Holistic Healing Principles

Hormesis refers to adaptive bodily changes to moderate environmental or self-imposed challenges through which the body/mind improves its functionality and/or tolerance to more severe challenges. Most of the gains that holistic healing bestows come from the hormetic (the adjective form of hormesis) effects of various challenges, like cold showers, running, weights, etc.

Hormesis has many very valuable and pleasant surprises. For example, cold showers bestows emotional resilience. Who would have thought that, in theory? Which thinker sat down and looked at the physiology of cold shocking and said, "Hey, I'll bet cold showers bestows emotional resilience." Someone discovered it. I didn't even know what emotional resilience meant, but it did sound good and I thought that I'd try it. It changed my life. Even my dog likes me more; she cuddles whereas before cold showers she didn't. Now she is an addict to sleeping with me.

These kinds of beneficial 'side effects' are an important aspect in so much that is good about holistic healing. The human person is a whole unit and cannot be divided into parts.

The biggest obstacle with hormesis is that people are addicted to comfort and get all worried when they have a little pain. They think that the minute exercise causes a little pain, then it must be bad and they should stop. It is important to learn to tell the difference between important or serious pain and the pain that is an adaptive response to a good old-fashioned challenge. Exercise pain is weakness leaving the body, usually. Learn to tell the difference. I have learned to like exercise "pain", because I know that it is improving my health.

Dave Asprey: Hormesis: How to Use Stress to Boost Your Resilience
MyBiohack is a site by Jacob, a regular dude, courageous, who was sick all of the time and who the doctors could not heal, so he decided to heal himself. My kind of guy.
Getting Stronger, My favorite source on hormesis.

Holism versus reductionism vs logical positivism. Our current modern thinking style is called reductionism, which is the dominant thinking style of modern science. It is extremely good at building our technologically based society, building bridges and stripped toothpaste and atomic bombs. But it is a disaster for it to dominate our thinking with regard to human beings.

There is pathological extension of reductionism called 'logical positivism'. This basically says that nothing is true until it has been proven. Not much in the way of discovery can happen with this attitude. You will encounter this kind of person. Lots of things are real that can't be proven, like love, loyalty, character, honesty, etc. Don't let yourself be cowed by these people.

Reductionist thinking: "One cause, one effect. Test everything by limiting the factors of causation to one so we can ferret out the active ingredient. Treat everything, including people, as objects." This bestows great accuracy, but it also is very slow and fails to consider the big picture. This is one of the main reasons why medical practice is so far behind the public. Doctors have to worry about litigation and their fellow echo chamber denizens ("The Standard of Care" crowd). The rest of us don't. A doctor can't go into court and tell the judge and jury that he felt that cold showers would be good for his patient and then the patient dies of a heart attack. The opposing lawyer would rip him to shreds.

Holistic thinking: "How do all of these things function together? What is the principle(s) behind this symptom or this practice?" Don't misunderstand me. The problem is not that reductionistic thinking is bad. The problem is that holistic thinking should have primacy when dealing with human beings. Reductionist thinking will obviously play a roll, an important roll. For that in medicine, if you actually need a doctor, there is a group of doctors who will agree with most of what I am saying and are holistic and paleo thinkers. They are called functional medicine. They are rare, or I should say still rare, but they are worth it. Anything nasty that I have said about conventional medical doctors does not apply to them, as it does not apply to the numerous online doctors like Kelly Brogan, Jason Fung, Shawn Baker, et. al.

But human beings can NEVER be thoroughly understood in isolation or parts. Reductionism can be very helpful, but you can't see the big picture by ignoring the big picture. We are part of a bigger whole and our parts work together. So instead of evaluating a diet by how much cholesterol it causes us, we have to evaluate a diet by all-means mortality and morbidity. Instead of working your quads, work you body in ways that include your quads. Supplemental Reading: Reductionism vs. Holism

Paleo Principles or evolutionary thinking helps to guide us. The closer to our paleolithic

Paleo Folks — My grand parents, 1000 generations removed. Your's also.

ancestors we can eat and live, the less drain there is on our prana. Or, the more in tune we are with our genes. Being out of tune with our genes is stressful at a very deep level; it wastes prana, another word for energy.

We are not adapted to eating "Crispy Sugar Puffs" in the morning. In fact, skipping breakfast is very good for the health. It is not so good to have ignorant adults worry about a child who doesn't eat breakfast.

