Our brain is the seat of intellect. It regulates and maintains balance and stability in a zillion bodily processes and systems. To pick a few examples — the rhythmic beating of your heart, blood pressure, transfer of oxygen into the blood stream, the extension and contraction of your lungs and regulation of innumerable chemicals. It warns you of impending peril; it helps you spread the joy of love and warmth with family and friends. It makes you believe in yourself. It turns your dreams into reality. The brain is nothing short of a miracle, a sophisticated system that no technology can match, or equal.
“Our brain,” as author and naturalist Diane Ackerman, PhD, puts it, “is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with non-stop neural conversations.” It is also a supercomputer keyed to maintaining equilibrium in our ever-changing environment. It adapts to change swiftly and keeps just about everything in sync — your physical demands, mindful needs, emotions and your every other connect — not to speak of your freshly evolving, altering, or inevitable ‘shifting’ moods. Change is a ‘constant’ for your brain — just as much as the physics of consciousness is to your growing awareness, or spiritual quotient. In like manner, the brain performs a host of ‘attentive’ functions — communication, planning, organising, delegating and attending to numerous day-to-day activities.
Most importantly, the brain not only adapts to varying situations, it also returns to a state of pristine balance — from the depths of despair, or stress, to happiness. This is ‘engineered’ by the release of our emotions through the act of weeping, laughing and increased muscle tension, including tremors and blushing in the presence of one’s sweetheart. Notwithstanding all its sophisticated intricacy, the brain is a multifarious organ, a gland like no other. It heightens our defence against illness. It is our foremost ally in overcoming, or healing illnesses, or syndromes, too. You’d call it the healing brain — quite like the healing heart. Just look at the plethora of natural ‘pharmaceutical’ agents our brain is equipped with — right from endorphins and the immune system to physiology and cognitive psychology. What you have is a therapeutic network that functions like clockwork, endowed with the uncanny precision of a super-duper computer. Of a unified blueprint of all our physical and emotional processes, including every aspect of our psyche.
The brain restores us to health after a fall, a wound, cut, or infection. It protects by shutting down certain systems in the wake of physical harm. It also heals illnesses that are brought about by grief, misery, emotional distress, or loss of a beloved, or loved one. It escalates our primaeval gift that all of us are born with — the art of ‘letting-go,’ while returning to a state of solidity, from within and without. You’d call this process as self-healing — a curative expedition aimed at lasting change and not just apparent relief on the surface.
As Sir Peter Medawar, PhD, the Nobel Prize-winning immunologist and virtuoso writer, put it: “[Tuberculosis] is an affliction in which the psychosomatic element is admitted even by those who contemptuously dismiss it in the context of any other ailment.” Not surprisingly, there’s abundant evidence, dating back hundreds of years, that, the course and progression of tuberculosis are influenced by the patient’s mental state. It goes without saying that someone who is infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis develops a protective immune response that could hold the bacteria in check and prevent them from multiplying. The resultant stalemate between the body and bacteria can mean that the disease will remain dormant for years. Well, if something happens to compromise, or weaken, the body’s immune defences, the bacteria can run riot and cause a resurgence of the disease. This is our mind, body, and soul connect — in health, illness, or harmony and dissonance.
Medicine alone cannot heal every illness. What supplants medicine is the body’s natural ability to repair, fix and heal from the inside-out — far beyond the obvious framework of physical healing. Picture this as the brain-mind-body healing ‘connect.’ In other words, it represents the harmonious rapport that exists between our neurons, neuropeptides, cells and tissues — of how our brain, organs and their physiological functions are interlinked to one another. To state the obvious — our emotions are not just allied to the brain — they are also linked to the whole body. This correlates with the good old idea of ‘gut feeling,’ where our emotional status is mirrored through the whole mind-body experience. This, in effect, is also the basis of mind-body healing and spiritual wellness.
— First published in India First
