Good relationships take lots of energy.
Stay healthy to keep your relationships on track.
Exhaustion makes it difficult to love oneself, let alone others!
There’s a baseline to health, below which it’s very difficult to spare any energy for other people.
Illness and low energy can make us pretty self-interested, verging on selfish.
You know how you feel, when a cold or flu strikes?
You feel very low energy. It’s an effort to do anything. The last thing you feel like is work, or socialising.
That’s because work, or socialising take an effort. We have a “Resting baseline” of our daily energy.
Qi
Our internal energy (called Qi, in Chinese medicine) can be likened to the simplification called Calories. Most dieters know the equation “Work done needs to be more that Calories in” if you want to lose weight.
So too with Qi. In our normal lives, we are not taught to “cultivate” this resource.
(To be fair, in the Western world, we still don’t even acknowledge its existence in our scientific models. )
Chinese hard and soft martial arts, are all designed to help one gather and channel this energy more effectively. Chinese Medicine is designed to unblock and enhance the flow of this internal resource. This is the reason some people have great “wins” with Qigong, Acupuncture and Chinese herbs, when Western Medicine has failed them. Essentially, they are working on an area of the body Western medics have totally ignored.
Some days you wake “full of beans,” other days not so much. What’s the difference?
Habits
We have many habits that detract from our “store” of Qi, and some that can fill them up too.
Detractors are such obvious things as alcohol, caffeine, junk food, and smoking (Tobacco and Marijuana..)
Less obvious detractors would be things like staying up too late, not giving oneself enough sleep, starting the sleep in a hyped up state (having just finished a box set of Line of Duty, or several hours of playing Call of Duty!). Not getting enough exercise, and not being in Nature enough, also add to the deficit. (A day on the couch can leave you feeling really low the next day..)
The lest obvious detractors are things such as being stuck in an abusive relationship, and doing work that doesn’t really “beat your heart”
You can see there’s a sliding scale, and it only slides in one direction – down!
Our baseline as young people mostly seems unsurpassable! By the time we hit the teens, and our hormones claim some of this energy, the slide can start. (You have a chance to get out of the slump in your 20’s – but often work, and the couch have already claimed you)
By the time you hit your 30’s, there’s often another drain on your Qi, and that’s young children!
Parenting
Young children don’t have to be a burden, but 21st Century living has made this so.
Young people in the UK are imbued with the idea that one’s home is one’s castle, and that property ownership is the only sensible idea. This ramps up the pressure.
My old next door neighbour once told me that he bought his first house outright for ÂŁ5000, the generation before that ÂŁ48 for a starter home. Sure, their wages were less, but the idea was that a working man could buy a small home, and feed a family.
This is no longer true. It would take both parents working to achieve this, and in pretty decent jobs also. Middle class kids have a slim shot at this idea, everybody below.. not so lucky…
This does mean that they would both have to work though.
There’s a dual complexity to childrearing. One, the hard work, and Two, the fact that often these young people have barely left the tag “Children” behind, themselves!
It seems a natural aspect of being young that one is selfish. It takes a while to spot that going out buccaneering for one’s own slice of the pie, is actually a pretty unattractive trait.
The more one open’s one’s heart to others, the more attractive one becomes as a long term prospect.
Parents often abuse children in various ways, the cycle goes through the generations, allowing selfish and bad men to thrive – “I always seem to fall in love with bad boys” and careless, selfish women to abound.
Selfishness
At some stage, a child might “pry open” our heart, in the worse case scenario this child just becomes another abused child, because one or both of their parents were still selfish children themselves.
So we have hard work, combined with childcare, which, if we are not careful can deplete the “wells” of Qi energy that lie deep inside.
Parenting, without too much pressure, can be an astonishing joy that feeds us, but there are few people in a good-enough financial position, who will ever experience this these days sadly.
The next chance of freedom lies in retirement!
What happened in the middle? Work worries, Kid worries, Money worries, rinse and repeat.
Did you make it to retirement without becoming unwell? Well done!
Illness
So, here’s the next Qi depleter – Illness.
By definition in Chinese medicine, getting ill IS a blockage of the flow of energy, and more likely a complete lack of Qi resources, to keep the systems going.
Let’s look for a moment at the “Getting Sick on Holiday” syndrome that so many of us experience.
From an energy perspective, we often feel that it’s to “dangerous” to get sick during work times. Which of our colleagues will eclipse us whilst we are away? What amazing opportunity will we miss is off sick too often? Will our boss see us as unreliable? I think we all know that horrible “first day of term” feeling of going back after being sick? Arriving back to work, people rarely ask you if you are all right now, they are more likely to view you with suspicion.
All of these mean that we keep our “Guards up” at work. This effort – albeit a subconscious effort, uses up energy to maintain – often energy we don’t have.
