By Penelope A. Domogo, MD
Last week we discussed our own body’s incredible healing power. It’s incredible – many people don’t believe it is there so they would rather trust the medicine and injection to heal them.
Praise God, He has given this super natural healing power to all people – whether you believe it or not. What more, He gave this power to animals and plants, too, and every living creature, including worms and bacteria and viruses.
For us to fully harness this power and for us to sustain this power, we, humans, have a responsibility. We have to choose wisely. According to the internationally-known doctor of Oriental Medicine, Roger Jahnke, there are three interconnected areas that affect our self-healing abilities. All these three areas are within our power to choose. That is our privilege as humans, having been given free will by our Maker.
First area is our choice of attitudes and mental influences. If we choose to believe that the power to heal is built-in inside us since birth, then the healer within us is automatically strengthened. This should be self-explanatory, right? But many times, we lack faith in our Creator. Let us compare our self-healing machine to that of a car engine. When you bought that car, am sure you fully trusted in the manufacturer that the engine and all the parts of the car will work harmoniously to bring you from place to place. Otherwise, if you didn’t have faith, then you would not have bought that car, right? Do we also have faith in our manufacturer (that is God) that He designed our body to be good and wonderful? If we put as much faith in our more amazingly-designed body as we give to that car, then our self-healing power would spring to life. Faith, however, cannot be bought in the store. We need a lot of prayers for God to increase our faith that He is our loving Maker.
The second area of choice is lifestyle – diet, activity, rest, relationships, finances, work, spiritual practice, material possessions, avoidance of alcohol and cigarettes, etc. Now, this area would
take a lot of discipline? and is affected by the first area – our attitude and mental influences.
Let us analyze further how lifestyle affects our healing power. For nature to do its healing job, there are two major conditions- 1) the cause of the disease has to be removed. Many times our problem lies in identifying the cause of the disease because we tend to blame external forces.
For example, we blame the change of weather for our colds when in fact we may have been eating so much white bread and drinking milk or 3 in 1 coffee or tea. Or we may blame our spouse and children for our high blood pressure when actually it is our uncontrolled meat-eating that is the cause.
Let us again compare this to the car engine. When your engine does not start and you blame it on the cold weather. You did not check that the fuel you placed is diesel, not gasoline. Your car runs on gasoline.
Many times also the cause of disease lies deeper in the subconscious – our attitudes and values.
If we look at food for comfort, then everytime we are stressed or down, we’ll eat. It is okay if your comfort food is pechay or carrots but when it is cake or Coke, then you have a problem.
You have an attitude problem and this is in the first area. You need some attitude make-over.
To overcome attitude problems, you need humility. Again, you don’t buy humility from the store, you have to earnestly ask our Creator for this.
2) The other major condition for nature to do its job is that you have to provide the right building and repair material. Any worker cannot do a good job with poor materials. Ask the carpenter. Even the best carpenter cannot make a sturdy bench if what you give him is plywood. Our body’s building materials are the things you put inside your body- food, drink and air. Of course, the best building blocks are those provided by our Maker because those are exactly what he designed for us – fresh air, natural water and natural food. We have been discussing this many many times already. If you have been putting in sugary, fatty, chemical-laden food in your mouth these past months and years, then it is time to clean them out.
“The third area of choice that affect our self-healing is personal self-care – the practice of self-healing and health enhancement methods- for improving, sustaining and ensuring the function of the healer within”. We’ll have more of these next issue.
Says Roger Jahnke, “The naturally occurring self-healing ability of your own body, mind, and spirit is the world’s greatest healer…. This does not suggest that our physicians will no longer be needed.” It means that “when it is necessary to have expert medical care, we can work with our physicians and therapists as partners by purposely stimulating our own precious gift of self-healing.” **
“There are two ways to live your life. One is as though there are no miracles. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” Albert Einstein
