Cleaning the Body and the Ego’s Dream of Perfect Health
BODY PROBLEMS
Feeling horrible in your body is an experience no one wants to deal with, especially for an extended period of time. Discomfort, pain, illness, deterioration, and all the other ailments the body presents can be a serious impediment to how you live your life. It can get so bad it quite literally takes over your life. If you are someone who was cruising along feeling amazing and suddenly your body starts falling apart, this can be utterly devastating. You might ask questions like:
Why is this happening to me?
Why does no one else in my family have this same illness?
Why does everyone else around me seem to be fine yet I’m not?
What did I do to deserve this?
How come no matter what I do I am not getting better?
Why can no one find what is wrong with me?
I’ve done everything right and I’m still sick, why?
I’m a healthy person why is my body ill?
These questions and more may flood your mind. You are scrambling around, bombarded with one anxiety ridden thought after the next, you are attending appointments with numerous doctors, all whom give you a different opinion. You are now more lost than ever and have no idea how to get any better. You begin to think that this is now your life and there is no way to heal or every feel any better. Sometimes the panic in your mind is worse than the actual degeneration in your body. Not only do you feel miserable in your physical body, but your mind is equally disturbed. Now you’re in therapy for anxiety, depression, panic attacks, you name it, and they will label you unstable.
Unfortunately, this happens to many people at some point in our lifetime. For most it occurs later in life, while others seem to experience unwanted symptoms of the body immediately. No matter what you think of the body, you can’t deny that it gets older, it becomes weaker, it begins to deteriorate, until eventually it no longer serves us. This is a fact of life here. Because most of us identify very strongly with our bodies, we believe it is who we are. The experience of a failing body brings up incredible inner turmoil.
A SIMPLE CAUSE AND WAYS TO CLEAN THE BODY
From a simple observational view, the body is merely utilizing the food, drink, and air you input into the system which it needs in order to survive. Whatever you input, is hopefully absorbed and utilized by the cells of the body to give you energy. When you overindulge by eating too much, drinking too much, or breathing toxic air the body seems to suffer. There are certain laws of cause and effect in this world and when you test those limits, the body starts screaming at you, doesn’t it? You know what it’s like when you overeat, how bad you feel, or you’re celebrating and partying too much, you wake up feeling like your head is in a vice and the room is spinning out of control. If you come to a place in your life and your body is presenting you with various symptoms, one of the simplest things to do is start cleaning out the WASTE!
Depending on how old you are, think about how much food you have consumed in your life, all the various drinks, medications, supplements, and over the counter formulas. Human beings ingest a lot of crap! Our food sources today are mostly concocted in a lab with numerous additives and unknown chemicals that effect the body. Even the whole foods are genetically modified, dowsed with pesticides, and seriously lacking in flavor because most are picked way before they are actually ripe and edible. Thinking about all of the potential harm going into the body, now think about how much of it is still inside the body, down to a cellular level. If the body has difficulty eliminated foreign material, or inorganic material, then the obstructions can be causing much of the symptoms that are so present today.
If the body is merely obstructed with waste, if it is constipated not only in the colon but constipated throughout, then removing these obstructions might help alleviate some of your body’s persistent symptoms. Here is a list of things to consider, to look into and research for yourself, that might help you on your physical healing journey.
Adopting an alkaline diet can help facilitate elimination and healing. Most foods we consume today are highly acidic and cause many illnesses inside the body. If you think of acid as burning, imagine what that is doing inside of you. Most fruits and vegetables are alkaline and can begin to shift the pH of your body so it is conducive for elimination and ultimately healing.
Eating less food but more nutritive, high quality, and hydrating foods. The more water content in the food, the more usable it is for the body and the easier it is to digest. Think about eating processed and salty foods that are dry, do you crave water afterwards? Probably, YES! Eating your water will make a world of difference.
Consider a series of colon hydrotherapy/colonic treatments, or enemas while you are committing to eating a lighter more alkaline fare. You eat the foods that are designed to heal, but if you find that you are not eliminating as much as you should, seeking a colonics practitioner can help you eliminate waste that is compacted within the colon walls.
Intermittent fasting is known to improve people’s overall health and reduce inflammation, which is a common problem amongst the population. Anytime you rest the body from eating, it can focus on healing and clearing out obstruction instead of digesting food that most people consume consistently throughout the day. When you research this, you will discover some who highly recommend it and others who say it’s unhealthy. The only way to know is to try it for yourself. If you do not have any chronic disease that may be difficult on this type of lifestyle, experience is the only way to know if it benefits your body.
Longer fasts, juice fasts, or fruit diets for a temporary period of time can also aid in cleaning out the body. Green and vegetable juices with some apples, lemons, and ginger can also help clean out the digestive tract.
A natural herbal colon supplement while you are cleansing may be very beneficial in removing old toxic matter and debris. Any product with psyllium or flax seeds should be taken with plenty of water because it can have the opposite effect.
Growing your own produce is the safest, healthiest, and tastiest way to eat fresh produce. If you have a green thumb and enjoy gardening, watching your seeds sprout, the plant maturing, and reaping the reward of eating a mouth watering tomato is well worth it. If you think gardening takes too much time, effort, for little return, look into the work of the famous Japanese philosopher and farmer Masanobu Fukuoka. He had revolutionary ideas about not tilling the soil. He observed nature and watched how the plants matured. Through this he developed a method of “natural farming.” He believed nature provided and farming could be quite simple. He spent his life teaching this principle to many around the world.
