Health for Life
Fighting for Wellness
and Freedom

By Charlene Muhammad
SeeingBlack.com Health Writer

Join our discussion on health and spirituality here.

I am looking for a little conscious company in this dialogue about health and well-being.

From my vantage point as a clinical herbalist and early childhood educator, the outlook often looks bleak and feels lonely. I work in a very urban setting in Baltimore and, although it is relatively clean, it’s a desolate kind of place. At the same time, I know that it almost takes an act of Congress to change group thought. And we all must reach beyond our desolate places and change group thought in order to heal ourselves as a collective.

This article begins a series on wellness to help change that group thought, in part by emphasizing good old common sense. Much of what I have to say you already intuitively know. But I am offering what I have learned over the course of eighteen years of study to make your life living a little easier.

Every kind of sage and spiritual tradition, whether Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Metaphysicalist, Channeler, I Ching thrower, Astrologist or what have you, is rooted in a solid health regiment. What all spiritual seekers understand—and you do too intuitively— is that a strong body equals a strong mind. A strong mind equals a strong spirit. A strong spirit equals… FREEDOM.

Autumn Changes
In the tradition of the five seasons or five elements, we have just transitioned in the season of autumn. Autumn represents harvest time. Autumn also represents the time to begin storing what is harvested for the next season: winter.

In this context, we will begin this series on the subject of the immune system. The immune system is our "storage tank" because it houses most of the amour we need to support life. The next season, winter, brings on the biggest assault on our health. As Africans, we are living in a climate that is not ours to begin with! Winter on the continent is not exactly like DC, or Baltimore, or Chicago, or New York—you get my drift.

The condition of our immune system is the main cause of illness. Did you know that the common cold can lead to a depressed immune system that may lead ultimately to such diseases as multiple sclerosis, lupus and even cancer? Did you know that eating today’s typical American diet can also lead to such diseases as irritable bowel syndrome, hypertension, diabetes and cancer?

Our immune system constantly battles impurities that have infiltrated our body both voluntarily (after all, we are what we eat, drink, think and smoke) as well as involuntarily. As we play a constant chess game with our social, political, psychological and spiritual lives, our immune system represents our knights in shining armor, wielding to our will, often as pawns in our battle to gain homeostasis: the human balance.

War on Our Bodies
The impurities we voluntarily inflict on ourselves must be eliminated. For example, it has been estimated that 35 percent of all cancer deaths are linked to poor eating habits. Our immune system is also hampered by the state of the nervous system. The hub of the nervous system, our brain, greatly influences the chemical and biological composition within us. The body does not feed itself. We make the conscious decision about what to eat. In turn, eating the wrong things disrupts our thinking process.

Psychological imbalances, such as stress, predispose us to illness. Think of stress as the misdirected importance we give some trivialness in our life. Now consider this thought to be deadly. Medical studies have shown that the effect of stress is even greater if it is caused by some role or relationship that is central to our identity—like a job!—or if it stems from a problem or situation that we feel we can’t escape.

How we react to stress makes the difference in our susceptibility to disease. Taking drugs, consuming alcohol and overeating to relieve stress will only diminish the immune system, numb our brains and cause depression. To depress is to dispirit. Once we are dispirited, we are easily defeated. Gaining control over our minds is our key to survival. The mind guides our will, which guides our life. It is our mind that sets the relationship between the biological systems within us. Our mind is the queen in the physiological hierarchy.

Love as Medicine
There is a new branch of medicine called psychoneuroimmunology that is attempting to prove that love, hope, faith and will can strengthen the immune system. The key to embracing this scientific thought is finding a direction for our love, hope, faith and will. We are to have love, hope and faith for what or whom? Where are we to direct these energies? We must free our minds from the rhetorical banter of daily pressures that keeps us from seeking the true knowledge of ourselves. Seeking the true knowledge of self is the proper food for thought. Once the physiological queen, our mind, is well fed, proper nourishment for the body will inevitably follow. Remember, the key to successful Chess is the protection of the queen. Once your queen has been captured or hindered from movement, the game is over.

In the next few articles, we’ll discuss concrete phenomena that affect our immune system from childhood to adulthood, such as chronic ear infections, eczema, asthma and the good old flu. We will also consider the possibility of these average problems growing into bigger problems likes multiple sclerosis, lupus and cancer. And I promise not to leave you hanging in the muck and mire. I’ll share my own nutrition and herbs tips to keep you healthy!

Charlene Muhammad, MS is a clinical herbalist, doula, early childhood educator and mother of two dynamic sons. She practices in the Baltimore-DC area.

— November 4, 2005

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