The Optimal Life
Empowering Health, Healing & Longevity
Dr. Stephen Bizal, D.C.
Published by Stephen Bizal at Smashwords
Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Charles Bizal
This book is available in print online at www.DrBizal.com.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own
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Stephen Charles Bizal
4533 MacArthur Blvd. Ste. A #166
Newport Beach, CA 92660
Tel: (949) 222-6681 Fax: (949) 222-6681
sbizal@drbizal.com
Disclaimer: This book is for reference and informational purposes only and is in no way intended as medical counseling or medical advice. The information contained herein should not be used to treat, diagnose, or prevent any disease or medical condition without the advice of a competent medical professional. The author and Wellness Communications shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss, damage, or injury caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.
ISBN 978-0-9800116-0-9
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What others are saying about
The Optimal Life
“This book provides step-by-step directions for achieving health, wellness, and longevity.”
- Julian Whitaker, MD , Founder, Whitaker Wellness Institute; Editor, Health & Healing
“Dr. Bizal’s book reveals how different expressions of energy are interconnected to shape our being. In today’s life - dominated by reductionism and lack of mind-body-spirit-emotion education - Steve’s book offers a great chance to pro-actively improve our own greatest asset: health. “The Optimal Life” is an invaluable tool to make us aware of our potential and ease the amazing journey of living.”
- Luca G. Guidotti, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor, Dept. Molecular and Experimental Medicine, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA
Head, Division of Liver Diseases, San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Milano, Italy
“Dr. Bizal presents these magnificent steps to creating and maintaining wellness. They are truly gifts given by a higher power through this humble servant, who is truly a proclaimer of the good news that can make an incredible difference in the quality of our health and life. This is a ‘must’ reading for every human being.”
- Donald Jolly-Gabriel, Ph.D., Director, Hyperbaric Medicine, Whitaker Wellness Institute
“Dr. Bizal’s book has a magical way of bringing us back to inner balance and ultimate health that is unique and unlike any book on the market. His message is refreshing, enlightening and life-changing.”
- Kardena Pauza, Ms America Fitness 2007
"Doctor Bizal lives by his Wellness words. He has set out a model which we can easily follow, in fact, embrace with much energy and joy."
-Lou Ringler, Ph.D., President, Innercalm Associates
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Part One: The Wholistic Health Model
Chapter One: Mind-Body-Spirit-Emotion (The Wholistic Nature of Humanity)
Chapter Two: Rules of Health (Universal Principles that Govern Health)
Chapter Three: Why People Get Sick (Understanding Disease)
Part Two: What the Body Needs – The Ten Principles of Wellness
Chapter Four: Principle #1 Healthy Spiritual Energy (Heal Spiritual Imbalances)
Chapter Five: Principle #2 Healthy Emotions (Take Care of Unfinished Emotional Business)
Chapter Six: Principle #3 Healthy Thoughts (Change Inaccurate & Limiting Belief Systems)
Chapter Seven: Principle #4 Oxygen (Breathe Deep)
Chapter Eight: Principle #5 Water (Hydrate)
Chapter Nine: Principle #6 Sunlight (Bask in Natural Full-Spectrum Light)
Chapter Ten: Principle #7 Acid/Alkaline pH Balance (Restore Acid/Alkaline pH Balance)
Chapter Eleven: Principle #8 Hormone Balance (Correct Hormone Imbalances)
Chapter Twelve: Principle #9 Nature’s Nutrition (Eat “Live” Foods!)
Chapter Thirteen: Principle #10 Physical Activity (Move the Body!)
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Figures – Tables – Exercises
Figure 1-1: The Wholistic Health Model
Table 3-1: Leading Causes of Premature Death
Table 3-2: Ten Toxic Chemicals Found in Health & Beauty Products
Exercise 4-1: Implementations
Exercise 5-1: Take Care of Unfinished Emotional Business
Exercise 6-2: Change Inaccurate & Limiting Belief Systems
Table 8-1: Drinking Water Technologies
Table 8-2: Basic Juicing Regimen & Recipes
Table 10-1: Optimal pH of Various Body Tissue
Table 10-2: Acid & Alkaline Forming Food Summary
Figure 11-1: The Endocrine Glands
Table 11-1: Stress Inventory Test
Table 12-1: Similarities and Differences between Carnivore, Herbivore and Man
Figure 12-1: Diet Mastery – Basic Food Combining
Figure 12-2: Diet Mastery – Optimal Food Combining
Figure 12-3: Diet Mastery – Optimal Fruit Combining
Table 12-2: Quality Protein Sources
Table 12-3: Protein Drink Recipes
Table 12-4: Quality Essential Fatty Acids
Table 12-5: To Twenty Fiber Foods
Wellness Mastery® EmPOWERment Programs
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Most of us want optimal health and a superior quality of life, but few claim it. After all, a healthy and vibrant physical life, free from illness and disease, is a prerequisite for achieving happiness and fulfillment and reaching your highest human potential. You can be pain-free, disease-free, medication-free and doctor-free . . . but only you can create it. It is possible! This book can show you how.
The Optimal Life was originally conceived to help the 76 million baby boomers—the 40 to 65 year olds—who are inching toward senior living. National statistics report that over 90% of these baby boomers will spend the remainder of their lives taking 12 to 15 prescription medications each day as they become participating members of the senior population. What’s wrong with this picture? How did this happen? Why is this acceptable to us? Can we reverse this trend? And if we can reverse it . . . how?
Creating your Optimal Life is not a mystery. Living a pain-free, disease-free and medication-free life is possible. Most roadblocks to achieving optimal health and healing are due to a lack of motivation, a lack of understanding, or both.
