430. Expert Interview: How to Unlock Your Body's Self-Healing Mechanism

Otakara Klettke

Otakara Klettke was a very sickly child who couldn’t even carry her books to school. She managed to escape special diets, constant visits to a doctor, surgeries and hospital stays and become a personal fitness trainer, adventurer and TV reporter while keeping her body in top shape since growing up. She talks to and listens to her body. In her book, “Hear Your Body Whisper,” she shares how she said no to the limitations of her health problems, left doctors in the dust, and started living life to the fullest. Currently, she lives on a ranch with her husband and daughter by the beautiful Cascade mountain range in Oregon, raising too many pets and taking every chance to go on road trips with her home-schooled daughter.

How to Unlock Your Body’s Self-Healing Mechanism

“With all the knowledge we have about health these days—including the mapping of the entire human genome and the discovery of the billions of organisms that make their home in and on us—it’s unfortunate that we apply it in such a non-productive way. More than ever, it’s crucial we learn how to bring our human consciousness and awareness to the task of keeping ourselves healthy. The body has its own, natural self-healing mechanism and we can listen to it and even learn to guide it.”

Why Is This Important?

“If we reside inside a healthy body, we can be more productive, healthier people. It’s important to every person at any point in their life. Outside our awareness, invisible to our eyes, we have ten times as many organisms that live inside and outside our bodies. I visualize our bodies as a kind of farm, where these billions of micro-organisms live, along with our bodies’ own cells. These cells are far more responsible for our own survival than our own cells are. Our bodies depend on them. They teach our body to heal by turning on our self-healing mechanisms. They attack invaders and fight for us. We go through life without ever acknowledge their existence or noticing them. This amazing capability that every person’s body has is slowly being disengaged by various outside influences, such as ill-advised medical information, the food supply, our own bad habits, the way we live, and the way we are told to live.”

What Are the Key Lessons Learned Here?

“We can choose to bring our conscious awareness into our bodies—even down to the cellular level—and learn to listen and communicate. A meditation practice plays a vital role, but it can begin by simply doing a mental scan of our body upon awakening each morning, right after hitting the snooze button on the alarm. As our ability to listen grows, we can even ask our bodies to tell us when we are at risk, or give us a heads-up if a cold is on the way.”