Short podcast by Billabong Retreat founder Paul about what makes good health (part 1)
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hi, my name is Paul von Bergen, and this is my podcast. So today I’m gonna talk about health generally and how we can cultivate good health and wellness. within ourselves, within our mental and physical and spiritual body, and how most importantly, we can train ourselves to be fully empowered in our health.
Fundamentally, we are the greatest determining factors in how we operate, how we relate to our environment, but unfortunately, in the western world, in particularly, We’ve moved into this situation where we feel we have become dependent on someone else for our good health that we just plod along, doing our lives, living as normal, [00:01:00] working, eating, drinking, looking after the kids, all of those things.
And then when we get sick, we go to the doctor and the doctor comes up with an answer normally within about 10 minutes. You can be pretty sure that that answer is probably nine times out of 10 to take some kind of form of medication. Someone gets sick, they go to the doctor, they get given medication.
This is the basic health system as we know it. And what I would like to try and propose is that we can actually start to take our health into our own hands. This doesn’t mean there’s not a role for the Western medical system. There surely is. But what it does mean is we can do everything possible within our power to stay out of hospital.[00:02:00]
To stay out of the diseased state, to actually connect with our body minds, and so we can start to see what kind of patterns we are creating internally, and we can start to notice the biofeedback signals that our body gives us when it’s out of balance. And if we can start to read and notice those signals in our body, if we can become sensitive to those signals in our body, then we have a chance of changing our daily patterns.
And by changing our daily patterns, that will change our biochemistry. We can change the foods we eat, we can change the way we move our body, we can change the thoughts we have. We can [00:03:00] change what chemicals we get exposed to, and all of those things ultimately will change how our body evolves and will reduce our likelihood of finding ourselves in a state of what we call disease or as I much prefer to reference it, dis-ease.
This dis-ease is an imbalance. It’s when our extremely complicated system with three and a half billion years of evolutionary history contained within each and every one of us, gets slightly out of balance, slightly out of kilter, for example, through the foods we eat or through the stress we generate. Or through the thoughts that we have or through [00:04:00] the antibiotics that we take.
this can have quite a strong effect on our gut biome. And if we particularly kill some bacteria within our gut biome, then other bacteria might get out of control. And we create what’s called an imbalance. And as we’re finding out now the balanced gut biome, wide diversity of gut bacteria is vital for all aspects of our health.
So this is why this series of podcasts is going to be about helping you to feel empowered, helping you to realize that you can be the master of your body mind, that no one knows your health and wellness like you do. And that you can do many, many things that will massively reduce the chances of your body experiencing disease.
And ultimately, you are the one that cares most about your health and wellness . Now, we’ve commercialised the wellness and health industry over the last 50 years to such a state that profit plays an unbelievably important role in the research that is being conducted. And the solutions that are being proposed mainly by big pharmaceutical companies.
Now, I’m not trying to suggest all big pharmaceutical companies are evil or anything like that, but we have to understand the business model, which is about making profit, and the business model of making profit is about making more profit each year, delivering a higher shareholder return year on year. [00:06:00] Now you don’t make a profit by selling someone drugs once.
You don’t make a profit from people who are completely healthy and well. You make a profit from people who do have disease. do have imbalance and regularly take your product on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. So the whole business model is set up to benefit from people being sick and taking drugs, pharmaceutical drugs on a regular basis.
And these drugs don’t really cure you of your disease. What they tend to do is mask your symptoms. Why would they want to cure your disease?
So, The inherent nature of those companies is to research solutions that mask symptoms, and you [00:07:00] have to realize that you do not want to be a slave to this system. Ultimately, we’ve had the Western medical system now for 50, 60, 70 years, but yet after all these trillions of dollars invested in this medical system, we are still seeing rising rates of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autoimmune disease, all of the above. So something is not working. Something is not right. And the way I would look at the Western medical system is really very good at accident and disease management, accident and disease management. That’s what it is okay at.
Accident management particularly, it’s good at, you have an accident, you have a car crash, you fall off your bike. Great. You’ve got a disease. Well, [00:08:00] okay, and the problem is you’ve got the disease or you’re showing the symptoms. So your system’s already so far out of balance that you’re needing Western Medical in intervention.
So what I’m more proposing is wellness cultivation, is doing everything within your power to stay out of the Western medical system, to not need to be on pharmaceuticals on a regular basis. And whilst of course, nothing is ever guaranteed, I would never promise that. I have heard reports and estimates that 95% of disease and illness is what we call environmental.
We can make a difference to it. We can change the environment. We can change the environment within our mind, the environment within our stress response system, the environment within our gut, the environment within our home, what chemicals and [00:09:00] pesticides we are exposed to, so we can change all that.
And what I’m gonna do over the series of this podcast is try and make it easy to do that by understanding human psychology, understanding busy western lives, and try and put into place simple practices that can develop over time, that can help you create new habitual patterns. Patterns of thinking, patterns of eating, patterns of moving.
That will give you the best possible chance of a healthy well outlook in life. Thanks for listening. This is Paul von Bergen. Until next time, goodbye.