Although motivation is a uniquely personal issue, understanding is entirely possible in this Information Age. Today, thanks to the internet, there is no lack of information about health and wellness, nor lack of access to this information. The real challenge is to ferret out the accurate information—the truthful—and separate it from the inaccurate—the untruthful. Then and only then will we be able to implement what works—utilizing truth—to achieve the results we want.
Best of all, accurate information will stand the test of time and will never fail you. Although the concepts and principles presented here were originally intended for baby-boomers, they are valid for every age group, and can help you optimize your life, as well as the lives of your loved ones, for generations to come.
The principles in this book have been used by thousands of people to create The Optimal Life—a vibrant, healthy, and disease-free experience of life. You too can experience the health and wellness that you were programmed for at birth. Take charge of your health and healing, starting today. What are you waiting for?
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Welcome to The Optimal Life
The Optimal Life is a reader-friendly reference guide to health and healing—short, concise, practical information based upon a philosophy of living that is in alignment with nature’s wisdom and the Universal Principles that govern the health and un-health we experience. This is your “Owner’s Manual” for taking care of your body. The Optimal Life is the primer on wellness that you never received on your way out of the womb: a combination of a “how to” self-help guide to creating well-being and the “why” behind the “how to.”
My intention is to provide you with an initial frame of reference, a starting point, for reclaiming your health, the cornerstone of human potential. The material presented avoids going too deeply into any one topic; my hope is to get you in the ballpark and onto first base, a safe place from which you can continue to build your health destiny. The downside to this approach is that the treatment of a topic may in some cases lack enough scientific accuracy to satisfy those of a more rigorous academic and scientific nature. Of course, there is still much that we do not fully understand about this complex, sophisticated, magnificent creature we call a human being, despite our best scientific and medical research efforts!
Whether you want this information or not, if you want to be in charge of your health destiny you need to know what is in these pages. Health—or maybe we should say un-health—will become an issue for you at some time in your life, and you need to have a working knowledge of the basic facts . . . though maybe not all the details.
My experience working with people over the past 25 years as a healthcare provider and wholistic health educator as well as a personal fitness trainer and nutrition counselor, has taught me that a great majority of folks don’t need the deep stuff—they just need the right stuff. And, as national health and mortality statistics tell us, there is a great deal of misunderstanding and confusion about what it takes to create a healthy life. Unfortunately, this is a problem shared by both lay people and all too many health professionals.
So what does it take to create The Optimal Life? It starts with a belief that things can be better and that you have the innate power to make things better, no matter what it takes. It takes an open mind, a genuine desire to change, a personal commitment to improve the quality of your life, a willingness to accept total responsibility for your current state of health, the ability to take action, and the discipline to stick with it . . . even in the face of adversity.
All the information in the world will not heal you from your current illness, keep you healthy, or prevent you from developing some disease. It takes action. The road to optimal health and healing is an experiential and uniquely personal journey of self-discovery. You have to be willing, determined, disciplined, and adventurous to succeed. Wimps need not apply! The road out of illness into a state of consistent health and well-being is not an easy journey. Your health is the cornerstone for achieving your highest human potential.
The Optimal Life was written in response to a huge gap that exists in the general understanding of how to create health. It is a tool designed specifically for you. Use it in good health!
My Journey to Optimal Health
My first major life lesson on my own personal journey for greater understanding about the potential of the human body began when I was a teenager. At the age of 15 I fractured my pelvis during a high school gymnastics competition. I remember the “popping” sound made as the hamstring tendon pulled a chunk of the bone away from the bottom of my pelvis. I remember lying on the gym floor in excruciating pain, unable to move after dropping into a split. I remember the inside of the ambulance that rushed me to the emergency room of our local hospital. I remember the emergency room. But mostly I remember the pain.
Because of the pain, I was heavily sedated for the first several days. During that time, the doctors debated over whether or not to surgically repair the fracture. Fortunately for me, the medical team ultimately decided not to operate. Instead, the doctors decided to let the pelvis “heal on its own,” since at age 15 the bone growth centers located in the pelvis were still active, and would therefore generate the new bone that would facilitate healing.
It was a decision that ultimately changed my life.
The road to recovery for this type of injury was a painful, long, drawn-out process. Nothing about it was easy or pleasant. The first week of my two-week hospital stay was spent lying flat on my back, unable even to roll on my side without a nurse’s assistance. In the days immediately following the injury the pain was deep and unrelenting. Needless to say, there were other medical complications and “elimination” difficulties that I won’t bother to go into as a result of the trauma to my groin area.
Once I got out of the hospital, I was on crutches for 3 months. I was able to stand up or lie down but could not sit. During the next several months I carried a circular pillow, what they call an orthopedic “donut,” with me everywhere I went, just to make the simple act of sitting more bearable.
I was a couple of months into the healing process when the orthopedic surgeon gave us the real bad news. During one of my weekly follow-up doctor visits, he quietly and with great certainty explained to my mother that my athletic career was over. He went on to explain that by the time I was 40 years old I would have “severe arthritis of the pelvis,” and that I would need a cane, or crutches, or even a wheelchair, just to move around.
It was devastating information . . . but I refused to believe a word of it.
For whatever reason—most likely, nothing more than my youthful rebellion—I never bought into the doctor’s story. I remember saying to myself, “Not me. No way! Whatever you are saying doesn’t apply to me.” I know now, in retrospect, that it was the power and energy of my initial thoughts —my unshakeable intention and determination—that directed my personal path for healing. There is no doubt in my mind today that it was my unrelenting belief that I was going to heal from this injury and be back to 100% that “guaranteed” my recovery.
Over time my body did indeed heal itself, and I went off to college to experience an accomplished athletic career. Today, at age 54, as I complete the writing of this book in the fall of 2007, I experience no residual limitations due to that early injury.