For example: Imagine what taking an enteric pill (one that dissolves only in the intestine) looks like. It falls apart about 4 inches down from the stomach and your bolus has an inch or so of 100% vitamin C (for example). Which gene is prepared for that? Which of our ancient ancestors got that mutation to deal with that insult and passed it along? None to both questions. Perhaps the ascorbic acid burns the lining of your intestine. If you have ever tried ascorbic acid directly by mouth, you know that it can burn. So, for several feet in your intestine, that 100% vitamin C is burning your gut lining. What a lovely picture that is.

On the other hand, imagine that you got it naturally in an orange or blended it into your smoothie. None of the ugly picture described above happens.

Weston A Price, circa 1930's who discovered that our modern diets are slowly degenerating us. Pivotal in our slow awaking to the ravages of modern (read: comfortable) living.
Loren Cordain, the man who started the paleo movement
Emily Deans one of my heroes -- Evolutionary Psychiatry

Whole Foods are generally to be preferred over parts of foods or refined foods or pills, like separating the yoke from the egg-white. Cute little chicks have thrived on what is inside the whole egg for 200 million years give or take with NO imput other than the warmth from their mothers.

Sugar is a natural food, sorta, but it is so highly refined as to be a threat to the human race. Many European monarchies fell in the late 1700's, but their fate was sealed when sugar was first introduced into Europe in the early 1600's, and no one could afford it except the very rich.

For example, I am very excited to have (re)discovered nutritional yeast and discovered that the taste has been greatly improved. I got the best non-fortified yeast that I could find on Amazon. I put four times the amount recommended into my very usual smoothie. I could not tell that it was there. Yeast is an excellent source of B-vitamins, trace minerals, and other goodies. But the best part is that it is not a pill and is a whole food. I even like the fact that it is from a biological kingdom that is neither animal nor plant.

So, what's wrong with non-whole foods, like pills? I myself take pills when necessary, but pills dissolve in the stomach or intestine and suddenly dump a huge amount of a single nutrient into your gut in the same place. This is not natural, not paleo. Is our gut ready for that? Do we want to wait 45 years (like we did with carbs) to discover that it wasn't such a great idea. So I use pills as little as possible.

Sally Fallon Podcast

Intuition, Deductive Reasoning, and Imagination Us holistic healing folks do a lot of deductive reasoning, intuition, and imagination. Deductive thinking is when we reason from ideas. Paleo thinking itself is deductive reasoning. "2 + 2 = 4" is deductive reasoning, even if it is always true. Con med is not very fond of deductive reasoning. They call their reasoning "evidence based". Which means that they may say that they believe in the theory of evolution, but they don't actually think it important enough to use it as a guide for their thinking. If they suddenly all gave the theory of evolution its due respect, the pharmaceutical companies would all collapse within a week. And wouldn't that be a lovely sight.

Intuition is a creative idea from the blue. Imagination helps with seeing things that we can't see, like what is happening inside of your intestines. These kinds of thinking need to be confirmed, but they will speed you along your way faster than waiting for evidence based science to give you permission to proceed forward. Principle based thinking, as that is what I call them, need to be confirmed. But notice that the great cathedrals of medieval Europe were made mostly without the exactitude of being "evidence based" with hard modern science. Roman architecture was and some still are quite impressive, but it was made with a number system that was and is very clumsy to say the least.

Taking Responsibility for One's Own Health To practice holistic healing, you must take full responsibility for your own health. Doctors, chiropractors, family members, others, and I can help, but only you care enough to get it right, only you are with your body observing it for 24 hours a day 7 days a week, only you have to live with the consequences of your actions and habits. The MD that recommended a radical hysterectomy for my wife for endometriosis didn't have to live with the consequences of her advice. (Perhaps now she has to live with the consequences of that advice in her afterlife.) Doctors and nurses and others may say that they care, and they may actually care. But as soon as you are out of their office, as soon as they go home from work, they don't care any more. They don't have to live with the consequences of their advice or actions on your body. I'm not saying that they are bad or evil.

For example, I care about my neighbor RC. I think that he is a sweet and decent person. But the moment that I stop thinking about him, I stop caring about him. Should he break his leg, I wouldn't know about it until someone told me. So, you have to care enough about yourself and your immediate family to make your health your number one priority. The MDs number one priority is their business or making money or their yacht. No matter how wonderful and well-meaning they are, their number one priority has to be their lives and their family. So even if we ignore incompetency or greed, YOU are not their number one priority.

