gut is the seat of all feeling. Polluting the gut not only cripples your immune system, but also destroys your sense of empathy, the ability to identify with other humans. Bad bacteria in the gut creates neurological issues. Autism can be cured by detoxifying the bellies of young children. People who think that feelings come from the heart are wrong. The gut is where you feel the loss of a loved one first. It's where you feel pain and a heavy bulk of your emotions. It's the central base of your entire immune system. If your gut is loaded with negative bacteria, it affects your mind. Your heart is the seat of your conscience. If your mind is corrupted, it affects your conscience. The heart is the Sun. The gut is the Moon. The pineal gland is Neptune, and your brain and nervous system (5 senses) are Mercury. What affects the moon or sun affects the entire universe within. So, if you poison the gut, it affects your entire nervous system, your sense of reasoning, and your senses.

When a lack of white blood cells exposes the horizon of being, one has to make a choice. To cloister yourself away in a germ-free environment, alive but alone, or to embrace the woman you love and catch your death of cold at the marriage ceremony? What a great show. It’s inner-directed script was unmatched by any other soap opera.

Living is difficult but desirable,” and the immune system works to keep us alive. I therefore use two major tools to change the body

Our immune system is evolving through trials of use in fighting illnesses and the bombardment of our modern world toxins and that this evolution not only engages the strengthening of the body and it’s T-Cell use but also our emotional intelligence and a higher awareness of our human nature and its original DNA coding as a highly self-reflective and intelligence evolving entity.

Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.

Every work of art stems from a wound in the soul of the artist. When a person is hurt, his immune system comes into operation, and a self-healing process takes place, mental and physical." He called art "a psychological component of the auto-immune system that gives expression to the healing process.

A good marriage, where both partners are exclusively committed to each other, keeps them healthier both physiologically and psychologically, by directly influencing the nervous system and immune system.

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.

It's worth remembering that [having a baby] is not of vital use to you as a woman. Yes, you could learn thousands of interesting things about love, strength, faith, fear, human relationships, genetic loyalty, and the effect of apricots on an immune digestive system. But I don't think there's a single lesson that motherhood has to offer that couldn't be learned elsewhere. If you want to know what's in motherhood for you, as a woman, then-in truth-it's nothing you couldn't get from, say, reading the 100 greatest books in human history; learning a foreign language well enough to argue in it; climbing hills; loving recklessly; sitting quietly, alone, in the dawn; drinking whiskey with revolutionaries; learning to do close-hand magic; swimming in a river in the winter; growing foxgloves, peas, and roses; calling your mum; singing while you walk; being polite; and always, always helping strangers. No one has ever claimed for a minute that childless men have missed out on a vital aspect of their existence, and were the poorer and crippled by it. Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Newton, Faraday, Plato, Aquinas, Beethoven, Handel, Kant, Hume, Jesus. They all seem to have managed quite well.

Look at all this. It's fantastic. A hundred thousand worlds. What I love most, because I'm a hideous narcissist, is knowing many of these worlds are mine. You know what all of this is, don't you? This is the immune system of the human soul. Superheroes, space rangers, time cowboys, they are the T cells of the spirit. They were always here to save us. We made them to save us.

Nurturing touch has all sorts of physiological benefits, including promoting the growth of the nervous system, stimulating the immune system, and decreasing stress hormones, but let’s focus on the emotional and psychological value. It is through nurturing touch that we feel loved, soothed, and protected.

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.

Hate is part of the immune system of your soul.

The power to achieve your best health goes beyond your immune system. It all starts with a little-known secret: loving yourself.

This healthy dependence is the essence of romantic love. The bodies of lovers are linked in a “neural duet.” One person sends out signals that alter the hormone levels, cardiovascular function, body rhythms, and even immune system of the other. In loving connection, the cuddle hormone oxytocin floods lovers’ bodies, bringing a calm joy and the sense that everything is right with the world. Our bodies are set up for this kind of connection.

Grayson Dunn is in my head. He's under my skin. He's invaded me like a deadly disease and hijacked my immune system until I don't even bother fighting it anymore. I look at him, and I'm twisted into knots. Tangled into a messy spool of desire and desperation.

