The Eastern Science of Self-Healing

What I love about the Eastern sciences of self-healing is their comprehensive approach to managing and understanding the human experience. For example, in our accepted paradigm here in the West, “health” is considered the absence of illness. I cannot even begin to express how myopically offensive that is from an Eastern point-of-view. In reality, illness starts out very slowly, gradually moving out of balance with subtle energies that don’t even register on most people’s awareness radar.

From an Indian, Tibetan ayurvedic and Chinese medicine paradigm, everything is energy in motion or in stasis. These sciences specialize in examining how the subtle energies that organize your body’s constitution are balanced:

• What are the qualities of these energies?
• What is the configuration of these energies?
• What and where are the energies in excesses and what and where are the energies in deficiencies?
• What and where are these energies too dry, too hot, too wet or too cold?

Already you can see the conversation is straying from the familiar allopathic confines of a numbers game: weight, blood pressure, cholesterol count, and so on.

Very simply stated, the Eastern self-healing sciences see illness as having its origins in an energetic make-up that could pre-exist for years before any actual physical symptoms arise. The subtle energies that make up any living being—the planet itself, a vegetable, an animal, or a human—are essential to our health and well-being. In ayurveda these energies are: air and space (vata), fire and water (pitta), and earth and water (kapha); in Chinese medicine they are earth, water, metal, wood and fire.

Every living thing has an energetic balance that is appropriate for its constitutional make-up. This means that some people have more fire energy than others; some have more earth energy than others; still others have more water or air than others. Each living thing has a mixture of these energies that make up life in a unique formula that balances and supports that life form. In the same way that no two people have the same fingerprints, every living thing is organized with an energy blueprint specific to that entity’s exclusive individual existence.

The beginning of illness, again from an Eastern perspective, is where one or more of these energies that make up your life experience begins to accumulate in excess. A fire predominate person would have the following proclivities: you eat lots of hot spicy foods; you love beer and/or wine; you have a tendency to express yourself on the critical, impatient, irritated end of the spectrum; you like to wear a lot of red, orange and yellow colors. In order for you to be happy, things need to be done in a certain way, in a clearly defined time frame. Life better be organized in a specific manner; you are perfection oriented and have a keenly honed eye for detail that must be met or there will be no rest. All these things provoke the fire element in your unique energy constitution. If this fire energy is continually stoked, provoked and generally inflamed, the subtle energy of fire will grow and grow. Fire energy is expansive in nature, so it will steadily accumulate until there is an excess that cannot be maintained within the boundaries of balance and good health. There may be more than just fire involved too. For example, it may be fire and excess air fanning the flames until they reach a level of aggravation to the body’s system and delicate point of energy balance. Bear in mind all this may be happening while the individual is still relatively symptom free. This is the time when many people go to their doctor feeling/knowing something is not right, but the doctor cannot find anything amiss or diagnose a pathology. “Sorry, your tests came back negative. There is nothing wrong with you.”

Once the out-of-balance energy reaches a level of profound and excessive accumulation, an aggravation flashpoint will occur. It is at this late stage that measurable symptoms begin to arise. Since the imbalance has become a full-blown malady, allopathic test results will come back positive and Western medicine can make a diagnosis. Better late than never, but by now it has reached critical mass and become a health crisis. However, accumulation and aggravation are only part of the overall picture.

Once an accumulated energy (or energies) moves into aggravation mode, the excess aggravated energy will then go into the body’s circulatory system and cycle around and around the body’s overall structure. This empowered accumulated/aggravated energy circulates until it finds a “defective” space within the body. The accumulated/aggravated energy will then deposit itself in the defective space. This is what is known in the Eastern systems of self-healing as the manifestation of a full-scale disease. So then, what exactly is a defective space, and if you did not have any defective spaces would there be any fertile ground for disease to take root?

A defective space starts in the mind; it is created by what you give your attention to and the emotions that arise as a result of that awareness. Eastern systems of self-healing define you as a spiritual being having a human experience. They see you as inseparable from a force of consciousness that existed before you came here and took a body, and will continue to exist as consciousness after the body falls away. They do not take your spiritual identity out of the health equation. Western medicine, on the other hand, at no time even acknowledges you as anything other than a mechanism. It fails to address the mind-body-spirit connection.

Socrates said it best: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The purpose of all created life is to experience the truth of who we are, and to honestly examine what we are and why we are here. When you define yourself as inferior, less than, not good enough, unlovable, worthless, disposable or powerless, you create a defective space in the mind/body energy configuration. Self-loathing, self-judgment and criticism erode inner integrity and personal balance leaving a defective space in their wake.

The reason for this is because those thoughts are in direct opposition to who and what you are. They create a relationship of dis-ease between you and the truth that promotes balance and sets you free. Nature does not like a vacuum, so when you give your power away and create a defective space, the pain, trauma and toxic energy that pushed you out, moves in.

Disease is a measurable, tangible state of being dis-at-ease with your conscious knowledge of yourself, and the symptoms of that dis-at-ease state will ultimately manifest physically. Obviously everyone has entertained “defective” thinking to varying degrees. The objective of life in this planet Earth classroom is to grow beyond the habit of giving attention to “defective” consciousness and return to a place of self-acceptance, ease and wholeness. When you love, accept and forgive yourself, you heal these “defective” spaces in the mind and body. There is nothing stronger than a fully realized being.

Even if you disagree with the fundamental concepts and principles shared here, what do you have to lose by accepting yourself? How is the quality of your life compromised in the least by extending love, compassion and forgiveness to yourself?

When you are comfortable, relaxed and confident within your own skin, you automatically feel better. At the end of the day you may not have full control over the amount of radiation, GMOs or environmental toxins you are habitually exposed to, but you do have the last word on how you perceive and define yourself, how you feel about yourself, and what you tell yourself. Here is where you have real control. In limiting the amount of defective space in your own mind, you not only feel better about yourself and your life, you strengthen your body’s defenses against disease.

Vaishali, author of You Are What You Love and Wisdom Rising, learned to transform her life after she was given two terminal disease diagnoses.

Photo courtesy Paul Hart