Are You Attracting Health or Disease?

Even after its passage and partial implementation, the new healthcare law (ObamaCare) remains highly controversial.  This is because many people doubt it will actually fix the fundamental problems that plague our healthcare system. Consider the following facts:

Americans spend more money on health care than any other nation on the face of the planet (over 15% of our entire nation’s expenditures). While we comprise only 5% of the world’s population, half of all the drug prescriptions in the world are taken by Americans.

This wouldn’t be so bad if we were the healthiest nation on the planet, but we aren’t. A report by the World Health Organization in 2000 ranked the U.S. 37th out of 190 nations in health care services. France was rated No. 1.

In terms of life expectancy, America ranks 42nd.  Just two decades ago we ranked 11th. Experts tell us that American life expectancy is decreasing and our children won’t live as long as we will.  France, Spain and Japan rank first, second and third for life expectancy, and they all spend less money on health care than we do. What's wrong with this picture?

More than 1.7 million Americans die of chronic diseases each year. Chronic disease accounts for about 70% of all deaths in the United States. Most of these deaths are caused by three diseases—heart disease, cancer and diabetes. These diseases aren’t just caused by old age, either. They are striking younger and younger people every year.

To make the situation even worse, the American medical system has one of the worst track records for making mistakes of any health care system in the world. Medical mistakes are ranked as the 6th leading cause of death, and that’s just the information that gets reported.

It is my opinion that socializing our health care system will not improve things because the core problem is not a financial or administrative one.  The real issue goes much deeper.  Simply put, we don’t have a HEALTH-care system in the first place; we have a DISEASE-care system.

Although I have some issues with the idea that our thoughts create our life, I do believe that what we focus on in our thoughts eventually manifests itself.  Most people focus too much on what they don't like, what they don't want and what they are against.  Positive thinking is thinking about what you do like, what you do want and what you are for.  So, let's look at our health care system in light of this idea to see why people never completely heal when they don’t “get it” and shift their consciousness to those things that create genuine health.

Positive Thinking Basics

As I explain in my book, The Heart's Key to Health, Happiness and Success, God doesn’t need any help enforcing his laws. It is simply impossible to disobey them. You couldn’t do it if you tried. Just try to disobey the law of gravity. Step off a cliff and fall up. I dare you! (Wait!  Let me take that back because someone might accept my dare and I’m not interested in being sued when they hit the bottom and are injured or killed.)

We call laws like the law of gravity laws of nature, because they simply express “how it is” or “the way things are.” Nature’s laws, which I see as God’s laws, are the ultimate answer to the child’s question, “Why?” If you keep answering a child’s “why?” long enough, you’ll ultimately come to the place where the only thing you can say is, “Because that’s the way it is.”

Well, I believe there is an equally unbreakable law that governs the intangible aspects of our life (relationships, finances, health, etc.). You can’t disobey it. It goes by many names, one of them is the law of attraction. It’s also called the law of the harvest (“as you sow, so shall you reap”) or the law of karma. It’s expressed in a variety of religious teachings and is now even being talked about by physicists. The movie, What the Bleep? Do We Know?, discusses how quantum physics is validating this law.

This law states that our outer reality is shaped by our inner experience. It says that there is no “objective” world out there that is making us think and feel certain things. What’s really happening is that our own thinking, feeling and actions are creating our experience of the objective world.

Our consciousness, which involves mind, spirit (or heart) and body, expresses itself through thought, feeling and action. The combined energy of our thoughts, feelings and actions is sending forth a vibration that is attracting people and experiences to us. This is the basic idea of the law of attraction.

It’s an odd idea when you’re first exposed to it, but if you can open your eyes and your mind and really look at the world around you, you will see abundant evidence that this is true. Why are some people accident prone, when others rarely have accidents? How is it that some people form great relationships all the time, while others can’t get a date to save their lives? Why do some people struggle with finances, while other people can make millions, go bankrupt, and then make millions again?

We all invent reasons in our minds to explain why this is so. We tell ourselves things like, “They’re just more intelligent (or creative, attractive, blessed or lucky) than I am,” while each time we repeat the same pattern of accidents, failure, financial disappointment, heartache or whatever negative pattern we’re stuck in, we say “See, this always happens to me!”

Well, the law of the harvest says that all the reasons we give ourselves to explain why something outside of ourselves is causing our unhappiness and lack of success aren’t true! We are attracting both our successes and our failures by what is inside ourselves. Most people express this idea as, “You create your own reality.” I think it is more correctly stated as, “You create your own delusions (or illusions, if you prefer)!”

