When I first read about AIP, I found that it’s much more than just a food diet. It shocked me to find that AIP is a real lifestyle that includes both dietary changes as well as lifestyle improvements. All things like getting enough rest, reducing stress, blocking toxic people from getting to you – all of these come to complete the physical diet and improve its beneficial effects.
And to be completely honest with you, reading all of this about the AIP diet scared me a little, because I was not a spiritual person before, and I had absolutely no idea how to handle something so deep like meditation and conversation with my inner self.
If I rewind my life a bit and remember the way I used to be before discovering this diet, I remember a lot of anxiety, self-induced stress and fear that i used to feel 24/7. And it was all in my head. Psychologist Joseph Murphy explains this state of mind in very few simple words: the way any life situation makes you feel and the way you perceive life in all its aspects – is only generated by your mind.
So I might get over-stressed by situations that don't stress another person at all, which proves my mind is the one that created the stress, not the situation itself.
And the only way I could actually feel these words was by experimenting the first authentic introspection of my life. It didn’t come natural, because I didn’t understand the role of meditation before. It just seemed like something unproven and useless. And for skeptical people like I used to be, meditation never comes natural from the first attempt, especially as we are programmed by our environment, by our families and by society to live with certain beliefs, feelings and fears. And maybe the greatest challenge is to leave all these behind. But nothing is impossible! And even if I only managed to get into this state by constant practice that I’ve been doing in the past 7 days, I feel so satisfied because I tried it with all my heart.
And I didn’t do any yoga, simply because right now I was so determined and I wanted this to be a 100% authentic experience with me being alone in my own company. However, the principles of yoga are strongly connected to my personal experiences presented in this article.
And my findings were absolutely incredible for myself. I think I managed to deeply get to my inner self for the first time in my life. And I did this by practicing some self-induced new feelings: I practiced forgiveness, I practiced gratitude and found an answer to a question that had been haunting me for so much time:
Why do things happen to us? Why do we attract certain situations, certain people, or certain diseases into our lives?
Well, the answer I’ve figured out was that nothing in this life is arbitrary. We are all made of Divine energy and we attract or reject different kinds of energy only by our way of thinking – that turns into our way of feeling. And I also had to do a comprehensive research on the human mind to figure this thing out. Joseph Murphy, an author who got me out of my mind’s darkness, and who was also a priest before being a psychologist, offers an interesting idea in that even the Bible itself connects the Divine power to our subconscious mind, treating our inner self as a gate to Divinity. And if we think about it, intuitions, coincidences and just about all the situations we cannot explain ourselves using our conscious mind, are generated by energies in our inner self.
During this past week I analyzed the impact of my autoimmune disease and of the AIP diet on my physical body. The impact of the disease was really generated by both negative thoughts and emotions that I had constantly developed and experienced, thus printing them deep in my subconscious mind. And I compared all of these negative states of mind that I’d been having with positive emotions and listened to my body while doing this. And so, with the help and guidance of bright and spiritual people who opened my inner eyes, I reached one important conclusion that I actually felt:
We are what we believe we are, we are our fears, our disappointments, our grief and our pain. And at the same time, we are anything that we strongly believe in!
After I’ve seen a self-healing documentary called “Heal” (you can find it on Netflix), I thought about all the people who miraculously healed only by their strong belief that they can be healed, so I gave the placebo effect a second thought. What is the placebo effect? It is nothing more than our brain’s reaction to something that we strongly believe is good for us. The studies conducted with patients who had been given actual medication vs patients given sugar pills and still obtaining the same effect – are absolutely amazing to prove how strong our brain can influence us if we believe strong enough in an idea, if we are deeply and strongly convinced by something. You can find more such examples in the documentary.
And then I thought about how great the AIP diet made me feel. And about how my antibodies lowered with this diet, while being sure that only medication couldn’t have done that – as I’d seen through my blood tests.
And so I became aware of the superpower laying in our minds. I always feared negative energy, but in my conscious mind I could not define this negative energy through a deep and comprehensible definition. Because I had never truly felt neither positive nor negative energy. I only felt frustration and anger that I would ease though a vicious life. I didn't know what those two antagonistic ideas felt like. Because they were abstract in my mind. And this loss of mine to understand them is probably because I was never really connected to my inner self like I am now. We cannot feel something we didn't experience before, because we're programmed to follow predefined patterns: predefined by family, by environment, by previous experiences.
So meditation helped me achieve a deep connection with my inner self and my body, and helped me figure out once more that my healing diet is the right choice for me, besides medication. I had never done this before, but instead I would only be certain that the AIP diet is good for me and that it would heal me. I used to have this belief unconsciously before meditating on it in depth. This kind of faith – the faith of healing – is the core belief that spirituality and yoga actually promote. The faith that you will get healed.
