or Germanische Heilkunde (Germanic Healing Knowledge), we find the scientific verification of this new paradigm. There is an immense intelligence within living matter, and it is closely anchored to our experiences in life. With the mother’s story above, we not only see the result of her conscious, intelligent expenditure of muscles, we also find subconscious organ adaptations that intelligently arise due to the shocking experience.
Upon a near death of a child, our innate intelligence employs many resources, subconsciously adapting and augmenting internal organ functions to aid in resolving the problem. For example, the mother’s lungs could have augmented their function to increase oxygenation to the bloodstream. Her breast gland may have augmented its function to produce more milk to nourish her wounded child (even if she is not currently breastfeeding). All organs of the body, from the eyes to the skin to the heart, have intelligent, though primitive, adaptions applicable to the various biological conflicts we experience in life. Each adaptation is controlled by the brain, and our unique perception of the shocking experience determines the specificity of which organ is engaged. And just like the muscles in recovery, each organ adaptation has an appropriate and necessary healing phase of recovery. For the lungs, we experience pain, coughing and sputum discharge. For the breast glands, we experience inflammatory lumps or swells.
Comprehending our Stories
There are many things to be said about the difficulty of a paradigm shift from the biochemical and mechanistic analysis of health to the emotional level that connects us to the stories and perceptions of our life. As human beings, we are easily ashamed of our stories, because we tend to harbor a belief that we have not lived up to our highest potential. There is always going to be an element of shame, for as long as there is a desire to grow beyond our present capacities, there will always be the shame of feeling as though we failed to grasp something bigger. However, this new paradigm really changes everything, when we realize that biological health is something deeply related to our story and perceptions, and so our story becomes something we must learn to know, understand, and love.
As living beings traversing a journey called life, we have been endowed by Nature to somehow know that we are in a story, and that our life is a story. Perhaps this is the truest fact of all, a fact known from the very first perception that we ever have—I am here, now. How strange? How wonderful! When we think of the organization of life, we have been taught to think of a vast machine made of puzzle-pieces. But what if life is consciousness, communicating an eternal story of self, where “the body” is animated from top to bottom by an inner knowledge that knows the story?
When threatening experiences happen along the way that are incomprehensible, unexpected, or hard to make sense of, they compel forth internal adaptations in our living organism. We can learn to restore the meaning that was lost at that moment, by resolving the experience and by listening to and speaking about our story in an environment of new knowledge, love, and connection.
Nature’s gift to the inner being within each of us is that no matter what we lose or how incomprehensible our experiences have been, we can always find the thread again. And when we do, something real and full of purpose begins to heal us from within. This is the healing expression of an unlimited, innate intelligence reconnecting to the limited brain-body-psyche that was traumatized and isolated by the experience.
This new paradigm, confirmed by key discoveries of the brain and nervous system, help validate what many brilliant thinkers of the past had intuited about health. It connects our micro-biology to the larger dimension of life and perception. In a way, it’s acting as a kind of renaissance seed for humanity at this time in history. From this seed, we are pressed onward to actualize the eternal aim of our human potential—to learn how to become proud of our stories and ourselves, to learn how to live in awe and symbiosis with the great mystery of life, and to know just how it is that our biology depends on our loving awareness for its harmonious organization. From this, we are sure to find the miraculous health and longevity that is an integral part of the birthright of our species.
I and many others are ready to live and share in this new paradigm of health. It encourages each of us to look back upon all who lived to make our own life stories possible, and to say, “Thank you. I am here. And I will honor the living thread of our song.”
I believe a growing majority are ready to make this shift—what many have called the shift from mechanism to vitalism.