Health is a composite of everything that we are.

Let me rephrase that. Let’s use the analogy of making bread to describe health.

Everything we think and say and do goes into a big spiritual mixer and gets mixed up like bread dough. Whatever is in that dough determines what the bread is like when we bake it. It can have too much yeast, it can fall during the proofing process. It can be fluffy and light and marvelous coming out of the oven. Or it can be dense and have pockets of air when we slice through the loaf.

It all depends on what we throw into the mixer.

Health is much more than our physical condition. It is also a reflection of everything thing that we are at any given moment – including our physical condition – and it changes constantly.

What we think about is critical because we now know from Quantum physics that when we focus our attention on something we actually affect what we focus on. We literally change the world around us
and create the world that ‘we are thinking’. Eastern mysticism has been saying the same thing for centuries.

So it is important that we pay close attention to WHAT we think about and HOW we think.

Our emotions play a big role in our health as well. Recently I read that our emotions are the primary tool God uses to communicate with us. For the vast majority of us earthlings, emotions are complicated. Generally, we associate deep feelings and emotions with FEELING PAIN – something we want to avoid.

This is rooted in our experiences as children. We are taught, in most cases, fairly early on that when we allow ourselves to feel deep emotions and when we feel that is where we get hurt. So as a culture, most of us run from emotions and have a tendency to shut them down or deny them because it is safer – and definitely simpler.

What I have learned over many years is that avoiding emotions is the worst way to handle them because unexpressed emotions are the ones that make us sick. They accumulate in the body and get ‘stuck’ if they are not expressed. Year after year they accumulate and in time they become toxic and painful almost like an infection. While we may not be aware of it on a conscious level, these emotions are constantly nagging at us to let them out. Emotions want to be expressed. In time, this turns into physical pain and manifests itself as ‘illness’ or DISease. Notice the word, it really means not-ease.

I heard a definition of emotion by a very tuned in lady in 1984. She said emotions are energy in motion and spelled it this way: E-motion.

Emotions are powerful tools and empower us to really feel and experience the greatest aspects of our lives fully and to feel LOVE to it’s intended depth and capacity. And if they really are the way God talks to us, it seems like we better figure out how to use and understand emotions effectively – just in case we miss something really important.

Aside from the spiritual aspect, which is actually an integral part of balanced health, we need to express our emotions or they will make us sick. And if we have a lot of them bottled up inside of us, it’s a good idea to get them out and clean out the “toxin” they have become.

Energetic health is critical to everything and yet it is probably the most misunderstood aspect of health from the perspective of western scientists, researchers and allopathic medical practitioners (although this is starting to change to some degree).

The Chinese call life energy CHI (QI) and refer to the energy pathways in the body as meridians, or channel chi meridians. East Indians refer to the “chakras” and the energy body. While Western medicine is still waking up – and/or in denial entirely, I can tell you from personal experience that not only are the meridians real, balancing energy, storage and refinement of energy is the real key to good health and longevity.

Spiritual balance is a big piece of the pie. And I am not talking about a particular religion or religious practice. I am talking about becoming spiritual, developing a spiritual awareness and aligning with that part of yourself deep within that knows the truth. It is getting good at remembering your connection to God.

In that context, whatever religious perspective you have, everyone should meditate. It is a key component for health and has a direct and profound influence on so many aspects of health that it could be the subject of an entire book or library.

Health is also the reflection of our physical condition. What we eat, how much we eat, how we take care of our body in all capacities – including exercise, removing toxins, rejuvenation, replenishment, and relaxation – all makes a difference.

Financial health is important in today’s world. Lack of money is the greatest destroyer of marriage today. It create stress, worry and a multitude of problems and most of us are raised with an inaccurate money consciousness. Most of us are taught a poverty consciousness. So part of real health in the 21st century includes recreating our (as Harv Eker calls it) MONEY BLUEPRINT.