The experience did teach me one life-altering lesson: the body can and does heal itself, and there are ways we can improve our ability to heal and improve the quality of our health.
Meanwhile, my own journey was far from over. At age 32, during midterm week halfway through Chiropractic College, I was working as a gymnastics coach for part-time income at a nearby gymnastics training center. It was a cold rainy Valentine’s night. While doing some “extreme” gymnastic tumbling passes—what we called “power” tumbling—I ruptured both Achilles tendons at the same time. Ouch!.
The pain felt like someone took two blow torches up the back of my lower legs. I remember hitting the mat and crumbling to the ground. I remember being on the ground once again in excruciating pain. With everyone else in the gym at a loss for what to do, I was forced to orchestrate what to do next. I got two of the other gymnasts to pick me up, carry me out of the gym, put me into the back seat of my car, then drive me to the nearest hospital emergency room.
After taking x-rays of both ankles to rule out the possibilities of any bone fractures, the ER surgeon on duty informed me that I had ruptured both Achilles tendons and that I would need immediate surgery to repair the damage. Having some knowledge of my injury and with no broken bones detected from the x-rays, I declined his offer to “cut” on both legs and informed him that I would be seeing an orthopedic surgeon who had seen me for other athletic injuries, for a second opinion.
The second opinion revealed that surgery was not warranted. My orthopedic surgeon who had experience with this type of athletic injury explained that this was because it was a complete functional rupture (i.e., the tendons did not “snap” and roll up into the back of the leg). Instead, the injury produced more of an extreme stretch tear where the tendon tissue was still connected within the sheath, and there were therefore no blunt ends that could be pulled back together and sewn.
Once again, I was able to avoid surgery. Four sets of leg casts and eight weeks later—without surgery—the tendons repaired themselves. Granted, it took longer than that to walk normally, but over time there was no pain and no residual functional limitation or restriction due to the injury. Once again, I experienced first hand the body’s potential and ability to heal itself.
The body’s ability to heal itself applies to chronic degenerative health conditions as well as orthopedic injuries.
By age 40, I successfully healed myself from life-long asthma.
As an infant in the crib I was diagnosed as “asthmatic.” Throughout my childhood, teenage, and early adult years, I suffered from severe allergies and breathing difficulties on an on-going basis. Now, as a health practitioner with greater awareness and understanding about the body and its innate healing ability, I discovered how illness and disease is created not just in response to physical and environmental factors but also in response to different mental and emotional states.
I was able to eliminate the symptoms of the allergies and asthma. By healing my heart as well as my mind I was able to resolve the physical ailments as well. My personal healing journey dealt with addressing two non-physical aspects of my health condition. First, dealing with my personal belief system and gaining a new understanding about what the asthma and allergy represented in my life. Second, identifying and dealing with the unfinished emotional business and the unresolved painful feelings from childhood, my emotional incompletions, that were the origin of the health problems. The short version . . . my body was able to heal itself once I dealt with the unfinished emotional business from my past.
At age 49, on my last ski trip, I “blew-out” my right knee. I had to be hauled off the mountain during a blizzard, strapped into a rescue gurney. Thank you ski patrol! Orthopedic tests and an MRI confirmed two partially torn ligaments in the right knee, and two out of three orthopedic surgeons recommended immediate reconstructive surgery.
“No, thank you,” I said. “No surgery. Also, no pain medication.” I wanted to be able to listen to everything, I mean everything, that my body was telling me so that I could be in complete charge of orchestrating my own healing process based upon unfiltered messages. Once again the knee healed after many months of conscientious self-managed physical therapy, including a strict nutritional regimen that supported and maximized the body’s natural healing powers along again with visualizations and an unwavering positive attitude and belief in my body’s innate ability to heal itself. That was more than five years ago. Today, as I share these stories, my knee is pain-free and I have no residual functional limitation and enjoy normal activity.
In case you are wondering, all-in-all I have been on crutches 14 times in my life between the ages of 15 and 50, due to athletic injuries and numerous accidents related to other extreme physical activity. I have also geared back quite a bit from the aggressive and “extreme” sports of my younger years. I no longer test the physical limits of my body because I know that everything physical wears out over time.
Where I do continue to “push the envelope” is in my pursuit of greater understanding of the spiritual, emotional, and psychological domains of the human condition and how they relate to the human potential equation. So, what have I learned through all this? What I do know for certain, through study, observation, and personal experience, is that the mind, body, spirit, and emotion all work together to heal everything that ails us, if only we are willing to allow and support what is essentially a natural process.
Helping Myself, Helping Others
What I have learned on my own personal journey of healing has been useful in helping others as well. When I was 27 years old, a good friend and business associate approached me during a family Thanksgiving get-together and asked me if I would help him lose weight.
My friend was 35 years old and weighed 365 pounds. He shared in confidence that he had recently completed an extensive medical diagnostic workup, performed by a world-renowned cardiologist who specialized in treating the critically obese (people who are more than 100 pounds over their ideal body weight). He had a number of health-related problems, all stemming from his excess weight. Apparently, at the conclusion of this comprehensive diagnostic work-up, the cardiologist sat my friend down behind closed doors and had what my friend described as a “come-to-Jesus” meeting with him.
The doctor informed him that, primarily due to his obesity, the pericardium, the protective sac around his heart, was filling up with fluid. In fact, it was already about 70% full of fluid. “The doctor told me that at the rate I was going I would be a ‘dead man’ in the next three to six months,” my friend shared, with a sense of heightened concern in his voice. “I’m literally drowning my heart, suffocating it.”
Well, fear of death can be a tremendous motivator. My friend went on to share how he had tried numerous popular weight loss programs over the years with little success, and didn’t know what to do next. I believe he asked me for help based upon his observation of my health and fitness lifestyle, which was in stark contrast to the lifestyle habits of most of the other people we worked with in corporate America. Over the next 12 months my friend and I worked together daily to create an eating, activity, and lifestyle regimen based upon nature’s wisdom.
