Our lungs are obviously essential for life! Healing our lungs can be tricky because they are something we have to keep using frequently even in the midst of healing. In this article, we’ll share more to help you understand the lungs function, what can harm the lungs and how they get hurt, and, finally, what the lungs need to heal.
What is the function of the lungs?
The lungs are structures in our chest that exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide, of course. But more than that, they exchange anything in gas form and expel it every time we breathe out. This includes lots of toxins meaning our lungs are a major detox organ.
When we breathe in, air goes into the capillary beds that line our lungs.These beds have been brought waste from the rest of the body to exchange into a gas to be breathed out. Think of this as a highway, which we need to be free flowing. Toxins can cause damage to the smaller capillary beds, especially if they’re particularly caustic. When the capillary beds are damaged, our body will shut down that part of the lungs so it can repair it. This happens multiple times a day in all of us but is generally so small we don’t even notice it. When the bed is repaired, it is opened back up and functioning again.
When the area becomes big enough to notice, we get short of breath and start to get diagnosable lung conditions like asthma. We have medications intended to help treat these conditions by forcing the air sacs open that are being closed for repair. This is a problem for obvious reasons! If you keep a highway open that is full of potholes with no chance for repair, eventually it becomes undriveable. We must get to the root problem to help our lungs heal.
How to Heal the Lungs: Remove What Can Damage
First things first - stop smoking or vaping! If this is something that you struggle with, let us help. There is an underlying cause for your addiction that can be helped.
Don’t use fake perfumes or scented aerosols to help lighten the workload for your bodies.
Remove heavy metals or plastics from your body like mercury fillings.
Next, look at things that may be damaging your lungs that you can’t control like forest fires or air pollution. Use a mask or bandana to help filter air if you are outdoors and the air quality is poor. Invest in an air filter at home.
To help your lungs heal, first avoid as many triggers as possible. Our body wants to be healthy and healed. It wants to heal itself if given the opportunity. If it has not healed itself, it’s because we did not give it everything it needs, like the correct nutrition.
How to Heal the Lungs: Breathe Correctly
Breathing correctly will help the lungs to their job better because well... breathing is what our lungs primary function is. Breathing correctly means breathing all the way down to the bases of our lungs. This will stimulate the vagus nerve, which controls the flight or fight response in our body. When we breathe using only the upper part of our lungs, we put our bodies into Flight or Fight.
Some clues your body may be giving you that you are not breathing correctly are an anxious feeling, feeling like you need to catch your breath, a shallowness to your breath, or yawning. Yawning is not always an indication of tiredness. Yawning can also be your brain asking for more oxygen because you’re not sitting in a way that oxygen can flow or you’re nervous and need more air. When you yawn, you take a deeper breath than normal. Yawning can also help our minds transition from one subject to another but if you find yourself yawning in the middle of a task, it’s good to think about your breathing.
There are lots of ways to help learn to breathe correctly. Try the Prana app, which is free, and leads you in different breathing exercises for different activities like calming down, easing anxiety, or going to sleep. You can also sit cross legged, with your hands on your waist above your hip bones. When you breathe in, you should get expansion movement in your abdomen. When you breathe out, your abdomen should contract.
Some people are able to get themselves so practiced breathing this way that they’re able to do it all the time! This can be life changing for health as it puts your whole body in a state of healing, relaxation and understanding. You’ll be able to understand and learn better because you’re out of the Flight or Fight response and able to concentrate on other things.
How to Heal the Lungs: Vitamins, Cholesterol, and PMGs
The lungs need Vitamin A and Vitamin C to heal. Interestingly, these are also the vitamins that our adrenal system needs in large amounts. Vitamin A is found in animal fat so eating butter, lard, and cod liver oil can help. Try Green Pastures Cod Liver Oil with Concentrated Butter oil. 4 a day is great but you might find that you need 6 a day if your lungs are bad or you’re stressed. Vitamin C is a water based vitamin found in sauerkraut, acerola cherry powder, and Indian Gooseberry (always my favorite but hard to find.) You also need a lot of minerals to help the structure of your lungs as well as helping your body get rid of heavy metals.
We use cholesterol to heal inflammation and damage to tissue that’s broken. Our lungs are a fatty type tissue so they need a lot of cholesterol to repair and rebuild lung cells. Lots of cholesterol will help your body repair your lungs quicker, similar to what we need to heal adrenal issues. For more on cholesterol, check out this video on the Surprising Role of Cholesterol.
When we have long standing lung issues, we can use PMGs or protomorphogens to help. Protomorphogens are the cell determinants, the name tags of the cell. They determine the functionality and size of an organ. When there is damage to lung tissue, the cells containing a lung PMG will leak into the bloodstream. The body will identify them as a problem and stop them. If the cells keep coming because the damage is still there, the body will look for the source and start attacking it. When this happens, you’ll have a subclinical autoimmune reaction. So now not only do you have toxins damaging your lungs, inflammation that’s not getting the response it needs and your own immune system is attacking your lungs! This is why it can be so difficult to heal the lungs. A supplement of concentrated PMGs from another animal can serve as a short term distraction for your immune system. Take them for a period of time to distract the immune system until your lungs, or other organ in question, is healthy. As soon as the cells are done leaking into the body, you can stop taking the PMGs. Try lung or skin PMGs from Standard Process to shorten healing time and get yourself ahead of your immune system.
How to Heal the Lungs: Deal with Grief
The emotion of the lungs as assigned by Chinese Medicine is grief. Grief can happen in a lot of ways. It is grieving the loss of something; like a loved one or even a lost opportunity. Many of us have been grieving recently with the changes our world has gone through.
Sometimes, grief is small and we can process it well. Sometimes, it is small and we ignore it, which isn’t the healthiest response. But, sometimes, grief is overwhelming. There is no definitive definition of what should be small grief or large grief. That is defined by you and you need to process it in your own way.
Rubbing essential oils like Console, Breathe, or Peppermint on the meridian energy line of the lungs, over your whole chest, or on the acupressure points in your feet and hands can help. Rubbing the essential oils on your body is more helpful than putting them in a diffuser.
Process your grief. Do not underestimate the significant way this will help your lung health!
If you need help with any of these, feel free to reach out! We’d love to help you with your healing journey.