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Something To Consider This Flu Season: Recent Research Shows Your Body Is Full Of Viruses All The Ti

Microbiome/Virome Research Shedding Light On Reality

Microbiome Network Life Center Flu

So much a part of our yearly cycle and so widespread is the buzz surrounding the flu that it has been granted its own season, dubbed the "flu season." Like the holiday season, the flu season is a large-scale, consumer/media event. Even as we speak our health care system is using the media to drive millions of consumers into the flu season marketplace where they will find supposed protection from the flu and, more importantly, buy millions of dollars worth of vaccine.

This approach to the flu stems from a consumer culture, health paradigm, the foundation of which rests on our inability to connect with or trust the wisdom of our bodies. "Getting sick" brings a lot of vulnerability to the surface for most of us and our consumer culture does not support vulnerability. If we don't feel a connection to the wisdom of our bodies then the vulnerable process of "getting sick" can feel like a loss of control; very confusing and scary. People will pay any price and do almost anything to remain in the good graces of the culture, retain control and avoid feeling that confusion and fear.

If we don't feel a connection to the wisdom of our bodies, then health is seen as something outside of us. If health is seen as something outside of us, then we will project our fear and confusion onto our Environment and any element in our Environment that might be seen as competing with us for a limited supply of health, like "germs." In this way the influenza virus has become the enemy and a convenient repository for our unconscious fear.

Our healthcare system takes advantage of this belief system and perpetuates it by selling us the illusion of health in the form of vaccine. Essentially they are soothing our fear and selling it back to us in the same motion; selling us a solution that creates more of the same problem, so they can sell more solution. In the process we stay dependent on the healthcare system to give us our soothing fix and blind to the fact that we can access an unlimited supply of health by simply connecting with our bodies and the wisdom therein.

The most commonly quoted definition of health, the definition formalized by the World Health Organization (WHO) over half a century ago, makes health feel less like something outside of us that can be purchased and more like something that is intrinsic to us, available in an unlimited supply and free of charge: "a complete state of physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity" (WHO, 1948). In this definition the measure of health does not rest solely on whether we are "sick" or not, and such words as "social" and "well-being" are suggestive of an implicit, trusting relationship with our selves, and between our selves and our Environment.

The wisdom of our bodies puts us in direct contact with the same Intelligence which coordinates all life on this Planet and its rhythms. If we are connected to the wisdom of our bodies then we have a sense of connection to our Environment and everything in it. If we have a sense of connection to our Environment and everything in it, then the "getting sick" experience becomes the empowering experience of the healing and evolutionary process as we allow our body-minds to entrain to the larger rhythms of our Environment. Within this context health is defined as our ability to perceive subtle changes within our selves and within our Environment, adapt to those changes and evolve through them with our Environment. When viewed from this perspective any element in our Environment, even the flu virus, can be utilized by our bodies' wisdom as a catalyst for creating health.

If you've had a direct, felt experience of this "connection to the wisdom of the body" that I keep referring to, then my words will resonate somewhere within you and that part of you will grok the bigger flu/health/Environment picture that I'm trying to paint. Whether you've had that direct, felt experience or not, it's useful to have information that can help your mind see things from a larger perspective, and scientific research can sometimes be good for providing that kind of information. Fortunately there is a new area of research that, I believe, will eventually lead to a total transformation in the way that we view our health as it is related to our Environment and things like the flu. In its early stages this research, conducted by the Human Microbiome Project, and the research that has come after it, is revealing a relationship between us and the microscopic animal kingdom that is vastly different from the relationship that the mainstream health model is based on.

The Human Microbiome Project is a National Institutes of Health initiative which has as its goal the identification and characterization of the microorganisms found in and around our bodies and the discovery of their relationship to human health and disease states. In a New York Times article, "How Microbes Defend and Define Us," Human Microbiome Project expert George Weinstock points out that "we have over 10 times more microbes than human cells in our bodies" (Zimmer, 2010). It is estimated that the average human body has about 50 trillion human cells in it. That means that we have somewhere around 500 trillion microbes in each of our bodies. And that's only taking into consideration the microbes on the inside of us. Human Microbiome Project researchers are finding that we are surrounded by and infused with a "cloud of microbes" (Zimmer, 2010). Researchers are calling this cloud the microbiome, which is to say, the veritable universe of microbes (bacteria, fungi and others) that occupy every nanometer of space in the air around us, on us and inside of us.

As a natural extension to the study of the microbes that share our space, and more relevant to our discussion of the flu, scientists are just beginning to train their focus on the world of viruses (known as the virome) that we co-exist with, as well. Researchers are finding that the vast communities of microbes are accompanied by, and working in tandem with, equally vast communities of viruses. A new study that appears in the July issue of Nature identified more than four thousand different viral strains in the guts of study subjects. Eighty percent of these apparently symbiotic viruses were previously unknown, along with their functions (Reyes, et al., 2010).

