In Sickness and In Health

So my lungs are on fire, it hurts to breathe, and the only way I can avoid being a mouth-breather is to keep a supply of wasabi peas nearby.  I opened my mouth to speak this morning and some guy’s gravelly voice came out.  Most cold medications, even in the correct dosage, make me high; the only thing that worked was Buckley’s and they’ve taken it off the market.  So I’m walking around with wasabi peas.

In general, I don’t do “sick.”  There was the bout with cancer over a decade ago, and I remember saying then “but I don’t even catch colds!”  I might get the sniffles if I don’t fully dry my hair after a swim, and lying down with a wet head when the temperature is under 40 gives me a kinda sore throat.  But all of that is dis-ease, the state of one’s body being out of its natural rhythm.  It does not escape me that the current dis-ease that’s come upon me is the direct result of that:  I haven’t been working out consistently, and have pretty much abandoned my largely plant-based, generally healthy diet for the typical American suicide food. 

I want to be clear here:  when I'm eating and exercising properly, I can swim 3-4 nights a week, go out into freezing weather with my wet hair stuffed under a cap, and the most that happens is I get the sniffles.  I fail to work out and eat properly for about a month, and suddenly I can't breathe through my nose, my lungs are on fire, I'm tired and achy and alternating sweats with chills.... You do the math.

Because I know what I’ve gotta do.  As a matter of fact, the first thing I did today was to go on my neighborhood stroll – I’d had a 1 pm meeting which needed to be rescheduled, then had like four mini-meetings before I got out of the house.  During my two mile stroll, I had a couple more, then I forced myself to make the rounds of some of my buildings, and now I’m in the office.  Still can’t breathe properly, but getting the body back into its natural function of movement is good.

Our organization provides services to people with mental, physical, emotional, and/or health challenges, and we serve a population that traditionally has had very limited access to healthcare.  I’m painfully aware of how dis-ease and unhealthy living impact quality and quantity of life.  No matter how sick we may be, we are in these earthen vessels, these temples of the soul, that are our bodies.  If we were to treat them (both our bodies and our souls) with the same care and reverence with which we treat, for example, our homes or our physical possessions, I can’t help but believe this world would be a better place.  If I’m eating toxic food every day, if I’m not moving my body to circulate the toxins of this industrial world out of that body, then the toxins remain and can’t help but manifest themselves in my body and, more often than not, in my spirit.

(As a side note, it just kills me to worship/fellowship/embrace a culture that says it loves God but makes no allowances for the wellbeing of the temples that house God’s Spirit among individuals.  But I’ve always been a little weird.)

I see a lot of sickness, a lot of dis-ease, in the physical and spiritual realms, all around me.  It’s been my privilege to know, work with, and/or be exposed to some visionaries who routinely lead their congregations in acts of prayer and fasting; my thought is that this should be a regular, routine, proactive measure for EVERYONE.  In the late 70s, I trained as a martial artist.  The focus was on wholistic living, integration of mind, body, and spirit.  While I lacked sufficient discipline to completely embrace the lifestyle forever, some things did stick.  I learned way back then that: human anatomy isn’t really designed for consumption or digestion of animal products; and regular fasting (2-3  days a month) can have unbelievable metabolic benefits.  Again, I did not embrace the lifestyle completely;  I’m an unapologetic omnivore, but routinely spend from 30-365 day periods abstaining from meat.  Fasting one day a month is no longer something about which I’m intentional; my body has gotten to the point where there are intervals when it simply doesn’t want food.  Thankfully, my body also knows what foods it needs, and I’ve learned that when I have odd cravings, it’s likely because there’s some sort of deficiency in my body.

Don’t get me wrong.   I’m a big believer in Western medicine.  I just think that when it’s laid atop a foundation of proper movement and healthy eating, that it becomes more effective.  Given the many unhealthy behaviors in which I’ve engaged over the years (routinely ceasing food intake, for instance, did not stop me from becoming morbidly obese), I cannot help but believe that this foundation of regularly cleansing my insides played some part in our being able to successfully fight off the cancer that later attacked.  I'm not saying wholistic living cures cancer. I'm saying that having developed a healthy baseline and adhering to it for years quite possibly made the difference between life and death, EVEN THOUGH I TEMPORARILY ABANDONED IT.

So this has kinda wandered around, but the bottom line is that we all get one body, and we get to determine how we use it.  Not everyone is physically able to do a five-mile walk, but each of us is able to challenge ourselves, to push past what we thought were our limits, and to journey on towards wholeness, and to a spiritual and physical stability that abides with us, in sickness and in health.