Love as Medicine – Thoughts on how to Enhance Immune Function

It has been said that…

“Love is the most powerful and still the most unknown energy in the world.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

How can it be so?

We, along with everything else, live in, contribute to and are sustained by the universal energy field.

Signals from this universal field or environment affect our state of being…we are in constant dialogue with ourselves and our environment.  How we perceive our environment and our cultural conditioning, determines how we react.

As Bruce Lipton states, “How I see the world controls not only my internal biology, energy and my behaviour but how I create in the world.” Rumi, the 13^th century Persian poet, Islamic scholar, theologian and mystic said it this way

“The world exists as you perceive it….
It’s not what you see, but how you see it.
It’s not what you hear, but how you hear it.
It’s not what you feel, but how you feel it.”

The nature of experience is unique, personal and subjective and informed by what we perceive and how that makes us feel. Modes of perception are also personal and subjective. Perception can also be inaccurate, misconstruing incoming signals through faulty sensory inputs, wishful thinking, paranoia, fantasy, anxiety or trauma.

The world is nothing but my perception of it.
I see only through myself.
I hear only through the filter of my story.

Byron Katie

Discernment is key. Paying attention…noticing what you are experiencing – just noticing, without judgment, is a good first step to self-awareness and discernment.

Recognizing the body’s experience of the fight or flight response to stimuli whether internal (feelings, perceptions, beliefs) or external (temperature, sound aggression) helps. The stress response is the body’s first protective system so it’s good to know what activates it in you.

The immune system – the body’s second protective system protects us from bacterial or viral infections (internal threats).  An activated immune system consumes much of the body’s available energy to combat the invading pathogen. For this reason, to conserve energy and regulate the system, the adrenal glands release stress hormones to suppress the immune function when the HPA axis is activated via the stress response (the body’s first protective system).

Almost every major illness people acquire has been linked to chronic low grade stress resulting in chronic activation of the HPA axis. Loss of self-regulation is characteristic of disease states. In autoimmune disease, the immune system treats self-tissue as an invader, attacking it and causing pathology such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, and lupus. In each disease, there is a change in the immune system – from flexible and balanced to inflexible and unbalanced suggesting increased vulnerability to stress-related immune dysregulation.

Identifying stressors; reducing stress and learning to manage stress supports the body’s inherent ability to self-regulate.  Noticing what you are noticing and making informed choices that are in your own best interests helps the body shift towards a more balanced state necessary for growth.

If how you perceive your environment, whether social, political or natural, is directly correlated to your health activating either your growth or defence mechanism or leaving you in a neutral, balanced state, how does it work?

This quote from John Lennon has some poignant insights with respect to the body’s protection and growth systems:

“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love.
When we are afraid, we pull back from life (defensive mode).
When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer
with passion, excitement, and acceptance. (growth mode)

We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections.
If we cannot love ourselves,
we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create.
Evolution and all hopes for a better world
rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”

According to Bruce Lipton, PhD, cellular biologist and author of The Biology of Belief “New-edge science reveals that the power to control our lives originates from our minds and is not pre-programmed in our genes…to activate the amazing power of mind over genes, we must reconsider our fundamental beliefs – our perceptions and misperceptions- of life.”

So often, all it takes, is a subtle shift of consciousness – of thought, of perspective… from the tightness of wanting something so badly; of the need to succeed or of the fear of failure; of the compulsion to do it right; to be the best; to be recognized, admired or approved of by others… to, oh, something so much simpler…to just be…to be free of all of those mental constructs – of that mental paradigm… and in a moment of self-recognition and awareness, you realize you have a choice.

The perception of love….the felt experience of being in love, according to Lipton, is the greatest environmental signal we can introduce to our cells. Appreciation, gratitude, compassion and forgiveness activate the heart and create system-wide coherence radiating out, from the centre of your being, ripples and waves of peace, love and joy. You can learn how to do this.

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.

It will not lead you astray.”

Rumi

Giving yourself permission…allowing yourself to simply be is maybe something new for you. Learning to relax and open to your own very personal felt experience and accept it without judgment is a process of personal growth in self awareness, self knowledge, self-acceptance and self respect. Coaching facilitates this process.