I thought I’d write a bit about high blood pressure in this article seeing as so many of my clients have mentioned about their blood pressure worries over the last year and that so many had what I consider a skewed belief of what high blood pressure really means. I will perhaps cover low blood pressure another time as there are other considerations with that.
Though I will be going over the spiritual significance somewhat of blood pressure, I will be mostly talking about the falsehoods that mainstream medicine likes us to believe about blood pressure and suggest some avenues to explore what you can do to fix it, or at the very least mitigate it, rather than just take drugs for the rest of your life, like the pharmaceutical companies would like you to do. There may be some that need to take drugs despite what I mention here so it will depend on your circumstances.
I won’t be going into the biochemical mechanisms of how the body controls blood pressure too much, nor will I talk about how each blood pressure medication works, as it would take up a whole article and you can find a lot of that information freely on the internet.
I will unfortunately have to repeat this here: I am not a practicing physician of any kind and you should consult your doctor on anything I have said here first, before following any advice or making any changes to your health. The modern world huh?!
The spiritual significance of high blood pressure
Seeing as I’ve written a lot of “spiritual significance” articles recently, let’s start here for people who don’t want to read all the physical world things below.
Blood on a physical level is a source of energy, nutrients and immune cells for the body to function and it also takes waste products away. So it is related a lot to spiritual energy resources, power and defense.
If blood is flowing freely there is a lot of joy in life. If it is not flowing freely or does not contain the resources provided by other organs, it suggests a lack of joy or a lack of support from others as well as a belief that there is not enough power to create the life you wish.
Low blood pressure suggests more that you have had unloving or unsupportive experiences in life leading to defeatism/depression and a lack of trying in life.
High blood pressure on the other hand suggests that you are not living life as you wish but unlike low blood pressure, you still have the energy/power to at least be trying and possibly trying too hard. This is a reflection of the blood pressure being increased to force itself into areas it struggles to get into otherwise.
Often it is trying to live up to your own standards based on limiting beliefs or trying to live up to other people’s standards, either way not accomplishing them. There can an attitude of “should” do this or that which can include trying to support others rather than looking at what actually will make you happy and fulfill your desires.
It can often be related to following what society or family believes creates a successful life, verses what would truly make your heart sing. It can lead to issues in relationships including judgment, blame, competition, fight or other forms of resistance with others. So sorting out relationship issues is often a big part of blood pressure issues.
I really like one of the suggested solutions in Daniel Condron’s book “Permanent Healing” which I will quote here: “It is not your responsibility to live for others. You are capable of fulfilling your own life and you need to, for this is the way you will aid the most people.” This is something that often comes up in healing sessions for me. You cannot support others without attending to your own needs and desires first. You will have more energy and capability of helping others if you are healthy, fit and mentally/emotionally strong yourself. You will also set a better example of how they too can get into a better state.
Searching for what you wish to achieve in this life and making goals and taking baby steps towards that will solve a lot of energetic causes of disease (yes you’ll likely see me write it over and over in many articles!). In the case of high blood pressure you are likely taking on too many things, even if you are not trying to help others and take on other responsibilities outside of yourself.
Hone in more closely on what is the most important to your happiness and drop all the other things that aren’t really needed or are causing you too much stress. I often say that it may seem nice having multiple mansions or sports cars to some people, but that’s a lot of things to be maintaining, repairing, visiting, worrying about, paying for insurance or people to look after them etc so it can take up a surprising amount of time and stress having more. Same goes for too many hobbies, too many club memberships etc You’ll stress yourself out too much spreading yourself thinly.
As I mention in the coming paragraphs, blood pressure generally increases with age because of the entropy of the physical body. We slowly start to have less resources available to mitigate issues rather than it being about a serious issue related to the energetic causes above necessarily. Often many people solve a lot of their relationship issues as they age in fact. In that case, high blood pressure is more about the beliefs related to no longer being able to achieve or experience x y or z due to age and a less able body.
If you find out what the underlying physical issue is, such as a liver problem for example, then consider what the spiritual significance of that organ is too when working out a plan to improve you blood pressure.
I say this because blood carries ideas with it too. What limiting beliefs do you have that are preventing new ideas/new energies from reaching that part of you? The liver in this example is a factory that in general relates to your beliefs on what, how and how much power you have to build/create the life you wish. So question your beliefs about what you can create and start making a plan with little steps to disprove that you need someone else’s permission first, money to achieve it, that you don’t have the courage, lack experience or that x, y or z has to happen first.