So at any given moment we are swimming in a sea of microbes and viruses (the microbiome/virome) and that sea of microbes and viruses is also swimming inside of us. If you subscribe to the mainstream health model and are fearful of "germs," you might not be feeling so well right now. This sea of microbes and viruses, however, is not the enemy - far from it, in fact. Microbiome/virome researchers are finding that the multitude of microbes and viruses are assisting us in ways that we couldn't live without, from playing a role in the timing of our growth and development, to virtually digesting our food for us. Our immune systems in particular appear to co-exist with the microbiome/virome. In fact, says the author of the previously mentioned New York Times article, Human Microbiome Project researchers are finding that "the microbiome itself guides the immune system to the proper balance" (Zimmer, 2010). The Nature, virus study revealed that viral strains were unique to each person in the study and over the course of the one year study the populations of viruses stayed mostly the same (Reyes, et al., 2010). According to Martin Blaser, a microbiologist and physician at New York University's Langone Medical Center, this kind of stability in viral populations indicates that the viruses are "part of our biology" (Saey, 2010).

So much for our "germ" phobias and the universally accepted idea that we need to compete with the world of microbes and viruses for our health. As we've just learned, the shear mass and complete omnipresence of the microbiome/virome makes it impossible to keep ourselves separate and it necessarily means that our relationship with the microbiome/virome is deeply symbiotic - if it weren't we'd be dead. The microbiome/virome is clearly as much a part of us as any of our organs and it functions as such.

New microbiome/virome research is proving the current health paradigm to be, at the least, based on a misguided premise. What then of all the treatment approaches that are based on that premise? Could we expect those treatment approaches to even work, or worse, could they result in negative repercussions of some kind? Some of the negative side effects of these treatment approaches are starting to surface in both the microbial and viral arenas. It is widely known and accepted that the obsessive overuse of antibiotics has resulted in the creation of "superbugs;" bacteria that have mutated and become more resilient, and thus resistant to even the strongest of antibacterial agents. Vaccines that are used to fight viruses have their own specters. The flu vaccine has been associated with a handful of harmful side effects, the most serious of which is Guillain-Barré syndrome. Guillain-Barré syndrome is an auto-immune disorder in which a person's own immune system attacks nerve cells, causing nerve damage and paralysis. Though cases of this are rare, Guillain-Barré syndrome remains a known, possible side effect of receiving the flu vaccine (CDC, 2011).

While it is controversial to suggest that the flu vaccine is harmful, there is a surprising amount of research in peer reviewed medical journals to support the idea that the flu vaccine simply doesn't work (Mercola, 2010). A very telling bit of research is a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine that found that sixty-two percent of healthcare workers, which include doctors and nurses, don't receive the flu vaccine themselves. The reasons for this, according to the authors of the study, are: A) the belief by healthcare workers that the flu vaccine doesn't work, B) healthcare workers' fear of side effects like Guillain-Barré syndrome and C) the belief by healthcare workers that their own immune systems are sufficient to keep them from getting sick (King, William D. et al., 2006). In other words the study shows that the people who actually work within our healthcare system are skeptical of the system's ability to produce health and not harm when it comes to things like the influenza virus. Ultimately, they choose to simply trust the wisdom of their bodies.

The Wisdom Of The Body

So what is this "wisdom of the body?" Most of us have felt our bodies buzzing after a good workout session, after making love or after some exhilarating experience. That buzz is life force energy - a kind of living, flowing Intelligence, or wisdom as I've been referring to it. This is the same Intelligence or wisdom which animates and coordinates the billions of processes that are happening every moment in our bodies that, multiplied together, equal life for us.

Our Planet is a dynamic, self-organizing, living system just like we are. The wisdom of our bodies is a subset of the Intelligence which animates and coordinates that global living system. And so by connecting with the life force energy in our bodies, we create an uplink to the massive Intelligence which animates and coordinates not only the life on this Planet, but the life of the Planet itself.

As a dynamic, self-organizing, living system our Planet does what all dynamic, self-organizing, living systems do. It trends towards greater and greater levels of complexity and higher levels of organization. Our Planet is changing and evolving, and through our connection to it, it is exerting pressure on us to entrain to its rhythms and evolve with it. This pressure to evolve is exerted on us through the various elements in our Environment.

In my experience the influenza virus is simply one of the elements of our Environment that is exerting pressure on us to evolve. Having worked very closely with thousands of people over the course of the last thirteen flu seasons, I have witnessed many instances in which the process of "getting sick" with the flu has become part and parcel of a broader healing and evolutionary process in someone's body and life. The more I've witnessed this phenomenon, the more I have begun to view the influenza virus as just another member of the symbiotic microbiome/virome whose presence can catalyze a process of healing and evolution.

