114 The Complete Home Guide to Herbs, Natural Healing, and Nutrition
jobs include helping to break down bile in order to inhibit pathogenic
organisms, assisting complete digestion, and helping to reduce toxic
residues that encourage putrefactive bacteria. They assist in the making of
B vitamins and important enzymes for digestion — particularly of lactose.
Where do probiotics come from? Some come from milk products,
others from fermented vegetables and other sources. Ask your supplier for
one that is suitable for you and appropriate for the problem at hand. Soil
organisms are also being used very successfully to balance our own fl ora,
reinstating the “peck of dirt” that used to be considered vital for our well-
being, according to the old European saying.
How We Think and Feel Is the Immune System
The key to an effective immune system is the general well-being of our
mind, body, and spirit. Being sick is not simply the result of one problem,
it is a collection of many factors. Some diseases are regarded as being
modern, such as depression caused by stress, pollution, and so on. We
become frightened by these diseases and perhaps even feel guilty about
them. These negative feelings are also factors in disease. Cancer is often
talked about as a modern problem too, but archaeologists and scientists
have told us that the skeletons of ancient peoples and animals have
repeatedly shown signs of cancer, proving that this is an old, inherent
problem affecting all living creatures.
In medical lectures on the immune system in top American hospitals,
great emphasis is usually laid on a patient’s state of mind as being the key
to the health of the immune system. Medical experts have discovered
through extensive research that the main, fundamental driver of the
immune system is the hypothalamus, and that what dictates its
performance is the way we think — that is, whether we are happy or sad,
positive or negative. It is also important to look at the health and well-
being of the adrenal glands, which support the hypothalamus. A stressed,
overworked, unhappy life can lead to disease, whereas a positive attitude,
happiness, and relaxation are vital in overcoming disease. In this modern
era of gene testing, it is important to realize that we can all possess
mutant genes with a potentiality toward cancer. Not only can we be
responsible, in part, for whether they get switched on, we can also have
the power to switch them off.
For those who are enlightened about positivity and who know about
negativity and pain, the subject becomes something of a meditation itself.
Maintaining genuinely good and positive feelings in any situation creates
vibrations, and these vibrations create different auras and body chemistry.
Kirlian photography and chromatography can reveal these normally
invisible things. Body chemistry creates smells and fragrances that repel
immunity 114