Blueprint for Holistic Healing. C. Norman Shealy
people eight hours—is critical. In all of history, societal stress has been present—from natural stressors such as weather to political ones. Stress is inevitable. Thus, finding ways to cope with external stress becomes equally critical. Stress can be:
physical—heat, cold, pressure, physical injuries, etc.
mental/emotional—worry, anger, anxiety, guilt, depression
chemical—toxins such as arsenic, cadmium, aluminum, lead as well as some 550,000 chemical pollutants released into the air, water, and earth every year and now 80% of all food sold in the U.S. is junk!
nuclear—radioactivity has increased many thousands of times in the past seventy years
Physical stress is perhaps most easily understood, with heat and cold being obvious. And perhaps the most common serious physical stress injuries are created by a modern luxury—automobiles. Not that earlier travel by horse or on foot was without potential physical stress.
Mental emotional stress requires both proactive and corrective approaches. For instance, it has been shown that twenty minutes of deep relaxation twice a day reduces insulin requirement and adrenalin production by 50% for the entire twenty-four hours. (See The Relaxation Response by Herb Benson.) In 1929, Edmund Jacobson demonstrated that thirty minutes of progressive relaxation not only reduced stress but also actually improved 89% of most stress illnesses! And beginning in 1912, Johanne Schultz demonstrated that autogenic training, twenty minutes daily, reduced stress illnesses by 80%. By 1969, the first of six volumes on autogenic training was published, with 2600 scientific references. Although I have examined the wide variety of mental approaches to stress reduction for over forty years (See my 90 Days to Self-Health), autogenic training is still my favorite because of the tremendous research showing that athletes, students, business people, and those with most stress illnesses are managed well by this simple tool—coordinating the words with your slow breathing and creating visual images to reinforce the statements. Essentially, you get into a relaxed physical body position and repeat for about three minutes each of the following statements:
My arms and legs are heavy and warm.
My heartbeat is calm and regular.
My breathing is free and easy.
My abdomen is warm.
My forehead is cool.
My mind is quiet and still.
Get the sensory feedback, awareness from each part of your body—face, jaws, neck, shoulders, arms and hands, chest, breasts, abdomen, back, buttocks, pelvis, legs before and after twenty minutes of practice. Basically you can feel good and OK with no tense pain or discomfort and no feeling from each and every body part. The goal is the relaxed and OK feedback from each part! If after twenty minutes there are still areas that are not relaxed and OK, you can:
Talk to the body part—e.g., My back is relaxed and comfortable.
Love it—appreciate that part of your body.
Tense and release the muscles in that part of your body.
Breathe in and collect tension or discomfort from that part of your body and breathe out, releasing the undesired sensation.
Breathe through the skin over that part of your body
Circulate the electrical energy from your heels up the back to the top of your head as you breathe in, and circulate the electrical energy down the front of your body as you breathe out.
Expand the electromagnetic field around your feet and gradually up around every part of your body, toes to head, seeing and feeling yourself in a capsule of living EMF (electromotive force) energy. Start with one sinch and expand gradually to 12 inches.
Three months of daily practice will retrain your brain and autonomic, automatic, nervous system. Then you may be able to continue with only five minutes daily.
Other tools for total body relaxation and balancing are:
Good music
Flashing lights at 1 to 7 cycles per second, such as the Shealy RelaxMate II
Vibratory music, through speakers placed in the mattress
Using chakra glasses—there are the 7 major colors—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, purple. Different strokes for different people—some people achieve much greater peace, using one they particularly like
Hot tubs, saunas, or a soak in a regular bathtub, perhaps adding a few drops of lavender oil to the water
Dancing or jogging
Just walking or lying in nature
Sitting in a copper pyramid or in front of a copper panel on the wall
Developing and using a mantra: I am relaxed and comfortable, etc.
Lying on a true magnetic mattress—MagneticoSleep is excellent.
Managing Chemical Stress
If you remember your total life stress, you can review the obvious chemical stressors in your life. Some come from common food/drink intakes like sugar, coffee, and alcohol. Others from your habits or those around you, such as smoking. Others come from society—the addition of chlorine and fluoride to drinking water.
According to many sources, the average American eats one hundred-fifty pounds of sugar a year. That is three pounds or forty-eight ounces a week or almost seven ounces daily. That is forty-two teaspoons of sugar daily! That is over eight stress points. About half is high fructose sugar added to many packaged foods. Each teaspoon deprives you of all the B vitamins, chromium, magnesium, and vanadium and helps burn out your adrenal glands. And of course this is added sugar, not that naturally found in fruits, etc.! No added sugar is needed or good. If you are consuming more than five teaspoons daily, your long-term health is at risk!!
Perhaps caffeine is the next most common chemical stressor. For most adults one cup of coffee daily is probably quite safe, but even without added sugar, one cup of coffee adds one stress point. The chemical stress of fluoride and chlorine is, like all stress, additive. To make it simple, no chlorine or fluoride is good or healthy, and if you just consume them daily, you have added three hundred-sixty-five stress points a year, or thirty a month! Remember that any stress above twenty points puts you at significant risk!
Table sugar is the first artificial food! The first food from which all vitamins, fiber, and minerals were removed! White rice was the second artificial food, removing the essential fiber and vitamins, leading especially to B 1 deficiency or beriberi. About 20% of all calories intake in the world comes from white rice, essentially a great stress food!
Wheat or the “staff of life” has been more prostituted than any other food. First and foremost, white flour is deficient in fiber, vitamins, and minerals. Further it is bleached with bromine, a neurologic toxin, and, most critically of all, it is now over 90% genetically modified, including the addition of Roundup®—a serious poison to the actual seed itself! I strongly advise eating no wheat.
With the chemicalization of most food also comes numerous artificial foods such as MSG, monosodium glutamate, a known brain toxin and artificially hydrogenated or trans-fats, which we cannot metabolize. Thus all margarines are far more toxically stressful than any natural fat. Then come the truly artificial, toxic, unreal junk sold as food: aspartame, saccharine, Splenda®, Olestra®, and artificial flavors, colors, tomato sauces, chocolate, etc. All of these add chemical poisons and stress to your body!
In addition, many modern fabrics, carpets, paints, insulation materials, detergents, etc. are chemical toxins, providing daily stress and even changing the endocrine glands—especially many estrogenic