During that period, not only did we work together for 10 hours a day in corporate America, but we also became roommates so that I could closely monitor the process and his progress. We created an ideal situation—I was able to “shadow” his daily activity from the time he awoke in the morning until the time he retired at night. We tracked and documented his vital signs, eating regimens, physical activity programs, changes in body fat, changes in weight, changes in attitude, and changes in perceptions about what it takes to create optimal health.
Over the next 12 months he lost 120 pounds and reversed every health problem he was suffering from. He even weaned himself off of every medication. Over the following six months he dropped an additional 45 pounds by continuing with his new routines.
His amazing recovery taught me that the principles that I had applied to myself in creating my own wellness worked just as effectively for others. It was through this experience that I learned one of the greatest lessons for working with others: People want to know how much you care, before they care how much you know.
Consequently, I have spent the last 25 years empowering others in achieving optimal health for the greater purpose of reaching their highest human potential.
The Four Realizations
My personal life experiences have brought me to four important realizations in my understanding about what it takes to create health, healing, and The Optimal Life:
Realization #1: The body heals itself.
Every cell in the body has its own built-in “intelligence.” At the moment of conception, every cell in the body is encoded with all the information and instruction—the DNA—it will ever need to perform its specialized function, replicate itself and repair itself, without the person’s conscious intervention. Our only real responsibility is to support the natural healing power of the body and not interfere with this innate ability.
As a wellness practitioner and wholistic health educator I have never cured or healed anyone. I believe that I have contributed energetically, psychologically, emotionally, and mechanically to my patients, allowing them to experience a faster or more positive healing outcome, but I humbly submit to the wisdom of nature, innate intelligence, and the life force energy within all living things as the real agent of healing. As the Nobel laureate Dr. Albert Schweitzer proclaimed, “Patients carry their own doctor inside. They come to us not knowing that truth. We are at our best when we give the physician who resides within each of us a chance to work.”
What is this truth that Albert was referring to? We shall cover this and other truths in Chapter 2, Rules of Health.
Realization #2: There are non-physical as well as physical forces that influence our health and govern the healing process.
Like every game, the game of health has its own specific set of rules. These are not rules created by human ideas or by the medical, pharmaceutical, scientific, or religious communities. These rules are the Universal Principles that govern the processes that determine the quality of health we experience. They apply at all times and in every situation without exception.
These Universal Principles include both Spiritual Laws and Laws of Nature. Spiritual Laws govern the realm of the non-physical aspect of life, like our thoughts and feelings. Laws of Nature, on the other hand, deal with physical realities such as our environment and the foods we eat. All Universal Principles work together, collectively, to influence body physiology: how the body works and how the body heals. From the “5,000 foot level,” health appears to be the natural consequence of being in alignment with Spiritual Laws and Laws of Nature.
In contrast, illness and disease, un-health, are merely the natural consequences of violating either Spiritual Laws or the Laws of Nature, or both. If this is true then we could define healing as the process of getting back into alignment with both of these Laws. So the real challenge in the presence of illness and disease is to figure out how we are violating these laws and what we need to change to get back in alignment.
Realization #3: Humans are wholistic.
A human being is more than the cells, tissues, and organ systems that make up the human body. Humans also have a spiritual, psychological, and emotional dimension to their existence. These factors work together, along with the physical, to create our experience of life and health. Because of this dynamic, any approach to health and healing that does not acknowledge and take into consideration this mind-body-spirit-emotion connection is inherently a self-limiting paradigm that is doomed to failure at the onset.
Our allopathic model of medicine and health care does not appear to recognize this wholistic, integrated dynamic in its approach to dealing with chronic degenerative diseases. Maybe this is what accounts for the high failure rate of conventional medicine (i.e. drugs and surgery) in treating and preventing cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and the rest of the lifestyle diseases.
Western medicine is a “reductionist” model. This approach recognizes and treats the human body as a mechanical model made up of separate parts. This “reductionistic” mentality does not recognize the significance of how our thoughts and feelings are expressed in the physiology of every cell throughout the human body. Some health professionals have figured it out, but most have missed the boat.
Realization #4: We are each 100% responsible and accountable for our experience of life, including our experience of health.
In his twilight years, the late actor, comedian, and centenarian George Burns is attributed with saying, “If I knew I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.” Although George may have been going for the joke, his words speak to a greater wisdom, a wisdom expressed in his acknowledgement that his health was his responsibility, and his alone.
In the U.S., the food manufacturers create and market artificial foods designed to increase your craving for, and consumption of, these unhealthy products.
The pharmaceutical industry leads you to believe that your only solution for the health maladies that you are suffering from—while you’re eating artificial foods and living an unhealthy lifestyle—is to introduce more foreign substances, synthetic chemicals, into your system.
The medical research and health care community tells you that it is not your fault that you are fat and depressed, but rather that the reason you are falling apart is because of your genes: you are the victim of being born human.
.....The music in the background being sung by the health insurance companies is that it is okay for you to not be responsible or accountable for how you lead your life, because when you start falling apart there is health insurance that, for a small up-front price, will pay to have you put back together again.
As for various government entitlement programs, wasn’t it Abraham Lincoln who once suggested that you cannot improve the quality of a man’s life by doing for him that which he needs to do for himself?
Who is responsible here? At a fundamental level, isn’t the out-of-control spiraling cost of health care being driven primarily by increased utilization of health services and drugs for the treatment of chronic degenerative diseases? Isn’t the increased utilization of health services simply due to more illness and disease and the continued deterioration in the general health of the population? If these are the facts, then the simplest, most direct, and most effective solution is to focus on educating people about basic healthy lifestyle issues and supporting them in that process.
