The Body's Natural Healing Abilities

"The body has an inherent ability to move toward wellness."

This statement changed my view of the body. We grow up believing that as we get older the body begins to break down and decay. We believe that when there is a disease, it is because the body is no longer working, it is broken. We are programmed to believe that the body does not regenerate itself, therefore if we lose a body part it will never grow back. Or if something in the body breaks down, it is broken for life.

What a sad view. To see the body as something so fragile, and so incapable of healing. Yet, our DNA was amazingly able to form every organ, every limb, every blood cell when we were developing in the womb. As we grew, old cells died to make room for new ones so that we could get bigger. Our bodies were constantly regenerating themselves. And even now, if we cut ourselves, our body knits itself back together. When we get sick, most of us eventually get well again. And science is even experimenting with stem cells, to grow body parts from DNA by "turning on" the gene that causes the body to grow and develop into a limb or an organ.
As you sit back and look at all of these facts, is it really such a stretch of the mind to believe that the body naturally moves toward healing and regeneration? That the body has the intelligence to recreate what was created in the first place? Or that if disease takes hold in the body, it has the capacity to fully heal?

What is the problem then?? We've all witnessed people getting old and breaking down. We've all seen people get a disease and have it for life. We've all known someone who has lost a finger or a limb and never regrew it. The doctors tell people that they have a terminal illness and they really do die. Some of us have even felt our own bodies not working as well as they use to, and expect them to keep going downhill.

What is it about the body that makes it grow and regenerate, or break down and not repair itself? There must be an explanation. And there is.

When a baby is first born, it has all of the necessary nutrients and elements in its body that it needs in order to grow and regenerate new cells. This is why babies heal so quickly if they get hurt. This process would continue unimpeded IF the necessary nutrients were properly replaced. If you grow a crop of vegetables in the same spot year after year, the nutrients will begin to be depleted and your vegetables will be a lot less nutritious and healthy looking. But if you keep putting nutrients back into the soil with good compost, you will be able to continue growing a healthy crop of vegetables year after year. The same is true with our cells. They need nutrient-rich "soil" in order to keep regenerating healthy cells.
If you look at the average diet of a baby, a child, a teenager, and adult... you will see the reason for our degeneration. White flour, sugar, pasta, crackers... most kids begin their life eating foods that actually deplete their bodies of nutrients rather than give them nutrients. And this process continues into teenage life and sometimes even into adulthood. By this time we have done our part to actually leech minerals from our body on a continual basis for so many years that we don't have enough nutrients left to regenerate healthy cells. The building blocks are no longer there, yet the body still 'moves towards wellness' and does what it can to keep us healthy, attempting to recreate the dying cells, but only able to do half the job it use to. It's actually amazing that our bodies go on as long as they do without problems at this rate.
So the number one reason our bodies don't appear to be moving toward wellness is that we do our part to leech important minerals from our bodies and don't replenish them with highly nutritious foods, therefore our bodies don't have the tools to rebuild healthy cells. Partially regenerated cells work less effectively in their specific roles in our bodies, and if we allow this process to continue, we will see visible evidence that our bodies are breaking down.

The second reason our bodies don't appear to be moving toward wellness is that we get in the way. A car will work just fine until you pour water into the fuel tank, or milk into the engine oil. Even if our bodies had the nutrients they needed to keep regenerating healthy cells, if we put substances into our bodies that are not meant to be there, it will block things up, create congestion, and our bodies will have to put most of its energy into getting rid of the incorrect fuel. It does this by getting you sick with a cold so that it can expel these toxins through your respiratory system. If you take medicine to stop that process, then your body is left with these blockages in its system... and some sort of malfunction is bound to happen. The car just won't run with milk in the engine oil. If it can't get rid of it, you will have engine troubles until you clean out the milk.
Congestion and blockages in the body's systems is the other main source of problems that keep the body from regenerating. Yet it can't be denied that the body is still trying to move toward wellness. The simple fact that you get a cold tells us the body is working. It is doing what it can to clean you out. Pain in an area of your body is a fire alarm going off, telling you to pay attention, that something you are doing is causing a problem. Something is congested or blocked.

The body wants to heal but we have to listen to its messages. Our bodies can move toward wellness no matter what state they are in now IF we will 1) clean out the junk that is getting in its way, and 2) nourish our bodies with nutrient-dense foods that work with the body because they are the correct fuel the body was made to run on. With a clean system and a storehouse of nutrients, the body can and will move towards healing and regenerating itself.
This is the foundation I learned at The School of Natural Healing - Cleanse & Nourish, and you know the basis for healing all problems in the body.