When I first contemplated this, I really didn’t like the idea. You mean to say that I’m responsible for all this material released by the consumption of cascara sagrada in my life!? (An inside joke for herbalists only. If you don’t get it, ask an herbalist to explain it to you.) You see, if I’m responsible for this stuff that keeps happening to me over and over again, then I can’t blame it on my parents, my ex-partners, my circumstances, the Devil or even God. That means I can’ t indulge in the drug of self-pity and enjoy the little “hit” I get when I tell my woes to someone and they express sympathy for me or join me in blaming the “bad” guys (or gals) that did this to me (poor victim that I am).

Playing the victim is a great role because it absolves you of responsibility for your life, but it’s also a lousy role because it means you can’t change anything about your life. You’re “locked in" to trying to change everyone and everything around you so you can “be happy.” Unfortunately, God only gave you the power to change one person’s life and that’s your own, so when you place the responsibility for your life, happiness and success on others, your life is completely out of control.

If you can break out of your self-pity syndrome and embrace the law of the harvest, you will discover the power to change your life from the inside out.  While we can’t stop being a magnet that attracts people and circumstances into our life (any more than we can escape the law of gravity), we can change the polarity of what’s inside of us from negative to positive and attract more positive experiences and fewer negative ones.

It’s Not Just about Thinking

Now, the way the law of attraction usually gets explained is that our thoughts create our life. So, we are encouraged to “think positively.” I think it's more complex than this.

For starters, if you’ve ever tried to monitor your thoughts, you will notice that numerous positive and negative thoughts are passing through your brain all the time. If you seriously believe that every time you have a negative thought you’re attracting bad things into your life, you’ll drive yourself insane with worry anytime you have a negative thought.

Fortunately, the law of attraction is based on consciousness, not on thinking. In fact, the scripture that is often quoted to back up discussion of the law of attraction doesn’t say, “As a man thinketh in his head so is he.” It says, “As he [a man] thinketh in his HEART so is he.” This suggests that the attracting power has more to do with what’s in our emotions or spirit than it does with what is in our head.

I believe, however, that what we attract is rooted in consciousness, which involves thinking, feeling and choices (actions).  Still, the basic idea is that whatever we give our energy to (thought, feeling and action), we eventually create.  So, if we’re giving our energy to something we don’t want by thinking about it, feeling badly about it and spending our time fighting against or resisting it, we attract more of it into our lives.

I don’t have space here to go into detail about all of this because I’ve got to move onto the second part of this article. But you can learn more about these ideas by reading my book, The Heart's Key to Health, Happiness and Success.

How to Attract Health

When you understand the principles of the law of harvest (or the law of attraction) and how our consciousness creates our reality, you begin to understand why our modern disease-care system doesn’t work. First, what do most people focus on?  Disease.  They think about their diseases, they worry about their diseases, and they spend time fighting their diseases.

I know this because after I've given a lecture on how to make the body healthy, people will always line up and ask me how to “cure” this or that. The idea of treating disease is so firmly entrenched in their minds, that they haven’t really heard what I was saying.

The fear most people have surrounding disease (and dying) drives them to make choices based on that fear. One of the principles of the law of attraction is that when we act out of fear we attract more of what we fear. I just finished a book on Native American healing traditions, and one of the things I learned was that the medicine man, or shaman, was supposed to overcome his fear of disease and death and only then could he fearlessly approach the sick and dying and actually help them.

If the law of attraction is true, and we attract more of what we fear, resist and attack, it’s no wonder that modern medicine is so fraught with side effects! The entire system is rooted in fear and based on a “war” model—attacking disease, fighting infection, killing cancer and so forth.

Unfortunately, when most people first get involved in natural healing, they bring this mind set with them. I find it interesting to see how much of what people do, even in natural health care, is motivated by fear. For instance, I see people who are terrified of environmental toxins and are constantly worried about their exposure to them. I also see people who are terrified of various foods, saying things like, “meat is poisonous” and “milk is poisonous.” This fear and fight mentality also carries over into their constant attacks on modern medicine, the FDA, and all the other axis of evil-doers out to ruin their health. Unfortunately, this puts them into the same attraction pattern that their “enemies” have and creates more conflict, disharmony and ultimately ill health.

Fighting disease will never create health. Likewise, attacking doctors and the FDA will not improve the health of the world. If you watch The Secret you’ll learn that declaring war on something creates more of it. If you want to create something positive, you have to focus your energy on what you want, not what you don’t want.