The only obstacle I can see to implementing the above solution is that it does not appear to be in alignment with the profit motives and economic appetites of the food, pharmaceutical, insurance, and health care industries . . . collectively no small adversary. What this means is that ultimately your health is in your hands. Why? Because, when it comes down to it, nobody else really cares!
How This Book Can Work For You
Section 1 of the book, The Wholistic Health Model, begins with a discussion in Chapter 1, Mind-Body-Spirit-Emotion of the wholistic nature of human beings, and an explanation of how this relationship is represented graphically as “The Wholistic Health Model.” Chapter 2, Rules of Health, discusses the Universal Principles—Spiritual Laws and Laws of Nature—that are the “rules of the game” that govern health outcomes. Chapter 3, Why People Get Sick, explores the fundamental nature of illness and disease.
Section 2, What the Body Needs, includes a chapter on each one of the “10 Principles of Wellness” for creating The Optimal Life. These 10 Principles offer a practical approach to creating a healthy life based upon the wholistic nature of human beings and the Universal Principles that govern health. The end of each chapter includes a “Must Know” summary and Chapters 3-13 also include a “Must Do” action list to help you on your journey. References to various research findings within the medical research literature are included to both entertain and enlighten, with the awareness that all research studies are inherently self-limiting; after all, they were designed by humans, so all “scientific” interpretation is open to scrutiny. In contrast, truth is self-evident by its very nature. It needs no scientific validation.
No claim of ownership is made by the author for the concepts, principles, laws, information, or knowledge shared in this publication. Although this manuscript represents my personal opinions and interpretation based upon my unique life experiences, the information contained in these pages has existed for all time and is in the domain of the living universe, available for the benefit of all humankind. All accurate and truthful health information is accessible at any time to anyone who is genuinely:
- open-minded
- seeking greater understanding
- willing to accept total responsibility for their health
- willing to do the work
This publication is offered as my best effort at this time, although I reserve the right to improve upon this work based upon an even greater understanding and awareness of the truth about health and healing as it is revealed to me.
Throughout this publication the term “(w)holistic” is used in lieu of the word “holistic” because I believe it reflects and portrays a more accurate visual message of the whole person concept. Throughout this publication the term “mind-body-spirit-emotion” is used to describe the wholsitic nature of human beings instead of the more common nomenclature of “mind-body-spirit.” Even though, technically, the term “mind” refers to both our intellect and our emotions, I believe that the phrase “mind-body-spirit-emotion” imparts a more accurate and comprehensive visual message of the whole person concept.
I am grateful for all the time, energy and Herculean efforts of all the healers, authors, doctors, allied health practitioners, health educators, researchers, and scientists whose works I have benefited from on my own distinctive journey of wellness and self-discovery, and in preparing this manuscript. As a wellness practitioner and wholistic health educator, I hope that sharing this information will help empower you on your personal journey to create greater health, happiness, and fulfillment on this beautiful planet.
If you strive to achieve your greatest human potential you will need to be healthy, this book is for you. Why? Because, optimal health is the cornerstone of all human potential.
If you are living with any chronic pain or degenerative disease and believe that life can be better, read on.
If you are suffering from any health problem and are open-minded enough to consider natural approaches that could transform your life . . . read this book!
If you believe you can be pain-free, disease-free, and medication-free, you can. You are a candidate for The Optimal Life.
Thank you and best in health!
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Part One
The Wholistic Health Model
“The doctor of the future will give no medication, but interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.”
- Thomas A. Edison, (1847- 1931), Inventor
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The Wholistic Nature of Humanity
The Premise
If it is true that humanity has spiritual, psychological, and emotional dimensions as well as a physical aspect, then in our attempts to fully understand how the human body works —why people get sick, what it takes to heal, and what it takes to stay healthy and prevent illness and disease—any health or wellness strategy we formulate that does not take all these factors into consideration is, by its own design, a self-limiting paradigm and doomed to failure from the onset.
“Enlightenment is merely the emergence of truth when the obstructions to the realization of that truth have been removed. By analogy, the shining of the sun is not conditional upon the removal of the clouds; it merely becomes apparent.”
- David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D., I, Reality and Subjectivity
The Big Picture
The real challenge is to look at the big picture and figure out how the dots are connected: how the mind (intellect and emotion), body, and spirit work together in creating either health or illness and disease. According to metaphysical principles there exists an answer to every question and a solution to every problem, even health problems. Why? Because, a problem cannot exist without there already being in existence a specific solution to that problem. The solution to every problem lies in having a greater and more comprehensive understanding of all aspects of the problem. So how do we arrive at this greater understanding?
Sometimes far greater insight into the understanding of a problem can be gleaned by backing away from the problem a bit and viewing it from a distance, so that we can see the bigger picture rather than only viewing it “under the microscope.” Why? Because the circumstances in which an event occurs, its context, determines its meaning and significance—it’s content. When speaking of health issues, content refers to the specific illness or disease which we seek to better understand while context refers to spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical circumstances surrounding the occurrence of the illness or disease. Context therefore determines content.
The Wholistic Nature of Man
Man is comprised of several different expressions of energy: physical energy (our body), mental energy (our thoughts), emotional energy (our feelings) and spiritual energy (our life force)
Wholistic refers to the “whole” person, mind-body-spirit-emotion, and is a variation of the more common term “holistic.” The term “holistic” (from the Greek word holos meaning "whole") in healthcare is used: (1) to describe that which is considered outside the mainstream of scientific medicine, and (2) emphasizes the importance of the whole person in its approach. Holistic also incorporates the holism doctrine that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
This mind-body-spirit-emotion relationship describes what we call the wholistic nature of humanity. Although technically, when referring to the “mind” we are speaking of both the mental (“thought”) and emotional (“feeling”) aspects of a person, for the sake of our discussion we will be using the term “mind” when referring to the intellectual or conscious mind and will be using the term “emotion” when referring to the subconscious or unconscious mind.