And then I thought about all these people in support groups who say that the AIP diet is not good for them and that it makes them feel sick and brings them all these symptoms they didn’t have before. And so I figured out something new:
If our brain accepts an idea, which in psychology is called auto-suggestion, our body will follow that idea as long as we believe in it strong enough. What is strong enough? You may ask now, because I've been asking myself the same question. The answer is that strong enough is not physical strong but spiritual strong. So if my brain is 100% convinced that the AIP diet, or any other diet - is not good for me, my body will respond accordingly and will reject that diet - it will give me these symptoms and signals that do nothing more than strengthening my belief.
And I practiced this, like the “Heal” movie shows in an example, with body reactions to other stimuli that are not physical but are only in my imagination. Like the lemon. I closed my eyes and I imagined I am licking half a lemon. My salivary glands already started to work, generated by a simple thought! So I didn’t have any lemon, I just imagined licking one and my body started to listen to my induced thought.
Stress is also an example. Whenever we feel stress, out body gives us all these physical reactions: we have stomach aches, sometimes nausea, headaches and so on. And all of these are generated by a simple thought! Stress is just a thought in our head, it is not real! It is just generated by our brain by our fears, by our frustrations and by our beliefs that something is probably going to hurt us at that moment. And so the body reacts to this thought.
By reading Joseph Murphy’s book “The power of your Subconscious Mind“, I found that the mind is an incredibly powerful source of energy. Both for ourselves and for others. And the secret is to turn this energy into positive and deviate it away from negative. And how to do that? Well, a simple explanation is this:
- The first generator of energy is the thought
- If this thought is accepted as being real by our brain, it creates a feeling
- Then the feeling influences us and our body instantly (there is no delay in feelings, they act on the spot)
So, by simple deduction, if the thought is positive – the result will be a good influence on our body. And in the same way, if the thought is negative – it will have a negative impact on our body. And we all know that negative thoughts don’t come alone. They like company, so they trigger more negative thoughts and hence, more body reactions.
The above theory is not supported by traditional medicine, but then again, neither is the AIP diet. What brought me to the conclusion that “we are what we think about” is the research I made on the real life cases of diseases put into remission by the simple thoughts of faith and positiveness. So when medicine gave no other alternative for stage 4 cancer patients for example, as you will see in the “Heal” documentary, they used the healing power of their minds.
This article does not promote the cut of medication or the self-treatment! Science has its important role and it always works if we put the same strong BELIEF in it! In the same way presented above, there are people who put all their faith in doctors and medication and can be healed in the same way! Because they focus on this thought and so their body reacts in a positive way – in the way of healing. This is also the power of thought but just focused in a different direction. At the same time, there are people who don’t think the AIP diet is good for them and they may find comfort in any other diet out there – paleo diet, keto diet or any diet that they trust and believe in. They just have to believe in its healing effects and they will surely see results.
I am not a mentalist, but I do feel greater than ever now, after I figured out that my greatest, strongest wish is HEALING. I also feel incredibly good when I help people. I am just a person who was diagnosed with Graves disease and who tried all the healing options out there and who now found the answer deep inside. I did this with the help of Joseph Murphy’s books and with motivating documentaries like “Heal”, “Memory Hackers” and others.
I hope my experience with meditation and with the AIP diet will be able to help you in any way and I am sure you have the healing power right there, in your mind. You only have to wish for it and I’m 100% convinced you will achieve it, just the way you are able to achieve anything else you want in your life. I am sending you lots of positive energy to support your strength. BECAUSE YOU ARE STRONGER THAN YOU THINK!
Just remember: fear, disappointment and hate are biologically transmitted to our physical body and turned into negative energy, harming us and affecting our health. If we replace these with love, forgiveness and gratitude, our body will respond so good, in ways that we never imagined! And if we have the AIP diet, or any other healthy diet, to provide our physical nurture, besides our spiritual “food”, we can be sure that the only way is up!
One of my next articles will be about me training my mother into mindful meditation for healing. She suffers from Hashimoto's and she is a very positive person on the outside, however deep inside she has a very heavy luggage of fear, grief and disappointment that she will need to throw away. She has always encouraged me to be positive, but she never actually told me how to do that, and especially what I can obtain out of it. Because she didn't have these answers herself. So this will be me, actually training my trainer 🙂
Until next time, I wish you speedy healing and if you have any questions feel free to join our AIP and Paleo Support Group on Facebook!
And remember: YOU ARE IN CONTROL! ❤
Ruxandra's AIP and Paleo Diet 