Your blood pressure increases because your body needs to increase it!
Yes, read that again. Your blood vessels are in many ways like water pipes in your home. If there is not enough water pressure then the water comes out in dribbles from your tap, doesn’t reach all areas of your home or in even worse cases, no water comes out of any tap.
Likewise in the human body, you need a certain amount of pressure in the arteries and veins for the blood to go from the heart (with oxygenated blood courtesy of the lungs) through the arteries, into the tissues of the body then take deoxygenated blood through the veins and back to the heart.
If there’s a lack of pressure then the bodily tissues don’t get enough oxygen and other nutrients to function, grow and repair. Also waste products from the body do not get taken away as efficiently causing toxic damage to the cells. If there is too low pressure then there isn’t enough oxygen to keep the body alive and you die, likely with a heart attack due to it pumping too hard to try and make the blood move and to get enough oxygen itself.
Obviously too low amounts of blood movement through the body is not good, especially for prolonged periods each day as the tissues of the body slowly suffer toxic damage and don’t get the nutrients and energy from oxygen to function properly, let alone repair any damage done. This would lead eventually to all sorts of diseases depending on where the blood supply is poor, what stresses are placed on the body and what nutrients are lacking etc.
So what is the simplest way the body can adapt to try and get to more blood flow to the tissues of the body that are stagnant? That’s right, the body intentionally increases blood pressure to try and squeeze more blood and the oxygen and other nutrients that come with it into those areas.
Taking blood pressure medications can increase your risk of disease, including heart attack
This is a tricky concept to get across to some people and of course I have to be careful here as medications can be useful in some situations. Each person has to assess their own case depending on many factors. Factors which include what else may be going on in the various organs and tissues of the body.
Let’s give you a simple example of why blood pressure medications can be dangerous…
Let’s say the arteries that supply blood to your heart muscles start to get narrowed (there are various reasons why that might happen of course). This means that the heart muscles aren’t getting enough nutrients & energy and that toxic by-products of metabolism aren’t getting removed quick enough. If allowed to continue, those heart muscles will fatigue and atrophy and of course struggle to pump blood, creating a risk of disease elsewhere in the body or even worse death from a heart attack, as those muscles fail to work.
The body will respond by increasing blood pressure, partly by making the heart pump stronger and/or faster, to attempt to increase blood flow to those heart muscles. While it doesn’t necessarily solve the initial issue in those arteries, it does compensate for the problem and give the body and you more time to solve why those arteries are narrowed in the first place.
Now if you happen to go to the GP, or more likely these days the nurse (as doctors don’t seem to want to see anyone anymore!) and they do a check of your blood pressure and see that “It’s on the high side” what typically happens?
The stories I keep hearing over and over again from the Western world is that they don’t ask any questions about your lifestyle factors, other signs or symptoms you may have, do little or no tests of the various systems of the body, don’t check the tissues of your body or do physical function tests, maybe do a blood test or not… Essentially they don’t really question or look for WHY the the blood pressure has increased in the first place.
Typically they put you on blood pressure medication straight away and unless you are firm with them and decide for yourself, they will never take you off blood pressure medications for the rest of your life.
In this example, while the blood pressure drops with medication and it looks like you are in better health because now the figure is closer to 120/80, your body is now in much greater risk of disease and death. Why? Because those little arteries supplying your heart muscles now have less blood flowing through them due to the lower pressure. Those heart muscles will now more easily fatigue, stagnate and possibly fail to work. So you have simply increased your risk of heart disease, angina and heart attack!
This is often why so many pharmaceutical medications often list causing the very diseases they claim to help with!
Polypharmacy
Polypharmacy is a term that is becoming more commonly used these days and simply means the practice of prescribing multiple medications for an individual, especially excessively, for a single disease and/or due to extra complications that come up because of the side effects of the initial medication.
If there is restricted blood flow in an area of the body, say the liver (due to heavy drinking and thus scarring of the liver as an example), then the cardio-vascular system will increase the blood pressure so that blood can percolate more easily into the tissues of the liver and reach more cells. This keeps them healthier and functioning better and of course reduces the risk of disease.
If blood pressure medications are taken then this doesn’t happen due to the lower pressure, and it will make it more likely a liver disease will occur. Also, because the liver is involved in so many biochemical processes of which other organs of the body rely on, other organs start to struggle too, making it more likely you’ll end up with diseases elsewhere.
