Innate Health

What is Innate Health?

Innate Health is the unrealized psychological aspect of our immune system. It is resiliency. It is as natural to us as the physical immune system that we count on to heal our cuts and bruises and fight off the flu.

All people come into life with a natural ability to regain their psychological balance and sense of wellbeing. Our minds ordinarily work in a quiet, positive feeling as we express an innate intelligence that we experience and take for granted as wisdom, common sense and peace of mind. When we get caught up in negative thinking or struggle to fight upsetting thinking, we temporarily override or block our natural thinking and positive feelings and find ourselves lost or stuck in stress and distress.

We can temporarily lose sight of our innate health. But we can never lose the ability to regain access to it and resume a constructive flow of present-moment thoughts to guide us through life. Innate health is like the sun in the sky; it is not always visible to us, and sometimes after prolonged bad weather we may begin to think we might never see it again – but it is always there and we can count on it.

No matter what we are doing, we are the thinkers creating our own experience of life as it happens. Although it is now widely understood that people’s thinking creates their perception of reality, it is not widely understood that recognizing the creative process that generates thinking holds the key to mental health and stability. There is a prevailing view that we live in an outside-in world in which people's thinking "happens" because of circumstances.

Innate Health suggests an entirely different explanation of the relationship between thinking and experience, an inside-out view. Understanding how we think and that we think changes our relationship to what we think (the contents of our thoughts). Our experience of circumstances varies according to how we are holding and using our thinking, not according to the circumstances. As that understanding grows, it opens increasingly sustained access to innate health. (Judy Sedgeman )