Monday, September 14, 2009

Curing Flu without Medication

Most of us have fought the flu - the sore throats, the phlegm, the discomfort, the sneezing and the coughs.
And we know it's not pretty. It comes unannounced and the after effects continue from a few days to weeks.
Many of us use cough syrups, antibiotics or other medicines that suppress the flu symptoms. The worst part is that it makes us feel drained out and weak.
Most of us have our own stories about the flu, like,
If I get flu, it takes at least two weeks for me to get ok.
I get congestion when I have flu.
If I drink something too cold, I get a sore throat, then I get cold and fever.
During the change of season, I usually get the flu because of the weather.
If I eat something too sour, my throat becomes sore and I get flu.
During the flu, I get too much phlegm and I have breathing problems.

There could be many different stories around flu and each of these stories determine our reaction to the flu and how much it affects our body.
I recently caught the flu after a long time. I got the usual dry throat followed by sore throat, fever, sneezing, weakness and phlegm. After the flu, I started analyzing my thoughts just before the flu. I had been thinking that I hadn't had flu in a long time and I was happy but a little fearful that I may get it as many people around me had.
When I got flu, I had the feeling of weakness and there was a little negativity about the state. During the next two days, I felt uncomfortable and weak but I didn't take medicines. I only took care of the food intake and used herbal remedies to help my body fight it (see the herbal remedy I used at the end of this post). After two days of fever and weakness, I decided that I am NOT sick. I realized that I didn't have flu but only my body did. And my body had it because probably its immune system was a little weak due to some negative thoughts.
After my decision, I was energetic, I was okay with the current situation and let my body go through the process but didn't let my mind feel the sickness. Many of you may not believe, but the next day I was almost completely healed. There was no fever, no throat discomfort and almost no phlegm.
What I realized was that my thoughts and feelings have a huge control over my body and its state of health. I could never have believed that my thinking induced sickness in my body but I could see it this time.
I have now taken a decision that I AM WELL.
You can try this too. Every time you feel sick, analyze the feelings and thoughts you had when you got sick and also the current thoughts. Modify those thoughts and feel healthy. Staying healthy is simply a choice. You either choose to stay in the negativity or choose to cure yourself out of anything.


Herbal remedy for flu, sore throat and cold:
1.5 tablespoons fennel seeds (saunf)
4-5 basil leaves - fresh or dry (tulsi)
7 whole peppercorn (kaali mirch sabut)
1 teaspoon minced fresh ginger or dry ginger powder (prefer fresh ginger)

Add the above ingredients to 2 cups of water and let it boil till the water becomes 1 cup. Sieve this mixture into a cup. Then add 3-4 teaspoons honey and squeeze fresh juice of half a lemon. Stir well and sip it.
This will taste like ginger honey lemon tea. 
Drink this upto 3-4 times in a day.
You may add black tea to the mixture if you want.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Stress and Health

Health is one of the major concerns in the present-day world. Compared to ancient India, much of the treatment in urban India is currently focused on modern medicine and surgeries.
Most of the modern medicine is based on the treatment of symptoms. Treating the symptom with medicines just removes the body signal of the actual problem leaving the body to fight it. In the meantime, we go about the usual business thinking that since the symptom is absent, we are healed.
Many people with chronic diseases like migraines, sinusitis, asthma go on getting their symptoms treated and expect their diseases to get treated. In turn, they get used to the recurrence of the symptoms and higher dose of medication each time. The same goes for diabetes and hypertension patients. The cycle of medicine becomes never-ending resulting in side effects to other parts of the body. Ultimately, this results in a perpetual reliance on medicines.
So, you can see how this pharmaceutical and health industry thrives even in the worst of times. And how unaware people keep on neglecting the actual source of their health issues.

Each kind of body ailment is due to a different kind of stress (mostly mental and sometimes bodily) that a person takes upon. If that source of stress is removed, the body ailment and also its symptom would go away.
For example, a person with high blood pressure has various symptoms like weight gain/loss, blurred vision, fatigue, anger or sometimes excessive symptoms like heart attack etc. Taking a medication for controlling the blood pressure would be a way to just avoid having symptoms. But the actual treatment would be to find out why the blood pressure is high - in most cases which is fat deposits in the arteries of the heart. Some of the causes could be stress/negative thinking, overeating (which may again have an emotional reason) etc.

In the early stages of health deterioration, exercise (this also creates a feeling of well being by releasing feel good hormones called "endorphins) and maintaining good mental health by removing unnecessary stress will make sure that most of the health issues go away.

