Imagine a bold horizontal line running across this page. Let’s call this line “zero”. Below this line is every imaginable health problem you could ever face, from colds to cancer. As you sink deeper below the line, the health problems worsen, becoming more life threatening.
Above the line is increasing health. As you go higher, your health improves. You have more energy, greater vitality, a greater sense of well-being and more and more feelings of being connected to yourself and others. Everything just seems to flow in your life.
Now, where do you want to be on that scale? As high as possible above the line, right? Yet, if you’re like most people that I meet in my office on an average day, you will tend to view your health simply as the absence of symptoms…in other words, living at “zero.”
Most people, I have observed, are satisfied if they have nothing particular bothering them at the moment. They become aware of their health only when it becomes a problem, when it dips below zero. The further down it dips, the more they long for the “good old days” of zero, when they were hovering just above poor health…believing they were well!
Many people will take drugs in an effort to stay above the line. Everything from pain killers to Prozac is an attempt to hover at zero. Drug companies have made billions of dollars perpetuating the myth that their products can somehow lead to true health.
But in most cases the best they can get you to is … zero.
Drugs can be enormously helpful in getting past a crisis situation and I thank God that we have them for that purpose. But getting past a crisis has little to do with optimal health; with extraordinary vitality; with a sense of peace and connection. To achieve that, we’ll need a different plan.
We, as a culture, are in need of a paradigm shift when it comes to health. The view of health as “not being sick” is deeply ingrained in our collective psyche and perpetuated daily by the medical and pharmaceutical industries.
Remember the ad a couple of years ago of the guy that dances out of his house, smiling and humming a happy tune? Takes a few steps, jumps over his mailbox and sashays down the street?
Wow! That sounds just like the description of extraordinary health and well being I gave earlier. What’s his secret? The answer flashes on the TV screen: Viagra.
Wouldn’t it be great if that were true? That all we need to do is take a pill and everything would be perfect? I’m no idiot…sign me up!
I have even better news. The source of extraordinary health and well being is even closer than your neighborhood drugstore: it’s already inside you. All you need to do is tap into it. There are many, many ways to do that, but that’s for another article. For now, consider that there may be more to health than you have been taught. There may be more to life than living at zero.
