There’s a pernicious set of ideas floating around New Age circles suggesting that our DNA is somehow either deficient or incomplete. That we’re somehow missing other strands, we need special healing to fix it, and so forth. These are bad ideas to culture. We have everything we need for full enlightenment.
Our body is a remarkable structure that contains profound intelligence. It is managed for us in large part. We don’t have to concern ourselves with breathing, or running our heart, or digestion, or thinking, and so forth. All we have to do is take appropriate care of the body with diet, exercise, managing stress, and culturing healthy emotions.
If there is a failing, it’s usually a consequence of our lifestyle choices, not the body.
Yes, some people have difficult genetic issues, but this is a very small percent of disease and is certainly not amongst the common ones. The vast majority of us have perfect DNA.
A straightforward way to see this is that the condition of our body is the result of past actions. If we’ve been taking reasonable care of it, it will be doing fine. We don’t have to be at all perfect at this – just within reasonable ranges.
That said, one of the ways that consequences arise for us is through the body. Karma may well manifest as disease. It may pick on what we’ve taken the worst care of or it may strike where we’re more healthy. But even then, if we’ve taken care of things, it will much reduce the depth and duration of an illness.
Karma is simply energy seeking resolution. If we give it an easy flow, it can often resolve quickly, or at least be as smooth as possible. Just because something difficult has shown up in our lives doesn’t mean we’re fated to experience it a certain way. How we respond is our choice, to the degree that we’ve learned to step out of the self-created dramas.
Our DNA comes with built in traits, like the colour of our eyes or our enjoyment of cilantro. As Ayurveda points out, some of that will come from the blood line we’re born into. The life we’ve qualified for, we might say. And some of that will be the “suitcase” of karma we’ve brought into this lifetime.
In other words, our DNA has a lot to do with what we’ve earned or qualified for and what we’ve chosen to do with that. It’s not given to us for our suffering but for the next class of earth school. Seeing your body as somehow deficient or wrong is anything but helpful.
And even then, just because we have a certain gene set does not mean it’s our fate. I have the DNA markers for certain diseases for example, but they have not manifest and are very unlikely to now.
The key is gene expression, not existing genes. To understand this, it’s important to recognize that genes don’t run the show. Our DNA is a blueprint for making proteins. When the cell signals it needs this or that chemical signal or building block, it gives the instruction set and the DNA assembles the protein.
In other words, it is environmental stimulus that manages our gene expression. And who creates the environment in our body? We do – through our diet, activity, thoughts, and emotions. We create the environment that leads to how our DNA expresses.
The retired geneticist Bruce Lipton speaks to this in great detail.
This is not to say we should blame ourselves if something crops up. That’s the wrong diet. It means that if disease shows up, it’s the bodies way of telling us that something is amiss. It may take a bit of work to figure out what but usually it’s in those places where we’ve not taken care. We may need to research specific things as generic answers may not suffice. Perhaps we need to take a break from certain foods or our computer, for example.
The old idea of treating your body as a temple is a good idea. Can’t say it’s one I’ve well integrated though. I tend to forget about the body until it grumbles. But I don’t blame my body for that. 😉
Davidya