Spiritual Hyperbaric Therapy

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) is a type of oxygen therapy where you breath oxygen in a pressurized chamber or tube. This environment allows your lungs to gather up to three times more oxygen than you would get by breathing oxygen at normal air pressure. The extra oxygen moves through your blood and to your organs and body tissues.

HBOT is used to treat certain serious wounds, burns, injuries, infections, and even victims of drowning. It also treats air or gas embolisms (bubbles of air in your bloodstream), decompression sickness suffered by scuba divers, and carbon monoxide poisoning.

This last March, I underwent 40 one-hour treatments (one a day) at the Rocky Mountain Hyperbaric Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is being studied as a treatment for long term COVID. I finally caught COVID last June and then again this last Christmas. Between the two rounds of COVID (and a different treatment each time), I began to have all the symptoms of LONG TERM COVID.
I have to say that the LONG TERM COVID has been worse than the week long bout each time with the virus itself. I have had many of the manifestations that a large number of people have reported across the country, such as:

• Post-exertional malaise (debilitating fatigue that gets worse after physical or mental activity)
• fatigue
• brain fog
• dizziness
• gastrointestinal symptoms
• heart palpitations
• loss of smell or taste
• thirst
• chronic cough
• chest pain

So, I decided to give the Hyperbaric treatments a chance. Below is a picture taken of me relaxing in my tube during one of the 40 treatments. There were 8 individual tubes in this clinic. The owner of the clinic received his training and certification to operate the clinic from the Navy Seals in San Diego, CA and he was an experienced scuba diver.

You cannot do much, but relax in the narrow tube. You are not allowed to take food, books, magazines, or any forms of paper in with you, because they could catch fire. You can have a bottle of water. They do provide an external TV above each monitor, with the audio piped into each tube, if anyone wants to watch the available programing.

I tried to take a nap each time. You also have to remove your clothing, shoes, and socks to put on a hospital type outfit that is pure 100% cotton. The owner told me that if a fire started and reached their oxygen supply on hand, the explosion would be so bad, that nothing but a hole in the ground would be left.

Once you are comfortably situated in your tube, they close the tube door on one end and slowly begin to increase the pressures inside, until they reach the specific pressures your doctor prescribed for you. This takes about ten minutes and then you lay there under that pressure for 60 minutes. Then they depressurize the tube slowly back to normal and roll your bed on wheels out of the tube, so you can change clothes and leave. A trained technician has to be close to your tube at all times to operate and monitor the pressures and watch how you are doing. The technician can talk with you through a phone on the outside of each tube.

I have to say, I believe the treatments did help. It took about 7-8 weeks after I finished up, before I began to feel the benefit of all that oxygen, but it slowly kicked in. The clinic’s medical director (MD), who set me up for this, told me that internal oxidative stress and inflammation are the bottom line causes of aging and disease. They just wear all the cells and organs of our body down over time. So, these treatments are designed to relieve that stress and inflammation. Wealthy people are using these as an anti-aging tool.

During those 40 hours of just lying there in the tube, for an hour at a time, I tried to think of how these Hyperbaric treatments might have spiritual applications for Christians. Don’t you agree that just living in this fallen world constantly wears us down spiritually (the oxidative stress on our spirits and souls so to speak).

One thing that came to mind was “meditation”, referring to the process of meditating upon the Word of God…not some kind of mystic meditation. I think every false religion in the world has some form or type of spiritual meditation designed to take you out of yourself or to help you realize your full self or to become one with the universe. Most of them involve you (the participant) trying to open your mind to anything or everything in the universe, but I believe these just lead to demonic influences coming into one’s life or even demon possession.

I began to think of Biblical meditation as an analogy to spiritual oxygen therapy or spiritual Hyperbaric treatments. The Word of God can be like a spiritual hyperbaric oxygen chamber. Just as that chamber I laid in for 40 hours (one hour a day) saturated my body and everything in it with oxygen (to help relieve, heal, restore the effects of oxidative stress), so proper meditation upon God’s Word can saturate my spirit and soul with pure, holy, and restorative spiritual oxygen (to help heal, restore, and relieve spiritual oxidative stress).

