A mindful solution to the winter flu

Over the years I have come to notice a common trend during the winter retreat I hold each January. Invariably one or two people arrive suffering with winter flu. Sitting together in a close environment, by the end of the second day, up to half of the group may be snivelling and sneezing. And yet by day four there is not a sneeze or sniff to be heard all day long, as everyone settles into their meditation and begins to deepen their concentration and mindfulness.

So how is it that such a change can come about in such a short time?

Mindfulness is quite simply awareness. Or even more simply it is paying attention.

Each of us has a certain amount of mindfulness as part of our everyday consciousness. In some it is naturally well developed in others the mind is scattered and restless, wandering around here there and everywhere but seldom resting within the body in a state of simply being present. The meditation I teach beginners to is to learn to settle their attention within the body. It serves to establish concentration while bringing a degree of coherence back to the otherwise disorganised energies in the body.

When I check each persons meditation, one of the things I am checking is the awareness , or mindfulness levels within their own bodies. This mindfulness is one of the key players in determining a person’s resistance to sickness or their tendency to ill health.

Lets take the virus as an example to illustrate this point.

I use a scale which I measure against my own body to assess a persons physical awareness levels. At an energetic level the correlation between this mindfulness level and the integrity of their immune system is considerable.

The average person’s level of mindfulness (on my arbitrary scale ) is around 90 ( with 300 being the highest level. A virus has more the characteristic of consciousness than matter, unlike a bacteria which is predominantly a material entity with limited awareness levels.

Viruses respond directly to consciousness, even mutating and changing characteristics with the conscious environment in which they reside. The average flu virus has an awareness level similar to that of most of us, around 90. The important difference to our own mindfulness is that a virus produces a left handed spin in matter while our own wholesome states of consciousness ( ie mindfulness ) produce a right handed spin. It is the left-handed spin that has the disorganising effect that opposes the organising effect that our own mindfulness has on your system. Put six people in a room for a few hours and bring in someone with the flu and the next day some of them will begin to display the flu symptoms, while others wont. Yet all of them will have been exposed to the virus in that time. In those whose mindfulness levels are over 90 the flu symptoms will not develop. Those who might be tired or run down, and with mindfulness levels below 90 will invariably develop the flu. To understand this we need to understand that it is not the virus that causes the sickness, but the body’s reaction to it. If there is enough mindfulness in the body there will not be a reaction to contact with the virus and so the body will not produce a supporting environment for it to proliferate.

When we meditate, most people are able to raise their mindfulness levels to over 100 within a couple of days of sustained practice. At this level the virus stops producing the reaction in the body that supports it and the flu symptoms will. Even at a physical level we can see the changes in the system. Under dark field microscope we can observe a significant increase in the mobilisation of the white blood cells witch the body uses to combat a virus after only three days of sustained meditation.

If we already have a resting level of mindfulness within our body of over 100 we are unlikely to develop flu at all.

Lets take the hepatitis virus as another example. This virus has a mindfulness level of around 120. This is higher than most people’s resting state mindfulness and so nearly everyone exposed to the Hep B virus will develop the symptoms. The virus produces a hot energy in the liver, and the lack of sufficient mindfulness causes the liver to react. The liver itself becomes hot and over time dry and stiff producing the cirrhosis.

Many of the people coming on meditation retreat have managed to raise their mindfulness levels up high enough to reverse the damage in the liver and allow the cells to correct themselves. Robbed of a supportive environment the virus no longer survives in the body. Some people have successfully achieved such results with a weeklong meditation retreat.

The HIV virus poses an even more challenging threat. It has an awareness level of 220. Now this is extremely high. Many advanced yogis have not reached this level of mindfulness in their own bodies. In fact the only person I have perceived to have a natural mindfulness level as high as this is the famous chess player Kaspirov. I am not saying that if exposed to the HIV virus he would not develop symptoms but his chances of resisting the virus would be good. Some years ago I did an experiment with my teacher on a group of meditators who all carried the HIV virus. They were trained extensively and spent many months diligently practicing. Eight of them were able over time to achieve such levels of mindfulness. All of their symptoms disappeared and when tested of the virus it had all but disappeared from the blood, with almost undetectable levels remaining.

Every year, millions of us go down within the flu. Until only there is no medicine that can treat the flu virus, we can only take medication or supplements to support the body’s resistance to it. This is because all medicine is nutriment. It is indeed possible to treat bacterial infection with nutriment, but not a virus. This is because the vibrational bandwidth of viruses is more akin to consciousness than nutriment of any kind. Medicine, being nutriment in nature, miss match with the virus’s energetic signature. However our consciousness interacts directly with viruses. A mind that is restless, stressed or scattered will react to and support the proliferation of viral infection in the body. But a mind that is well organised, concentrated and mindful will not. This year, why not try for yourself. Learn a basic meditation practice that takes the body as the object of concentration. Practice daily to raise your body’s mindfulness levels and see if you can be one of those who can sail through the winter without falling prey to the dreaded flu.