Hope in Healing

Myasthenia gravis is one the many autoimmune diseases, which, according to contemporary Western medicine, offers no known cure, except controlling or suppressing its symptoms. This book is based on the author's own experience of battling against his myasthenia gravis: how he stopped all his medications through a holistic approach to controlling and managing the disease. This book provides insight and well-researched information that he would like to share with those who are afflicted with myasthenia gravis or any other autoimmune disease.

Albert Einstein once said: "There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle." Believe in the miracle of self-healing. Healing comes only from within, and not from any external source. Every individual should avail every opportunity to initiate the self-healing process, which is innate in the human body. Just believing in a miracle cure, however, is not enough; you must also empower yourself with knowledge and information to overcome myasthenia gravis through a holistic approach to the wellness of the body, the mind, and the spirit.

This book covers every aspect of holistic health to cope with autoimmunity: body detox, diet, lifestyle changes, exercises for muscle weakness, and mental relaxation techniques for vision problems. 

"The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope. That is why the patient's hopes are the physician's secret weapon. They are the hidden ingredients in any prescription." (Norman Cousins) Find your own ingredients in your prescription for a cure of your myasthenia gravis.

Hope is an important ingredient in healing. Life is always what you believe it is—as if nothing is a miracle, or as if everything is a miracle. Life always has been and always will be. Therefore, it is your belief that holds the key to your healing.

But can we believe or hope in the miracle of healing? God has given us an innate self-healing mechanism that enables us to fight and recover from diseases, including autoimmune disorders. Unfortunately, many of us ignored this natural healing; instead we have sought healing through science (I am not saying that science does not play a pivotal role in medicine and healing, but we often put too much emphasis on its efficacy that we have disregarded the natural laws of healing. As a result, our natural self-healing mechanism may have become compromised and ineffective.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Aging and Autoimmune Diseases

Aging always take a toll on the human body, causing autoimmune diseases and other age-related diseases. To avoid this scenario, delay the aging process as much as possible.

Aging begins as early as from young adulthood (around age 20 to 40) to middle adulthood (around age 40 to 65), and continues to old age (beginning at the age of retirement, approximately at age 65). Aging occurs throughout most of lifespan. Such a process is an accumulation of changes, which may be subtle or even drastic, that progressively lead to disease, degeneration, and, ultimately, death. Aging is difficult to define, but you will know it when you see it or experience it yourself. In brief, aging is a steady decline in health, which is instrumental in shortening lifespan; and the aging process is the duration during which such changes occur.

Whether you like it or not, your biological clock is ticking, and this will happen to various systems in your body: 

• Your heart will pump less blood, and your arteries will become stiffer and less flexible, resulting in high blood pressure—a health problem that often increases with age.
• With less oxygen and nutrients from the heart, your lungs will become less efficient in distributing oxygen to different organs and membranes of your body. 
• Your brain size will gradually reduce by approximately 10 percent between the age of 30 and 70. Loss of short-term memory will become more acute. 
• Your bone mass will reduce, making it more brittle and fragile. Your body size will shrink as you lose your muscle mass.

Your biological clock is ticking, whether you are conscious of it or not. Your biological clock may increase its speed of ticking if your body has more free radicals.   

What are free radicals? Your body is composed of many different types of cells, made up of many different types of molecules. Free radicals are molecules that contain unpaired electrons. Since electrons have a very strong tendency to co-exist in a paired rather than an unpaired state, free radicals indiscriminately pick up electrons from other healthy molecules close by. This chemical reaction converts those otherwise “healthy” molecules into free radicals, and thus setting up a chain reaction that can cause substantial biological damage to cells.

Free radicals are highly reactive, damaging not only cells but also chemicals in your body, such as enzymes (for digestion), making them less effective.

Aging causes oxidation, which literally means “rusting.” Free radicals cause oxidative damage to cells and tissues. Free radicals do not make you younger and healthier for longer; quite the contrary, they age you prematurely and contribute to many different diseases, including autoimmune diseases, cancers and heart diseases, among others.

