Health Is Adaptation

FRI., DEC. 20, 1996, 6:50 AM
FARM, STUDY

I like the two terms you use, academically, to describe health. One is the quality of functioning, which is doing well what you usually do. This morning, in a cold study, with lots of snow and frigid weather outside, I’ll focus on adaptation as a key to real health. Adapting is being able to function, well, in unexpected or non-ideal conditions.

Your desk here is relatively clean this morning, and this pad was ready for you to write, as you rose out of a warm bed for a Teaching. But you were too conservative at a bit after 3 this morning, and didn’t light your stove. So now you must adapt to quite a cool room as you hear Me. This, to Me, is healthy behavior… being able to have a Teaching when conditions are far from ideal.

Winter, and it officially commences tomorrow, is a season for adaptation for you humans. Now, you don’t have the challenge here that those in the Dakotas have… or those farther up in Canada and other truly northern regions, but you have enough to require some adaptation. You think about your animals who must adapt to the outside temperatures plus the wind chill, and you marvel at their capacities… and almost expect that there will be some who will not be alive as you check on them this morning.

Cold temperatures are a challenge for you humans, but, today, in much warmer climes there are those who must adapt to lack of nourishing food and to the need to walk distances, carrying all they possess. Those who can make such adaptations are the healthy ones, physically. And health certainly includes the adaptation of the physical body, even as I have urged you toward a much more holistic concept.

For one fundamental adaptation related to health, from My perspective, is that of the spirit, which is your essence, adapting to being in a body, with its pleasures and its limitations. Some I see adapting well to physical life, but, unfortunately, coming to feel that this is “all there is”… and even denying the reality of spirit. Others, who are healthier, in My terms, recognize spirit, but still see it as less central than the body. Too much of their attention goes to the physical body, its needs and wants.

Who, then, are healthiest, as I evaluate humans? Those who appreciate earth life and its physical nature, but who also appreciate the centrality of spirit. In your culture it is certainly acceptable to develop your intellect, to relate predictively with others, and to take care of your body. It is good to have tangible purposes in life, but as you become older I see it as healthy adaptation that you focus more on spirit and on relationship with Me.

In your culture a few die young, being unable to adapt, in some variety of ways. Most of you live on, as you are experiencing, to a time of retirement, into your 70’s or beyond. The adaptation that is essential to health then becomes that of focusing more on spirit than on the physical, or even the social. For this is what you are, essentially, and this spirit will live on when the body has finally “given up”.

I have no deep objections to medical care and procedures that will sustain the body for “more time”. But what I see too often is too much of a focus on these physical imperfections, which, in practice, denies the centrality of spirit. For a strong spirit can adapt to physical difficulties, even pain. To deny the importance of spirit as earth life ebbs is truly unhealthy. You showed real health when you received a teaching from Me when you were recuperating in the hospital, continuing in our regular “schedule” when you came home, still in some pain and with some disability.