Retroviruses love to hang out in the digestive tract. A great deal of the immune system is found in the digestive tract. So, if you’re a retrovirus and you want to disable the immune system, the gut is where you want to go. Not hard to make that connection, right?

A healthy, civilized society can absorb some anger and dysfunction, as a healthy immune system can absorb some disease. But a massive buildup of anger and mean-spiritedness bombarding our social system day in and day out in millions upon millions of individual doses overwhelms our societal defenses. Medicine does little good in the absence of a healthy immune system. Likewise police and other institutional efforts to counter violence do little good, ultimately, in the absence of our individual efforts to deal with it. Violence is routed out of the world only by being routed out of our minds. Hatred is diseased thinking. Just as a cancer cell was a healthy cell that then transformed, so is hatred, love gone wrong.

Despite the intervening six decades of scientific inquiry since Selye’s groundbreaking work, the physiological impact of the emotions is still far from fully appreciated. The medical approach to health and illness continues to suppose that body and mind are separable from each other and from the milieu in which they exist. Compounding that mistake is a definition of stress that is narrow and simplistic. Medical thinking usually sees stress as highly disturbing but isolated events such as, for example, sudden unemployment, a marriage breakup or the death of a loved one. These major events are potent sources of stress for many, but there are chronic daily stresses in people’s lives that are more insidious and more harmful in their long-term biological consequences. Internally generated stresses take their toll without in any way seeming out of the ordinary. For those habituated to high levels of internal stress since early childhood, it is the absence of stress that creates unease, evoking boredom and a sense of meaninglessness. People may become addicted to their own stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, Hans Selye observed. To such persons stress feels desirable, while the absence of it feels like something to be avoided. When people describe themselves as being stressed, they usually mean the nervous agitation they experience under excessive demands — most commonly in the areas of work, family, relationships, finances or health. But sensations of nervous tension do not define stress — nor, strictly speaking, are they always perceived when people are stressed. Stress, as we will define it, is not a matter of subjective feeling. It is a measurable set of objective physiological events in the body, involving the brain, the hormonal apparatus, the immune system and many other organs. Both animals and people can experience stress with no awareness of its presence. “Stress is not simply nervous tension,” Selye pointed out. “Stress reactions do occur in lower animals, and even in plants, that have no nervous systems…. Indeed, stress can be produced under deep anaesthesia in patients who are unconscious, and even in cell cultures grown outside the body.” Similarly, stress effects can be highly active in persons who are fully awake, but who are in the grip of unconscious emotions or cut off from their body responses. The physiology of stress may be triggered without observable effects on behaviour and without subjective awareness, as has been shown in animal experiments and in human studies.

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.

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.

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

Grief literally changes and rearranges the cells of our bodies. Our brains rewire, our nerves fire us up and settle us down, and our immune systems do everything they can to protect us from stress. When our loved one dies, our bodies feel it—from the immediate impact to the lasting effects. Grief leaves a visible and invisible impression on our lives, in our lungs, in our brains, and in our hearts. Everyone who has ever grieved is, at least partially, made up of grief.

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.

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.

Watching violent, arousing shows may actually contribute to suppressing your immune system. As you identify with the anger you see on the screen or read about, stress chemicals called catecholamine and cortisone are released that can adversely affect your immune system. The effect of exposure to both anger and love on the immune system was shown in research by Harvard scientist David Mclelland, and later reproduced by the Heart Math Institute in California (Bhat 1995). Watching an anger-provoking movie suppressed the immune system (as measured by chemicals in the saliva) for five to six hours in study subjects. However, watching a movie about the compassionate work of Mother Teresa caused elevation of the immune level in the participants.