Optimal health assumes a balanced and integrated relationship encompassing all these areas of human existence. A brief overview and description of the different health models practiced in America today will help us in our discussion as we move forward.
Two Different Health Care Models in America
There are fundamentally two contrasting health care models, two schools of thought that exist in the U.S. today: medical and non-medical. While both aim to cure what ails you, they are based upon very different philosophical approaches. The medical model includes terms like Allopathic, Western, Conventional and Scientific medicine to describe itself. All of these medical models treat illness and disease from the same orientation: all focus on identifying and treating the symptoms of illness and disease with drugs and surgery.
Allopathic medicine is the standard practiced by medical doctors such as family and general practitioners, cardiologists, neurologists, oncologists, endocrinologists, psychiatrists, etc. Western medicine is what is practiced in the modern and Western cultures in North America and Europe, predominantly using drugs and surgery. Conventional medicine is that which is taught in medical schools and practiced in hospitals—exclusively drugs and surgery. Scientific medicine claims to be founded on scientific principles and only recognizes that which can be proven scientifically. It does not recognize theories or practices of healing illness and disease which have not been proven scientifically and therefore, in their eyes, have no validity within the scientific medical research community.
The non-medical approach to health and healing uses terms like Wholistic or Holistic, Alternative and Complementary medicine, and Natural Healing to refer to these contrasting schools of thought. All are practiced by non-medical health practitioners (Chiropractors, Acupuncturists, Naturopaths, Clinical Nutritionists, Herbalists, etc.) and some medical doctors. These non-allopathic approaches identify and treat the cause of illness and disease from a whole person perspective, and treat the symptoms using only natural remedies—physical medicine, herbs, nutrition, etc.—as the first-line strategy.
The Medical Health Care Model
Allopathic medicine’s approach to treating illness and disease claims to be founded on scientific principles and is considered a “reductionist” model. Its emphasis is on the physical aspects, reducing a human being to a collection of systems. This scientific view sees a person as a machine. The “parts” of this machine—heart, brain, lungs, kidneys, muscles, joints, etc.—are prone to “breakdown” and either need time to repair or need to be replaced with “spare parts.” Here, the purpose of medicine is to intervene to correct dysfunction and restore “normality” using drugs and surgery.
Allopathic medicine views what happens in the physical body as separate and distinct from what may also be happening simultaneously with that person at a psychological, emotional, and spiritual level. The modern medical research approach to understanding health problems is to isolate the sick or unhealthy cells from diseased tissues and organ systems, and study them under a microscope. This approach formulates an understanding and treatment strategy based upon this microscopic interpretation. Although there is value to understanding something at a microscopic level, it doesn’t explain how it got there in the context of its surrounding physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy influences.
A limitation of this approach is that in extracting cells out of their natural setting within the human body and analyzing their mechanical and chemical nature, we are not only removing them from their normal relationship with other cells but also removing them from the context of the other wholistic factors—mental, emotional, and spiritual energy forces—that influence cell physiology. The danger with this reductionistic approach is that it leaves us open to making interpretations about and creating treatment strategies for health problems without considering the big picture. This creates a self-limiting paradigm. Although considered the best option for acute illness that is due to bacterial infections and/or physical trauma, allopathic medicine has not been effective in treating the chronic degenerative diseases, such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity, fibromyalgia, Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s.
The Non-Medical Health Care Model
Wholistic or Holistic medicine is designed to look at and treat the “whole” person, not just the disease symptoms. This approach looks at the mind-body-spirit-emotion relationship and how a person’s spiritual, psychological, emotional as well as physical energy states contribute to creating the imbalances in the biochemistry of the body that contribute to illness and disease. The objective in Wholistic medicine is to identify, treat, and eliminate the cause of the disease itself, while simultaneously treating the symptoms.
This “whole” person approach to treating illness and disease includes the analysis of physical, nutritional, environmental, emotional, social, spiritual, and lifestyle issues. It also focuses on patient education and the patient’s personal responsibility for achieving balance and well being. From the wholistic perspective, the allopathic model is self-limiting by definition.
Alternative medicine—that which is not taught in medical schools or practiced in hospitals—is the term often used by the general public and some healthcare practitioners to refer to healing techniques which are either not well known or not accepted by the majority of “conventional” or “allopathic” medical practitioners (M.D.'s). Such techniques would include non-invasive, non-pharmaceutical approaches such as Chiropractic, Acupuncture, Naturopathy, Herbalism, Homeopathy, Massage, and many others.
However, the term Alternative medicine has also been used to refer to any experimental technique, drug or non-drug, which is not currently accepted by “conventional” medical practitioners. As non-invasive, non-pharmaceutical techniques become popular and accepted by larger number of conventional practitioners, these techniques will no longer be considered alternative.
Complementary medicine refers to non-invasive, non-pharmaceutical techniques used as a complement to the conventional medical treatments of drugs and surgery. The term implies that conventional medicine is used as a primary tool and the non-invasive, non-pharmaceutical techniques are used as a supplement when needed: Chiropractic, Acupuncture, Naturopathy, Herbalism, Homeopathy, Massage, etc.
Natural Healing is the term used to describe those natural methods that support the wisdom of the body and the body’s innate natural ability to heal itself as the primary emphasis for treating illness and disease instead of using drugs and surgery. The primary treatment objective here is to strengthen the systems that make up the body’s immune response, including the digestive, cardiovascular, and lymphatic systems, as well as strengthen specific organs such as the heart, lungs, liver, and kidney. Natural Healing refers to the use of nature’s nutrition as well as all the natural physical healing techniques available: healing touch, massage, hot and cold water therapies, manual manipulation, breath work, oxygen therapies, etc.
