A systems view of biological health

Section 4: Application and Practical exercises

11 : Six simple principles

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There are six simple principles that you need to know :

1. Whatever you focus on or place your attention on will get bigger – via sensory and neurological feedback loops
2. You have a choice as to where you put your attention – so you do not have to allow the biggest noise to call you all the time.
3. You also have a certain amount of choice as to the mental emotional state that you experience. Emotions cannot be "made up", but if they happen, you can choose how much priority to give them, and most importantly, how much Meaning to give them.
4. "Good" flags can be set by deliberately using the mental-emotional range Curiosity / Gratitude / Appreciation, and the more "good" flags are set, the less priority the "bad" ones will have.
5. Your body is a friend, and as a friend, it needs certain attention to cultivate that friendship. This friendship is cultivated by being interested in the body (i.e. feeling what it feels like inside) and having some compassion for the body. Your body loves being actively appreciated and communicated with.
6. There is a specific time frame that ensures the messages reach deeply enough into the body. It takes about 40 seconds of uninterrupted genuine curiosity to tell the body that it is safe, and then another couple of minutes to allow the body to process that new information.

If pain becomes a regular feature of life, many people will start to think of the body as being the enemy, and/or of needing fixing. In reality, the body can never be the enemy – its biological imperative is to survive and to work as efficiently as possible. And it contains inside itself the solutions to most of its ailments.

If you practice connecting to the Health in your body when you are feeling good, this sets up neural pathways and makes it far easier to connect to Health when you are not feeling so good. The Love-Gratitude-Appreciation exercise is the simplest, most effective single thing you can do as a lifetime habit to improve your physical health, mental coherence, self-confidence and connection to the Living world. In short – train yourself to be habitually and curiously appreciative of the world around you and appreciative of your body.

Your job as a conscious presence in a biological organism is to do "reality checks" to CALIBRATE your primitive brain TO THE CURRENT LEVEL OF ENVIRONMENTAL SAFETY.

If your body or mind get over-reactive to something, then it's important to do a reality check and say "just how bad is this, on the grand scale of things?" If the answer is "Not that bad" (i.e. this is NOT an immediate mortal threat to your existence), then you know that you're not in immediate danger of annihilation... There is nothing out there that is going to eat you in the next 10 minutes – so why not refocus and find something to be aware of that brings you a feeling of appreciation and pleasure? Again, some part of the body that feels to be happy being here and now (and is not reacting to the world) – is a good place to place your awareness. If there really IS a problem, then do something about it ASAP, so it's not there – or recognise that it's not something that you can do anything about, and refocus [1] .