Putting It All Together: Ideas and Guidance for the Individual Health Plan

Food must be a spiritual idea. It must be an idea of substance and supply … there is an intelligence within us, which will guide us into a proper diet. Since each is an individual, the intaking of food is an individual idea and an individual approach to reality. Whatever our individual system needs to make it harmonious, Intelligence will guide us to.

— Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind

We can think of genuinely well-rounded health as occurring through four overlapping domains: spinal alignment/structural, nutrition, emotions/spirit, and circulatory or cardiovascular health. Our individual development of a raw-foods-dominant dietary lifestyle will, over time, dramatically assist the progressive balance of the other three domains (structure, emotions, and cardiovascular). However, beyond the positive influence of living nutrition each of these three domains has special practices that, when used together, synergistically assist in an accelerated achievement of more balanced levels of health.

It is not within the scope of this book to catalog the healthcare modalities available for work in the structural, spiritual, or cardiovascular domains—however, careful and conscious attention to these aspects of health is essential to putting together an Individual Health Plan (IHP). Here are some suggestions to get you started in the working formulation of your IHP. Phone consultations and personal training are also available from the authors.

  STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY/REPROGRAMMING THE SPINE

Many styles and systems of bodywork attempt to improve structural integrity. Yoga, biokinesiology, and other self-help methods of position-release exercise are highly effective in the proactive maintenance of both skeletal and muscular/ligamentous integrity. For more primary care, however, Network Spinal Analysis™ offers what many feel is a highly effective and refined multidimensional approach to healthcare ostensibly through the structural domain. Network Spinal Analysis is often very affordable and is simply great for kids.

Both yogic exercise/breathing and network entrainment of the nervous system/breathing can easily overlap with the emotional and spiritual domain because they are conducive to states of mental quietude, meditation, and the retracing and release of old traumas that can underlie structural imbalance and thus affect the whole of wellbeing.

  PSYCHOSOMATICA

Emotional or psychosomatic influence is present to some degree in most if not all health disturbances. A calm and relatively quiet mind is ultimately as important to health as the yogic postures, spinal entrainments, aerobic exercise, and living foods that need to go with and support it. Unfortunately, development of emotional calm or even spiritual presence through quieting of the mind is somewhat of a lost art. After age one or two, children can easily begin learning it when they can see it being modeled by others.

  NUTRITION AGAIN

The nutritional domain has its special tools in addition to the foundational daily practice of a raw-foods-dominant diet. The overarching idea here is that we are moving from standard aberrant practices of nutrition and health to much more refined practices of the same. Initially, a transitional phase requires some degree of adjustment, often considerable in adults and older children, that involves detoxification; replenishment of depleted reserves on several levels; restoration of nervous and regenerative function; and the emotional acceptance, reorientation, and growth needed to integrate the transition. Bioenergetic testing, Terrain testing, Contact Reflex Analysis, Computerized Electro Dermal Screening (CEDS), and homeopathic supplementation are very economic, effective, and paint an accurate picture of nutritional and metabolic disturbances. Please see the “References, Further Reading, and Resources” section for how to find bioenergetic, nutritional, and terrain testing in your area.

The need for a plan, however informal, is essential during this important transition. This transitional period, and the rebuilding and balancing of the internal ecology that occurs with testing or not, is usually at least six months to a year and a half. It is a work of faith in progress and need not be rushed or agonized over. How long this transitional period takes depends basically on three things: the size and depth of the toxic load to be eliminated; the degree of disturbance among the organs, tissues, and internal terrain; and lastly, the degree of individual determination and vision to achieve wellness.

Doing for yourself and your loved ones what no one else can—maintaining internal calm, eating right, keeping the spine free of interference, and enjoying some form of physical exercise—is simultaneously a joy and a challenging need to be fulfilled in order to stay whole in today’s world.