The goal of all non-medical approaches to healing is to support the body’s own innate natural ability to heal itself by strengthening the immune response. The major focus in natural healing is to neutralize and remove toxins from the body while nourishing the body back to optimal health using quality nutrients.
There is one more category: Integrated medicine. This approach attempts to combine what it considers the best of both the medical and non-medical approaches, for the maximum benefit of the patient.
To be Wholistic, any wellness program designed to cure and prevent illness and disease, improve quality of life, and achieve optimal health must take into account the spiritual, psychological, and emotional as well as the physical aspects of the human condition. We must then consider what we mean when we speak of the spirit, the mind, the emotions, and the body, and how they work together to create optimal health.
Spirit & Spirituality
When we speak of the “spirit”, I believe we are referring to the essence of the individual at an energy level. When referring to the nature of an individual, we use terms like “gentle-spirited” or “mean-spirited” to describe our experience of that essence. Although difficult to measure and quantify by current scientific standards, the experience is undeniable. According to the theory of quantum physics, everything in the universe is energy. All physical matter, when continually broken down to its smaller and smaller units, becomes energy—there is a level of interface where physical matter eventually becomes pure energy and pure energy becomes physical matter.
At a very essential level, everything in the universe is about information and energy. It is also postulated that everything in the universe is connected and it is through our spirit, or spiritual energy, that we are connected at an essential level with every other human being and every sentient being on the planet.
So what do we mean when we speak of “spirit,” “spiritual,” and “spirituality”?
Trying to define these terms is like trying to hold water in the palm of your open hand or trying to grasp smoke out of thin air. It is certainly real—it’s right there in front of you!—but it is difficult to embrace, even when closing your fingers around it.
Spirit, spiritual, and spirituality seem to mean different things to different people, depending on orientation and personal beliefs. A cursory review of the current literature on the subject reveals varying perspectives depending upon the field of study from which the writer emerges—the religious community, the scientific community, or the metaphysical community. Each community defines spirituality within the context of its own discipline. The religious community embraces the concept of spirituality that has a strong association to their specific religious beliefs and dogma, i.e. Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim. Both the scientific and metaphysical communities define spirituality outside the context of an association with any specific religion or religious dogma.
For the sake of our discussions we will be referring to the term spirit and its derivations in a metaphysical context that is not associated with any specific religious dogma, while at the same time embracing all religious beliefs that embrace love as their highest guiding principle.
In this metaphysical context, the terms spirit, spiritual, and spirituality refer to the non-physical, non-material aspect of our being. The words spiritual and spirituality refer to those higher virtues that are an expression of divinity—love and truth as manifested in our thoughts, feelings, words, and actions. We experience these virtues as compassion, patience, tolerance, joy, kindness, gentleness, sensitivity, gratitude, non-judgment, and non-materialism in our dealings with ourselves and others.
These virtues call on us to engage in life with an attitude of lovingness in everything we do. Because everything in the world is connected at an energy level, every thought, every feeling, every word, and every action that is an expression of this attitude of lovingness benefits the recipient, the giver, and the entire universe.
What we refer to as spiritual qualities are beyond the perceptual world of form, although they do affect what happens in the physical world. They are subjective, experiential realities. They are states of knowing that are beyond perception.
“The proper utilization of our intelligence and knowledge is to effect changes from within to develop a good heart.”
- Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness
The Mind
What do we mean when we speak of the “mind”? What is the relationship between the mind and the body? How does the activity of our mind influence our health?
The mind we are referring to here is not the physical brain and central nervous system. The mind in this context is that part of human existence that is comprised of thoughts, attitudes, opinions, perspectives, feelings, and emotions. Mind includes both intellectual and emotional phenomena, both thinking and feeling. Both are forms of energy that influence the physiology of the body.
“Mind includes your thoughts and emotions as well as all unconscious mental-emotional reactive patterns. Emotion arises at a place where the mind and body meet. It is your body’s reaction to your mind—a reflection of your mind in the body.”
- Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
Our Emotions & Feelings
Our emotions and feelings have a profound impact on our health. There is an intimate and direct relationship between our emotions and feelings and the physiology of the cells in the body. For every feeling there are physiological, hormonal, and chemical changes that occur in the body. Painful feelings like fear, anger, guilt, shame, and sadness adversely affect our state of well being. These painful feelings are the natural consequence of unresolved emotional issues (“emotional incompletions”) from childhood that we carry forward into our adult life.
So, what are our emotions and feelings? How do they affect health? The terms “emotions” and “feelings” are used interchangeably by most authoritative sources. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines emotion as “a physiological departing from homeostasis (balance) that is subjectively experienced in strong feeling (as of love, hate, desire or fear) and manifests itself in neuromuscular, cardiovascular, hormonal and other body changes . . .” Webster also defines feelings as “an emotional state.” By this definition we see that emotion is described within the context of its effect on the physiology of the body.
As previously stated, quantum physics suggests that everything in the universe, at an essential level, is information and energy, and that energy possesses a vibrational frequency that describes the quality of itself. If this is true, then every emotion and feeling, also expressions of human energy, possesses a specific vibrational frequency that reflects some quality of energy, and it is the quality of this emotional energy that determines its effect on the physiology of the cells that in turn influences the quality of our health.
Research has shown that strong emotions, both joyful and painful feelings, cause changes in the biochemistry of the body. While positive emotions of joy, gratitude, and peacefulness enhance energy flow in the body and cause beneficial change to the physiology that support health, painful or negative emotions such as fear, anger, guilt, and shame restrict energy flow in the body, causing physiological, hormonal, and chemical change that lead to illness and disease. We could say that positive energy affects cells in a positive and healthy way, while negative energy affects cells in a negative and unhealthy way.