Free radicals occur naturally as byproducts of oxidation, such as during respiration and other chemical processes. For example, during breathing, life-giving oxygen is produced and harmful carbon dioxide is released; digestion is another oxidation process, and your body obtains its energy from food through oxidation, during which free radicals are generated in the form of waste buildup. Ironically, what gives life may also take away life.

Free radicals are normally present in your body in small numbers, without causing too much harm. However, over time, the accumulation of free radicals may cause irreparable damage to your cells and tissues, if such accumulation is unchecked.

In addition, free radicals can also be caused by external factors, including alcohol, chemicals and pesticides (from foods and pharmaceutical drugs), heavy metals, such as cadmium and lead (from the environment), radiation (from the sun and other sources), and tobacco smoke

In particular, heavy metals in your body can dramatically increase free radical chain reactions. The more toxic metals in your body, the higher is the free radical activity.

Antioxidants are powerful scavengers of free radicals in your body. They are substances in foods that disarm free radicals. Antioxidants include beta-carotene, and vitamins A, C, and E.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Letting Go for Eye Relaxation

Myasthenia gravis affects muscles of the body, especially those of the eyes, often leading to drooping eyelids and eyestrain that may affect the overall vision of an individual. Therefore, eye relaxation is important to how the eye muscles may function optimally.

Eye relaxation begins with the mind first, not the eye. The mind must be completely relaxed before it can relax the body—and the eye, which is only one of the organs of the body. Letting go is the way to go for relaxation of the mind, the body, and then the eye.

Relax the body to relax the eye

Practicing Oriental exercises, such as Qi Gong, Tai Chi, and Yoga, can significantly relax the body because these exercises focus on “soft” movements of the body. Western-style exercises, on the other hand, focus more on building physical strength and muscles rather than on relaxing the muscles, and hence total body relaxation.

Self-massage to relax the eye

Self-massage the eye for relaxation to increase blood circulation, to create a sense of ease about seeing, and to enhance eye awareness for better vision.

Facial and eye massage 

• Breathe deeply and slowly.
• Rub both hands to generate warmth.
• Massage your jaw with your hands moving in small circles, from the chin outward along your jawbone up to the front of and behind your ears.
• Then, move your hands over the bridge of your nose, and massage outward along your cheekbones until you reach your temples and your ears.
• Then, starting from the bridge of your nose, massage along your eyebrows, moving above, below, and along the brow. Use your thumbs to press against the grooves slightly below your eyebrow ridge close to the bridge of your nose.
• Gently squeeze your eyeball with your fingers.
• Finally, use long, firm, strokes to massage your forehead from the left to the right, and then from the right to the left.

Throughout your facial and eye self-massage, identify sore spots, especially in the eyebrow area. Massage them with slightly harder and stronger circular movements.

Rub the eye 

• Apply and press the heel of your left palm and the heel of your right palm against your left eye and right eye, respectively.
• With gentle pressure, rub with a twisting movement your left eye with your left palm and your right eye with your right palm.
• Meanwhile, contract and relax your eyelid muscles.

Of course, relaxation has also to do with how you live your life, how you perceive your daily stress and how you cope with them. Remember, relaxation has much to do with letting go of all attachments in life. Let go of controlling how your life may turn out. If the mind is relaxed, the body will follow, and then the eye. We are living in a complex world with too many attachments that we are reluctant to let go of. Not letting go gives us everyday stress that is the underlying cause of many diseases, especially autoimmune disease, such as myasthenia gravis. 

The Book of Life and Living (2^nd edition) This 200-page book may help you to live your life in spite of having an autoimmune disease. The Book of Life and Living is a 200-page book that explains what true wisdom is: it is a process of asking meaningful questions and getting relevant answers from them to empower your mind to think differently. Learn how to harness your mind power with thinking -- how you think, react to life experiences, such as being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. The brain is a complex organ. In the book I try to explain in simple language how the mind works, and how you weave the fabrics of your reality from the life experiences encountered. Remember, being diagnosed with a degenerative disease, such as an autoimmune disease, is not the end of the world. Empower your mind to overcome it.