Keeping a positive outlook or de-stressing sounds easy to many people. But for someone who has lived in a stressful environment or has had a difficult/traumatic past, such a mental state is the most difficult to attain.
For those people, many alternate techniques like yoga or therapies like acupressure and counselling would definitely help change the attitude towards circumstances and life and hence would positively affect the well being of the person. It is scientifically proven that a positive attitude makes the immune system stronger. So, the body is able to fight different infections better.

So, the next time you get sick, think of what has been going on in your mind recently. Try to get a different perspective of your situation, exercise and eat well and make a commitment to yourself that "I AM WELL." This commitment itself and its true feeling results in a healthy and confident state of mind.

Want to Change the World?

I know most of us have this idea of a perfect world that we want to live in. We see various environmentalists, social workers, thinkers debating alike that the world is going crazier and the future generations will have it all bad. And the overdose of media and news channels in trying to convince all the people about this bad world doesn't help either.
All these social issues, climate changes, new innovations have always been there in this world - even before human beings evolved.
The temperatures on earth have been changing from very hot to ice-like. Life has evolved from single cells to dinosaurs to human beings.
During the human history, there have always been wars, politics, development of new tools and the rise and fall of different empires/cultures.
Each one of those phases has had its share of turmoil. Which one of those phases do you think is the perfect one?
What if the one you thought was perfect didn't really turn out to be that good?
I think the best way to change the world is to change how you see it.
There will always be issues and problems in everyone's life and in this world. And changing the way we see things doesn't mean we don't care about anything. It just means we don't worry unnecessarily and  just do our part while living completely and fully for NOW - not for some ideal, imaginary world but just for this present moment.

Monday, September 7, 2009

Who Am I?

I am not my body.
I am not my mind.
I am not my name.
I am not my job.
I am not my friends.
I am not my family.

I
don't die. I don't have any disease. I am not weak. I am not alone. I am not bad. I am not good either.
I am not who you say I am and I am not even who I say I am.

I am not separate from you. I am a part of you.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Reality

One bright day in the middle of the night two dead boys rose to fight.
Back to back they faced each other, drew their swords and shot one another.
A deaf policeman heard the noise, and saved the lives of the two dead boys.
If you don't believe this lie is true, ask the blind man, he saw it too.
~Author Unknown


Think about this:

What if the world as you see it is different from the world as I see it?
What if there is no absolute truth?
What if there is nothing out there in the world?
What if we don't have a purpose in life?
What if everything we perceive is governed by some factors that are different for every person?
What if there is just self and everything else is just happening around you and has no significance?

These are some of the many questions that have bothered me.
The concept of reality has intrigued me very much. So, I will make an attempt to write about what I make of reality and the world around us.

For each one of us, the reality about an event, a person, a situation is different. In spite of that, all of us like to believe that our interpretation is "THE" absolute reality.
This is the core of all human conflicts.

Some of the ways we perceive reality are through our personal checks for reality like our:
Past experiences
Senses
Feelings
Beliefs
Intuition
Thoughts
Personal logic

Most of us base our present and future according to our past experiences. We modify our behaviour and the way we look at things based on the past. By doing this, we force ourselves to look at the present and the future through the spectacles of the past. This limits our experience of life and makes us judge the situations.
Similarly, our five senses, thoughts and feelings govern so much of our perception. We judge others based on our feelings and thoughts.
More than that, most people think about their beliefs as if those were reality. All of us have a set of beliefs about everything - such as code of conduct, moral values and ethics.

We base our life according to all these personal checks for reality. All our actions are based on our perception that is a result of these.
Even right now, each one of you has your own interpretation about this blog article and about me. We all have our own thoughts and feelings creating our stories.
Using our perception and interpretation we decide if something is right or wrong OR good or bad. And that is what results in unhappiness, dissatisfaction and suffering. Have you ever wondered what our life would be without this perception and the meanings we create out of every event?
If we didn't have this perception, I suppose we would live in a perfect bliss with our circumstances just reduced to something happening in the background.
Most of the religions in this world teach us to be in this natural state of existence - in that state one has complete love for others and oneself and there is no expectation from any events or from other people. Buddhism even has a kind of meditation called Vipassana which teaches how to simply observe such thoughts/feelings/judgements and ignore those to alleviate the suffering of human beings.
It's very difficult to completely ignore all these factors and is highly impractical in this world. But by not giving too much importance to this perception of circumstances and people, we could make our life much simpler and happier.
To conclude, I would like to quote Albert Einstein:
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.