This healing and evolutionary process is more than a mere philosophical concept. It is a measurable and reproducible phenomenon that I have observed in the bodies and lives of the people I've worked with. The healing and evolution process is always evidenced by a decrease in the overall tension in a person's body, a positive change in their posture, a constructive shift in their perceptions of themselves and the World around them, an increased ability to adapt to stress, enhanced and refined body-mind awareness, increased range and depth of emotional expression, heightened sensitivity to their internal rhythms and the rhythms of their Environment and a tendency to make choices from that point forward that will permanently support and sustain these changes.

To the extent that we can connect with our bodies and the wisdom therein, the energy that was previously bound up in the pain, or the symptom, or the "sickness," or the condition, or the disease becomes the energy that fuels our healing and evolutionary process. No matter how the "getting sick" process looks, whether it's a simple back ache, or allergies, or depression, or the flu, or even cancer, it is always part of a broader healing and evolutionary process that involves the shifting balance in our relationship with our selves, and between our selves and our Environment.

The key to accessing the wisdom of our bodies and transforming the "getting sick" process into an empowering process of healing and evolution lies with our ability to focus our attention. The most life changing thing that we can do for ourselves is to simply turn our focused attention toward our body and let our attention rest on the life force energy that we feel there.

If this sounds too elementary to have the profound effect that I'm claiming, it is because most of us are completely unaware of just how little of our attention we are directing towards our bodies from moment to moment, and therefore have no direct experience of the massive power that we can access by doing so. We've been born into a culture that has an aversion to feeling the body. This habitual resistance to feeling our bodies has been building momentum in us over the course of thousands of years as each generation has become increasingly convinced of the preeminence of thought. As humans we spend most of our time completely captivated by the constant stream of thoughts running through our heads. As a principle of Nature the flow of our attention is constantly and strongly being drawn towards the sensations in our bodies, as well. But because of our cultural conditioning and our habitual aversion to feeling our bodies, we expend massive amounts of energy in our constant attempt to resist that draw. That's why our bodies have to scream at us with painful symptoms or knock us out with disabling illnesses before we'll stop what we're doing and pay attention.

Any skill worth learning will take some practice. In this case the effort is well worth the payoff. The ability to feel our bodies at all times is the most fundamental skill that we could learn during our lifetime. I say fundamental because our ability to stay connected to the wisdom of our bodies has a deeply profound effect on the most foundational aspect of our lives, that being our relationship with our selves and our Environment, or our health as I've defined it at the beginning of this paper.

Microbiome/virome research supports this larger view of health. It is showing us that the thing that we call an immune system is not so much a system that protects and defends against attack from the microscopic animal kingdom. It is a relational system that coordinates and regulates a harmonious interaction between our cells and theirs, between our selves and our Environment. As our skill in allowing our attention to rest in our bodies increases, so does our access to the wisdom of our bodies, along with our access to the Intelligence that coordinates all of the life on this Planet. As we become more connected to our selves and our Environment, we feel naturally compelled to make decisions that are more congruent with who we are and why we're here; decisions that will support a more efficient use of the resources that our bodies and being share with the Planet. When our resources are not being spent on the continual effort to resist feeling our bodies, our bodies no longer need to scream at us to get our attention and so our pain and our symptoms dissipate. It also becomes less and less necessary for us to "get sick." When we do "get sick" with things like the flu, we are able to see and feel it as part of an Intelligent and empowering process of healing and evolution; the direct experience of abundant health.

Works Cited:

"CDC H1N1 Flu | General Questions and Answers on Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS)." Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 07 Jan. 2011 .

King, William D., Steffie J. Woolhandler, Arleen F. Brown, Luohua Jiang, Kristine Kavorkian, David U. Himmelstein, and David H. Bor. "BRIEF REPORT: Influenza Vaccination and Health Care Workers in the United States." Journal of General Internal Medicine 21 (2006): 181-84.

Mercola. "More Proof Flu Shots Don't Work." Natural Health Articles - Latest and Current Health News and Information by Dr. Mercola. Web. 04 Dec. 2010. .

Reyes, A., M. Haynes, and N. Hanson. "Viruses in the Faecal Microbiota of Monozygotic Twins and their Mother." Nature 466 (2010).

Saey, Tina Hesman. "Everyone Poops His Or Her Own Viruses." Science News. 06 Jan. 2011 .

WHO. Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, 19-22 June 1946, and entered into force on 7 April 1948.

Zimmer, Carl. "How Microbes Defend and Define Us." New York Times.com. 12 July 2010. Web.

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