How do you define health?

My husband marvels at my ability to shut off a movie mid-scene, declare, “Bedtime!” and walk away. My bedtime is 10:00pm. I don’t always make it on time but I try. I know the movie will be there for me tomorrow after a good night’s sleep.

If your health has always been reliable, count your lucky stars and do everything you can to keep it that way. Mine has not, and anyone who has lost their sense of health knows that getting it back is much more work than losing it. I organize my life around creating a resilient, healthy mind, body, and spirit, including early to bed, so I was blindsided last Thursday when I woke up feeling craptastic, with thoughts to match.
Weird, invasive thoughts infiltrated my mind like,

“Well, it doesn’t matter what I do, I’ll be sick forever,” and,

“I should just give up, it doesn’t make a difference that I organize my life around health, my body just doesn’t work right.”

Hopelessness, a sense of everything I’d worked for slipping away, and a lonely, impotent feeling that nothing I do to take care of myself is ever really enough were seeping in. I had woken up with a sudden onset of strange symptoms, felt abysmal all day, and by evening tested positive for COV*D-19—and that’s when the lightbulb went on:

“I don’t have mysterious symptoms and all is not lost—I’m just sick! This is the inflammation talking!”

All these thoughts from the deep-dark-dungeon parts of my mind were arising in direct correspondence to the rise of fever, chills, body aches, and brain fog. That might sound terrible, but to me it was empowering because it meant this experience wasn’t permanent, and because I know how to work with inflammation. I have an army of herbal allies that waits on the shelf for just such a moment, ready to go to the mat for me, and I have lots of practices to reduce stress and lower inflammation. Those morose, invasive thoughts were the bat signal from my body that she was in distress.

I listened and I took care of myself. It’s Wednesday now and, though I’m still recovering, I feel worlds better and I want to share two insights with you.

1. Chronic inflammation and mental health challenges go hand in hand.

Research is mounting to support the theory that chronic inflammation coexists with, and may be a root cause of, depression and other issues labeled as psychological, psychiatric, or emotionally based. The sudden turn of mood I had as my inflammation levels rose reflects this directly. I like to think of this as my body’s cry for help through the translator of my brain. Processwork might call it the dreambody.

When you experience inflammation—which can be caused by diet, stress, injury, microbiome imbalances, chronic or acute infection, toxic overload, medications, allergies, and more—your body feels,

“Ack, something’s not right, something’s overwhelming, we can’t get this pathogen or injury or perceived intruder under control! Red alert, red alert!”

and sends that signal to your brain. Often, you brain then has thoughts that match your body’s experience, just like mine did.

It’s important to work on the thoughts so they don’t spiral out of control, so you don’t mistake them for the whole truth, and so you can process any underlying traumas or patterns that are fanning the flames. A skilled health coach, therapist, counselor, hypnotherapist, or other mental health or mindset-based practitioner can help you do that with care and intention. However, new thought patterns might not stick if the body’s needs aren’t met. In fact, I would say they shouldn’t yet stick because the body’s message hasn’t been heard and integrated.

Change works both ways—healing the body changes the mind, and healing the mind changes the body. They’re not separate entities. It’s important to explore the mental, emotional, social, and spiritual components of a particular health challenge. Don’t just ask what’s wrong with your body, ask: what is the body trying to say about my inner life? Real healthcare assumes wholeness. It’s all one process.

2. Cultivating health is an ongoing practice, not a situational reaction.

I take care of myself all the time, not just when I suddenly fall ill. I take care of my mental and emotional state, my sleep hygiene, and my stress resiliency every day of the week. I am confident that the adaptogenic (stress-resiliency) herbs I use daily helped me bounce back much faster from this bout with the virus than if I just took herbs, vitamins, and medications for an acute illness and nothing else. Having those herbal supports in the background all the time feels like wearing a life jacket—it’s there for me whether the sea is calm or rough, even if I’m a good swimmer.

Health is not a static state of perfection reflected by an absence of illness. Health is resiliency. Health is responsiveness to what’s happening in the moment. Health is getting knocked down and being able to pop back up. Health is knowing when to stay down and rest, listen, and restore yourself before popping back up. Health is learning and growing and receiving the communications of the body when she sends symptoms as archetypal messengers. Health is an ongoing process that you create with your long-term habits, not short-term reactions. I am recovering from COV*D and, even though I feel under the weather right now, I am healthy.

To our throw-away culture, to our quick-fix culture, to our disconnected-from-nature-and-body culture, to our polarized culture, to our antibiotic instead of pre-and-pro-biotic culture, to our product-not-process-oriented culture, the idea of health as a process is as foreign as living on the moon. You might be familiar with the idea of preventative healthcare, but it's often presented as a method of scouting for danger: get that mammogram, that colonoscopy, that skin cancer screening and you’ll be safe. It’s still reactive.

What about what you put into your body and mind every day?

Do you have a sense of purpose in life?

Are you eating food filled with lifeforce, that came from the earth?

Are your relationships supportive?

Do you cultivate good digestion and healthy cells in every part of your body by collaborating with the healing herbs?

Do you honor your body’s natural rhythms?

What about listening to the spirits of the plants?

Do you tend to your dreams?

These things are preventative healthcare because health is not a state of reactivity, it’s a state of responsive, systemic, multi-dimensional collaborative intelligence. When you work with me on health-related goals, I’m interested in health as a function of your whole self, not the sum of your parts. I’m interested in your health as a resilient, adaptive process. I’m interested in what you feel called to do, from deep within yourself, to support your sense of wholeness. I'm interested in the process that is you.