The most powerful way to use the mind-body connection to improve your physical and mental health is through guiding your autonomic nervous system (ANS). Every time you calm the ANS through stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), you tilt your body, brain, and mind increasingly toward inner peace and well-being. You can activate the PNS in many ways, including relaxation, big exhalations, touching the lips, mindfulness of the body, imagery, balancing your heartbeat, and meditation. Meditation increases gray matter in brain regions that handle attention, compassion, and empathy. It also helps a variety of medical conditions, strengthens the immune system, and improves psychological functioning. Deliberately feeling safer helps control the hardwired tendency to look for and overreact to threats. Feel safer by relaxing, using imagery, connecting with others, being mindful of fear itself, evoking inner protectors, being realistic, and increasing your sense of secure attachment. Find refuge in whatever is a sanctuary and refueling station for you. Potential refuges include people, activities, places, and intangible things like reason, a sense of your innermost being, or truth.

Yet despite the excessive hype, the concept behind probiotics is still sound.19 Given all the important roles that bacteria play in our bodies, it should be possible to improve our health by swallowing or applying the right microbes. It’s just that the strains in current use may not be the right ones. They make up just a tiny fraction of the microbes that live with us, and their abilities represent a thin slice of what the microbiome is fully capable of. We met more suitable microbes in earlier chapters. There’s the mucus-loving bacterium, Akkermansia muciniphila, whose presence correlates with a lower risk of obesity and malnutrition. There’s Bacteroides fragilis, which stokes the anti-inflammatory side of the immune system. There’s Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, another anti-inflammatory bug, which is conspicuously rare in the guts of people with IBD, and whose arrival can reverse the symptoms of that disease in mice. These microbes could be part of the probiotics of the future. Their abilities are relevant and impressive. They are well adapted to our bodies. Some are already abundant – in healthy adults, one in every twenty gut bacteria is F. prausnitzii. These are not D-listers of the human microbiome like Lactobacillus; they are the stars of the gut. They won’t be shy about colonising it.20

The first few months of life are very demanding on your baby. She's used to living in your womb and having your body regulate all her bodily processes. Her body now has to do it all alone. Her nervous system is forced to adapt and she now has to maintain her own breathing and provide oxygen and nutrients to her cells. During this stressful time, your loving presence regulates her hormones, immune & cardiovascular system and sleep patterns.

It’s not what makes Tao unique that fascinates us, but what makes her an example everyone can follow. Strip away the uniqueness, and Tao has lived almost a century consciously shaping her own life . As a result, if you took a snapshot of any day in her long existence on Earth, you’d see someone who Put her inner life first Trusted her feelings and intuition Valued the now as the source of constant renewal Cultivated emotional resilience, refusing to be stuck in old wounds and setbacks Activated her core beliefs, turning her vision into action Placed her trust in love and spiritual growth every day We’d call this the model of a healing lifestyle. It’s not that Tao hasn’t had her share of painful experiences, beginning with the death of her mother; the loss of her husband; and on the physical level, three hip replacements. But instead of converting these experiences into suffering, she has consciously done the opposite—she has become even more dynamic and resilient. One might say that for Tao, only two kinds of experience exist, not the good ones and the bad ones, the moments of pleasure and the moments of pain, but experiences she can celebrate and those she can heal. You can live your life the same way.

In order to attack us, the devil must first weaken our spiritual immune systems by infecting us with the snake oil of this delusion rooted not in dialogue with God “just as I am” but the thought that I should postpone dialogue with God until after I can become good enough to be worthy of such a meeting. This is the other end of the stick of pride, which already presumes to be worthy of dialogue and so remains in a monologue of self-love out of envy and vainglory.

The chances of a zombie outbreak beginning in a daycare are alarmingly high. Toddlers are walking Petri dishes. Every major illness starts with them. They are so contagious that NATO’s current germ warfare policy is to parachute preschoolers into enemy countries. A single runny nose could wipe out North Korea. Little kids have undeveloped immune systems and love to eat food off the floor. To diseases, they’re Disneyland. Put twelve toddlers in a room together and you’ll have the deadliest germ laboratory in the world. Everyone knows the bubonic plague started in a daycare. I don’t see why the first case of zombieism will be any different.

...don’t shake hands with people more than you need to unless you’re ok with the risk of getting sick. There’s a fine line between having enough germs around to have a healthy immune system, and getting sick more than needed.