So if your doctor isn’t looking for the root cause and is just treating the symptoms instead, after that initial blood pressure medication, your GP will prescribe another medication to solve the symptoms of that new disease which depending on many factors could be anything from muscular pain, to fatigue, to kidney disease, to genito-urinary disease etc etc.
Of course no medication is perfect and that second disease causes yet further imbalances making it more likely yet another disease can occur. And so it continues, getting even more complicated as each additional medication causes untold harmful interactions with each other and the body.
I sometimes shake my head with my Uncle as an example, who was prescribed medications by his GP to widen his urethra to help him urinate as part of his prostate issues and then was also prescribed medications by another practitioner to narrow his urethra because he was becoming incontinent. Literally two medications cancelling out each other’s effects and likely causing extra stress on his liver and kidneys as the body tries to detoxify both medications!
Blood pressure norms are made up!
This is something my Wife came across when listening to Dr John Bergman D. C. one of our favorite physicians we’ve come across over the years.
By the way, a lot of the information I have shared in this article Dr Bergman agrees with. If you’d like to go deeper into the scientific research surrounding what I am trying to say here, then looking up this doctor can take you quite quickly to the scientific studies that back this information up. Here is one of Dr Bergman’s YouTube videos that mirrors a lot of what I am saying here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM6DGBZrWrs
Essentially it looks like a lot of the blood pressure standards that doctors and other physicians follow was simply made up a group of physicians, without any solid basis for what was healthy or not. They have altered the blood pressure values over the years multiple times, again without scientific findings to back it up!
Mostly the “normal” range for blood pressure has generally gone down over the years. This means that it is easier and easier for GPs to say that your blood pressure is “high” and encourage you to go on blood pressure medications.
Other standards have changed too. They used to say that it was normal for your blood pressure to be higher as you age but in a lot of countries now that has been changed meaning that older people too are judged by younger people’s standards, again pressuring them to go on pharmaceuticals.
It appears to differ from country to country and physician to physician too so I’m not going to post all the figures here – go and look it up if you’re interested.
Those who live longer and healthier lives without intervention show higher blood pressures in old age
Yes, more recent and especially more independent studies (of which Dr Bergman mentions in his many talks) show that those who live the longest and with the fewest diseases have higher blood pressure as they age! They tend to take much fewer pharmaceuticals too.
Drug companies will likely say something akin to those living longer simply having looked after themselves more with certain lifestyle factors, had better genetics or living environments or were lucky. There’s no getting away from the observation however that those who take less pharmaceuticals have a lower risk of disease and live longer and healthier.
So what do these sorts of studies show? Allowing blood pressure to increase appears to allow people to live longer and healthier. Very different to what mainstream medicine wants you to believe huh?!
This makes sense when we return to what I was saying in the examples above. Higher blood pressure happens to make sure blood and nutrients reach struggling tissues thus helping to maintain their health or at the very least giving the body and you more time to sort out that issue.
Fascia and other connective tissues
Fascia you can think of as a skin-like tissue that is continuous throughout the body, connecting and surrounding all organs and tissues of the body.
If you read my previous article about tensegrity (read here) you can think of the fascia as the fabric of the tent in my example. Essentially the fascia has a big impact on posture, bone position, body movement, energy movement and in our case today especially, fluid movement.
If the fascia is scarred or restricted in some way from injuries, operations, poor posture or movement, then the fluids of our body such as cerebral-spinal fluid, lymphatic fluid and of course blood, start to find it hard to move through the body.
It is not just physical things that effect the fascia. Holding onto mental, emotional and even spiritual problems causes the tissues of the body to tense up in response to the lack of energy movement in the emotional, mental and astral densities of the aura. Those that follow my work will know that I repeat over and over again that the physical body is reciprocally related to the energy bodies and aura. So look after your physical body if you want better mental, emotional and spiritual health.
An emotion stuck in the groin/hip chakra region can cause tension in the hip flexor muscles and the fascia affecting the groin, hip joint and genital and urinary areas of the physical body as an example.
If this tension is not released either by working on the emotion and/or the physical tension (preferably both!) then fluid movement through that area will cause a lack of good fluid and blood supply, making it more likely that a disease of some sort will develop there. Depending on other stresses in that individuals life, they may get hip pain, pelvic imbalances, urinary and/or genital infections and so on.
