How's Your Daily Balance?

Good health requires good balance.

If you are sick, you've lost some balance, temporarily I hope.

Hang with me here.

Picture yourself swinging between Yang and Yin over a precipice. When you stop swinging you see a ledge. You stand on it, safely.

Now, if you're unfamiliar with Eastern medicine, consider the Aristotelian Mean. Aristotle advocated following a path between two extremes. If you swing too far in either direction you are apt to get sick.

Since I have skimmed the surface of Eastern Philosophy, Aristotle, Stephen Hawkings' string theory, brain research, religions, meditation, and Western medical science, I am no authority, but I can show you how they relate to good health.

First, Yang refers to the masculine, left-brained energy in everyone and Yin the right-brained, feminine energy. When these two are out of balance, things go awry. Acupuncture is the medical practice of releasing blocked flow of energy to regain balance and good health. Obviously, it works.

String theory, I think, says everything in the universe consists of strings of energy. Nothing is solid. (Phew, wish I could understand physics!)

Brain research shows three major parts to the human brain: reptile, limbic, and neo-cortex. We use our reptile brain whenever we feel our survival threatened. (Explains continual warfare.)

The limbic system, our midbrain or early mammalian brain, stores our emotions. It does our caring, nurturing.

We use the neo-cortex for thinking, forward planning and problem solving. All three brains are interdependent and function together. The neo-cortex houses the right and left brain. When either of these is too far out of balance we suffer.

You may know (slightly) an accountant or computer programmer who is so left-brained he is practically a hermit. Or you may know an artist who is so right-brained he forgets to pay his rent and is often in some kind of trouble.

I think physicists use all three brains in balance. I may be wrong.

Experiments with meditation have shown some amazing results. Dr. Richard Davidson of the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior studied the brain waves of some Tibetan Buddhist monks, including the Dalai Lama. He found unusually high amounts of gamma brain waves—brain waves that increase compassion for others.

Compassion comes out of good balance and good health.

Bill Harris,

Director of Centerpointe, created a sound track designed to create the same brain waves experienced by the Buddhist monks. I have benefited from Centerpointe's sound tracks. They put my left and right brains in balance and kicked out my shy bone by broadcasting my words subliminally into each ear at different rates of speed.

Learning Strategies, inc., has wonderful paraliminals, hypnotic discs for learning. I have most of them and listen to them daily. Also, they have an amazing program called Spring Forest QiGong that teaches you how to heal yourself whenever you get sick. Guess how—balancing energy! I recommend the book, "Born a Healer" by Chunyi Lin. Scroll down to the bottom of Learning Strategies and click on Spring Forest Qigong.

Finally, there's nothing like Western medicine when you tear a meniscus or get a concussion, among other off-balance things.

But, in our Western World fear hovers below the surface. The more money and power we have, the more fear. We are not openly afraid. It shows up as anxiety in our dreams and in our bodies.

Anxiety is catching, like bird flu. I spent a lifetime hunching up my shoulders, anxiously expecting to be yelled at for something I did wrong. My shoulders finally gave out. I had them replaced. Now they set off security alarms. Sweet revenge?

Since you have read this far, you will be fascinated by "Does Mind-Over-Body Healing Work?" It's an article by an African professor of Western Medicines that begins, "Life is energy, and all living beings are energy beings."

Click on the title. You may be surprised by his thesis.

Here's to your good balance and good health.

Evy
Evelyn Cole, MA, MFA
The Whole-mind Writer

P.S. Here's a relevant poem, another way of saying all this:

Clinging Strings by Evelyn Cole

A poet awoke
with a star in his bed,
a real star

I woke up at four
with strings
clinging

Stephen Hawking strings
teasing, tickling,
telling me
to trust,

whispering,
“Careful, don’t fall.
You’re tilting too far
toward Yang.”

It’s time to pull in,
to re-live the day
I lost all fear of mice
by reading Wordsworth
in bed
to the nearby sounds of
swish and scurry

and feed my Yin again with
Hopkins, Coleridge and Keats.

It’s time to shut the laptop
forget the Web
feel those strings
that tickle, cling
and create cathedrals

Yes, it’s time to tilt a tad
toward Yin
for an Aristotelian Mean and Gamma love waves