2. Drink more water! Somewhere between two and three liters a day. The more fiber you add to your diet, the more water you need to drink.
3. Massage your own abdomen, moving in a clockwise direction pressing in with a circular motion. You should try and pull in your abdominal muscles at the same time. You can also find a massage therapist who is trained in abdominal massage. Once you know what it feels like, you can perform the same maneuvers on your own body. It is safe and natural, and it works.
4. One of the oldest natural laxative tonics is hot water and freshly squeezed lemon first thing in the morning. This can be enhanced with fresh basil or cinnamon bark for an additional medicinal kick.
The other eliminative organs crucial to good health are your lungs. It is important to breathe deeply throughout the day, especially exhaling. All the Asian health arts from Taoist Kung Fu to yogic Pranayama focus intently on breathing. Ancient Chinese tradition speaks of the “elders who had long life because they breathed deeper than we do.” This was written some twenty-three centuries ago, so we really have a lot of catching up to do. In Genesis 2:7, God “breathes into his [Adam’s] nostrils the breath of life.” Everything depends on breath. In many languages, breath and spirit mean the same thing or share the same word or character.
This is emblematic for the fact that we rely on the unseen for everything—body, mind, and soul. The timeless myth of our elimination is “Let go and let God” and “In this world and the next / There is impurity and impurity: / When a woman lacks dignity / When a man lacks generosity / But the greatest impurity is ignorance / Free yourself from it / Be pure.”4
The fourth subcategory of physical health to attend to diligently is relaxation. Our modern vernacular would express this as stress management. Knowing how to eliminate the unnecessary stressors and manage the ones that you cannot change is a necessary habit for good health in our frenetic, ever-kinetic Information Age.
The Cayce Source returned to emotions repeatedly as potential sources of disease. This knowledge is also an integral part of understanding health and healing in traditional Chinese medicine and Indian ayurveda. Our modern technophilic system is the first medical model that separates the functioning of the body from the mind. With the increasing study in a relatively new medical discipline that explores the relationships between the mind and the immune system, psychoneuroimmunology, the post-industrial medical behemoth is coming back to ancient traditions. Welcome back aboard. The rather regrettable effect of this happening within the confines of a chemocentric medical culture is that pills will likely be the resulting solution to the problem of the month. Let us hope this will change with the entrance into medical school of more holistically oriented healers and future medical pioneers. I am hopeful it will.
We know chronic stress is a killer, whether it is physical or mental. The Buddha has famously stated that your mind is the most important aspect of your personality to develop, since your world is filtered through the quality of your consciousness. Here are some words of wisdom from a being who figured this out:5
1. “Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded. But once mastered, no one can help you as much, not even your father or your mother.”
2. “Are you quiet? Quiet your body. Quiet your mind. You want nothing. Your words are still. You are still. By your own efforts waken yourself, watch yourself, and live joyfully.”
3. “To straighten the crooked you must first do a harder thing—straighten yourself.”
What can you do about managing stress? Ask yourself, “In a hundred years, will this really matter?” The Cayce Source enjoyed the phrase, “Watch oneself go by.” This is another way of getting perspective, of stepping outside of your little drama and seeing that you are not really the earth’s axis. The world goes on, with or without you. While you are here, do your best, not someone else’s worst; be kind and patient; surrender to Spirit. Learn to meditate—the best means to get to know the real you, the one behind all the “sturm and drang” of this world created by the mind.
The timeless myth of our relaxation is “Be still and know that I am God.”6
The legacy of the Cayce Source is manifold. For the purpose of understanding health and healing, it is valuable to keep in mind the basics:
• Good foods are needed for good health.
• Watch what you feed your mind even more than what you feed your stomach, but have a sensible diet.
• Pay attention to the big four: assimilation, circulation, elimination, and relaxation.
• You cannot genuinely heal the body without engaging the soul, so engage the soul daily.
• Be of good use in this world—serve your fellow humans. The difference you make, no matter how small, is great in the eyes of God.
• In giving, you get; in surrendering, you are supported; in loving, you are loved. To paraphrase the Dalai Lama, “You should help each other, but if you cannot help each other, do not hurt each other.”
The Fleshy Machine
IT IS QUITE ASTOUNDING TO DISCOVER THE LARGE NUMBER OF people who do not know their body—not to the degree of a medical specialist or health professional but just the basics—the ability to confidently answer the question “Where are the spleen, stomach, liver, and colon located?” If the plumbing, electricity, air conditioning, or heating unit in your house malfunctions, you should know where the equipment is in order to repair it, and I suspect that most people know more about their house than their own fleshy machine.
The most important factor in understanding how the body stays in balance (or does not) is the nervous system, specifically the autonomic nervous system and the cerebrospinal nervous system. These are not really separate systems, as no organ or tissue system functions completely independently; they are two sides of the same coin. When your body is in balance, in a state of ease, technically called homeostasis (or conversely, when out of balance and in a state of dis-ease), these two systems are functioning harmoniously.
The nervous system is the electrical medium between thoughts, ideas, and perceptions, all occurring in the mind, and the physical housing, principally the myofascial-skeletal system. The nervous system is the vehicle for translating thought into action and spirit into soma.1
The health of the nervous system is predicated upon good nutrition, which includes nutrients rich in quality fat-soluble and water-soluble vitamins. Your diet, coupled with how well you manage stressors (your mental diet), helps predict the state of your nervous system. Your nervous system is the center of all other biological functions, affecting all organs, as well as the endocrine (glandular), digestive, and myofascial-skeletal systems.
The nervous system is separated into two main divisions, the cerebrospinal system and the autonomic system, which play off each other in day-to-day activities and perceptions.
The cerebrospinal division includes the brain and spinal cord, and all the nerves that attach to your limbs. This division is responsible for voluntary functioning of the body. The principle job of the cerebrospinal division is moving the fleshy machine here and there with force, grace, urgency, style, rhythm—all the ways that one uniquely expresses himself or herself through movement and posture. This is how a person willfully moves through space.
The autonomic (another term for automatic) division includes nerve ganglia (networks) that lie parallel to the spine on both sides. This division is responsible for the mostly involuntary processes of the body, such as respiration, myocardial functioning and circulation, and peristalsis,2 to identify just a few. The standard medical orthodoxy considers this division to be wholly involuntary and not significantly influenced by the will, but by emotional reactions only.
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