Our Inner healer By Dr. Silvia Casabianca, MA, LMT, RM, CTP.

Our body is a self-regulating organism that encloses an inner healer. This healer's functioning is not limited to instinctive responses, as it has been understood in the past few centuries, but it is in charge of surveillance and communication, storage of information, evaluation, organization and expression of the body as a whole. This inner healer is also responsible for providing suitable solutions in response to adaptive challenges imposed by the environment. It draws on the information that the body has memorized and learned in order to perform its functions and therefore, we can call it an intelligent healer

Let me give you some examples of the body functioning under this perspective. The lungs inhale air and take out the oxygen from it. In the lung's tiny alveoli, red blood cells (RBC) receive the oxygen and transport it to the tissues. For that purpose, RBCs use a molecule known as hemoglobin, partly made of iron. This iron comes from what we eat. The digestive system must select this element from the food. The circulatory system takes iron to the liver for storage or directly to the bone marrow where the hemoglobin factories are located. Bone production rate is regulated by thyroid hormones (Calcitonin) and parathyroid hormones (PTH)and it is also stimulated by muscle contraction. Sugar produces the necessary energy to make the muscle contract. Sugar, coming from our food or from our body storage, requires insulin to enter the cells in order to be used. Insulin is produced in the pancreas. Other hormones produced in the same organ regulate the amount of insulin the pancreas secretes. The above is a good example of systems interaction and interrelation. In order to perform their tasks, the different organs require an optimal communication system. Each one of our skin cells lives for about 36 days. Once one cell dies, another cell replaces it. How else could you explain that our skin lasts during a whole lifetime? Our red blood cells live up to 119 days. However, the number of cells remains constant in our blood. It's not necessary to intervene these regenerative processes. We don't have to pay a medical consultation or get medication to guarantee that our skin or our red blood cells will continue to regenerate. We completely renew our body tissues every seven years. It happens without our intervention. Although, of course, we need to guarantee the raw material: food, air, water. Our tissues are made up with materials that come from the nutrients we eat, and the quality of our tissues will depend on the quality of our food, air and water.

Who instructs our body to do the regeneration and reparation job? How does it know that it has to build skin cells in the skin and red blood cells in the blood? A blueprint within our cells mediates the communication system in the body and guarantees regeneration, reparation and survival. And, how do we explain growth and development of a child? We have to assume that there is intelligence imprinted in our organism. There is some sort of software in our energetic bodies and in our genes as well, to maintain our life.

What defeats this inner healer, which resides in our subtle bodies as well as in the depths of our entrails, what breaks the balance and generates dis-ease, is stress. A certain amount of stress in life is unavoidable and even stimulating and healthy, and the body is fully equipped to deal with it. However, excessive stress has a cumulative effect and ends up compromising our body balance, hindering the body's capacity to respond to stressors. In modern life, we face all kinds of stress and stressors. Mechanical, biological, physical, emotional, mental, electromagnetic, chemical. Some we cannot avoid, but others depend on the lifestyle we choose. If we want to know what is causing a symptom, where it comes from, it's not a matter of getting an MRI or a T-scan. We need to start asking questions to ourselves. We require an inventory that starts by inquiring about the life styles imposed upon us or chosen by ourselves, according to cultural, social and financial factors. We need to know the quality of the food we eat, the air we breath and the water we drink; reflect on the roles we play in society, the quality of our relationships  with others, our nutritional habits, patterns of physical activity, breathing patterns, self-esteem, our sense of safety and how positive or traumatic experiences have affected us. There is plenty of information out there about the importance of nutrition, innumerable studies, articles and diet designing are available to the public. Notwithstanding, obesity and overweight affect almost 7 out of 10 Americans. Obesity has become epidemic. Some of the most recent studies show that people is overweight not only because of the increase in intake and the decrease in physical activity but also because of the food additives that impair the functioning of some of the body systems and the increase in the levels of cortisol in the body as the result of chemical stress. We have reduced our physical activity because of urban sprawl, the generalization of automobiles, remote controls, etc. We have become increasingly sedentary.

There is a proven correlation between the number of hours a child spends in front of a TV and weight gaining. Industrialization has taken over our lives and we've chosen to live in overpopulated urban spaces, while we've  lost both innate and traditional wisdom; we've polluted the water and the air and ruined nature. As a result, we've isolated ourselves from the whole and live in a constant hassle. Children do not play outdoors anymore. They sit hours in front of a screen, TV, computer or gameboy. We move around in tiny metallic boxes that heat the atmosphere and restrict our movement, through the rapid, distressing, traffic of the streets. We barely find the time to stop and grab a fast-food bite. We have even given up our intimate moments, in which we could reflect on our lives, and in order to preserve the illusion of connecting with clients, bosses, friends, family and the world, we hook up to a cell phone or a computer, while we don't even know who our neighbors are.
Our needs are no longer satisfied. Publicity makes us aware of our lacks in order to sell us panaceas. We buy them, but we keep craving for a promised happiness that nobody will provide to us. It cannot come from external sources. To summarize, we have lost awareness of who we are, we don't enjoy spare time any more and we don't care for our bodies or our planet.

Evolution is moving us towards depending on acquired knowledge to replace our lost inner wisdom. We've come to live in a world of thoughts, images and words. We are split, torn. Once we lose the connection with our body and ignore its own needs and alarm signs, we also deteriorate our relationship with the universe of which we are creatures. That's why we pollute it, that's  why we harm ourselves. Our contemporary lifestyles debilitate our inner healer, that becomes incapable of maintaining balance and therefore we manifest symptoms and disease in all dimensions of our being, physical, emotional, mental or spiritual. Solutions are at hand. There are many ways to support the inner healer in restoring the lost balance, and we can reconnect with our own body and the environment, by retaking responsibility over the way we eat, move, breath, and respond to stressors. Healing, which is the process by which we become whole again, requires us to be increasingly aware of our body and to trust its self-healing capacity to overcome the restrictions that hinder the full realization of our potential and become a continuous source of pain and limitation. REIKI is one natural healing method that can be used to stimulate and support the inner healer, to help undo the path that leads to dis-ease and to recover a harmonic and simple life style.

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