Inner Healing Capacity, also called "Prana" or "Chi". This is the most important concept I want to convey to you and is the most important idea for understanding and practicing real healing. If this is difficult to understand, think of it as a working hypothesis.

There are many individual nutrients that can serve as physical analogues for prana or chi, including glutathione, vitamin D3, and magnesium. If you are deficient in any one of those and perhaps others, then everything doesn't work right. You start getting enough of any one of them, and it is like coming back to life.

You may have to take it on faith or intuition that we are in a sea of spiritual energy that nurtures us. How much of this spiritual energy we can garner in a balanced way is how healthy we are going to be.

Since we do not have direct access to prana or chi, we are forced to use 'tools' to understand it and use it. One of these tools is the concepts of "yin" and "yang". The words yin and yang are tools to help us understand prana or chi. Chinese medicine recognizes two forms of chi: active or yang and receptive or yin. Yin and yang are relative terms. Balance is everything. Physical organs correspond to each type of energy as well. The yin organs are basically container organs, which store substances: the liver, heart, spleen, lungs, and kidneys. The yang organs are characterized by constant movement of substances; they are the organs of transfer: stomach, small intestines, bladder, large intestines, and gallbladder. I mostly compare different foods with the yin/yang yard stick. Compared with weight lifting, which would be yang, tai chi would be yin. Man would be yang and woman would be yin. House cats would be yin and pet mountain lions (like Messi) would be yang. Beef yang, salmon yin. It is wise to strike a balance in one's life.

Chinese medicine also have the acupuncture meridians, but generally speaking this information would be far too complicated to be of practical use for the non-professional.

Then there is the Hindu chakra system which deserve a look-see, but they are also too complicated for practical everyday use for the ordinary working person. Messing with them can also be dangerous and should be avoided without qualified instruction from an informed teacher. ('Informed' in this case includes at least gentle, patient, and caring.)

Recently, some health oriented ideas of Rudolf Steiner, a Western advanced soul, have come to my attention. Steiner is almost unreadable for the average person, which I am, so thanks to my close friend of 50 years Jim Peterson, and I have found Steiner's perspective to be very useful, easy to understand, practical, and spiritual. He starts with the three aspect of God's reality: Infinite Power, Infinite Bliss, and Infinite Knowledge. As God's energy descends into the individual, those three become will, love/feelings, and thought, respectively. And these three human subjective characteristics become the metabolic-limb system, the rhythmic system, and the nerve-sense system, thusly:

Level	Infinite Power	Infinite Bliss	Infinite Knowledge
Subjective in humans	Will	Love or feeling	Thought
Objective in humans, our bodily Systems	Metabolic-Limb	Rhythmic	Nerve-Sense
Organs Involved	digestive and reproductive organs and limbs and muscles	heart, lungs, and circulatory system	Head, brain, nervous system
Characteristics	Hot, mobile, mostly unconscious	<---- In between ---->	Cool, still, very conscious
Discussion	Notice how weight lifters improve their metabolism almost magically, because they are pouring a lot of time and energy into their metabolic-limb system. Also notice that if they do little else than weight lifting, they can become intolerant of weakness and a lack of resolve. I noticed that in myself. Balance is everything.	I look upon the rhythmic system as the fulcrum needed for balance. Breathing exercises, cardio exercise, and dance would be very helpful with the rhythmic system. Loving your dog with all of your heart would be very valuable. So would cardio and dance.	The brain needs stillness. Notice the professional football players, all of whom are exceedingly rough, tough men, need to wear helmet to reduce the jarring effects of their profession.

Understanding Steiner's three fold perspective of human beings will greatly help and encourage the selection of various exercises, practices, and lifestyle choices.

