The Thymus and Self Love

What's a Thymus?

Let's find out in this short podcast.  

We'll discuss the basics of the Thymus, the base camp for your immune cells to learn their job.  We'll also discuss:

• How the Thymus plays a role in Self Tolerance 
• The relationship between the immune system and self compassion
• What are Adverse Childhood Experience and adult disease

If you are needing to determine your ACE Score, you can do  an ACE score here:
ACE Score Self Assessment

Self compassion helps to calm your mind, center your spirit and decrease your body's ability to attack itself.  Self compassion is a positive psychological tool that enhances well being.

In my upcoming book, The Heart of Being, we  will cultivate this and other positive psychological tools to enhance well being of the heart, mind and spirit.

Welcome to the Art of Healing Podcast community.  This podcast is devoted to helping you find what works on your journey to health and wellness.  This podcast is devoted to providing information on many healing modalities.  Learn more about:

• Reiki
• Functional Medicine
• Meditation
• Energy Healing

and more!

Learn more about Dr. Charlyce here. 

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome back to Art Healing Podcast. This is Charli, and thank you so much for joining me for today's episode, Thymus Self-Love and Your Immune System. So I have been wanting to discuss the thymus gland for a while, partially because, um, my job as an internist is often to discuss very boring topics that put people to sleep. Just kidding<laugh>. No. But, uh, um, it is a topic that gets almost no conversation, gets almost no notice in popular media, in medical literature, and definitely during medical practice. And this is probably because as a source of disease, it's probably poorly understood. Um, the thymus gland's not often gonna be a target for many treatments, uh, only in certain diagnosis that have to, uh, do with overgrowth or cancer. So it's not a topic that you hear a lot about in the glands. Um, we hear lots about the thyroid gland. That's really common. We hear, of course, about our ovaries and our testes. Um, and of course we hear a lot about our Juno glands. So I thought it'd be nice to spend an episode discussing just the thymus gland, what it does. And then of course, we'll get into how our thoughts and our patterns might be affecting our thymus gland and what that may have to do with our immune system, whether or not the immune system's working too much or if it's not working enough. So the thymus gland is a gland that is located just in the chest. It's just behind what's called the sternum or the breast bone. It sits in front of the heart and it's surrounded by like a protective layer of fat. The interesting thing about the thymus gland is that it shrinks over time. So we actually start off with a very large thymus gland when we're kids, and then it shrinks all the way down to when we're adults, and it tends to shrink the rest of our life. And it's primary job throughout our lives is to work on what's called the T cells. So T cells are part of your immune system, part of what's called your white blood cells. So let's cover a little bit what that is. So when we say immune system, and we use the term really broadly, and sometimes I'm not even sure if we all know we're, we're all talking about the same thing, but in medicine we typically mean when we say immune system, we mean the body's defense mechanism against threats both internally and externally. So, um, our immune system really is thought of as being comprised of multiple organs, not just one. So the immune system can include the skin, um, it can include layers of the digestor tract, layers of the respiratory tract, and then of course, it includes the organs that manufacture or produce the cells that participate in immunity, the spleen, um, even to some extent the liver, um, as well as the lymph nodes, which we all know. So you've got the ones in your neck and maybe like in your armpit. Um, so all of those are comprising what we say is the immune system when we use that term kind of generally. So, um, your immune system has different aspects and sometimes when I work with my patients, I explain to them that you can think of it maybe as almost like a military and which is gonna be different branches. And we tend to think of one, the branches in two big slots, uh, which is gonna be the innate immunity, and then the adaptive immunity. So the innate immunity is the first responder. It's the part of the immune system that stays ready for a threat, but it may not know exactly what the threat is. It's like a first responder, so it's gonna go in for the first action, although whatever the first action is, it's not sure. Then the adaptive immunity is where we can actually have trained specialist, um, parts of the immune system that have been trained to handle things like viruses or a fungus or a parasite or a cancer cell. So, and often I'm having to remind my patients and remind myself that as far as what our immune system has to manage, it's got to be ready to defend against viruses, bacteria, fungus, um, it also has to be ready to manage internal threats. Um, there's a whole part of our immune system that is dedicated just to monitoring for abnormal cell growths. And if it works correctly, those are actually called natural killer cells. Um, a cell that is replicating abnormally, it's growing not, uh, at not by plan, It's not following the plan dna or it's altered its dna or it's doing something that's just not right. Those natural killer cells will go in and make sure that cell is not allowed to grow. Um, it'll kill it. Natural killer cells, and that's actually part of our cancer defense internally. So the part of the thymus that is interacting with our immune system as creating this, the thymus is part of the adaptive immunity. So the thymus its main role is to train these T cells in order to work correctly. So it's gonna train those T cells primarily to