By Chia Cheri

Your body is incredible. During every breath you take and every move you make, your body is working on automatic to protect you. All you need to do is partner with Mother Nature to provide the conditions most conducive to harmonizing your health. This is simple but may not be easy, given all the forces pushing on you to do otherwise, like worrying about Covid-19 sucking your breath away. Here are some facts and positive counter-forces to help you keep breathing deeply and peacefully.

Your body thrives best in an internal acid-free environment. So, what causes acid? The number one culprit is stress, or more specifically, how you relate to stress. If you’re like many others, your responses are typically expressed as feelings that emanate from fear, i.e. worry, uncertainty, anger, hurt, anxiety, doubt, helplessness, regret, and foreboding.

Five hundred years ago, Michel de Montaigne said: "My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened." Studies prove that generally to be true for most of us. It turns out that 85 percent of what the subjects in one such study worried about never happened. With the 15 percent that did happen, 79 percent of the subjects discovered either they could handle the difficulty better than expected, or the difficulty taught them a lesson worth learning. This means that 97 percent of what you worry over may be not much more than a fearful mind punishing you with exaggerations and misperceptions. It is especially heightened by listening to the news or fear-captured friends and family. You can think of fear as: False Evidence Appearing Real.

However, an unhealthy fear response is no joke. The stress it generates causes serious problems. The stress hormones dumped into your brain are linked to shrinking brain mass, lowered IQ, being prone to heart disease, cancer and premature aging, predicting marital problems, family dysfunction and clinical depression, and making seniors more likely to develop dementia and Alzheimer's. Fear can be much more contagious than even Covid-19.

The Fear Cure Did you know that the word universe means one song! A Rumi poem says, “I want to sing like birds sing, not worrying who listens or what they think.” If you can sing your unique song with that attitude, your every intention is like a melody in nature’s symphony, suggests Deepak Chopra. He urges you to: • Stay alert to the opportunity within every problem by letting go of your idea of how things should be. • Accept uncertainty as an essential part of your experience. In your willingness to accept uncertainty, solutions will spontaneously appear. • Remain open to all possibilities and appreciate every moment in the journey of your life—all the challenges, fun, mystery, and magic in the field of pure potentiality. • Question what is presented as reality. Just because it comes from an authority, it doesn't mean it's true. You were sent to this Earth for a purpose; questioning helps fulfill that purpose. Conscious openness awakens and expands your soul, the essence of you.

When a fear feeling comes to you, honor it, thank it for coming, and send it on its way, as you don’t need it anymore. Quickly replace the feeling with gratitude statements. Fear feelings cannot exist in the same space as gratitude and Love feelings. Give thanks that you are Love and Light. You were created by the same Living Force, the same Love, that created the endless universes. You are a field of energy that is part of the powerful infinite field of possibilities. Give thanks.

The most effective way to get in touch with your unique song is through stillness, connecting with the Living Force through meditation, immersing yourself in nature’s magnificent beauty.

To diminish the other sources of acid each day, eat primarily organic whole foods (fresh and colorful vegetables, berries, nuts, seeds), drink plenty of clean filtered water (1/2 your body weight in ounces), exercise (move exuberantly at least 10 minutes every hour during your awake time), give your body rest time (internal “janitors” need an uninterrupted eight hours to clean up the waste and polish up new cells), stay away from chemicals, i.e., in your cosmetics and cleaning products, and rejuvenate with your connections to family and friends, purpose, creativity, and joy.