To recap, according to my way of thinking and the way I describe it in my book, Healthy Wealthy Boomer: The Plan to Make the 2nd Fifty Years Better Than the 1st, true health is a balance of the:

• Physical
• Mental
• Emotional
• Spiritual
• Energetic
• Financial

aspects of our lives.

Physical health is the real starting point because if we don’t feel good when we get up in the morning, it’s a really poor way to start each day and to live our lives. The body is very tolerant and also very resilient. You can choose health or not, it’s up to you.

Abundance is the true default of the universe – abundant LOVE, prosperity, joy and health. It is our job to remember that we deserve and have the right to manifest everything we want in our life and that we are worthy.

We were designed to be healthy and the universe wants us to have abundant joyful lives in all aspects. Feeling good every day and vibrant health is our right.

I’m serious about making my life everything I want it to be. Right now, I’m working on the 7 Steps to Manifesting the Life of Your Dreams, it’s a free course, it fun and it’s helping me. I recommend you do the same thing. Find out about Manifest Mastermind and build the life you want including amazing health. It teaches you how to use the Law of Attraction to get whatever you want in your life.

It’s not too late for Baby Boomers to change our health and our lives.

Opening the heart chakra changes your life – no doubt about that. Sometimes I wish I had never learned anything about energy and the heart chakra - ignorance is bliss and much simpler.

Because…

Opening and expanding is always exciting but it’s also a double edged sword. The more you feel, the more you feel – more joy AND more pain. Being totally vulnerable and allowing a heightened depth of understanding and sensitivity can be a very dangerous place to be.

Pain without defense means it cuts deep and efficiently to the core. Without a reason, there is no need for a defense to be in place and we let our guard down and it’s easy not to see it coming – kind of a double whammi. No wonder many people never allow themselves to open up or let people get too close.

I have a high pain threshold – physically, quite high actually. But I had forgotten how much a pain in my heart can make it hard to breathe, buckle my knees or make me too weak to make make a fist.

Vulnerability is one thing, but I hate being weak.

Being deeply in love, expressing gratitude for it every day and fully appreciating its depth, taught me to forget that kind of pain for a long time.

From a spiritual cost benefit analysis perspective, isn’t it easier not to open the heart chakra this deeply in the first place?  Is the cost really worth the benefit?

Yet loving that deeply – even for a split second – may be worth it. After all, it is irreplaceable. People search an entire lifetime for this kind of love and to some degree doesn’t rarity define value in and of itself ?

I have spent most of my adult life learning how to express my emotions and allowing myself to be vulnerable. At the same time, if it were possible just to reformat and restore all the old blissful ignorance defaults and select the “remain ignorant” option from the drop down list, I might make that choice and live out life on autopilot.

Does this mean that Spiritual growth has to be painful? Does it mean that it is painful because I do not have enough Spiritual purity?

I think not.

There is no elegant way to feel pain. We always heal – mostly – with enough time. But the possibility occurs to me that since feeling true joy is such a vulnerable way to live,  it makes an open heart chakra kind of a scary prospect .

Maybe I don’t want to be that open. Maybe I’m afraid to really let go again.

That’s a weird thought – one I’ve never had before.

The problem is that you definitely can never go back once you start growing. Even so, every choice we make determines what happens in our life. We can always choose how we grow and how we integrate what we learn, unless we are in denial about that truth and choose to deny it.

In the short term, denial is an easier choice. But in the long run, denial is neither easy nor sustainable. The longer we hold it, the more energy it takes. Denial also tends to be a very selfish act because it leaves out how other people feel when your deny their true expression of love by not loving your self enough.

Yes everything happens for a reason and ultimately everything is in Divine order.

In any case,  you can not close your heart chakra once it opens. You can only choose to deny your true feelings and choose separation.

I moved this post to:

http://askmichaelbarrett.com/2009/02/14/happy-valentines-day-a-poem-by-michael-barrett/

Happy Valentine’s Day…