Breathing Right for Autoimmune Diseases

Autoimmune diseases are complex disorders involving a compromised immune system. To date, the Western medicine has not been able to come up with any effective cure, except recommending toxic pharmaceutical drugs to control the symptoms. One of the underlying causes of autoimmune diseases is stress, which also plays a pivotal role in aggravating the disease symptoms.

Surprisingly, stress has much to do with breathing—yes,  the way you breathe can adversely affect your whole body system, including your immune system. In addition, breathing right can also reduce your stress, both the physical and the mental stress.

Your Creator has given you powerful lungs, which are capable of taking any strenuous workout well into your seventies. But your respiratory system may be severely compromised due to cigarette smoke, alcohol, gallstones in the liver causing allergies, disorders of the nose and nasal cavities, and diseases of the bronchi and lungs.

Your body wellness replies on breathing right.

Breathing gives you invisible food to all your body cells and organs by supplying them with life-giving oxygen. Your intake of oxygen depends on the quality of the air as well as the how deeply you breathe in and out. All centenarians have one thing in common: they all breathe deeply and slowly. Conscious deep breathing may calm and integrate your body and mind, contributing to overall peace of mind, which is important to your physical and mental health.

The secret of breathing right is to take your lungs everywhere and breathe deeply and slowly. It’s that simple. Unfortunately, many people simply take breathing right for granted.

The wrong way to breathe

• Hold in your stomach or have a flat stomach while breathing in and out.
• Take rapid, small, and shallow upper-body breaths (leading to aches and pain). 
• Exhale carbon too quickly (disturbing the balance of acidity and alkalinity in your body–known as the pH level).
• Use your neck and upper-back muscles to breathe (resulting in high blood pressure and racing heartbeats).

The right way to breathe

Breathe with the diaphragm: breathe deeply through your nose; your belly and diaphragm should move noticeably while breathing.

How to breathe right:

• Sit comfortably in a relaxed mode with your feet resting comfortably on the floor.
• Place your hands on your stomach.
• Breathe in slowly through your nose on a count of five, while gently pushing your hands up on your stomach.
• Hold your breath for a count of five.
• Breathe out slowly through your mouth on a count of five, while pushing your hands down on your stomach.
• Repeat. Allow your eyes to close as your breath deepens and your belly begins to rise and fall.
• Begin your 10-15 minute breathing session several times a day until your breathing becomes second nature to you.

Optimal breathing benefits the flow of qi (internal vital force). In the Orient,

Yoga, Qigong, and Zen meditation, all teach correct breathing as the basic principle for practice.

Breathing right leads to correct posture, which also affects the natural flow of qi, which is the internal life force energy responsible for transporting oxygen and nutrients to different organs and tissues in your body. Good posture contributes to breathing right. Incidentally, rodents, with the shortest breaths in the animal kingdom, also have the shortest lifespan. Therefore, breathing right is an important component of your body's overall  wellness.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Sleep and Stress

Stress is the underlying cause of many diseases, including autoimmune diseases. Stress can often worsen the symptoms of an autoimmune disease. Therefore, it is important to have good sleep to reduce the stress level. Sleep is vital to wellness. A gold fish deprived of sleep will remain still for a prolonged period to make up for its lack of sleep. Natural sleep holds the key to living a stress-free life. The paradox is that we cannot have natural sleep if there are too many stressors in our lives. Living in this day and age, stress is an everyday phenomenon. In contemporary living, nearly every aspect of life and living involves speed, so much so that many of us have become addicted speed, and thus become time-stressed.

In our daily lives, there are so many chores we have to do, so many tasks we want to accomplish, so many life goals we hope to achieve, and so many dreams we wish to fulfill. We end up becoming unduly stressed, so much so that we cannot sleep at night, and, as a result, we resort to taking sleep medications. But do they work? No, they don’t work over the long haul. Worse, many of us may become addicted to these sleep medications, and we form a vicious circle of getting more sleeplessness and more sleep medications.

Natural sleep comes from relaxation of the body, the mind, and the soul. Without this total relaxation, we become stressed and restless. But how can we relax if we are unduly stressed by the many different things we think we must do?

Ask yourself these self-probing questions: Why do you think there are so many different things you must do? Where do they come from? Time is a leveler of man in that everyone has only 24 hours. Why do you seem to have less time than others?

The answer to these questions is simple: your ego.

