What is innate health?
Innate Health is the unrealized psychological aspect of our immune system. It is as natural a part of us as the physical immune system that we count on to heal our cuts and bruises and fight off the flu …
All people come into life with a natural ability to regain their psychological balance and sense of wellbeing. Our minds ordinarily work with an innate intelligence that we experience as wisdom, common sense and peace of mind. When we get caught up in negative thinking or struggle to fight upsetting thinking, we temporarily override or block that natural intelligence and find ourselves lost or stuck in stress or distress. We can learn to produce a more constructive flow of present-moment thoughts that guide us through life. No matter what we are doing, we are the thinkers creating our own experience of life as it happens.
Although it is now widely understood that people’s thinking creates their reality, it is not widely understood that the creative process that generates thinking holds the key to mental health and stability. Understanding how we think and that we think changes our relationship to what we think (the contents of our thoughts). That understanding opens increasingly sustained access to innate health. Innate health is like the sun in the sky; it is not always visible to us, and sometimes after prolonged bad weather we may begin to think we might never see it again – but it is always there and we can count on it.
Three universal principles explain the thinking process: Mind, Consciousness and Thought. Simply put, Mind is the energy of life, the fact that we are alive. Thought is our ability to create forms or ideas from that energy. Consciousness is our ability to experience what we think as real. In other words, we are born thinking. We think our way through life. We see life through our thoughts as we go, and the quality of our thinking determines the quality of our lives (how we see our lives moment-to-moment).
Awakening to those principles sets people free from attachment to the contents of any particular thinking with the knowledge that thoughts naturally come and go. It frees people to see their state of mind, their felt response to perceived reality, as an indicator of the moment-to-moment quality of their thinking. A stressed or negative feeling state or state of mind produces a low mood and increasing tension, a feeling of insecurity, or dis-ease. That feeling warns us to allow our thinking to quiet. As people learn to trust their state of mind as a guide through life, they catch themselves earlier and earlier in the process of insecure thinking that can lead to chronic stressful states of mind and worse. Recognizing the signal to quiet down, people can allow negative thoughts to pass and leave them alone. As our minds quiet, our feeling changes and our perceived reality changes. We come naturally back into balance.
Once people recognize that innate health is constant and always accessible, they are able to navigate the ups and downs of their thinking without frightening themselves with their most negative thinking or deceiving themselves with their most positive thinking. We are able to be grateful in moments of exhilaration and graceful in moments of distress, and to experience the rich landscape of all our thinking as the gift of life.
© 2005 West Virginia Initiative for Innate Health