To get the Amazon Kindle version of The Book of Life and Living, click here; to get the paperback edition, click here.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Letting Go to Heal

Healing always begins with the mind first, and not the body. The mind must express the intent to heal, and the body may react accordingly. It is the mind that matters. Therefore, it is important to empower the mind for healing.

But the problem is that the human body living in the material world is like a wild and horse running here and there, and the mind is like a horseman who has to bring it back on track. To do just that, the horseman requires skill and horsemanship in the form of human and spiritual wisdom, without both the horse and the rider are getting nowhere.

I have just published my book: The Wisdom of Letting Go.

This book explain in plain English how the ancient Tao wisdom from China may provide a blueprint for nourishing human wisdom: an empty mind with reverse thinking, mindfulness for clarity thinking, living in the present with no expectations of the future, no picking and choosing, accepting and embracing everything that comes in the natural cycle of change—what goes up must always come down. True human wisdom is the ability to understand that attachments are no more than distractions of the mind from letting go of anything that is impermanent.

Human wisdom may not be inadequate due to the human flaws that originate from the human ego who wants to be in control of everything.  To overcome this inadequacy, spiritual wisdom is required.

Attachments to the many things in the material world, such as careers, health, relationships, and among others may affect the mind and the soul. The only antidote is letting go. Letting go to let God is the central theme of the book, and the only pathway to enlightenment.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Anxiety and Fear

To be diagnosed with myasthenia gravis is devastating, creating anxiety and fear, especially if your doctor tells you there is no cure, only treatment of the disease symptoms.

The good news is that we were all born with a natural gift -- freedom from anxiety and fear, expectation and regret, ambition and disappointment. However, as we grow older, we knowingly or unknowingly abuse or misuse that natural gift.

This is how.

We begin to develop our sensations and become affected by them. We all have our five senses: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting; they then become our perceptions and sensations that are stored as memories in our subconscious minds. Over the long haul, these accumulative experiences form our beliefs and personalities, and make us who we are. In other words, these memories become our bondage and we no longer have that innate freedom.

It is difficult to regain that natural gift once we have relinquished it. To illustrate, if we experienced something unpleasant in the past, we might have anxiety and fear that it would happen again. On the other hand, if we experience something pleasant, we would expect it to happen again; our expectations begin to precondition our minds to do certain things that we think will enable us to fulfill that expectations; by doing so, we pick and choose; any wrong choice or decision may lead to regret. By the same token, disappointment may be the consequence of ambition. 

Develop the mindset of living in the present. Essentially, it means focusing on what is real in the now, rather than letting the mind shuffle between the past and the future. The past was gone and therefore unreal; the future is yet to come, and therefore also unreal. Only the present is real; it is a gift, and that is why it is called "present." If we live in the present, we appreciate what we have, and not what we are supposed to have; more importantly, we have no fear and worry of what might or might not come.

AsIf Everything Is A Miracle

This 125-page book is about how to live your life as if everything is a miracle, instead of as if nothing is a miracle. To do just that, you need wisdom to "rethink" your mind, which may not be telling you the whole truth about your thoughts and life experiences; you need wisdom to "renew" your body, which lives in a toxic physical environment; you need spiritual wisdom to "reconnect" your soul, which is the essence of your spirituality. Most importantly, you need wisdom to "realign" your whole being because the body, the mind, and the soul are all interconnected and interdependent on one another for your well-being to live your life as if everything is a miracle. Your mind is the roadmap and your soul is the compass; without them, your body is going nowhere, and you will live your life as if nothing is a miracle.

Without anxiety and fear, you will become a better, happier, and healthier you. With enlightenment, you will live a stress-free life. Learn how to overcome your stress by letting go your ego-self. No Ego No Stress!

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau