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By Emmanuel Williams

The Bloodstream hypothesis is based on a biological constant. That what’s coursing through your bloodstream is by no means flowing through mine. And vice versa.

It demands that we come to terms with our biological distance from each other, and how we seek to bridge that gap both successfully and unsuccessfully.

First, let’s begin with the biological facts. We all breathe oxygen, which enriches our red blood cells, while our white blood cells fight off infections and rush to the site of our injuries to heal tissue. We all have the same organs and tissues, bones, a central nervous system including our highly rational brains, and an endocrine system. The latter two systems should be the focus concerning this hypothesis.

Considering the facts, the nervous system and endocrine system are connected by the hypothalamus, and when input signals to the nervous system trigger a response, it can happen in the brain or at the site of endocrine organs throughout the body known as nerve plexuses. The term ‘chakra’ has been used to describe these areas, but we will ______

In the head, the brain and hypothalamus is the seat of our imagination built on experience, thought, preference, environment, and all our concern and concentration. It is the seat of the mind, the “third eye”. What we see that isn’t in our current environment along with our interpretation of what goes on around us.

In the throat plexus, the thyroid gland regulates metabolism, energy levels, and body temperature. The parathyroid regulates calcium, vital for nerve function, muscle function, and balancing between extremes in mood.

You’ll be interested to know that the cardiac plexus (heart plexus) plays little part beyond pulse and circulation. At the hormonal level, the heart secretes hormones only to help itself pump blood, it does not contribute to your mood or nervous response except, of course, for its rate of pulsation (heart rate) usually produced after epinephrine reaches the heart from the adrenal glands (solar plexus).

The adrenal glands are responsible for the stress response. Releasing epinephrine (adrenaline) when a threat is perceived to the body, and norepinephrine in the absence, or reduction, of threats.

The pancreas regulates insulin and glucagon (blood sugar), which out of balance can cause consequences in anxiety, confusion, and irritability. 

A note about a major pancreatic pathology: Diabetes. 

Those with diabetes know more about pancreatic dysfunction. Type 1 is a genetic condition best treated with a medicine and an endocrinologist. Type 2 requires the same treatment. The condition is nongenetic, but brought on by constant coffee with excessive sugar yet a mostly sedentary lifestyle, add the camel’s backbreaker: soft drinks, and all the calories stack up in fatty tissue localized to the belly, thighs, and upper arms since the body is not expending this energy, but storing it. 

Energy does not die, it is only transformed.

Back to the hypothesis at hand!

Sex hormones (sacral plexus/root chakra) estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone need no extensive explanation save for their roles in reproduction, pregnancy and regulation of the menstrual cycle in females (E/P) and sperm production, libido, motivation, and assertiveness in males (T).

The point is, none of us secrete the same hormones at the same time. Not on our own. Not apart from each other. No no, individually we are all feeling something different from one another as separate hormones, with major events of multiple hormones at once.

These hormones pass through our blood to get to other organs. They all have to pass through the heart, but the heart never feels them pass through it! We feel secreted hormones in their destination organs. In the plexuses (chakras) or in our skeletal muscle and skin. Even in the hair on our arms and legs. How we all differ is by individual bloodstream.

But we were never a solitary species.

We come together. We eat the same food at the dinner table. Consuming the same sources of energy in shared glasses of red wine over steak. We hug each other (mutual oxytocin), we communicate ideas through speech so we can visualize the same things. 

With our friends we share the same experiences. We fall in love with each other and begin to share as much as we can, even our deepest secrets in sacred intimacy.

Conversely, isolation is a cross none should bear, but in its excesses, one is left alone to bear their own hormonal lives. It forces us to confront whether or not we are open to another, to friends, the community, and the collective. 

Or are we closed off from the bloodstream of others because of traumas, betrayals, losses, and mistrust?

I would wager that if we want to live unalone, we have to share our inner states with other human beings, and participate in activities where we are just as vulnerable as those around us, because we all have blood.

And there is more around us than within us…

Be well.

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Google Gemini provided data for this essay.