And what does the body do to try and improve blood flow to those tense tissues and poorly moving fascia? One of them is to increase blood pressure.
Blood pressure always goes up and down through the day
It needs to do this depending on the needs of the body at any given time. If you exercise of course the pressure goes up to get more blood to the muscles so that you can exercise better or get tasks done.
Many of you who have measured their blood pressure will notice how much their mental and emotional state effects a blood pressure reading. While we often explain this effect via the nervous and endocrine systems reacting to how we are thinking and emoting, part of the reason for an increase in the figures is due to this tension I am explaining here, even if it is more related to longer term effects usually.
Don’t get caught out by a doctor if just one reading is high. Remember blood pressure can go up just by you thinking/worrying about it, even if it’s only subconscious. So, I would suggest asking for a monitor you can borrow or buy yourself to measure throughout a week. The pressure will often go down just by you getting used to taking your own readings over time.
Tension slowly builds in the body when we age
Ignoring the possibility of becoming very self aware and energy efficient such that this does not happen, as we grow older our bodies go through a lot of challenges that slowly build up tension in various ways in the body.
We get injuries or various sorts. We sometimes have operations to sort out injuries and diseases. We slowly build up fibrous or scar tissue as we repeat certain movements that gradually cause more strain through the body. We build up muscular tension in various areas through activity. We start create cysts at times when we don’t have the capacity to solve an immune system challenge. We gradually build up more and more inflammatory issues in the body in response to toxins in our food, from vaccinations, our surroundings etc that take more and more energy to deal with and less energy available to clear the various things that create tension in the body. Our bodies become slowly less resilient to infection by bacteria and funghi furthering this effect. Also from holding onto mental, emotional and spiritual traumas and limiting beliefs even, builds up tension in the physical body.
All this leads to poorer fluid movement throughout the body as the tissues of each organ and the fascia become more tense and fluid gets harder to move through them.
We can often mitigate a lot of this through spiritual, mental and emotional therapy/healing, various forms of physical therapy, good diet, sleep, rest, exercise etc. However the vast majority of us are agreeing to and thus experiencing a reality where we age and die, so there is entropy happening and we slowly have less available energy and resources to correct these tensions and restrictions in our bodies.
This results in restrictions building up over time and is probably the main reason why most of us slowly have an increase in blood pressure as we age.
I have to also mention that inflammation and the resultant build up of plaques in the blood vessels (cholesterol is not the cause but the body trying to cover up the inflammation by the way!) as well as hardening of blood vessels due to poor uptake of the right fats (avoid seed oils and opt more for saturated fats – yes the opposite of what they tell us!) and toxin damage of various kinds are also big factors in poor fluid movement through the vessels themselves. That is a story for another blog article.
Work on the solutions to why your blood pressure increases
The things you can do to work on underlying factors of high blood pressure are vast and I cannot possibly cover all the things that might help. Here are some ideas:
- Fascia work. There are many forms of physical therapy that work on the fascia to free up restrictions and improve fluid movement in the body. They include cranio-sacral therapy, osteopathic soft-tissue techniques, Rolfing and myo-fascial therapy to name but a few.
- Posture. The way you hold your body can have a huge impact on tensions in the body being created or released including in the fascia. The Alexander Technique is a well-known one that I can recommend. Posture is an integral part of yoga, tai chi and chi gung of course. Using furniture to help keep a better posture is also recommended.
- Better diet. This should be self-explanatory as your body is built and maintained on what you eat and drink. If you don’t have the resources to fight infection, build tissues, repair tissues, relieve tension, prevent disease etc then the whole body is negatively affected including an increase in blood pressure. I’d recommend seeing a naturopathic nutritionist to get started as there’s so much false information out there about what is healthy and what is not.
- Herbs/supplements. Ideally you should get all your nutritional needs through a good diet rather than needing supplementation. However there are some herbs ad supplements that can be useful. I yet again cannot fit all of the recommendations here so please go and see a naturopathic nutritionist for more help on this.
- Reduce toxic exposure. Including drinking and smoking, there are a lot of sources of which I’ve mentioned in the last few articles but suffice to say reduce them so there’s less pressure on the body maintaining itself and reducing the risk of diseases, including inflammation that can affect blood vessels and fascia among many things.
- Toxic release. There are a lot of ways of taking out all the various chemicals that irritate and cause tensions and disease in the body, including detox diets of various kinds, however don’t underestimate the power of saunas. Sweating for 20 minutes in a sauna has been shown to release more toxins than all sorts of detoxifying diets that last over a month in duration!
