their house than their own fleshy machine.
The most important factor in understanding how the body stays in balance (or does not) is the nervous system, specifically the autonomic nervous system and the cerebrospinal nervous system. These are not really separate systems, as no organ or tissue system functions completely independently; they are two sides of the same coin. When your body is in balance, in a state of ease, technically called homeostasis (or conversely, when out of balance and in a state of dis-ease), these two systems are functioning harmoniously.
The nervous system is the electrical medium between thoughts, ideas, and perceptions, all occurring in the mind, and the physical housing, principally the myofascial-skeletal system. The nervous system is the vehicle for translating thought into action and spirit into soma.1
The health of the nervous system is predicated upon good nutrition, which includes nutrients rich in quality fat-soluble and water-soluble vitamins. Your diet, coupled with how well you manage stressors (your mental diet), helps predict the state of your nervous system. Your nervous system is the center of all other biological functions, affecting all organs, as well as the endocrine (glandular), digestive, and myofascial-skeletal systems.
The nervous system is separated into two main divisions, the cerebrospinal system and the autonomic system, which play off each other in day-to-day activities and perceptions.
The cerebrospinal division includes the brain and spinal cord, and all the nerves that attach to your limbs. This division is responsible for voluntary functioning of the body. The principle job of the cerebrospinal division is moving the fleshy machine here and there with force, grace, urgency, style, rhythm—all the ways that one uniquely expresses himself or herself through movement and posture. This is how a person willfully moves through space.
The autonomic (another term for automatic) division includes nerve ganglia (networks) that lie parallel to the spine on both sides. This division is responsible for the mostly involuntary processes of the body, such as respiration, myocardial functioning and circulation, and peristalsis,2 to identify just a few. The standard medical orthodoxy considers this division to be wholly involuntary and not significantly influenced by the will, but by emotional reactions only.
The ancient Asian traditions that produce advanced yogis, swamis, and lamas present a counterpoint to this modern orthodox idea. Many of these Asian adepts have been documented slowing their heartbeat to a standstill and slowing down respiration to such a degree that they can be buried for days and weeks underground only to be exhumed and found to be biologically fully functional. The great swami Paramahansa Yogananda writes about just a few of these adepts in his classic book Autobiography of a Yogi.3 There are numerous examples available for one to study.
The medical clairvoyant Edgar Cayce, along with the father of osteopathic medicine, A.T. Still, and respected Eastern teachers from B.K.S. Iyengar to Baba Hari Dass all concur on the importance of coordinating these two divisions of the nervous system: the voluntary and involuntary. It is the chronic discord between these two that facilitates many diseases.
What are some ways to remedy or, better yet, prevent this discord? A fantastic starting point would be to learn meditation and practice regularly. This is an outstanding method for gaining mind-body, cerebrospinal-autonomic harmony. Secondly, moderate your stress levels and cultivate methods to effectively handle stressors: allow more time for travel and commuting, do not take it all so seriously, and learn how to stop the “monkey mind” from perpetuating its crazy little agenda. Thirdly, get your eating habits on track. Eating good quality fats, produce raised in nutritious soil, and foods naturally high in C and B-complex vitamins, knowing your metabolic dominance (carbohydrate-, protein-, or mixed-type dominance), minimizing (or better yet, eliminating) refined sugars and starches, and drinking plenty of purified water will greatly enhance your health and well-being.
Even though the body is exceedingly resilient under most circumstances, there is a point of no return if you abuse yourself long enough. There are certain conditions of disease in which the catabolic or tearing-down functions of the cellular matrices are dominating the anabolic or building-up functions of the cells. If the underlying imbalance is not discovered early enough and treated properly, the above recommendations may be palliative at best.
The role stress plays in the perpetuation of disease cannot be overstated. A person who is always stressed out or a chronic nervous wreck will surely manifest an illness, as the autonomic and cerebrospinal systems cannot function well in disharmony. This is simply your body’s way of getting your attention to make a change. All the various symptoms of disease are gifts from the marvelous intelligence of your body alerting you that you are somehow out of balance. How you remedy the situation is up to your free will and common sense.
Every credible educator and researcher acknowledges this next point, even if there is not accord on any other detail: regular exercise is medicine for your body and mind and is excellent for naturally reducing stress levels while increasing your body’s stress adaptation ability.
What is good exercise? Here we may have diverging opinions, but undoubtedly one can rely on this definition: Moving the body with awareness and enthusiasm. A daily brisk walk does many good things for the body. Do not push it too far with exercise—just enough so that there is perspiration and a slight feeling of exhilaration. We are made to move the body with awareness and enthusiasm, whatever our age.
The sedentary life is a real killer. We are tied to our desks and computers five out of seven days during the sun’s best hours—forty, fifty, sixty hours a week. Certainly our evolutionary trajectory is thrown off a bit by this, being that we have worked much harder to accumulate our food supplies in the not-too-distant past. Add to this sedentary dilemma poor nutrition, which is becoming more common all the time with people’s frantic, overscheduled lives, with fewer people growing their own produce or raising their own animals for food. It seems we are verging on an epidemic of lethargy and dietary malaise, all the while over-relying on technology to show us the way.
Our post-industrial culture has created the habit of eating convenient empty-calorie foods on the run, with no thought of the essence or quality of the nutrient, with substitutes galore: fat substitutes, sugar substitutes, taste substitutes. After all, who really wants to eat cardboard sprinkled with paprika, conveniently available in a nearby vending machine, if it is not going to be chemically enhanced? If we add to this equation more refined sugar consumption per person than we have seen in the last two-hundred-plus years of sugar’s ignoble appearance in commercial food and drink supplies, we are set up for a Casey Jones nervous system train wreck.
Take care of the body’s nervous system: everything depends on its healthy functioning—organs, muscles, glands, hormones, and especially your spirit.
The next intriguing system to explore briefly is the myofascial-skeletal system. The body’s myofascia is the combination of the intricate connective tissue network (fascia) and muscle tissue (the Latin root for which is myo or mya). Covering every bone, organ, vein, artery, vessel, tendon, ligament, and muscle is the pervasive and sturdy tissue called fascia.4 Understanding fascia is crucial to understanding the integrity and long-term health of your entire biologic network.
Since fascia envelops all structures of the body, it interacts significantly with all structures. We cannot get a reliable sense of this by examining fascia on cadavers but only in vivo. By the time the body expires, fascia has already started dehydrating, and the crucial life energy that flows through fascia quickly dissipates.
Fascia is a dynamic, living system that can only be truly appreciated in living bodies. You may think of it as the Saran Wrap of all the tissues of the body—it is covering everything from your skull to your palms to your soles, deep to superficial. It is made up of three substances that rely considerably
