The author of ‘Coaching, Science and Health’ explains the theories that put us in charge of our health. A powerful vision that the expert also addresses in the course ‘Biology of Observer Change’.
Do genes control our health, our illness?
Not as much as we thought. Scientists are discovering in this 21st century, through a new science called epigenetics, that we are not slaves to our genes. Epigenetics studies the interactions between genes and the environment that occur in organisms, and this science is teaching us that genes are merely possibilities rather than something that predetermines health or illness.
What responsibility does each person have for their own health? What can they do? What is in our hands to “escape” illness?
The science of epigenetics has radically changed our view on the control of life. We should be more responsible to avoid many illnesses. There are increasingly more studies demonstrating the influence of emotions, thoughts, nutrition, stress, and physical exercise on our biology and health. By properly managing these environmental influences, we could “escape” illness.
Are you arguing that we are what we feel, and in what sense?
We truly are what we feel, think, and eat. Matter is merely a form of energy, and we nourish ourselves with both what we call “matter” and what we call “energy.” Through food, thoughts, and emotions, we control our appearance, our behaviour, and our health, sometimes for our entire lives and even for that of future generations. We switch our genes on and off based on our diet and our feelings.
What is the relationship between coaching and the body? What effects does it have on health and biology?
Through coaching, we can help our clients to take responsibility for their bodies and gain control of their own health and well-being. A Health Coach can support their client in taking responsibility for those environmental influences (beliefs, stress, diet...) that directly interfere with their health. From my experience as a coach, I am discovering that often all our clients need to recover from their illness is someone who provides them with time and space to think and who listens to them empathetically; someone who helps them generate new empowering beliefs and accompanies them in a conversation that illuminates dormant genes, thereby activating their healing. In this way, and from this new transformational perspective, the will towards new habits can be generated, sending new signals to the genes continuously and unconsciously to reinvent a healthier state.
How did you discover psychoanalysis?
It all started 13 years ago, when I read one of his masterpieces entitled Project Psychology for Neurologists [‘The Project’]. His work fascinated me so much that, as I reread his work, I began to study the most recent concepts I found in the neuroscience literature. The psychic apparatus Freud laid out was spectacular, despite the limitations of some of the physiological and neurological concepts not yet discovered in his time. Freud did not manage to finish this work, it was absorbing so much of his energy that he was becoming ill, so he decided to put it away in a drawer in an unfinished state, never to return to it again. I am convinced that he did not finish the work because he was discouraged by the lack of knowledge about some important later discoveries (neurotransmitters, action potentials, DNA, etc.). However, his ideas remained with him and later found expression in psychoanalytic theories about the unconscious, or even later influenced the world of coaching.
In his book, he corresponds with Freud. What does Freud represent to you? Why the keenness to write letters to him?
This fact made me feel a great deal of sorrow and admiration for Freud. I wish his brilliant mind had been able to process all the neurological advancements of the 20th century that he didn't live to see, as well as the recent discoveries of 21st-century neuroscience. It was then that the idea occurred to me to write letters to tell him everything he was missing and to make him my “coach” so that with his presence and empathetic listening in my mind, we could discover new paradigms of science together. I liked this idea, so with great enthusiasm and motivation, I began to gather information from different areas of knowledge with the intention of telling him things and learning at the same time. Therefore, if you ask me what Freud represents to me, I would say he represents the ideal teacher, the one who doesn't teach you but helps you to learn.
Health coaching is also the subject of the ‘BCO’ training. What is your interest in this area?
In a somewhat unsettling way, I believe I've spent half my life trying to consider human health as a whole: body, mind, and spirit. Nowadays, thanks to neuroscience, epigenetics, quantum physics, and coaching, I can scientifically understand what traditional medicines, whether Chinese, Tibetan, Ayurvedic, Greco-Roman, or popular wisdom, already intuited. I believe we live in a privileged moment where it's exciting to delve into the new paradigm of science that is awakening… That is my motivation.
