Excerpted from a series of Articles on Life Style: Freight Train

[Effects of Separation from Nature]

by Dr. Roy Ozanne, MD, HMD

Excerpt:

(Note -- the prior three references are to 1, healthy nutrition, 2 healthy environment, 3 healthy medicine (homeopathy).

...There is a fourth freight train or misunderstanding operating in the world today that is contributing to some extent to the growth of chronic disease. I don’t think it is as significant as the first three. I think that if we took on the first three, this one would sort itself out. It would come along with the first three. But for completeness, at least right now, I want to say that it is a lifestyle -- a lifestyle that is separating itself from nature.

Our genetics were made to operate in a natural ecosystem. They were made to operate in an environment where you feel the wind and the rain, where you see the change in light from dawn till dusk, where you hear the sounds of the wind, the creatures you live near, where –as I mentioned before – you are exposed to the radiations of the earth. The reason that that is important is the impact on our biochemistry and physiology.

There are two ways to say it.

• The poetic way was sent by Laurens Van Der Post, one of my favorite authors, in his great tales of Africa. He said that there is a sunrise within us as well as without and that we lose touch of that at our own peril.
• My biologist interpretation of that is that the way a human being functions is an extremely complex set of physiological and biochemical mechanisms that must be totally integrated.

  All of the different systems that are going on are unimaginable: we fall asleep, we wake up! We cleanse our body, we rejuvenate our body. We distribute supplies, we take away waste products. We grow and develop. At certain times we move to different stages of life. We heal from illnesses. We face challenges and we move on. The timing of all that we do is phenomenal. Our bones, our organs, everything is constantly being remodeled, rebuilt, redone. Computer engineers, I think, can begin to understand the awesome complexity and interrelationships that go on to have a system like this.

Some of the things that are needed in a system like this is to remind everyone of what time it is. That means all of the different systems in your body: what time is it? The early questions around space travel had to do with what was going to happen to the body when it no longer had a day and night cycle that it was used to without the gravitational pull it was used to. And what was found was that:

...When we take ourselves away from the natural cues that we are made to live in, our physiologic mechanisms begin to drift. They do not know when it’s midnight, when it’s dawn. They don’t know when it’s Spring, Summer, Winter or Fall. There begin to be mistakes and errors that creep in to our functioning. These are not as gross or as significant as mercury poisoning or a poisoning symptom caused by an allopathic drug or putting ourselves into strong electro-magnetic fields. But these effects do exist and they do assert a negative influence.

The more we place ourselves into a life cycle that exposes us to the natural elements, the more many things in our brains and our bodies work better.

Our nervous system is made to feel at peace with certain sounds and vibrations and colors, schematics, physical appearances. The simple question is: put yourself in a very busy, congested, slightly or highly polluted downtown busy street with no great aesthetics, with wires and billboards, and noise, et cetera. Put yourself there for one day, two days, three days or however long you want and put yourself into a pristine, natural environment and you can have your needs in terms of food, water and rest met in each place. Now, in which place do you feel better?

The answer is pretty obvious for most people. We do better and we function better – our blood pressure will be better, our heart rate will be more normal, our digestion will work better in the natural environment.

In fact, way back in the Greek times, if you were a Greek government employee that worked in the city, you were required to leave the city and go for a health retreat, a vacation at least twice a year! And you would go into nature to a spa and in that place you would be under the care of physicians whose job it was to restore you to health, to return you to a state of good health. And they determined when you could leave by the way they were skilled at judging from the color of your tongue, the glint in your eyes, how your saliva appeared, how you were sleeping , et cetera. They would determine when you were restored to health, when you could go back to work.

Nature was the cure! And nature is and has been the cure and is how our genetics are made to heal in nature. It’s not easy to be restored to health in a hospital! Lots of things can happen in a hospital but total restoration to health is more difficult. That requires nature. A nature cure does a lot.

So that’s the fourth freight train. But really in a large sense it is. Modern life, driving at a pace beyond what people can cope with – faster speeds, faster change – our genetics were not made to cope with the speeds and the change, the rate and nature of stimuli coming at us. This is not what we were made to handle and it is overburdening our stress and relaxation systems of the body. It is overburdening our adrenal glands.