- Energy/spiritual healing. As mentioned, tensions in the aura manifest as tensions in the physical body and vice versa, so go see a healer like me to help sort out all the various issues that may be possible. Psychic attack, parasites, energy cysts, closed chakras etc are some of the many possible causes.
Tai Chi is a wonderful practice that incorporates many of what I mention in this list – posture, exercise, bodily fluid movement, spiritual energy movement, body awareness, relaxation and more. - Work on your aura/energy flow. The more open you are to energy flowing through you the more energy issues of all kinds start to clear helping reduce physical tensions. Working on being present and with chakras open is the key to a lot of issues. Tai chi, chi gung, yoga and a whole host of other practices help with better energy flow as well as physical movement.
- Exercise/move more. More body movement helps with better fluid flow through your body and so better nutrient supply and better waste removal from your tissues.
- Work on and question your beliefs. A lot of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual tensions are due to limiting beliefs & habits that don’t serve you. Question how you view the world and what you’d like to get out of this life. Are you fulfilling your desires for this life and are your beliefs and habits stopping you doing that?
- Work on improving your relationships. Life is all about relationships. You cannot experience being an independent consciousness without the ego comparing yourself to other people/beings/things, however this can cause separation, judgments and traumas impacting your energetic and physical tensions. Happy people are more relaxed.
- Work on expressing yourself more truthfully. The more you become the person you truly wish to be on all levels (not just the head!) the happier and the less bodily tension you’ll hold. Let go of those habits, beliefs, jobs, etc that stop you from being so and start making little steps each day to becoming who or what you wish.
- Therapy. This can help with many of the above points and there are a lot of types of therapist depending on you and what you want to work on. If it’s spiritual then you can see me or a Barbara Brennan practitioner for example. Psychotherapy can be very useful for a lot of people. If there are other people involved then family constallation work can be useful if you can’t get them together. There’s a lot of different therapies to pick from so go research what might be best for you.
- Rest/relax. Sometimes it is learning to relax in challenging situations. Sometimes learning to not take on too many things. Sometimes more about better quality of sleep or other forms of relaxation. Sometimes more time for yourself rather than doing too much for others.
There may be many more practical solutions for underlying factors, including operations to remove tumors that are too far gone, antibiotics for serious infections, castor oil packs to pull out toxins, essential oils to fight infections, chanca piedra to dissolve stones in the body etc etc.
The various organs of the body and the tissues between them all have varying functions. For some people it may be just one or two organs struggling to allow blood through them that is causing a high blood pressure, where as for others it may be more organs or for others all organs generally having less permeability. For this reason what works to reduce one person’s blood pressure may not work as well for another.
Get checked by a doctor anyway!
I did start writing here about all sorts of things about the pros and cons of doctors but I’m going to save that for another article.
Essentially, there is far too much medical science out there for everyday people to understand. You can easily think you know everything after reading a few articles but that can be dangerous if it blinds you to other possibilities.
People can often know more than a doctor when they start educating themselves about a specific medical subject BUT that does not mean that they should not go to a doctor when certain symptoms start appearing.
A doctor even with all the pharmaceutical influence and bias can still pick up on a lot of things that you may not consider. You may actually have something different that what you have diagnosed yourself.
See doctors as people with a different set of ideas and tools rather than the gods that they are often portrayed as. You will not be able to spot nor solve many things that they can, especially with the diagnostic tools and treatment procedures they have and they may save your life.
Many of my articles warn against what horrible things can happen if you always follow their advice but if you treat them as an alternative source of information that you can choose to follow none, part or all of their advice in any given situation, then you will find them very useful and have a better relationship with them. Like a friend, you don’t always believe the same way nor follow their advice all the time but they are still your friend ;-).
I will say that you should absolutely pepper your doctor with questions and ask for certain tests if they don’t immediately suggest them. Remember they are a better tool for you if you stir up questions in them. Make sure you mention all signs and symptoms you have noticed even if you think they are not relevant as that could get your doctor contemplating and investigating something they might have missed otherwise.
In the case of high blood pressure, for a lot of you, not taking blood pressure medication for the reasons mentioned above would give you a better quality of life, especially if you work on the reasons why your blood pressure increased in the first place. However go get checked anyway. The underlying reason for your blood pressure might be something serious and beyond what I can cover in this article.
