It’s safe to say mold plays a very important, even vital role in nature, but what exactly is it? Mold is a fungal organism that grows in filaments, reproducing by creating spores that can’t be seen by the naked eye, but have a distinctive odor. It consumes cellulose-based materials for food and produces volatile organic compounds as well as gaseous toxins.
Mold poisoning is gaining awareness, often misdiagnosed because like so many other hidden infections, it initiates oxidative stress & inflammation creating a physiological terrain that favors disease. Mold can also alter responses to treatments, especially medications. If you’re mold-sick, you may get insomnia while taking a medication prescribed for sleeping. The mold can also imitate other conditions while exacerbating other pre-existing illnesses. What isn’t common knowledge, is how deep the mold and mycotoxins can penetrate our tissues, more specifically the mitochondria: our cell’s powerhouse.
Without turning this into a lengthy science lesson, just a couple cliff notes:
1. The mitochondria convert the energy from our food into energy that the cell can use. They generate the majority of ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate), the energy molecule used by the cell (our energy currency) and cell signaling (communication).
2. They are responsible for many of the biochemical reactions involved in cellular respiration. Your cells breathe just like your lungs by producing energy through the oxidation of organic substances. If you have mold, your cells are ‘breathing’ in the mycotoxins that mold releases, so imagine the damage happening. Compound that by the millions and it’s no wonder mold turns you into what feels like the Crypt Keeper!
Mold finds its way into the body anyway it can. It could be from a beautiful estate where they just keep painting over the black toxic mold growing near the sink, that water damaged basement, a leak in your roof, or improperly installed Air Conditioning. Awareness that areas that remain damp for any reason – leaks, condensation, vapor infiltration, can make it easy for mold to grow quickly. It slowly becomes a part of our life and our symptoms get exacerbated everytime we are exposed to it.
Pay attention to how you feel when you enter a building, or when you’ve spent time away from there. Are you constantly sick? Do you feel overwhelmingly sensitive? You may notice an uptick in food sensitivities, EMF sensitivities, chemical sensitivities, or insatiable sugar cravings. Do you have raging allergy attacks when there’s no pollen in the air or chronic sinusitis? Dollars to donuts, you have mold. Of course, there is professional testing that should be done to confirm your suspicions, but intuitively YOU know when something is off. Mold turns you into another person. Mold makes you angry, even having unpredictable bouts of rage because it is quite literally attacking your liver and other vital organs.
As we go deeper into our self healing, we’ve learned how connected emotions are with our physical health. Our emotions can be a representation of what’s happening inside our bodies. Emotions associated with the liver are angry, while kidneys that are poorly functioning instill fear. If your small intestine is sluggish or weak you may notice heightened impatience, where anxiety indicates a spleen or pancreatic issue. When we are mold sick, these negative emotions will become more difficult to control because the mold is slowly taking over, brainwashing us and making life seem like a fight just to survive.