The only difference between positive and negative thinking is this— negative thinking is focusing your attention on what you don’t want, and positive thinking is focusing your attention on what you do want. Either way, the law of attraction says you will get more of what you focus on in your life.

So, how do we change this pattern?  Michael Losier, author of The Law of Attraction talks about our magic reset button. The magic reset button is a question we ask ourselves when we find ourselves focusing on what we don’t want. The question is, “So, what do I want?” This means, that we can stop asking questions like:

How do I cure my disease?
How do I reduce my stress?
How do I relieve my pain?
How do I get rid of my cancer?

Instead, we should be asking questions like:

How do I help my body heal?
How can I feel more relaxed? How can I feel good?
How can I support my immune system?
How can I become healthier?

By changing the focus from what we don’t want to what we do want, we switch from a disease-care system to a health-care system—and this is what we really need.

The beautiful thing about focusing on health care instead of disease care is that we can help people with simple things. It makes the job of helping people get started on supplements much easier, because there are certain basic things that can help the body overcome many of the chronic health problems prevalent in our society.

A Basic Health Care System

Start your health care system by upgrading your food choices. It’s not that hard to start eating more whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables and other healthy foods.

Enjoy regular physical activity. You don’t have to go to the gym—just get up off the couch and take a walk, go dancing, or participate in some other activity that gets you moving.

Get a good night’s sleep.  Most people are getting short-changed on sleep, and the body needs sleep in order to heal itself.  A little R&R (rest and relaxation) also goes a long way in helping the body to heal.

Drink more water.  Much of our pain and sickness comes from being dehydrated. Water and deep breathing alone can do wonders to ease pain and increase energy.

Instead of relying so much on drugs that merely manage the symptoms of disease, consider taking a few supplements that might actually improve your health. Most people benefit from taking high quality multi-vitamins, antioxidants, omega-3 essential fatty acids, dietary fiber and minerals.

A high quality multi-vitamin and mineral supplement can be thought of as a nutritional health insurance policy. It’s a way to make sure that you’re getting most of the major nutrients your body needs even when you’re diet is less than perfect. NSP’s Super Supplemental is a good choice. I personally prefer a whole food supplement like GreenZone, however.

As more and more research demonstrates that chronic diseases like heart disease, cancer, dementia and arthritis are linked to free radical damage and chronic inflammation, the importance of antioxidants in the diet is becoming firmly established. The primary source for these nutrients is fresh fruits and vegetables, which is why many experts say that the best way to protect yourself from chronic diseases is to eat 7-9 servings of fresh fruits and vegetables every day. Since few people do this, taking an antioxidant supplement is the next best thing. A good antioxidant supplement can reduce pain and inflammation, promote faster healing and overall health, slow the aging process, and help prevent chronic disease.

Omega-3 essential fatty acids are lacking in modern diets, yet they are essential for cardiovascular health and managing inflammation and pain. If you want to protect your heart and blood vessels or if you are suffering from any kind of chronic inflammatory disease, you may want to consider adding omega-3 to your diet.

There are a few other supplements that one might consider. For example, fiber is lacking in most diets and is necessary for bowel health. Fiber can reduce cholesterol, improve blood sugar levels in diabetes and protect against colon cancer and other diseases of the intestinal tract. I personally like the combination of psyllum hulls and freshly ground flax seeds.

The bowel also benefits from probiotic supplements, which replace the friendly bacteria in the colon that are destroyed by antibiotics, chlorinated water and many drugs. These friendly bacteria are essential to the function of the immune system and help prevent bacterial, fungal and yeast infections, as well as make certain nutrients available to the body. Many people find a probiotic supplement very helpful, but eating naturally-fermented foods is even better.

Speaking of the digestive tract, raw and naturally fermented foods contain enzymes that take stress off the digestive tract. Since most of us eat little raw food, a good enzyme supplement can improve digestion, prevent gas and bloating, enhance immune function, and even reduce inflammation and pain.

Finally, modern agricultural methods have depleted mineral content in our foods, so most of us aren’t getting the trace minerals we need—even if we’re eating healthy foods. This is why a trace mineral supplement can be beneficial for many people.

It’s time we stopped thinking in terms of disease care and start creating a genuine health care system in our lives. It’s something that neither the medical profession or the government can do for us. Let’s change our focus from disease to health—it’s really the only way to attract what we really want.