The daily chores, the multi tasks, the life goals, the big dreams—they all originate from your ego self. You simply want to feel good about yourself. Your ego is behind everything that you wish for in life—a successful career, good relationships, and a happy family, and among others. But they all come with a price: your health. Ironically enough, they all stress you one way or another. When you become stressed, you cannot sleep, and you take sleep medications, which further impair your health. When your health deteriorates, you take more meditations, and thus a vicious circle is formed. Stress takes a toll on everything you wish for, everything you have set your mind to achieve and attain. The bottom line: you may end up getting nothing, except your broken and unfulfilled dreams.

So, what is the solution to the above? The starting point is letting go of your ego. Without your ego, you would have different perspectives of your desires and expectations in life; with different attitudes, you would take actions differently; most importantly, you would become less stressed. It is stress that takes away your natural sleep, your relaxation, your clarity of thinking—they all play a pivotal role in wisdom in living your life as if everything is a miracle.

No Ego No Stress: My book explains in detail how you can eliminate stress in your everyday life and living.

Take Control of Your Health and Escape the Sickness Industry: This informative and inspirational book by Elaine Hollingsworth, the movie-star-turned-heath-crusader, explains in detail how understanding dangerous drugs, unreliable medical tests, and often-times unnecessary procedures may help you escape the sickness industry through healthy sleep and natural health. Teach yourself self-responsibility—your greatest weapon in improving health at any age, and your first step in getting healthy sleep. Do not fall into the trap of the sickness industry by taking more dangerous drugs. Just tell your doctor, "You're fired!"

Without stress, there is no reason why you cannot have natural sleep, which is essential to longevity living.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Drugs Or No Drugs?

Myasthenia gravis is a disorder caused by the malfunctioning of the immune system. The malfunctioning is a result of the accumulated toxins in the body, impairing and weakening the immune system.

It is a fact that pharmaceutical drugs are toxic chemicals. Although they may be effective in temporarily removing undesirable symptoms of a disease, they also have long-term adverse side effects. Therefore, carefully consider the trade-off. The goal is always to eliminate ultimately the use of pharmaceutical drugs.

The pharmaceutical companies and the FDA have convinced not only the medical establishment but also the gullible public that costly drugs are the answer to all their health problems, despite their dubious track records and often-deadly side effects.

The use, misuse, and abuse of drugs account for 250,000 to 500,000 deaths each year in the United States. And do you still believe that pharmaceutical drugs provide all the answers to your health problems?  Dr. O. W. Holmes, Professor of Medicine, Harvard University, had this to say regarding pharmaceuticals putting you in harm’s way: “If all the medicine in the world were thrown into the sea, it would be bad for the fish and good for humanity.” Dr. Holmes’ statement speaks volumes of the potential harm of pharmaceuticals.

When you give your body a drug that replaces a substance your body is capable of making itself, you body then becomes weaker, not stronger, and begins not only to manufacture less of that substance, but also to become more dependent on the outside source, which is usually the drug.

Unfortunately, no drug can give you insight into the circumstance that created your problems. At best, it can only temporarily reduce the physical pain created by your situation. A drug "cures" your symptoms at the expense of creating more potential symptoms down the road. For a while, you may be symptom-free, but soon enough new symptoms may emerge, requiring yet a more potent drug to deal with them.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Help the Toxic Mind to Let Go

Myasthenia gravis is a disorder caused by the malfunctioning of the immune system. The malfunctioning is a result of the accumulated toxins in the body, impairing and weakening the immune system.

It is a fact that pharmaceutical drugs are toxic chemicals. Although they may be effective in temporarily removing undesirable symptoms of a disease, they also have long-term adverse side effects. Therefore, carefully consider the trade-off. The goal is always to eliminate ultimately the use of pharmaceutical drugs.

Your body’s toxins may have come from many sources. All these years, knowingly or unknowingly, you may have poisoned your body with toxins coming from many different sources: pesticides and herbicides from agricultural products; industrial wastes; exhaust fumes from factories and automobiles; polluted waters; irradiation from use of cell phones, microwave ovens, power plants, radio satellite transmissions; food contamination; chemicals in food processing.

In addition, your mind may have many toxic emotions and thoughts. Remember, there is a close body-and-mind connection. Toxic emotions and thoughts can do much damage to your choice of actions that may lead to a compromised autoimmune system resulting in your myasthenia gravis symptoms.

The Wisdom of Letting Go

Your toxic thoughts may create your toxic mind. We are living in a world with many attachments that have become the sources of stress, causing strain on your body cells that compromise your immune system. To initiate and facilitate self-healing, you must let go of all toxic emotions, such as anger, hatred, regret, disappointments, among others that originate from attachments to the past and the future, success and failure, careers and relationships, among others. You have to let go of all attachments to the material world. But it is easier said than done. You need both human wisdom and spiritual wisdom to do just that -- letting go to let God.

The ancient Tao wisdom from China provides 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.  

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau