Monthly Archives: August 2013

Our western culture finds itself in an extreme state of imbalance. We are buying too many things we don’t really need, eat too much unhealthy food and allowing our mind to be captured by a cacophony of so many voices that we can barely be alone in total silence for more than a few minutes.

We have become sidetracked. There is much we can learn from ancient eastern culture to regain our bearings. According to the ancient Daoist principle the universe is constantly striving toward a balance between the polarity of yin and yang.

We can understand the principle of yin and yang best by looking at the yin and yang symbol.

Within the dark yin is also yang and in the lightened yang is also yin. Day turns to night and night turns to day. The entire universe is based on this polarity which is constantly in flow and in movement. Without the polarity of the male and female there would be no life. Like this universal principle the body will always try to restore balance between these energies and set the stage for the next growth cycle.

Illness, imbalance or destruction proceeds where there is too much yin or too much yang. The advertising world is indoctrinating us 24-7 on what we need to buy or do to live a happy life. In most cases we don’t even notice how subtle these influences are. These mostly “external needs” can never be met. We live a hollow life of what we perceive to be unfulfilled personal needs and wants. Our western culture feeds on us comparing ourselves with Joe next door who has “a big house and can afford to buy a sports car.”

A couple of years ago I visited Malawi, a small south eastern African country and one of the world’s poorest countries with a gross national income per capita of 870 dollars (or personal income per person annually) compared to 27,000 in the United States. I have never seen so many happy and smiling people around me than in Malawi. It is a subjective view, but still set me thinking why people in the wealthy countries look a lot more glum. This is not to be misunderstood that you need to be poor to be happy. I presume however, that the people in the mainly agrarian culture of Malawi know that they are dependent on each other and feel a much greater sense of being part of a caring family and community.

In the Book of Wisdom, the I Ging, one of the central themes is finding the right moment to withdraw into yin or to become pro-active by going into yang. The Daoist and other wise women and men teach us that we need to let go of attachment and that this is one of the main reasons for misery and unhappiness. Unhappy and sad moments in our lives are just as transient as the happy moments. Thus the happy person is the one who has found peace in himself or herself that everything is impermanent, in a constant cycle like the seasons going through birth, growth, death and rebirth. Sadly much of organised Christian in the West focuses too much on the crucifixion and pain aspect. It is my personal view that the deeper meaning of the Christ is that we constantly go through cycles of birth, crucifixion and resurrection. After walking painfully over the path of hot coals lies growth and light.

Are we victims of our genes or can we largely influence our health?

 The debate has been raging all the more since the 38-year-old actress Angelina Jolie went public earlier this year by revealing that she underwent a double masectomy after discovering she had inherited a cancer gene that killed her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.

While it remains a very personal and painful decision to undergo such a radical step, one side of the medical profession is lauding Jolie while others are questioning whether this was really necessary.

For the past decade most research has concluded that genes play a major role on whether we are obese, die of a heart attack or cancer. But this appears to be only half the truth. A new field of research called epigenetics tells us that the choices we make in our daily living and in what environment we live can actually alter our health at the molecular level, even if we are born with genes that give us a predisposition of contracting certain types of disease.

The good news here is that we have the choice. We have the freedom to decide how healthy our lives are going to be. The amount of exercise we get, the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe has a huge effect on our health.

According to the research, exercise may well alter the expression of our genes in a positive way, preventing a variety of disease such as Alzheimer, heart and circulatory problems.

Certain types of stem cells appear to determine their direction at an early stage, depending on how well we exercise and what food we eat. Using treadmill-conditioned mice, a team of researchers from McMaster University, United States, led by the Department of Kinesiology’s Gianni Parise has shown that exercise triggers those cells to become bone more often than fat. In sedentary mice, the same stem cells were more likely to become fat, impairing blood production in the marrow cavities of bones.

 “The interesting thing was that a modest exercise program was able to significantly increase blood cells in the marrow and in circulation. What we are suggesting is that exercise is a potent stimulus, enough of a stimulus to actually trigger a switch in these mesenchymal stem cells,” according to Parise

The research appeared in a paper published by the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.