Subconsciously, you know there’s a strange noise coming from the engine of your car, but you don’t have the money or the time to take it in to be checked…until it breaks down…
Same with your body. They say “You are writing Cheques the bank can’t cash!” – (Last time out for that image – soon people will have no idea what that means!)
So you plan a wonderful holiday to the Greek Ilse and end up with Flu for the first three days!
You literally defer your illness, until you can have it on your own time, not the company time!
This is an illustration of managing our energy badly.
Chronic Illness
So, to major illness. Breaking a leg, or getting smashed up in a car accident.. western medicine is great at fixing you up.
Getting Cancer, Heart disease or Diabetes – not so good.
Why’s that? Simply because the illnesses are a result of bad management of our Diet, Lifestyle and our Qi resources.
How much training does your physician receive in these arts? Virtually NONE!
Your doctor can tell you that stress is bad for you, and that you should stop eating pies, but that’s about the full training. (Normally between four hours and a few days out of FIVE years are spent studying diet’s effect on the body for most doctors.. They seem to have forgotten the old adage, “You ARE what you eat!”)
So, we are now gleefully told that One in Two of us will have a brush with Cancer in our lifetimes.
I’m here to tell you that if you invest in you, early on in life that, One in every Ten MIGHT have a brush with cancer, and that if you do, it certainly needn’t be fatal.
When one gets ill, all the resources (that are left in the body) become focused on the healing journey – rightly so. But I’d like to say that many of the people I have seen over the years who have presented with Chronic illnesses, can’t see the connection between their lifestyles and their illnesses.
Husband’s still expect dinner from wives with cancer “because they still have to work.”
Husbands with cancer, still have to work “to keep the kids in school and a roof over their heads”
Stress
Illnesses put relationships under immense stress.
The primary reason is that a person who used to give you lots of their energy, can no longer do that anymore, they need the energy for themselves.
Often, if the truth be told, “Needy People” partner with “Serial Givers” and run their batteries down, until the “Givers” become chronically ill…
This pattern is most often seen with Men, who need somebody to be their Mummy, and women who have no self-respect, and who will never say NO!
Is your relationship making you ill?
Is your work making you unhappy and ill?
Not yet? Well is it “in the post?” Are you an accident waiting to happen?
It’s for this reason that I support “Universal Basic income.” This is the suggestion (already trialled in a few countries) where every citizen gets a basic wage, and we dispense with the Social State.
I often deal with (ladies generally) who are trapped in relationships. The Husband earns the main income, owns the house, the car etc.
When these unfortunate ladies become ill, and the Husband is one of the primary sources of that illness, it seems impossible for the ladies to leave the house.
Medicineless Hospital
It’s for this reason, that I have been attempting to open my own version of “The Medicineless Hospital” that Dr Pang Ming ran in the 1990’s in China (See my website www.24days.org)
I want to be able to say to clients – “Leave, come stay with me, I’ll help you to become well again and start again.” With a Universal Basic Income, anybody could contemplate a restart.
Could you imagine how much pressure it would take off our Health Services?
What would happen if people only needed to work three days a week?
Imagine a life where people could work each morning from home for a few hours, have a nice healthy lunch at home, go for a walk after lunch, go for a swim, spend time with the kids after school… Stress would evaporate, health levels would surge, creativity would flower – You don’t have to imagine it, this is the message that lockdown showed us! It’s possible!
( I have to put my hand up here, and admit that I almost killed myself to bring this story to you.
For me, I had to learn the hard way, almost facing a mental and physical breakdown in the City of London..
I survived that craziness, and found my way to Qigong in the early 90’s, it saved my life.)
Please don’t sleepwalk into Chronic illness.
What’s your life plan currently? – If it’s “This job of mine gives me enough money to survive but it doesn’t make me happy. If I keep going it will hurt my body and my mind.. but what choice do I have..?” Then you need to think again..
Every moment is a choice!
If your choice is “I don’t want to think about my bad habits, or bad relationships” then you are destined for future problems.
Fear
If your assumption is “They’ll have a cure for cancer, by the time it gets me” – well how are they doing so far?
The Trillions spent on the “War on Cancer” and we have slipped from “one in three,” to “one in two,” in the past five years.
In a moment you can change anything.
In every life, changes can be made.
The only thing that holds us back is our FEAR.
I recently read about a lady who cured herself of Lymphoma. (In about six months I think..!)
She simplified EVERYTHING. Stopped working, ate simply, started exercising & meditation, cut out life complexities and dietary complexities and her cancer simply disappeared. Her doctors had no explanation.
So, come on then, what do you chose?
Are you going to stumble blindly into horrific surgery, and body destroying drugs and radiation, or will you finally choose to save your life?
I can help you if you choose the later.
I can also help you if you’ve already chosen the former, it’s never too late.
Just remember, Prevention is better than cure.
Love, love, love and above all, good health!