How Toxins Affect Your Health – Quantum Toxins

Toxicity is not limited to the realm of food and chemicals. There is another kind of toxicity that is just as pervasive and influential on modern health—even though it’s harder to measure or isolate. Toxic thoughts, toxic relationships, the undercurrent of anxiety that is almost an automatic by-product of making it in the modern American world— all these things are pollutants in that they disturb the peace and nor­mal body functioning we were born to have. Although it doesn’t come up on the EPA’s list of worst environmental dangers and is still not fully recognized by many busy doctors in hospitals (as the lack of adequate therapies in them reveals), the stress of modern life is as much a toxin as the chemicals in our food, water, and air.

Today there is a constant assault on our attention that keeps the mind switched on at all times. There is more information circulating than at any other time in human history. (Even the TV news is no longer just an anchorperson sitting at a desk. Now it has three lines of ticker-tape information streaming across the bottom. Our atten­tion is literally being divided.) Add to that the situation where we are all available for communication at all times (and in all time zones). Cell phones, Bluetooth headsets, e-mails, text messages, faxes—it has become almost taboo to ever be disconnected. On top of this we are so busy all the time, striving for great careers, great relationships, great children, great homes—the pressure to achieve has never been higher and has us living in a constant state of planning, working, trying. All this energy going on in the brain keeps it from being available where it is needed in the body. In fact we are a society of people barely aware of our bodies—which may be suffering and breaking down under our noses as we keep thinking and worrying.

It was incessant, negative, fearful thinking that started me on my journey of self-healing. I could somehow cope with my allergies, my weight gain, and my irritable bowels, but it was my toxic thoughts that stopped me in my tracks and made me look for a deeper understanding. The toxic food I was eating, the toxic schedules I was working by, and the toxic hospital environment, full of fear and frustration, within one of the most toxic cities in the world had taken a toll on my body. But it wasn’t until my incessant worrying and the chest pain it generated got me wondering if I was having a heart attack that I began searching for a different solution. My initial experience with meditation gave me hope and a clear goal, to silence my mind. In my case, at that time, every­thing else took second place—propelling me onto that plane to India.

I am still working on that goal for myself. But whatever ability I have gained to quiet my own mind allows me to recognize a similar level of distraction and the constant loop of thinking and worry in my patients. It is rampant in modern life; unproductive thinking rules us and controls our lives. We get stuck not just in habits of eating that hurt us and drain the energy necessary for our body’s needs, but stuck in incessant thought. It also drains energy and leaves us fatigued, worn down, and with a physical body deprived of the resources it needs to heal itself. I call the negative effects of stress “quantum toxins” because they exist outside of the scope of doctors’ measuring tools. Stress finds many ways to manifest in body, behavior, and outlook, influencing eating patterns, addictions, and belief in our own potential to be (or never be) well. Quantum toxicity is without doubt one of the greatest obstacles to vibrant well-being. How did it become this way?

Quantum toxicity is not new. In fact, thousands of years before humans invented preservatives, antibiotics, hormones, fertilizers, or any chemicals whatsoever, detoxification was the main topic for some very influential people on our planet. Buddhism, one of the oldest spir­itual paths, was described as a path of detoxification by the Buddha himself. Professor Robert Thurman, who teaches Tibetan Buddhism at Columbia University, is a dear friend and one of my teachers. He once explained it to me in this way:

In the Buddhist Wheel of Life, the center has a circle in which there are three animals, a pig, a cock, and a snake, holding each other by the tail. The pig stands for the delusion or ignorance that says, “I am the real thing, the center of the universe, and the most important being in it, and the rest and all others are separate from me!” This deep conviction of the egoistic being places that being in the unwin­nable situation of confrontation with the universe, which any single being has got to lose, sooner or later. Based on this perspective, the being wants to consume lots of the universe, to turn it into him- or herself, and this is called greed, represented by the cock. If possible, the being would devour the whole thing and then would no longer need to fear it. But the universe is infinite, so that never succeeds. Also, based on the same perspective, the being fears others want to devour him or her and so becomes paranoid and seeks to repel them all, and this is called anger and hatred, symbolized by the snake.

These are the three poisons or toxins (Sanskrit trivisha) that make the unenlightened world go around, the samsara of endless suffering. In Indo-Tibetan medicine they correspond to phlegm, wind, and bile in the physical realm (the kapha, vata, and pitta body types), or more generally, cohesion, movement, and heat. Health for an unenlight­ened person is the balance of these poisons and energies—that is the best that can be achieved. But real health, durable and joyous, comes from detoxification, removal of the poisons by wisdom, insight into the true nature of reality, the experience of the self being one with the universe, filled with energy and bliss, not needing to be greedy, not fearing or hating anyone, but being joyfully compassionate to all, seen as ultimately the same as oneself and beautiful in their relative difference—just as one sees one’s beloved child or lover or good friend. This is the true health of enlightenment.

Enlightenment as true health may seem unattainable for so many of us, but getting rid of the poisons that Buddha spoke of could be, from this point of view, more urgent than anything we can do at the level of food, drink, and natural cleaning products. Only when freed of delusion, greed, and anger can we return to an enlightened state in which we live with the knowledge that we already have everything we need. Only this will truly stop the rampant consumption and human-made madness of modern life.

As part of Detoxification, you will be invited to start a short daily medi­tation practice, a chance to unload some of this mental burden and explore the very beginning of what “real health, durable and joyous” may mean to you.