I love writing these articles! The creative process is a fascinating thing, entirely non-linear and often unexpected. I am always being surprised by what comes up from spirit. Sometimes I run across a vein of information that opens up like a flower, and keeps developing new petals of information, new tendrils that turn out to be blooms of the same vine, and then I get into a series of articles where I thought there was only one.
This occurred when I wrote about Susumu Hashimoto and Mokichi Okada and Natural Farming. The response to that article was generous and included thoughts from readers that led me to write an article about Machaelle Small Wright and cooperating with nature. Coincidentally, I saw an ad for an upcoming TV show which led me to write about Fritz Haeg, his attack on the front lawn and his Edible Estates. That article in turn led Penny Kelly to send me her book, From the Soil to the Stomach: Understanding the Connection between the Earth and your Health.
Reading her excellent book, I realized I wanted to share with you some background she offers in that book which makes it very clear why my strong feeling that living the Law of One involves reconnecting with nature at a personal level in some physical way - like having a front-yard garden, or creating a bio-dynamic farm as we are trying to do at Avalon – makes good sense for all of us today.
Kelly is basically a healer, trained as a doctor of naturopathy. She offers her information in order to give us the tools we need to heal ourselves. I will divide her information into five parts – stress, the soil, the trees, water and nutrition. And Penny, thank you so much for this book! It’s a dandy! It is available from Amazon: From The Soil To The Stomach.
As Kelly says in her introductory words,
“Hardly anyone understands the devastating physiological effects of stress and thus they tend to discount the necessity of eliminating stressors, especially if it’s a wife, a child or a job.”
I think it’s very true that we tend to discount the evils of stress. Of course we know that stress is bad. But if we have a difficult or demanding relationship or job, we may well feel – as I have been known to do in the past – that we still need to hew to that relationship or do that job, regardless of its effects on us. When someone or some good cause needs us, it is hard to put into place the boundaries that relieve us from that stress.
However, as Kelly says on page 204,
“We have forgotten what peacefulness is like because our lives are so stressful. Lots of people think stress is just another vague mood but it’s not. Stress is a series of physiological changes in the body. These changes are disastrous over time.”
Kelly goes on to detail this series of changes. Paraphrasing her far more comprehensive explanation, this series consists in:
Stage One: Alarm. When something triggers or stresses us, the “fight or flight” mechanism goes into full swing.
Stage Two: Resistance. Chemicals are released into our blood stream to help us to deal with fighting or fleeing.
Stage Three: Exhaustion. The released chemicals are used up. The body gives up.
Stage Four: Death. The body, taxed beyond its ability to respond, experiences organs or systems failing and perishes.
Most of us have good coping mechanisms in place to deal with stress, such as meditation, prayer, hard physical exercise or time spent in nature. We interrupt Stage Two in mid fight/flight and get our minds and emotions back to a fairly even keel. By doing this as often as it is needed, we limp along, even if we have chronic stress, managing to pull back from the full exhaustion of our body’s resources. We regain our perspective and we keep on keeping on.
Generally, however, we are not dealing with the underlying defenses our bodies need to help us to live life as healthy people. These defense systems depend upon good nutrition, and that is where this series of articles will end up, after we wend our way through the fascinating, and concerning, information Kelly puts forth.
But for this article, let us remain focused on stress. Because, as Kelly says on page 205,
“If you spend any amount of time in stress, not only will you exhaust your endocrine system and your immune system, you will suffer nutritionally simply because the processes of digestion shut down during stress. All the nutrients you put into yourself are wasted because they are not absorbed and thus their healing effects are not enjoyed.”
I have been told over and over again by healers that my foods are not being properly absorbed by my body. As I live a peaceful and joyful life, I have wondered why. Kelly suggests that the physical discomfort I experience daily is, in itself, stressful. So I can begin to see at least part of why I am not absorbing my food and getting the good from it, even though I always cook with organic foods.