People today think they need much more coffee than they did a couple of generations ago just to function. Is it because the coffee is better? No. It’s because people are more exhausted. It’s a combination of the first freight train – the nutrition is decreasing and the amount and bombardment of stimulation and the pace that things are going is increasing. It is a combination of the first and the fourth freight train moving out of a natural way of life into an unnatural, overly accelerated, overly stimulating pace of life without adequate nutrition to cope with it and is leading people to a life of exhaustion, a life of looking for stimulants (uppers, downers) to try and do what nature cannot, which is to run our machinery at the modern pace of life. All you’re going to do in that way is to create more disease. When what we need is Life-giving, Life-promoting Environments

The Modern Lifestyle

We can have the things we like from modern life, but they will need to be tempered in and delivered with a large dose of nature. We have to learn our lessons.

• We have to learn the type of environment that nature supports, the type of speed, the rates of change, the types of learning that nature really promotes and work with that. And then we can have things that we really love, which feel really fulfilling and sustaining.
• We can create our cities to be beautiful and to be nurturing and spiritually enlightening places. That’s what they’re really to be. We can have them be places of commerce that support our genetics, not destroy our genetics.

It’s a lot of work and it’s a wonderful to be working at in this 21st Century, to be creating environments that really honor life. Life-giving, life-promoting environments.

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Our Sensitivities

I want to say something more about that, the types of environments we live in. I thought of this many, many years ago. Our genetics develop very acute sensitivities, senses: we have a very acute sense of hearing, a very acute vision sense, a very acute sense of smell and really a "sense" of motion – things coming toward us and moving away from us, a sense of moving through our environment, psychokinetic senses – all of these senses are highly developed in a healthy human being.

And then we take this creature, this human being with all of these highly developed senses and we put her or him into some of our modern city environments where there are none of the sensual cues that the human being is used to:

• None of the types of movement;
• None of the sounds;
• None of the smells -- none that the brain is programmed to pay attention to.

Instead, we are put into an environment that overstresses the senses and creates disharmony and painful reactions to it. So the temptation is there for human beings to try and numb our senses in order to live in a nonsensical environment. It does promote the use of alcohol, the use of drugs, the use of hypnotic, trance-inducing music and states to allow ourselves to exist in a nonsensical environment. These things are not needed or desired where one spends more time in an environment that is conducive to normal, natural, healthy living.

Living Your Healthy Life

I want to consider a fourth path here and it’s not something that I necessarily know a lot about; it’s about living a healthy life.

It’s not a straightforward answer to all things because it does involve living a life that is within the bounds of our genetics, that allows our genetics to shine. It includes a lot of factors that are so individual; it’s not the same for everyone.

And this is: Building YOUR healthy life, living YOUR healthy life; it’s not the same as someone else’s. What’s healthy for YOU, what brings YOU "life" may not be the same as what brings someone else "life."

This part is a very individual aspect as is the one before on choosing medicine for health. It is a totally individual approach. And to actually practice well, homeopathy will lead you closer and closer to YOUR healthy life as will any truly spiritual practice. We need to build up our "muscle" that says this is what I chose for living, this is not dying, this is living -- and understanding the difference between doing things that are part of dying as opposed to part of living. [And not that death is bad, but to start living a life that insures death, or brings death on sooner, or brings disease -- well, it may be better to begin to choose a healthy life rather than a diseased life and not focus on a life of death.]

I am thinking of such things as at some point, we need to align our day and night cycles with the sun. Giving up our daylight so that we can have more time in a nightlife is not ultimately going to build our genetics. But as our bodies get more in health, these things come easier, these things come easier and tell us what it is. This section is more about listening to the signals that come from our bodies.

One of the things that we can do to learn what is a healthy life is to spend more time at health spas in nature, being in places where food is good, the environment is pure, and a lot of the stimulations of modern life are not present. Getting away from the electronic world for a bit so that we can hear ourselves and let our own rhythm come in tune with those of the earth. For many people this involves a spiritual practice that deepens our appreciation and awareness in relationship to ourselves and to others and to spirit. It involves learning pleasures, helping others -- and the balance; being responsible to ourselves as well as helping others. ...

Another thing I have thought and haven’t emphasized it so much is I did follow earlier lots of rules, lots by different conventions about what is healthy living? But I think that unless nutrition is in place and we are creating a healthy environment for ourselves and we are using a healthy form of medicine that brings us back to ourselves, it is hard to do the other things. And, as we do the first three, we do build a healthy life for ourselves.

But I am sure there is room for education and training, experiencing and whatever in developing healthy lifestyles.

-- Excerpts from "Freight Train" -- Lifestyles...

Dr. Roy Ozanne, MD, HMD