STEP THREE: MAXIMIZE YOUR ENERGY & REGENERATION Consider what aspects of Vitality Pharmacy (Chapter 10) might help you accelerate your energy, your strength, your vitality. Or help you to recover from challenges you may be facing. 1. Are you going to expand your capacity by optimizing your hormones through H.O.T. (hormone optimization therapy)? 2. Would peptides be something you may want to consider? Are there any peptides that you’d like to look into that could make a difference in anything from your immune system to sexual desire and drive? 3. What are some of the pharmaceutical-grade supplements that you might want to have to start your day with energy or to get yourself to sleep at night without side effects? 4. Or would you like to tap into NAD3 or other NMN-like products to maximize your energy and vitality? STEP

STEP THREE: MAXIMIZE YOUR ENERGY & REGENERATION Consider what aspects of Vitality Pharmacy (Chapter 10) might help you accelerate your energy, your strength, your vitality. Or help you to recover from challenges you may be facing. 1. Are you going to expand your capacity by optimizing your hormones through H.O.T. (hormone optimization therapy)? 2. Would peptides be something you may want to consider? Are there any peptides that you’d like to look into that could make a difference in anything from your immune system to sexual desire and drive? 3. What are some of the pharmaceutical-grade supplements that you might want to have to start your day with energy or to get yourself to sleep at night without side effects? 4. Or would you like to tap into NAD3 or other NMN-like products to maximize your energy and vitality?

If you’ve ever found yourself snapping at someone you dearly love, or sitting down to complete a work project only to spend five hours shopping for home tattoo kits online, it’s probably because you’re internally divided. You’re trying to act in ways that don’t feel right to you at the deepest level. Whenever we do this, our lives begin to go pear-shaped. Emotionally, we feel grumpy, sad, or numb. Physically, our immune systems and muscles weaken; we might get sick, and even if we don’t, our energy flattens. Mentally, we lose focus and clarity. That’s how it feels to be out of integrity.

Steven Cole says that the best cure for loneliness or disconnection is to combine a sense of mission and purpose in your life with community engagement. Spending time in service marries connection with deep fulfillment, and the result is a boost in health. Prosocial behavior, including volunteering, has also been shown to boost our immune system, combat the physical stress caused by loneliness, and extend our longevity. Sadly, says Cole, these days too many of us have actually dialed back our engagement with others to pursue individual health-enhancing goals, like training for a triathlon, taking yoga classes, or trying to find our “one true love.” Those things are all great, but the biggest benefit for all comes when, as Cole describes it, your health is a “means to an end, which is, essentially, to make some meaningful stuff happen, not just for you but for others.” What

A Thank You to My Body I just want to say "Thank You." Thank you for keeping your promise Thank you for... having kept our heart beating, and healing it when it was broken Thank you for... recognizing the negativity and toxicity in others before I did, and for warning me by making me feel that shit in our gut Thank you for... nursing us back to health, when our immune system either rebelled or failed Thank you for... loving me during the times, that I neglected you, or just outright failed to love you Thank you for... being the ballast when our mind, felt unstable, in the midst of chaos Thank you for... always having recovered when I, nearly destroyed us, or pushed us past our limit Thank you for... always having believed in us, and not quitting on us when I, stopped believing and wanted to quit Thank you for today, and for waking us up ---"ready!" Excerpt from: Jacob's Ascent, New Collected Poems by Mekael © Mekael Shane 2024

What we believe about our health has a powerful effect on our immune system. If our approach to a diagnosis, a treatment plan, or a diet is driven by fear, we miss out on the benefits of our loving inner wisdom.

Why It’s Good to Take in the Good Given the negativity bias of the brain, it takes an active effort to internalize positive experiences and heal negative ones. When you tilt toward what’s positive, you’re actually righting a neurological imbalance. And you’re giving yourself today the caring and encouragement you should have received as a child, but perhaps didn’t get in full measure. Focusing on what is wholesome and then taking it in naturally increases the positive emotions flowing through your mind each day. Emotions have global effects since they organize the brain as a whole. Consequently, positive feelings have far-reaching benefits, including a stronger immune system (Frederickson 2000) and a cardiovascular system that is less reactive to stress (Frederickson and Levenson 1998). They lift your mood; increase optimism, resilience, and resourcefulness; and help counteract the effects of painful experiences, including trauma (Frederickson 2001; Frederickson et al. 2000). It’s a positive cycle: good feelings today increase the likelihood of good feelings tomorrow.