identify what is self and what is not self, what is a threat and what is not a threat. So the T cells in the thymus will be in there and they get lots of biochemical training and exposures to things. And as a thymus is training these T-cell almost like a military, if the T-cells aren't cooperating or won't learn what self is or sort of like refused to identify, this is my tissue versus this is enemy, um, the thymus will not let those T cells go on to survive. It'll take them out. So it's, it's a really interesting mechanism that's happening all the time inside of our, inside of our chest cavity. So, um, in my upcoming book, uh, the heart of Being one of the topics that we are discussing is how we feel about ourselves, self-love and self-compassion. And we're talking about some of the energetics of this. And as I was, um, been thinking about this over the past several years, I find this interesting that, um, the organ that's responsible for training one of the most, uh, dangerous aspects of our immune system also sits in the heart chakra. It's kind of interesting. So just as a reminder and, um, just if you've listening in my pockets, we, we do talk about energy medicine quite a bit and there's quite a few, um, podcasts on each chakra, and I'll try to include some in the link, but the heart chakra is considered our seat of love. It's the fourth chakra and it's in the chest. So it really helps, I feel that it helps to understand the connection between the, the energy part and the physical part. And, um, when we are thinking about our immune system and we think about its primary objective, which is to protect us from infection and protect us from, um, inside threads like cancer. But if you start to think about it, um, and our, our mindset, if our thoughts aren't so loving and aren't so caring, um, what happens? So, um, as I started to do my reading, both for my practice and then as well just in trying to understand this topic, um, initially for myself, but now for the book, um, it's a pretty easy connection to make that if we aren't loving and caring to ourselves, we're probably gonna have some issues with training that really powerful part of our immune system, our T-cells, um, as we all know, there are strong connections between autoimmune disease and, um, mental health issues that run the gait from anxiety to depression. And something that we commonly know is the adverse childhood experiences or ace, that if someone has a high score on an ace, then I'll include a link or you can do your own, um, adverse childhood experiences assessment that chances of as an adult and particularly autoimmune disease may actually be pretty high. And why is that? And all of research is attempting to summarize it being that I'm a reiki practicing physician, um, I would, um, offer that if you have not been taught to love yourself, what self-love even is, if you have not been taught self-compassion, you don't know what it feels to have compassion for yourself, that as those internal thoughts circulate in your mind, that your physical body picks up the script and the parts of your immune system such as your thymus begin to train your body, that the thoughts that you may have of I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not pretty enough, I don't deserve, I don't get, da da da. Um, eventually land onto the thymus in which it trains those T cells incorrectly and it trains them to identify your joints, the, the lining of your joints as a threat, or it trains your immune system that your kidneys are a threat or it trains your immune system, that your skin is a threat. The parts of you are a threat. So that sounds really sad and depressing of course, but I think it's important to step back and use our awareness to understand this link between mind and body. And when I'm practicing and working with my patients, it's just not a luxury. We have to deal with our illnesses, we've gotta deal with medications, and we just don't get this luxury of sitting down and saying, Hey, it looks like, you know, you were diagnosed with, um, rheumatoid arthritis last year. Um, does anything in your life lead to this? Do you think anything you've been through has encouraged this? And can we talk about it? Is there childhood experiences that maybe have encouraged your immune system to wake up and attack you? Let's, let's flesh that out. So as you're listening to this and think about this, here's a few questions you can ask yourself and then after we go through these questions, um, and you might wanna even take this next week to journal and reflect on it, we will end the week of February with a meditation to help ourselves. Um, we'll practice some meditation with our hands on our heart. Um, and it can be a practice that you can carry with you. It's my own personal practice that I do every day to encourage myself to have self-compassion. So we'll, we'll ask a few of these questions we'll, and if you're listening, maybe the next week reflect on it and then when we get back together, we'll practice some self-compassion. So let's have a look at some of the information in your thoughts. And something you can ask yourself is how do you think of your body? What do you think about your, your personality, who you are as a person? When you look in the mirror, what do you see? And even as we close this reflection, what are you noticing are the stream of your thoughts? So I will let you reflect on those. And then when we get back together, um, in the next week, which, um, I really like to do with Art of Healing is will in the month with a meditation that we can do together, meditation that you can actually easily do on your own, which won't be much to memorize, that will help you get back in touch with your heart, with your self-compassion, and help you start to reengage with your thymus in a healthy, healing way. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode, and please join me for next week where we'll end the month with the hands on heart meditation. Thanks. Bye-bye.