Unfinished Emotional Business
What do we mean by “unfinished emotional business” and how does it affect our health? With unfinished emotional business—unresolved emotions or emotional incompletions—we are referring to the painful feelings such as fear, anger, resentment, guilt, shame, hatred, inferiority, worthlessness, and sadness that we initially experienced in childhood and are still carrying with us today as adults.
Our unfinished emotional business is considered unresolved and therefore incomplete because it was never dealt with, resolved, or released at the time they were experienced. We could say that we got stuck in those painful feelings as children. The reason we got stuck in the first place is because as children we lacked the necessary tools—personal power, knowledge, and life’s experiences—to accurately interpret and then deal effectively and appropriately with what happened to us.
We carry unfinished emotional business with us into adulthood that continues to cause emotional discomfort. Every unresolved emotion holds your body in a state of “heterostasis,” a condition of physiological imbalance.
The phenomenon that describes the body’s ability to hold onto painful feelings from past events is “cellular memory.” Every emotional and physical trauma you experience in your life is recorded by your cells. It is this cellular memory that explains why emotional discomfort experienced in childhood can still be present in our adult life, even though the emotional trauma may have happened long ago and has even been forgotten at a conscious level. Unresolved emotional issues remain an active and prevalent part of our subconscious mind until raised to a conscious level to be identified, confronted and resolved (healed). It is for this reason that there exists an intimate and direct relationship between unresolved, painful emotions in a person’s life and illness and disease.
Some psychologists believe that depression is nothing more than unresolved anger turned inward, and that cancer is nothing but the physical expression of the energy of anger creating major physiological imbalance in the body. With greater awareness and understanding we would probably find that every illness and disease process is rooted in some way to unresolved emotional pain in a person’s life.
The Law of Responsibility is another Universal Principle which states that everything we experience in our life we create at some level. This can be a difficult pill for some to swallow. We previously stated that most of the disease processes that we have created in our life have a strong connection to unresolved emotional issues. Our lack of awareness of this dynamic, whether out of denial or ignorance, will not excuse us from experiencing the truth and consequences of this reality. But based upon our power to create and our freedom to choose, we possess the ability to recreate anything and everything in our lives that is not working for us. We need only be genuinely open to the possibilities.
Our Thoughts & Belief Systems
There is an intimate and direct relationship between the thoughts we think, what happens at the cellular level in our bodies, and the health we experience. Our thoughts are an extension of our belief systems. Our belief systems are that which we hold to be true about ourselves and the world around us. That which we believe to be true provides the foundation for our decision making processes: not only what we think, but why we think that way. Our judgments and subsequent actions are based upon these beliefs.
Our beliefs are either accurate—in alignment with truth and the way things really are, or inaccurate—not in alignment with truth. If our beliefs are in alignment with the way things really are, then the decisions we make and the actions we take create a certain outcome. On the other hand, if what we believe to be true is, in fact, not true, then the decisions we make and the subsequent actions we take based upon those decisions will create a different outcome. All outcomes we experience reflect the accuracy of our beliefs.
All health, illness, and disease we experience are an expression of the accuracy of our belief systems regarding the truth about health—what health is and what health is not.
“It’s not what we don’t know that gets us into trouble. Its what we think we know that just ain’t so.”
- Mark Twain, American humorist, satirist, lecturer and writer, (1835-1910)
In Chapter 2, Rules of Health, we will explore the quantum physics concept that everything in the universe is comprised of information and energy, and that all energy possesses a vibrational frequency. This vibrational frequency describes the characteristic or “quality” of the energy. Energy itself has no meaning, quality, or characteristic other than the one we give it.
Thought is one expression of human energy. A thought is a real thing that possesses a vibrational frequency. Every thought we think, whether verbalized or not, is energy of a specific vibrational frequency that is released into the universe. The universe, then, simply takes our thought and works toward manifesting outcomes and events in the physical world that are in alignment with the quality of the energy of our original thought. The material form of that expression is inconsequential, at least to the universe, even though it matters to us. What is significant is the quality of the energy—the vibrational frequency—that is being expressed.
This principle applies at an individual level as well as at a group level, the collective consciousness. When we think a thought and implement an action that represents a quality of energy that expresses an attitude of lovingness toward ourselves and others, universal dynamics will manifest an outcome in the physical reality which is consistent with the quality of the energy of the original thought. Here is how the principle works: think happy thoughts, you create happiness; think unhappy thoughts, you create unhappiness. Think healthy thoughts, you create health; think unhealthy thoughts, you create illness and disease.
This is an example of a Universal Principle known as the Law of Attraction. It states that energy attracts back to itself energy of like kind. At an energy level, we attract health, people, and events into our life—regardless of how it may appear—that are in alignment with the quality of the energy of our thoughts, feelings, words, and actions.
So what does this have to do with health? What is this universal dynamic and how does it work? What is the connection between our thoughts and our physical health?
Simply put, that which you give attention to grows stronger in your life, and that which you give intention to transforms the un-manifest into the manifest. Intention transforms energy and information, thereby organizing its own fulfillment. Your thoughts can influence cellular physiology and biochemistry and therefore have power over your physical body.
What you believe to be true about health—whether actually true or not—will be manifested in your physical body. If you truly believe that the body and every cell in the body has the potential to heal itself, then by this genuine belief you engage the power of the universal laws that support that outcome and the physiological activity of every cell in your body will move in that direction, working toward a healing outcome. Of course, this assumes that everything else you are doing in your life supports and honors that belief. If, on the other hand, you genuinely believe that healing is not possible, then you create a dynamic that sets into motion physiological and chemical changes in the body that move you in the direction of unhealth.