However you choose to cleanse your body, know that there are many ways to go about this. Finding what works for you will require you to listen to your own body and seek advice from medical or alternative practitioners that specialize in this field.
THE OBSESSION OVER PERFECT HEALTH
In the various health movements today such as clean eating communities, organic eating, plant-based diets, Ayurveda, whole food movements, fruitarians, raw foodists, and biohackers, they all have one thing in common, a serious obsession with the body and striving for perfect health. Do you recognize this? Are you actively involved in a health community and feel that sometimes it can be a little over the top? Is there such a thing as a perfect body? What would that be exactly? It’s one thing to want to feel well, to have lots of energy, to feel flexible in your joints so that you can navigate through the world doing what you need and desire to do. However, when does the focus for perfect health, anti-aging, and the neurosis that can develop become nothing more than a mind gone mad? Do people really think that there is a way to avoid the natural deterioration of the body?
This obsession for perfection is impossible. Have you ever seen a very old person defy the aging process? Bodies get old. Everyone dies of something. That is just the nature of the dual world. You can certainly work to eat as best as you can, exercise your body so it remains mobile, flexible, and strong, but to think it will never present you with pain, symptoms, or degeneration of any kind is farfetched. Injuries happen every day, and then you must deal with the healing process involved in that. People who work to hack the body, to trick it into thinking it’s younger, do you think they are going to live that much longer than everybody else? There are always those people who eat whatever they want, smoke and drink alcohol every day, and live a very long life. Is the health of the body really about what we do to it, or is it more about what we think of it?
What about people who are constantly detoxing? They are cleaning the body non-stop. At a certain point haven’t you cleaned it enough? What else is there to clean out? Some people take their health perfection to extremes, even to the point of separating themselves from others who do not eat the same. Some claim the more spiritual you are the better you eat. Is that true? Is spirituality about the body?
Judging others as wrong, inferior, stupid, and mentally ill for eating a different way only reinforces separation. Those holding onto judgment claim that everyone else is on a lower level of thinking, that they are lower on the totem pole of spiritual advancement, you’ve heard it, you know what some do in the name of health food. Clinging to the idea of perfect health, and the belief that there is only one way to do it, disconnects you from your fellow man and demonstrates that the real problem has nothing to do with the body, it has everything to do with the mind.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES PERSPECTIVE ON THE BODY
From a much deeper perspective, what is the obsession with the body all about? Where does it come from? A Course in Miracles has a unique and most interesting perspective that is worth mentioning. In the Course, the ego thought system made up this dual world and therefore created the body. The ego will project all of its unconscious guilt, which is mostly about the belief in separation from God, onto the world and onto the body itself. Although we see our bodies presenting us ailments and disease, our mind looks for the causes from the physical world. A Course in Miracles is telling us that the body’s problems are simply due to unprojected guilt we manifest into the body. Having numerous problems in the body distracts us from the real problem, which the Course explains is only in the mind. There is no problem outside of our sick mind. This ill mind is simply the choice of believing in the ego thought system, instead of the correction for this error, which is the Holy Spirit’s thought system.
The Course is speaking to us on the level of the mind, and never on the level of bodies. This can be a huge source of confusion and misunderstanding when the text seems to point that we can have perfect health. A healed mind in the Course is referring to our decision to choose the Holy Spirit, the correct teacher to guide us back to the real world, or our real home in God. The aim of A Course in Miracles is not for us to live a happier dream, a perfect dream, or have a perfectly healthy body, the main teaching is getting us to go back into our decision-making mind and choose again. It is to recognize that no matter what happens to the body, no matter how sick or ill it becomes, that our true source of peace is in the spiritual side of the mind.
Building a connection with this side of our true self creates a power that can never waiver. The peace of God becomes so strong within you, that no physical symptom or pain in the body, or disease can touch this peace. This is the direction the Course is leading us. It is not leading us or suggesting that if we choose the Holy Spirit, we can have perfect physical health. This would be considered level confusion. Everything in the Course is speaking on the level of minds, not the body.
THINKING DIFFERENTLY ABOUT YOUR ILLNESS
If you find yourself in a place of temporary or terminal illness, A Course in Miracles would encourage you to look in the mind for the eternal connection to peace that is available. Nothing of the body can touch this memory each individual has. It will also help you understand the ego’s projection of inherent guilt onto the body. The answer to this in the Course is the Atonement, or the recognition that the separation never happened. There is no separation in reality. This is a very deep metaphysical concept to wrap your head around, and one that takes a long time to practice and implement into your life.
This does not mean you don’t tend to your body, it does not mean that you don’t take the necessary steps to heal your body in the physical world. You don’t need to adopt a mentality that this is an illusion, so you don’t need medical attention. A Course in Miracles never asks anyone to live a different way in the world. There’s no recipe for a perfect life or a perfect body here. You simply go along as you normally would, except you are doing it with a wiser teacher, that’s all. You can see the mind’s obsession with the body because that’s the ego’s defense against the truth of God.
One last thing to consider, choosing the Holy Spirit as your teacher does not mean you will be granted perfect health, or you will never be sick. That would be the ego’s idea of making the dream real, which the Holy Spirit does not see. The sickness of the body has nothing to do with the ultimate healing that occurs in your mind. Upon true healing, and the recognition that you are not a body, only then will you join with God, and then there is no need for a body, according to the teachings of the Course. Notice if you obsess over your body, over its ailments, if it’s unwell, or to the contrary if you are obsessing about achieving body perfections, this is simply the ego distracting you from discovering the symbol of truth within you.