Let's take, ah, me, for example, since I know myself better than I know anyone else. In the nerve-sense department, I am very present. I put myself to sleep calculating the prime factors of the numbers that I see on my digital clock. I've gotten so good at it, that it is getting boring. My capacity to do division in my head has actually improved. At age 76. I still get migraine headaches just by missing a few hours of sleep. I am definitely a head-case. I am also strong in the metabolic-limb department. I was a champion swimmer as a teenager. I've done 100 push-ups in 3 minutes and 56 seconds recently. But my rhythmic system, not so good. My social skills suck. I struggle to keep my circadian rhythm from being a total disaster (probably from too much head work, like programming or watching YouTube.). I believe in heart-felt sweetness, but I don't actually DO heart-felt sweetness. I have basically very few feelings and can be gruff at times. I don't even feel loneliness. Between my metabolic-limb system and my nerve-sense system is a dead space, a barren wasteland. I don't feel anything, ever.

So, what do I do? I try to emphasize my heart, lungs, and circulatory system in my daily life and exercise. I make sure that I do lots of cardio. I watch YouTube videos about sweet puppies being rescued. I pour my heart out to my silly goose dog named Tango. (Yes, "Tango", and our previous dog was named "Dance".) I might take up dance. I am trying to do Zumba while watching YouTube. Will I abandon doing 100 push-ups every few days because it is metabolic-limb system oriented? Not a chance. Will I stop calculating prime factors? I sure hope so, but I will always be a head case. If I wasn't a head case, I could not have developed and/or collected all of these ideas during my health odyssey; and I even did my own programming so that I can give it away all at once instead of in dribs and drabs on Facebook or Reddit.

The Autonomic Nervous System is a major meeting place for mind and matter. There is a lot of talk here and elsewhere that is basically matter over mind, about how our physical health affects our mind. Even this is considered very far-out by mainstream medicine and the public. But we are discovering that too many carbs spike insulin, too much insulin causes inflammation, and inflammation can cause depression and anxiety (and basically most all other diseases of modern life). I struggled with depression for decades until I discovered the ketogenic diet where carbs are sharply curtailed. I eat about 1/100th as many grams of carbs as most people, and I NEVER get depressed anymore; I haven't been depressed for 5 years, since I started the ketogenic diet. (I'm sure it is just a coincidence. /s)

Instead of matter mastering the mind, in the autonomic nervous system is a major way for mind to master matter, or "mind over matter".

It is only been recent that Western medicine has begun to accept the fact that matter can master mind. But now it is beginning to dawn on society and leading edge health enthusiasts that not only can matter master mind, but mind can master matter, and it does so regularly, and knowing how this happens gives us the power to consciously control to some degree our autonomic nervous system, and controlling the autonomic nervous system means that we can make healing happen by changing our minds. This was considered impossible and absurd until recently by the mainstream. You can thank Wim Hof for blowing that self-imposed limitation right out of the warm water and into the icy cold water.

There are two aspects of the autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system (which has got to be the worst misnomer of the millennium), or the "fight, flight, freeze, and faun" nervous system, and the parasympathetic nervous system, the "rest and digest" nervous system, when healing takes place. I was surprised to learn that we are talking about different actual nerves. The vagus nerve runs from the back of the skull to outside the spinal column to all over the body, particularly the organs. It controls and basically is the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is basically the usual nerves that people know about that run down the spinal cord. When you meet a grizzly bear mother with cubs on your hike, your nervous system immediately pushes you into "fight or flight" mode, hopefully "flight" rather than "fight" because you wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell against a mother grizzly bear. Your body suddenly can't heal. It can only try to survive. That is the autonomic nervous system switching to the sympathetic mode.

Grizzly Bear — A "fight or flight" generator

Sweet Tango — My "rest and digest" generator,
and a certified silly goose.

If you have managed to survive, you take a deep breath and relax. If you can get into a "rest and digest" state, then you can heal. But what happens if you are chronically in "fight or flight" mode because your boss is mean or because your commute is horrible. What if you are chronically stressed because your friends all got blown to bits in combat or your childhood was stressful. Then you don't heal and you become a problem for yourself and society. If you are lucky, you learn about meditation or breathing exercises (or both) or some other practice that helps teach you how to relax deeply inwardly.

Being Comfortable with Uncertainty is the beginning of wisdom, but not too comfortable that you don't want to find an answer. For many people, especially juvenile science types, something is either true or false, and this usually leads to logical positivism, which says that if something hasn't been proven to be true, then it is automatically false. But the REAL truth is that we sometimes don't know, and a person saying that they don't know is deemed a weakness or shameful. But in fact it is a strength. When you know that you don't know, then you can do something about it and not latch on to any convenient idea or demean others who think differently.