As a scripture or scriptures come into your conscious mind (and especially when they are stored there), it can release God’s truth & light, His wisdom, His understanding, His holiness (moral purity), His joy, His fear, His hope, His freedom, His comfort, His peace, etc… Please review Psalm 119 for examples of this. It illuminates the heart and mind of God inside us. The Word of God quickens your spirit, renews and transforms your mind, and forms more of Christ’s image in you.

These things reduce that spiritual and moral oxidative stress and inflammation that come at you from just being in the world each day (temptation, sensuality, deception, negative pressures, compromise, worldliness, evil people, etc, etc, etc…). It takes spiritual and moral energy to bear up under all of these things each day.

True biblical meditation on God’s Word renews this energy for us. Just reading God’s Word each day does a lot for sure, but meditation does even more. So, the winning combination is reading, memorizing, and meditating {to focus on, to muse, to remember, to recall, to ponder, to visualize, to feed upon, to try and understand, to delight in, to internalize, to think of ways to use the Word in our lives…obedience, and on and on).

It is fascinating that we cannot see oxygen…it is invisible. We cannot taste it or smell it or hear it….but we cannot live without it. 65% of our body weight is oxygen and most if it is found in our bloodstream and lungs. It allows us to breath. Oxygen is produced naturally when Photosynthesis uses energy from the sun to convert it into chemical energy for food. (https://www.study.com)

Just as oxygen is produced naturally when photosynthesis uses energy from the sun to convert it into chemical energy for food, spiritual oxygen is produced naturally when spiritual photosynthesis uses power from the Word of God to convert it into spiritual energy that our spirits breath in and use to live a spiritual life. We cannot live healthy and fruitful and productive spiritual lives without it.

Does the Word of God really produce spiritual energy? YES!!! Hebrews 4:12 explains how God’s Word is living (alive), active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, able to pierce the division between soul and spirit, joints and marrow (It penetrates the most inward parts of our lives….like highly pressurized oxygen penetrates the inward parts of our physical bodies). The result is we can then discern the thoughts and intentions (motives) of our hearts. And we can free or cleanse ourselves of spiritual oxidative stress.

2 Timothy 3:16 explains how all Scripture (any Scripture, every Scripture) is God-breathed (breathed out by God….like spiritual oxygen for us to breath in) and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness (the kinds of help we need for all of that spiritual oxidative stress).

As we sincerely think about, meditate upon, try to figure out, and pray over any Scripture, we will experience God’s supernatural breath (power & energy) coming down into us through that Scripture or Scriptures.

This is why the Apostle Paul explained that he could do all things through Christ who strengthened him (Philippians 4:13). Paul thought about, studied, and prayed over Scripture more than any other person in history, except for Jesus Christ in His humanity.

Jesus explained to us in John 15:5 how He is the “Vine of God” and we are “His branches”. If we remain in Him and He in us, we will bear (produce) much fruit, but apart from Him (without Him), we can do nothing (no fruit).

How can (how do) we remain in Him on a daily basis? We can remain in Him by remaining in His Word. He confirmed this in John 6:63, where He said that, “It is the Spirit that gives life (spiritual and moral oxygen) and the flesh can achieve nothing. So the words that I have spoken to you are Spirit and life”.

His Spirit and His life relieve us of the spiritual oxidative stress we face all day long of every day and fulfill the promise given to us in Isaiah 40:31 that if we wait for the Lord, we shall renew our strength and we shall mount up with wings like eagles and we shall run and not be weary and we shall walk and not faint. We wait for the Lord by waiting in His Word (meditating on it day and night – Joshua 1:8).

One simple approach I found is to have one or more of the verses I read in the morning (or on a previous day) written down on an index card. Each evening, I review the verse or verses on the card and then memorize part of it or all of it (depending on how long it is) right before I go to sleep.

Then I keep the card in my bathroom. Each time I have to get and use the restroom, I try to redeem the time and review the verse or verses on the card and reinforce them in my mind.

I will think about the verse as a whole or any of the words or phrases in the verse, as long as I am in the bathroom, and as I crawl back under the sheets. This way I can keep my meditation process going each night. This process has been a tangible blessing and gives the verse or verses the chance to seep deep into my unconscious mind and then do its work, as I sleep.

Thanks for your time!
Gene

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