The beliefs you hold about yourself and the world, your emotions, your memories, and your habits all influence mental and physical health. These connections between what is going on in your mind and heart, and what is happening in your body, form the psycho-emotional roots of health and disease.
The holistic view of disease stresses the mind body connection and maintains that health and disease depend on a dynamic and often subtle interplay among the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects of our being, as well as our relationship to the environment in which we live.
In healing every bit of information, every piece of truth, may be crucial.
The medical approach to health and illness continues to suppose that body and mind are separable from each other and from the milieu they exist within.
The brain is the hardware that allows you to experience mental states that are labelled the “mind, ego, thoughts…” This concept of the “mind” encompasses mental states including thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and emotions. Different mental states can positively or negatively affect biological functioning. More on this in the chapters that follow.
The nervous, endocrine, and immune systems share a common chemical language, that allows constant communication between the mind and body through messengers like hormones and neurotransmitters.
For example, neurological pathways connect parts of the brain that process emotions with the spinal cord, muscles, cardiovascular system, and digestive tract. We’ve all experienced butterflies in our stomach when we are stressed or when we see a loved one and so on. That’s why sometimes when we feel intense pain, sorrow, anxiety or trauma it is often seen that people press their hands to their chest due to the physical reaction.
Major life events, stressors, or emotions trigger physical symptoms.
The innate healing power of the mind is part of our birthright and is within reach for each and every one of us.
Dr. Epstein writes: “Healing is a process, not a magical event. Nothing new is added to your body or mind… Nothing is taken out. Healing involves a greater experience of oneness, wholeness, and reconnection with all aspects of your being.”
We all heard about the power of the mind and how it can heal the body. We’ve heard the stories about individuals who experienced a health problem and, despite the finest medical care (and often a positive initial medical prognosis), got sicker and died. We have also seen people with life-threatening terminal diseases who were given up on by their doctors return from the brink of death to enjoy long, healthy, and productive lives.
These cases are called spontaneous remissions or miracles. Often the patient has changed everything, not only diet and toxins…. but also the environment that they live in, their work and even relationships. I personally know a highly stressed out business man with prostate cancer, he had 6 months to live so he decided to go on an Australian walkabout (walk through the Australian outback). When he first time came back to civilisation he had a health check-up. No cancer was detected.
I don’t want to say that everyone needs to go on a walkabout or that all of us can have spontaneous remissions but in his case that was what he needed the most to heal.
Disease: A Wake-Up Call to Change
In the context of holistic mind body healing, illness should never be viewed as a punishment or a failure. Instead, disease can be seen as the result of a lack of alignment among the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects of our being.
Rather than being viewed as “bad” or “evil,” symptoms are the body’s way of telling us that something is wrong. They are a wake-up call that tells us that we need to change old attitudes, perspectives, and lifestyle habits that may have contributed to our health problem. To the degree that we are sensitive to our body’s subtle messages, we can often deal with a problem before it becomes serious.
Life-threatening diseases like cancer and AIDS can play a special role in the transformative process. They challenge us to the very core of our being and can mobilize us to make major changes in personality, thinking, and lifestyle.
Illness forces us to make choices. Choices based on fear and other limited perspectives often lead to more suffering, whereas those based on knowledge and hope have often been found to lead to healing.
In their book Living in Hope, Cindy Mikluscak-Cooper, R.N., and Emmett E. Miller, M.D., list some traits that long-term survivors with AIDS have in common. Many are similar to those of long-term cancer survivors. The ones appearing here are applicable to individuals suffering from all serious illness, whether it is life-threatening or not.
These traits include the following:
- Having a sense of personal responsibility for their health and a sense that they can influence it.
- Having a sense of purpose in life.
- Finding new meaning in life as a result of the illness itself.
- Having previously mastered a life-threatening illness or other life crisis.
- Having accepted the reality of their diagnosis, yet refusing to believe that it is a death sentence.
- Having an ability to communicate their concerns to others, including concerns regarding the illness itself.
- Being assertive and having the ability to say no.
- Having the ability to withdraw from involvements and to nurture themselves.
- Being sensitive to their body and its needs
Other common traits among long-term AIDS survivors that speak to the healing power of the mind are addressed in Scott J. Gregory’s book A Holistic Protocol for the Immune System.
Ten points in particular stand out, summarized as follows:
- They had expectations of favourable results regarding their situation.
- They took charge of their healing and took control of decisions that vitally affected their lives.
- They developed a sense of humour and learned to laugh.
- They developed compassion toward others.
- They were patient in their expectations and did not expect to be healed overnight.
- They changed their attitudes about themselves and developed a stronger self-image.
- They realised that there was no one thing that could cure them and sought a combination of life-reinforcing factors and modalities.
- They had no fear of death—or life.
- They educated themselves in prevention and treatment.
- They were fighters.
Healing is about embracing all of it: the mess, the magic, the joy, the imperfection, the beauty, and the pain. Healing is a matter of releasing what we have been told, so we can remember who we truly are. It’s the space and place where there’s no more hiding - only embracing all of it.
Further studying but not required:
Book: Heal your body, cure your mind by Dr. Ameet Aggarwal