Screams from your liver and kidneys

An injury to my left palm

When I was closing the windows at home on 12^th November 2018, my left palm got caught in between and a small portion of skin got crushed. I gave Reiki immediately to subdue the pain and for healing to start. I knew it would take at least three weeks to heal.

                                            Healing progressing- 24 November 2018
Usually, the injured portion gets inflamed, swollen, then it gradually dries up and falls off as new skin regenerates beneath it.

Autophaging

Our human body is a self-healing machine par excellence. If the body’s intelligence is left to operate, it can set right any problem it encounters, majority of which are due to our negligence and carelessness. All the body needs is just time and co-operation from us.

That the body eats up the damaged and diseased cells has been proven in 2016 by Yoshinori Ohsumi,which led to him winning the Nobel prize in Physiology of Medicine. 

The word 'autophagy' — from the Greek for 'self-eating' — was coined in 1963 by the Belgian biochemist Christian de Duve, who saw how cells broke down their parts inside a waste-processing sac that he called a lysosome. Biologists now understand that this process is fundamentally important to living cells.

"Without autophagy our cells won't survive," says Juleen Zierath, a physiologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who was on the selection committee for the medicine Nobel. When cells are starved, they can consume their own proteins for fuel. The same degradation process can be used to eliminate damaged proteins and organelles — effectively, to renew cells and clear out debris — or to ward off invading bacteria and viruses.Disruptions in autophagy have been linked to Parkinson's disease, type 2 diabetes and other disorders. It is now known that fasting provides the greatest known boost to autophagy.

Fasting is actually far more beneficial than just stimulating autophagy. It does two good things. By stimulating autophagy, we are clearing out all our old, junky proteins and cellular parts. At the same time, fasting also stimulates growth hormone, which tells our body to start producing some new snazzy parts for the body. We are really giving our bodies a complete renovation.

To activate autophagy

Remember, autophagy is turned on when your body is in stress response mode. Stressing your cells is the natural way to turn on autophagy. You can do this through intermittent fasting and protein cycling to create nutrient deprivation in your cells. You can also create cellular stress in the body through exercise.

For performing this function, the body should be freed from other functions like digestion. This means a 12 hour fasting is required every day for the body to do the overhauling function. And you have an optimum functioning body. Isn’t it great?

The thought that crossed my mind

It came to my mind that I do 12 hour fast daily. After my dinner of a small bowl of fruits at about 7.30 pm, I have my breakfast at 9.15 am. That meant I was letting my body to do its job of cleaning up. If it can eat up damaged cells from inside the body, I thought it should be able to absorb the inflamed drying up part of my skin in the injured area. I would consider it as the proof of autophaging mechanism.

And it really happened

 To my pleasant surprise, I noticed that the injured area was getting shrunken and disappearing slowly. Just look at on 2^nd December 2018, twenty days after the injury. It is almost gone, being absorbed by the body! 

Two days later, it is totally resorbed.

Be considerate to your liver and kidneys

If we don’t allow the body to do its autophaging function, a whole lot of stress comes to the liver and kidneys that do the clean-up job. When we overstuff ourselves with food, and daily medicines (which are chemicals and need to be expelled on a daily basis), liver and kidneys suffer from backlog work. This is why many people go for liver and kidney failure these days!

References:

-          https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2016/ohsumi/lecture/

-          https://www.nature.com/news/medicine-nobel-for-research-on-how-cells-eat-themselves-1.20721

-          https://thechalkboardmag.com/what-is-autophagy-intermittent-fasting-process

-          https://www.dietdoctor.com/renew-body-fasting-autophagy

Bhojan (Eating) as a Sadhana

Food is required for the nourishment of our physical body, or the ‘Annamayakosha’. If we consider our mealtimes as a sadhana, satvik energy will enrich our body.

Mealtimes for meditation

I make my mealtimes meditation times. For this to happen, first of all, one should eat when one is hungry. How many of us experience hunger on a day to day basis? Many are in the habit of eating before the previous meal has fully digested. If one is hungry, his/her body and mind are waiting in all eagerness to receive the food, which becomes like ‘Amrit’ (nectar).

On the other hand, when food is reaching the body which is not hungry, it acts as a poison to the body.

Mealtimes as ‘Seva’

The fact that somebody is dying every second from lack of food and hunger makes my inner self cringe, even from my childhood. I used the same argument to develop the habit of not wasting food in my children.

            Does this picture come to our mind while overeating or throwing away food?

About a decade back, the thought came to me that if mentally I offer a portion of my food to somebody anywhere in the world who is hungry at that time, that should work as energetically we are all one. Then it became my habit, though I did not have any proof that it works.

Proof for the theory

My mother was having some health issues and for two months she was having only two glasses of tender coconut water daily, no other food or drinks. During every meal that I had during that period, I was mentally offering nutrients to her.

Later when I met my chachi (father’s younger brother’s wife) who stayed in the adjacent house of my parents' place and who used to visit them every day, told me that even though my mother was having just the coconut water, there was no dearth of energy noticed. When I told what I was doing for my mother, she was awestruck that such a thing is possible!

So it is a good idea on humanitarian grounds to rever the food we are getting and menally offer a part of it to somebody who is hungry at that time anywhere in the world.