How full is your rainbarrel?
I recently gave a talk about German auricular acupuncture at a health fair. Afterwards, a couple of people came up to me saying they could relate to a certain phenomenon that I had described. I’ve written about this topic in my newsletter in the past, but it’s been a couple of years, and I think it warrants being revisited now.
The phenomenon that I described in my talk goes something like this. You’re humming along, relatively healthy, body functioning normally, until a distinct moment when everything falls apart. For example, you bend over to pick a pen off of the floor, your back seizes up, and it hasn’t been the same since. Or you experienced a stressful event like a car accident, then developed fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, or an autoimmune condition. I hear stories like this from my clients all the time.
Have you experienced something like this?
This phenomenon is explained by the rain barrel theory. Imagine that we each come into this world with an empty rain barrel, which represents our capacity for healing. It’s like our own personal health insurance. As we go through life and experience stress, illness, injury, toxic exposure, poor diets, and more, our rain barrel starts to fill up. As the contents of the barrel reach the tippy top, all it takes is one more drop for the barrel to begin to overflow. When this happens, we begin to experience a whole host of symptoms, because the body is out of energy to heal and adapt to what life presents us with on a daily basis.
What can you do if your rain barrel is overflowing?
You have two obvious choices: you can make your barrel bigger, or you can drain it. To make your barrel bigger, you can reduce stress, get plenty of sleep, clean up your diet, exercise, meditate, take more breaks. These are all important tactics to halt the cascade of symptoms and improve and maintain your health, but there is a limit to how big you can make your rain barrel.
There are only two ways that I know of to drain your rain barrel: clearing blockages from the body’s memory bank and identifying, then treating by detoxifying, chronic stressors.
Clearing blockages
Our body and brain retains memories of stresses and traumas that we have experienced throughout our lifetime. Sometimes it’s the big events. Other times it’s insignificant injuries and illnesses that the body becomes consumed by. When a blockage develops, there is little energy left to heal new injuries or illnesses. German auricular acupuncture can identify what and how severe these blockages to healing are. The blockages can be treated with acupuncture needles and low-level laser therapy, which can drain your rain barrel significantly.
Identifying and treating/detoxifying chronic stressors
Over our lifetimes, our bodies are exposed to many stressors, such as toxic substances and foods that are less than nutritious. The most common body stressors include food sensitivities, immune challenges, chemicals, heavy metals, and scars. These exposures can gradually stress and assault an organ, a gland, a joint, or any part of our body.
When someone comes to the clinic with a particular complaint, it is important to identify whether or not their complaint is being caused or exacerbated by a particular stressor. If it is, they won’t heal completely without avoiding exposure, detoxifying, and/or treating that stressor. Using Nutrition Response Testing, the exact source of body stress can be identified and treated. Treatment methods include avoiding certain foods, nutritional supplementation, herbal/homeopathic therapy, as well as low-level laser therapy for the treatment of scars.
By detoxifying the tissues of heavy metals, chemicals and immune debris, and treating scars, your rain barrel can be drained even further.
Imagine the state of health that is possible if you not only adopt the health-supporting methods that increase the size of your rain barrel, but also piece together the puzzle of causative factors and get the appropriate treatment to help you drain your rain barrel!