I’m always amazed by nature. It has a kind of wisdom we can all learn from. If you live long enough—I’m 72 and shooting for 120!—and after watching the world around me for so many years, I’ve noticed its patterns.
Every spring, nature comes alive again. Every winter, it slows down and rests. These rhythms remind me a lot of the body’s ability to heal itself—it knows when to grow, when to rest, and when to repair.
Nature’s Remarkable Healing Power
Nature shows us an amazing capacity for repair, recovery, and adaptation. I spend a week each summer gathering with four college friends inspired by our passion for card and board games and frisbee golf.
One friend lives in Vancouver, WA, a suburb of Portland, OR, and on a visit to his place several years ago, we took a day trip to see Mount Saint Helens, the site of the worst volcanic eruption in this country in our lifetimes. The visitor center located at the epicenter of the 1980 explosion is still a wasteland, but the surrounding area is a “young” healthy forest.
Nature’s ability to repair, recover, and adapt to the environment dramatically altered by the eruption is beyond impressive! The biodiversity of nature is on full display in the blast zone. Individual species of plants, insects, animals, etc., all exhibiting their individual skills of survival, collectively have returned most of the area to what existed before the devastation.
You can see the amazing abilities of nature everywhere, but particularly at the site of ecological disasters—from Chernobyl, to massive oil spills, to forest fires that burn hundreds of thousands of acres. Nature always surprises scientists with how quickly it finds a way to heal—just like the body’s ability to heal itself often surprises us.
The Body as Part of Nature
Here’s the thing: our bodies are part of nature too. As in nature, the macro, so in the body, the micro. Your body has the same skills of repair, recovery, and adaptation that we see all around us. But too often, modern medicine ignores this wisdom.
We visit our doctors when something goes wrong with our bodies and what do they reach for?
A drug. A substance foreign to our bodies designed to suppress a symptom rather than heal the disease. I was blessed in my life to discover a completely different approach to disease and health.
I helped start a nutritional supplement company in the early 1990s. My job was sales and our target markets were the natural and functional medicine doctors. Through that journey, I learned a healing philosophy that honors the body’s ability to heal itself.
I was introduced to a concept of what causes disease and what it takes to recover from illness that completely embraces the wisdom of nature. Their products and protocols are actually designed to support the body’s inherent abilities of repair, recovery, and adaptation.
Rediscovering a Different Path to Healing
There’s something quietly beautiful about the way our bodies know how to care for us. Anytime we face illness—whether mild or severe—there’s a steady, unseen process within. Without us needing to guide it, our body begins to mend, to restore, to bring us back into balance.
It is a constant, loving presence—always there, always working—reminding us that healing is not something we have to force. It’s something we can trust. I was literally blown away by this non-pharmaceutical approach to health and wellness. Support the body’s natural abilities rather than suppress symptoms.
It was quickly so obvious that this was the right approach to treating illness that it left me with one burning question:
How did we drift so far from trusting the body’s ability to heal itself that drugs became the first line of defense?
More on that later, but suffice it to say the starting point of the ForeverWell message is: honor the wisdom of the body. Work with the body and its natural abilities to repair, recover, and adapt before reaching for options that suppress and overwhelm.
What Comes Next
In The First Five #2, I’ll explore homeostasis, the energy of balance that fuels this healing process, and how you can work with it to restore your health.
Read next:
The First Five #2 Homeostasis and the Power of Natural Healing
