I want to share a brief thought on health…When it comes to our overall health, we need to examine our relationship to stress.  Keely A Muscatel says the body has an immune response to stress—the cytokines of a stressful situation can cause an immune/stress response in the body simply by thought.  An otherwise physically healthy person will feel depressed and down when put in a stressful situation.  The brain tells the body to shut down. This is why it’s so important to manage our relationship to stress. It isn’t just about a heightened emotional state, our body responds to it. This means that our mental state is indeed responsible for some of the issues we have with our bodies.  Some scenarios are out of our control while others we need to be more cognizant of our role in it or our choice to participate.  The bottom line is there is physiological evidence that our thoughts impact the body.  If a thought can inspire action, it can also inspire internal discord on a chemical level.  The body believes what the brain tells it, so we need to be very careful in what we tell our bodies.    

We can’t be at war with our minds—we need to learn to make peace with them, we need to learn to honor them, and we need to learn to respect them.  The brain is the most powerful supercomputer in the world.  For so long we thought we were at the mercy of a series of impulses or that we needed to fight to survive—and for millennia we did.  Now we can take the time to understand more of the intricacies of how we function and the impact of our mental state on the body.  If we seek to improve ourselves physically, we need to master ourselves mentally.  We don’t want our bodies to shut down, we want them to thrive so they can fulfill our purpose. The more we manage those impulses, the more we can manage our reactions and relationship to things going on around us.  Don’t create more stress by allowing thoughts to run rampant, spend time each day working to mitigate and manage what goes through our minds.  Ask how our relationship to stress is impacting our health.  Is it something we can alter and adjust?  Always.  We just need to be honest about how.