If we think that there is an idea of Absolute Health and try to hold on it. What is the inevitable result? Sickness. This is the modern way. If you like to be a loyal, patriotic American, you work hard everyday, taking medications to keep away symptoms and problems. You push yourself so that you are at your peak day by day, until one day you have a heart attack or cancer or something else.

If you look around you, you can see that this is the pattern everyone goes through. And this is the pattern we create, thinking there is separation where there is none. Thinking that health and sickness are separate. If we realize that one contains the other, we realize that within health we have sickness, and that sickness expresses itself as minor problems like aches and pains, colds and fever or not feeling or acting well. These are signals to tell us to adjust our direction, to adjust where we are going.

Real health always has some problems we have to take care of. But if the direction is right, then we have the ability to overcome, to pass through those problems. This is the idea of health in macrobiotics. With everything, we have to start to see a more dynamic movement and a dynamic relationship between these two. We have to see that one changes into the other and one completes the other and they are not separate. We can never take one away from the other. We can’t take day away from night. We can’t take life away from death. Everyone is clear about that, but when it comes to sickness, not everyone is clear.

Practicing the Seven Steps of Strengthening Health Macrobiotics helps us create a good direction in our lives and health. When we sit down to eat at meal time, eat a grain and separate vegetable dish at each meal and walk outside or do the body rub, we open ourselves up to receive this approach to health. A more flexible and dynamic understanding of health can only benefit ourselves, families, communities and planet in the short and long run.