We began this book by saying that expanding the definition of immunity was an urgent need, because every person’s health is being challenged as never before. You must make sure that your immunity doesn’t reach the tipping point at which stress, lifestyle disorders, and aging get the upper hand. Now you have the knowledge to follow a new model—the healing self—that will boost immunity and protect your health for a lifetime.

But knowledge is useless until it gets activated. That’s almost too obvious to state. Motivating people to act tends to face a huge obstacle. Good intentions fade, and best-laid plans go astray. So we had to ask ourselves how an action plan can last a lifetime. Nothing less will produce the benefits we’ve been holding out as a real possibility.

The answer came to us by watching young children. Childhood development, as every parent knows, is fascinating to watch. A four-year-old is playing with paper dolls and alphabet blocks, then you turn your back for what seems like an instant, and the same child is reading books and playing hopscotch. Major changes have taken place in brain development to coordinate everything needed to learn how to read, even to do something as simple as hop on one foot with perfect balance.

Nature has arranged every step of childhood development to be so effortless that a child doesn’t even know that an earlier self has been discarded for a later one—and this gave us our clue. Adopting the healing self needs to be so effortless that in a week, month, or year, major changes have occurred that feel so natural, you can’t remember living any other way.

This is the philosophy behind the seven-day plan presented here in Part Two. Each day focuses on a theme that occupies your attention for that day. Monday, for example, contains recommendations about changing to an anti-inflammatory diet. There are several recommendations in the “Do” category and several in the “Undo” category—we prefer “Undo” to “Don’t” because changing your lifestyle usually involves old choices you need to abandon. No recommendation is better than the others; choose whatever appeals to you.

On Tuesday you’ll move on to a new theme, stress reduction, putting your focus there. If you don’t want to continue with the change you made on Monday, that’s fine.

After you finish the week and turn the page to the next week, the same themes will be repeated. Once more you casually choose the changes you want to make. We feel that by doing this, putting absolutely no pressure on yourself, your bodymind will enjoy each change and retain the ones that feel good. To counter inflammation, for example, one person might add nuts to her diet while another increases the amount of fiber. We can’t predict which change will stick, but if these two people persist, it’s inevitable that some choices will become part of their lifestyle—it’s only a matter of time.

Here’s the weekly schedule, covering themes you learned about in Part One.

Monday: Anti-inflammation Diet

Tuesday: Stress Reduction

Wednesday: Anti-aging

Thursday: Stand, Walk, Rest, Sleep

Friday: Core Beliefs

Saturday: Non-struggle

Sunday: Evolution

Your only obligation is to follow your own desires, selecting something to do or undo from the list of choices. We recommend that you read the entire section for that day at least once and go back to it as often as possible for reinforcement.

How will your choice turn out? Keep an open mind. This is an experiment with you playing the role of both scientist and lab rat!

For some themes, like following an anti-inflammatory diet, it will be easy to make simple changes and stick with them, hopefully on a permanent basis. In other cases, such as taking a half-hour walk every evening, fitting this choice into your schedule over a long time span may be more challenging. Just move at your own pace and always remember that your choices should be enjoyable.