She’s got a compromised immune system when it comes to love.

the happiness that arises from being a noble soul brings improved immune system response and better protection against pathogens, while happiness associated with selfish pleasures brings less protection against pathogens and greater inflammation.III

Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Matt?” I ask. And I really want to know, because it’s unfathomable to me that he’s single. He’s handsome, and he’s so kind. He shakes a finger at me. “There’s a story there,” he says. I settle into the sofa a little deeper and turn so that my feet are pointed toward him, my legs extended. My toes almost touch his thigh. But then he lifts my feet and slides under them, scooting closer to me. “I was in love with a girl. For a long time.” “What happened to her?” I ask. He starts to tickle across my toes, and then his fingertips drag down the top of my foot. It’s a gentle sweep, and it feels so good that I don’t want him to stop. His fingers play absently as he starts to talk. “When I got the diagnosis,” he says, “she couldn’t deal with it.” “Cancer?” I ask. He nods. His fingers drag up and down my shin, and he slides around to stroke the back of my knee. I don’t stop him when his hand slides beneath my skirt, although I do tense up. He smiles when he finds the top of my thigh-highs, and he unclips the little fastener that attaches them to my garters. He repeats the action on the other side, his hands teasing the sensitive skin of my inner thigh as he frees the stocking and rolls it down. He pulls it all the way over my foot, and does the same with the other side. I am suddenly really glad I shaved my legs this morning. I wiggle my toes at him, and he starts to stroke me again. I don’t ever want him to stop. “This okay?” he asks. But he’s not looking at my face. He’s looking at my legs. “Yeah,” I breathe. “Keep talking. You got diagnosed…” “I got diagnosed, and the prognosis wasn’t good. I went through chemo and got a little better. But then I needed a second round. Things didn’t look good, and we were flat broke. I couldn’t work at the tattoo parlor anymore because my immune system was too weak, so I had no money coming in. I was poor and sick, and she didn’t love me enough to walk the path with me.” He shrugs, but I can tell he’s serious. “She cheated with my best friend.” He shrugs again. “And that’s the end of that sad story.” “You still love her?” I ask. I don’t breathe, waiting for his answer. He shakes his head and looks up. “I did love her for a long time. And I haven’t been looking for a relationship. I haven’t dated anyone since her. But I’m not in love with her anymore. I know that now.” “Why now?” I ask. He looks directly into my eyes and says, “Because I met you, and I feel really hopeful that you’ll want to go after something real with me. I know we just met and all, but I was serious about making you fall in love with me.” He laughs. “Then you hit me in the nose tonight, and I knew it was meant to be.” “What?” I have no idea what he’s talking about. “When my brother Logan met Emily, she punched him in the face. And when Pete and Reagan first started dating, she hit him in the nose.” He reaches up and touches his nose gently. “So, when you hit me tonight, I just knew it was meant to be.” He grins. “I hope you feel the same way, because I really want to see where this thing is going to go.” “So the women your brothers fell in love with, they committed bodily harm to them and that’s how you guys knew it was real?” “We kind of have a rule. If a woman punches you in the face, you have to marry her.” He laughs. “I didn’t punch you.” “Same difference,” he says. “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

The fetishizing of the past is something that seems to happen more now than ever because of these perceived “dark times” that we're living in. People say, "Oh I'd love to go back and live in France in the '20s" and romanticize rubbing shoulders with Hemingway or whatever. But do you want to die of fucking influenza or tuberculosis? Or, if you're black or gay or any other minority that was not acceptable in that time, is that really a place you want to be? I'd rather live in the future. Who doesn't want infrared vision? To have hearing that goes beyond 20 kilohertz to 20 hertz, like a dog. An immune system that's like a tank, breathing under water. Eternal life. Weekends in Europa. To me, that's infinitely more interesting than going back.