Kelly goes on to say,
“During periods of stress it is difficult to sleep because your endocrine system is too exhausted to produce serotonin or melatonin. Your creative abilities suffer because the downshifting of the brain from cortical to limbic functions [two different parts of the brain, the cerebral cortex, which controls balance and muscle movement, and the limbus, which controls emotion] leaves you without access to the great creative abilities of the frontal lobes of the cortex. This leaves you dull, foggy and fatigued, and interferes with your ability to see clearly what is happening around you. Thus intelligence, decision-making and energetic action remain just out of reach.”
The information in the above quote in brackets, by the way, is mine, added because I had to look up cortical and limbic, and wanted to save you having to do so too.
Knowing how important the Confederation’s channeled material says that it is that we use our frontal lobes – part of the cortical system – I feel that this information is crucial for us to understand. Stress creates various emotional responses in us, most of which are negative and all of which take us from insight to fuzziness, logic to illogic and alertness to fatigue. We become too weary to care.
Kelly says, further, that at first, she felt that her illness – she had rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia – was due to her thinking. She asked herself that New Age question, “Why do I want to be ill?” Ultimately, she saw, through her research, that she did not want to be ill at all. She simply lacked the tools to keep her body from being ill.
This was a breakthrough for her. She stopped blaming herself and realized that we do not think ourselves sick – not exactly. But there is thinking involved. She says,
“If we think we can eat foods with no nutrition in them… if we think we can spray pesticides and other extremely poisonous chemicals on our foods… if we think we can manufacture food instead of eating the foods Nature has produced for us to eat… if we think we can lead lives of great stress and dismiss that stress as a mere emotional figment… if we think we can cover up the early warning signs of physical degeneration with drugs… then we are going to end up creating nightmarish diseases that we will have to deal with or die.”
I hope that you will stay with me for the next few articles. Neither she nor I intends to be a buzz-kill! Do not let this information bring you down. Rather, let it give you the tools you need to do what you can to turn this around for yourself and for our hurting world.
I looked back over L/L Research’s archive of channelings and found one, dated September 17, 1989, which concerns stress. The Q’uo group’s advice on stress is worth sharing here.
One thing they recommend is maintaining at all costs your sense of humor:
“Stress must not get in the way of the light touch, the merry joke, the smile, the grin, the laughter, the good times. That is your true nature. You are all children of the Creator, and the Creator is love and joy, merriment and peace.
“Therefore, it is a matter of shifting the point of view from gazing at a stressful situation and realizing that it is stressful to gazing at the same situation and asking the self confidently, serenely and surely, ‘What may I do to be part of the good that is occurring upon the planet at this time? What service may I perform?’
“Many times you find that the only service you have been asked to perform is that service of preparing the personality with the discipline of the free will so that one is not at the beck and call of one’s emotions, that is, the surface emotions of the uninformed and mystery-clad being, but, rather, [that one] moves from the deeper source that is the heart and the spirit.”
Another aspect of stress upon which Q’uo comments is noise:
“The noise level of your society is stressful. We note that particularly because of the fondness that your culture has for the gadgets: the television, the video games, the armchair watching of others competing like gladiators. The noise beats against the serene and quiet mind and creates a cluttered mental landscape in which one finds it difficult to think clearly because one’s attention is scattered, one eye upon the television, one eye upon one’s empty stomach, another eye upon the consumer world.”
One final quote from this session will sum Q’uo’s thoughts up:
“We would not be a stumbling block to you and add stress to your stress by giving a long list of things which one must do to relieve stress. It is basically a pulling back of the point of view. The longer the point of view, the clearer the challenges of loving other people without expectation of return become.
“That is the simple heart of living a less stressful life, becoming confident of your role within this illusion, this dance which you dance, for a fleeting moment, a parenthesis in eternity. To realize that you are eternal, imperishable and one with the Creator, to affirm that, to give praise for that, to give thanks for your blessings—these are things which take seconds but which may turn the mood completely.”
I open my arms and embrace your spirit. I join you in the dance we share with all imperishable beings, and in giving thanks for being one with you all and for living in a universe of love.