The medical clairvoyant Edgar Cayce, along with the father of osteopathic medicine, A.T. Still, and respected Eastern teachers from B.K.S. Iyengar to Baba Hari Dass all concur on the importance of coordinating these two divisions of the nervous system: the voluntary and involuntary. It is the chronic discord between these two that facilitates many diseases.
What are some ways to remedy or, better yet, prevent this discord? A fantastic starting point would be to learn meditation and practice regularly. This is an outstanding method for gaining mind-body, cerebrospinal-autonomic harmony. Secondly, moderate your stress levels and cultivate methods to effectively handle stressors: allow more time for travel and commuting, do not take it all so seriously, and learn how to stop the “monkey mind” from perpetuating its crazy little agenda. Thirdly, get your eating habits on track. Eating good quality fats, produce raised in nutritious soil, and foods naturally high in C and B-complex vitamins, knowing your metabolic dominance (carbohydrate-, protein-, or mixed-type dominance), minimizing (or better yet, eliminating) refined sugars and starches, and drinking plenty of purified water will greatly enhance your health and well-being.
Even though the body is exceedingly resilient under most circumstances, there is a point of no return if you abuse yourself long enough. There are certain conditions of disease in which the catabolic or tearing-down functions of the cellular matrices are dominating the anabolic or building-up functions of the cells. If the underlying imbalance is not discovered early enough and treated properly, the above recommendations may be palliative at best.
The role stress plays in the perpetuation of disease cannot be overstated. A person who is always stressed out or a chronic nervous wreck will surely manifest an illness, as the autonomic and cerebrospinal systems cannot function well in disharmony. This is simply your body’s way of getting your attention to make a change. All the various symptoms of disease are gifts from the marvelous intelligence of your body alerting you that you are somehow out of balance. How you remedy the situation is up to your free will and common sense.
Every credible educator and researcher acknowledges this next point, even if there is not accord on any other detail: regular exercise is medicine for your body and mind and is excellent for naturally reducing stress levels while increasing your body’s stress adaptation ability.
What is good exercise? Here we may have diverging opinions, but undoubtedly one can rely on this definition: Moving the body with awareness and enthusiasm. A daily brisk walk does many good things for the body. Do not push it too far with exercise—just enough so that there is perspiration and a slight feeling of exhilaration. We are made to move the body with awareness and enthusiasm, whatever our age.
The sedentary life is a real killer. We are tied to our desks and computers five out of seven days during the sun’s best hours—forty, fifty, sixty hours a week. Certainly our evolutionary trajectory is thrown off a bit by this, being that we have worked much harder to accumulate our food supplies in the not-too-distant past. Add to this sedentary dilemma poor nutrition, which is becoming more common all the time with people’s frantic, overscheduled lives, with fewer people growing their own produce or raising their own animals for food. It seems we are verging on an epidemic of lethargy and dietary malaise, all the while over-relying on technology to show us the way.
Our post-industrial culture has created the habit of eating convenient empty-calorie foods on the run, with no thought of the essence or quality of the nutrient, with substitutes galore: fat substitutes, sugar substitutes, taste substitutes. After all, who really wants to eat cardboard sprinkled with paprika, conveniently available in a nearby vending machine, if it is not going to be chemically enhanced? If we add to this equation more refined sugar consumption per person than we have seen in the last two-hundred-plus years of sugar’s ignoble appearance in commercial food and drink supplies, we are set up for a Casey Jones nervous system train wreck.
Take care of the body’s nervous system: everything depends on its healthy functioning—organs, muscles, glands, hormones, and especially your spirit.
The next intriguing system to explore briefly is the myofascial-skeletal system. The body’s myofascia is the combination of the intricate connective tissue network (fascia) and muscle tissue (the Latin root for which is myo or mya). Covering every bone, organ, vein, artery, vessel, tendon, ligament, and muscle is the pervasive and sturdy tissue called fascia.4 Understanding fascia is crucial to understanding the integrity and long-term health of your entire biologic network.
Since fascia envelops all structures of the body, it interacts significantly with all structures. We cannot get a reliable sense of this by examining fascia on cadavers but only in vivo. By the time the body expires, fascia has already started dehydrating, and the crucial life energy that flows through fascia quickly dissipates.
Fascia is a dynamic, living system that can only be truly appreciated in living bodies. You may think of it as the Saran Wrap of all the tissues of the body—it is covering everything from your skull to your palms to your soles, deep to superficial. It is made up of three substances that rely considerably on nutritional sources for repletion and regeneration: collagen, hyaline, and ground substance. Collagen is a protein that has many uses in the body. It is widely known as an injectable substance used by models and entertainers to puff up their lip size (as in “I just had my lips done, dahling.”). Yes, they are getting injections of animal collagen. Where else has a person encountered collagen? In commercial gelatin (about 40–45% collagen) and upon the ends of chicken bones; that opaque gristle-like material is made of collagen.
Currently there are about twenty-one types of collagen used in medical or cosmetic applications, in everything from catheters, corneal implants, and artificial skin (for skin grafts) to the cosmetic kind with which Paulina Pouter gets her lip tissue distended. And yes, most of it comes from animal tissue. I wonder if the vegan supermodel knows that? The next time you see the model with the ballooned high-fashion lips, just think—her lip stuffing could have been the posterior loin of a common Hereford. Ah, the price to pay for beauty.
Not only do the soft tissues of the body have a fascial wrapping (muscles, tendons, and the like), but all the bones of the body do, too. The skeletal system acts as the dynamic support, the moving framework, for the myofascial system. It is also an important production center for red and white blood cells in the bone’s marrow and the most abundant storage system for calcium and phosphorus. Almost two-thirds of the weight of a bone is calcium phosphate, the two most plentiful minerals in the body. The majority of remaining third is collagen, and collagen components, the building block of connective tissue (fascia).
All life implies movement. This system of your muscles, connective tissues, and skeleton, which is referred to here as the myofascial-skeletal system, is the prime source of movement, of life. One of the essential functions of nutrition is to provide energy for the neuromuscular system (nervous + muscular tissues) and quality tissue production for the myofascial-skeletal system. If your nutritional habits are sub-par, your body will eventually reveal this in the myofascial-skeletal system in many possible manifestations of disease: osteoporosis, osteomalacia, fibromyalgia, persistent muscle cramps, postural deviations, gout, osteoarthritis. And the list has just begun.
One of the misleading aspects of studying the body as separate organ systems, organs, and tissues is that this approach can easily convey the illusion of biologic independence. The truth is that the body operates as a whole unit, and it always has. Each organ system—nervous, muscular, skeletal, fascial—is a separate “finger” connecting to one “hand.” It is important to emphasize this as one studies individual functioning and specific relationships of systems. A greater understanding of the various organ systems of the body inevitably leads the individual back to the concept of oneness: everything depends upon everything else.
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