When your emotions drop, when your vibration drops, when your thoughts and beliefs spiral downward into blame, victimhood, doubt, and fear, your immune system is weakened. And so, being happy is the best immunity booster you can nurture. Being in love is the best way for you to take your abundance to the next level, and for your finances to reach the state you truly desire. Love and happiness are the foundation for you to create anything you want in life. A partner, the right job, a business opportunity, well-being, vitality, and health are all strengthened and helped by feelings of love, happiness, and well-being.

Unconditional love is the most powerful stimulant of the immune system. The truth is: love heals.” I

the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.

If you operate from these life positive things like joy, bliss, love, even the chemicals and hormones your body secretes strengthens your immune system. There are tons of researches to prove this.

She pointed out in a recent study in Experimental Gerontology,19 saunas have been shown to stimulate the immune system, lower blood pressure, reduce inflammation, and improve cardiovascular function. Sitting in a sauna can also boost your heart rate in much the same way as medium-intensity exercise—but with far less effort! Plus, there’s the emotional bonus of taking time to relax, rejuvenating in peace on your own or in the company of friends and family. The

his book, he adds this stark warning: “Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system.” And as we’ve seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s no better defense against viruses, the flu, and many other threats to our health than to maintain a robust immune system.

Omega-3 optimizer: SmartPrime-Om: With his partners, Dr. Lopez has leveraged artificial intelligence to identify a cocktail of methylation pathway nutrients and plant-based bioactive ingredients found in sesame seed oil extract that can expand the benefits of fish oil and increase activity of genes and enzymes responsible for increasing the body’s “pool” of omega-3s like DHA, DPA, and EPA. SmartPrime-Om also promotes delivery of omega-3s in the ideal biochemical phospholipid package to increase benefits for most cells, tissues, and major organs. 8. 23Vitals for nutraceutical immune optimization was formulated to shore up our bodies on a molecular level and rejuvenate our immune system. It contains 23 bioactive ingredients, covering more than fifty human clinical trials showing immune system bolstering, and other ingredients to support our digestive tract, respiratory, and cardiovascular health, and muscle and joint recovery from exercise stress. It’s designed to promote a healthy immune response when we need to fight off a challenge, and then tone down inflammation once the threat has been neutralized and the “wave” has receded. Available in a ready-to-mix powder. I use this personally, and am also an investor in the company.

TO STRENGTHEN OUR IMMUNE SYSTEM AND COMBAT ITS AGE-RELATED DECLINE: The peptide thymosin alpha-1 (Zadaxin): As we age, our thymus gland gradually turns into fat tissue and stops producing the robust battalions of T cells that fight off infections or eliminate rogue cancer cells. If we had to choose a single peptide to help address immunological aging, according to Dr. Lopez, thymosin alpha-1 might be the one. TA-1 has proven its ability to stimulate the immune system in both animal and human studies.

And remember, emotions can rule the physical body. One study showed that one five-minute angry outburst can impair your immune system for up to five hours.4 And so: learning to master your mind is essential to an extraordinary quality of life and extraordinary amounts of energy. We’ll explore more in depth the power of mindset and strategies for controlling it in the final two chapters of this book.

positive feelings have far-reaching benefits, including a stronger immune system (Frederickson 2000) and a cardiovascular system that is less reactive to stress (Frederickson and Levenson 1998).

