Over the years I’ve heard many patients say to me things like: “My mother had a bad back and her mother before her.” Or “I have adult onset diabetes and it seems to run in my family.”
It turns out that only around 5% of all disease is purely genetic. The rest of the 95% is influenced by your environment. You may have a familial trait in your genes or a predisposition but that is not a death sentence. Just because you have a gene encoding for a particular dysfunction doesn’t mean the gene has to switch on.
Our genes are like a movie script. Depending on the director, the actors that are hired, the cultural environment that the film is produced in, all will affect how the movie turns out. There are many examples of remakes in Hollywood. Movies like Sabrina (1954/1995) or Father of the Bride (1950/1991), or Total Recall (1990/2012). The original is never the same as the remake.
Epigenetics is the study of how environmental factors change our gene expression.
The environment includes the food that we eat, how much movement we get throughout the day, the types of thoughts that we think, the air we breathe, how much sunshine we are exposed to etc.
What’s very exciting about this for me is that our health is then determined by ourselves and how we interact with our environment. When we can fully take charge of our health and become greater than our environment, we open ourselves up to more possibilities and the power of evolution.
We have a modern cultural focus of drawing our attention outwards (so that we can consume more). Turning our attention inward then takes more energy at first. But this is the way to fully take charge of our health.
You can do this when you’re on the table at the Happy Spine. Over the course of the session, there are many things that shift including your brain waves, your nervous system activity and many different aspects of your physiology such as your blood pressure and digestion. Meditation is another way of turning our attention inwards.
Whether you’re at the Happy Spine or you are meditating at home, you can become more aware of your thoughts and feelings. Becoming more conscious means that you start to uncover your subconscious thoughts. Your brain can then learn to associate what feelings go with what thoughts. You start to change who’s directing the movie.
You can create more space between you and your thoughts. And this gives you the capacity to choose your thoughts rather than letting your thoughts run you.
Our subconscious thoughts are a big part of our environment. They strongly affect our health through affecting our genes. So it’s not just the bad habits like staying up late, eating junk food, and not exercising that you want to pay attention to. You also want to pay more attention to what you’re thinking every moment of everyday.
This way you get to create the movie that you want to see using the same script as before, just with different emotions, different thoughts and different actions.