Throat Let your fingers touch each other as you cup your hands on the bottom of the throat. Be gentle, and hold on to your hands, but do not touch your throat. Helping the thyroid and parathyroid gland, vocal cords, larynx, and lymph nodes, this hand position handles the throat (fifth) chakra that regulates neck and chest. This is the seat of communication and expression. Using therapy to help the patient speak, speak their minds, talk for themselves, and tell their reality. It's also perfect for writer’s block! Collarbone Place your hands with your fingers pointing to the middle of your chest on the sides of your arms. This position gives Reiki to the area of the thymus between the chakras of the throat and the neck. For immune function, the thymus gland is essential. Place yourself behind or on the recipient's side for this next position (it all depends on your height logistics, their height, and how far you can stretch!). Back of the neck and front of the heart Put your left hand under the neck area and your right hand over the top of the heart area of the middle. This role incorporates heart and back care of the heart. They address two regions simultaneously: the chakra of the throat and the chakra of the heart, which helps to express one's heart or to say one's reality. This is a good position to handle high blood pressure; any position on the neck actually helps reduce high blood pressure. Heart Place the hands in a T, a hand positioned horizontally above the breasts, and a hand placed vertically between the breasts. Treating the heart (fourth) chakra governs everything related to the circulatory system, including the pulse, veins, and arteries; the lungs (related to the chakras of the heart and throat); the breasts; and the thymus. Opening Reiki's heart chakra increases the supply of affection, air, and nourishment that can be received and offered. The recipient feels acceptance and a sense of love and compassion when the heart chakra is free and moving.

When stuck in bad anxiety, this activation can trigger a host of feelings: nervousness, fear, discomfort, pain—the negative emotions that pull down our moods, distract us, and make us withdraw and isolate ourselves. On the other side of these negative emotions are the wonderful, uplifting positive emotions: joy, love, humor, excitement, curiosity, wonder, gratitude, serenity, inspiration—the list goes on and on. These positive feelings drive our connection to ourselves and others; they ward off illness and keep us healthy by strengthening our immune system; they reward enjoyment and pleasurable behaviors so that we will continue to seek them out.

When you snatch chimps, dogs, laboratory mice, and a wide variety of other animals away from the group they know and love,* exhaustion overwhelms them, their immune system downshifts, and they begin to waste away.

Visibly concerned, Holden drove Powers to his home in Palm Springs, where she rested for nearly five weeks, while taking a variety of medical treatments. To reduce the risk of liver damage, Powers modified her diet and exercise program. The sunlight helped to boost her immune system with the increase of vitamin D, which she absorbed in large quantities, and the actress slowly regained her strength.

The kind of stress that you are most vulnerable to, as a Black woman, is chronic or ongoing stress that can affect heart health, weaken your immune system, and increase your risk of complications in pregnancy.

...we might try to assuage our loneliness and fears by sleeping with partners we don't love or respect -- sometimes men who won't even remember our names -- as we use sex addictively to fill the emotional hole. But we never walk away from sex Scott free. Sex is more personal to us than to men, and there's a reason for that. The results of preliminary research suggests that when we have orgasms, our bodies release oxytocin, the same chemical that's produced during breast-feeding, and that heightens feelings of bonding. As [Niravi] Payne explains in The Language of Fertility, which is coauthored with Brenda Richardson, her work is based on research that validates thoughts and beliefs can affect functioning in cells, tissues and organs. In recent decades, scientists have learned that much of human perception is based not on information flowing into the brain from the external world, but on what the brain based on previous experience, expects to happen next. That means if we unconsciously believe that sex is "shameful" or something to be feared, that belief can be reflected in our reproductive organs by throwing our hormonal functioning, which regulates pregnancy, or in our immune system, which governs our ability to maintain a pregnancy, or even in our menstrual flow, which if malfunctioning can lead to fibroid tumors. Like all feelings, sexual feelings are energy, and when energy is suppressed, it builds and burst out in destructive ways. Clinical psychologist Darlene Powell Hopson has said she teaches her clients an invocation that in, part, she learned from fellow author Iyanla Vanzant: 'Dear God, I love you and being your child. You made me a sexual being and I want to experience closeness and fulfillment with my partner. My soul yearns for the pleasure and satisfaction of being spiritually and physically intimate with my partner....Please continue to remain with me and in me, forever.

Our feelings and thoughts towards ourselves play a crucial role in keeping our immune system working well. When we love ourselves our immune system is powerful and strong.

I tell John about what’s known as the psychological immune system. Just as the physiological immune system helps your body recover from physical attack, your brain helps you recover from psychological attack. A series of studies by the researcher Daniel Gilbert at Harvard found that in responding to challenging life events from the devastating (becoming handicapped, losing a loved one) to the difficult (a divorce, an illness), people do better than they anticipate. They believe that they’ll never love again, but they do. They think they’ll never love again, but they do. They go grocery shopping and see movies; they have sex and dance at weddings; they overeat on Thanksgiving and go on diets in the New Year – the day-to-day returns.

How and why does love promote physical health? When infatuation turns into lasting love, what can this do for our well-being? If love becomes deep enough, does it open the door for higher consciousness? The human experience testifies that love has a unique power in all these areas, and if we investigate deeply enough, there are answers for why this is so.

The course of true love never did run smooth.

Falling in love gives a more realistic view of life by placing us in contact with our true self. We fall accidentally and temporarily into a state of expanded awareness that is exalted by the great mystic poets, who connect intense human love with divine love. The beloved Persian poet Rumi exults: Oh God, I have discovered love! How marvelous, how good, how beautiful it is! … I offer my salutation To the spirit of passion that aroused and excited this whole universe And all it contains.

There’s no distinction here between what a saint would describe and a Patrick who discovers love for the first time. He and Fran didn’t last as a couple beyond a year. Like everyone who has passed through the stage of infatuation, they had ego needs that weren’t the same. Settling down to love while negotiating the demands of “I, me, and mine” poses its own challenges. But Patrick learned the most valuable lesson of his life, that he was lovable and, along with this, that he could love.

Patients who told the researchers that they felt loved and emotionally supported generally exhibited less blockage in their coronary arteries, the main cause of heart attacks and strokes.

having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.

our emotions can also prompt the release of beneficial neurochemicals and hormones. Crying is soothing because it carries stress hormones out of our bodies. Feelings of gratitude increase oxygen levels in our tissues, speed healing, and boost our immune system. Being in love was found to raise the level of nerve growth factor, a hormonelike substance that restores the nervous system and improves memory.

You will observe how leaders impact a system by separating themselves from the surrounding anxiety making decisions based on principle, not instinct taking responsibility for their own emotional being regulating their own anxiety in the face of sabotage or resistance staying connected to others, even those who disagree with them choosing self-directed goals being a non-anxious presence supplying an immune response to pathogenic forces (invasiveness) focusing on emotional processes rather than the symptoms they produce not allowing the most dependent to be in control knowing that people naturally influence one another recognizing leader and follower as complements, parts of the whole realizing that insight, love, and reasonableness are not adequate for change in an anxious system accepting that mature leadership does not always work, that immaturity is too embedded in the system The overall health and functioning of any organization depends primarily on one or several people at the top who can exercise the above characteristics well.

Focusing on what is wholesome and then taking it in naturally increases the positive emotions flowing through your mind each day. Emotions have global effects since they organize the brain as a whole. Consequently, positive feelings have far-reaching benefits, including a stronger immune system (Frederickson 2000) and a cardiovascular system that is less reactive to stress (Frederickson and Levenson 1998). They lift your mood; increase optimism, resilience, and resourcefulness; and help counteract the effects of painful experiences, including trauma (Frederickson 2001; Frederickson et al. 2000). It’s a positive cycle: good feelings today increase the likelihood of good feelings tomorrow.

I didn't just feel it; I recorded each and every sensation. I can replicate each one. I will. I'll play it back plus ten for the pastardthat caused my love to fall. And before they go down, I'll wet the concrete with their brain mattter. I'll explode their marrow out of their bones and make a mess of their capillaries. I'll make a paste of their eyes, Yasmine, I promise. I'll make them bleed from their ears and turn their digestive system against them. They'll digest their own organs. I'll increase their pain receptors so that their clothes feel like sandpaper. I'll make their own breath soun d like a DC-10 is landing in their chest. I'll fill their longs with every excessive fluid in their body I can find. I'll make a decomposing mess of them, I swear I will. They'll pray to gods they don't belive in for the pain to end before I explode each taste bud in their mough and inflame their genitals with the stray parasites they immune system usually fights off.