THINK YOURSELF WELL

I don’t believe in the germ theory. I believe in the conflict theory. If it were true that germs were the sole cause of illness, we would be sick all the time. There are millions of microorganisms and infectious diseases everywhere-where we live, work, play, shop, and eat. Stress and conflict play a major role in whether we are well or sick. Next time you get sick, ask yourself what was or is going on in your life during this time? Chances are you have had conflict and stress in your life. A broken heart can break down the body. When we suffer from aches and pains, chances are you also have pain in your life. Research is showing that our emotions cause at least 75 % of all disease. In his classic book The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale quotes a physician who said, “Many of my patients have nothing wrong with them except their thoughts.” Meditation, massage, hypnosis, acupuncture, and hands on healing work because they all have one thing in common; they promote relaxation of the body and the mind creating a more balanced state for healing. Healing practitioners must center and balance their own energy for healing to occur. Emotions that make us ill are anger, guilt, boredom, and fear. We can suppress our emotions or recognize them. Psychotherapy and counseling can be helpful because bringing all of these emotions to the surface without the proper guidance to deal with them can make us sicker. Obviously delving into the mind and the emotions is difficult because every human being is different. How we see life and react to change and stress is individual. Our medical system can measure physical changes in the body with laboratory evaluations of the blood and body fluids, but measuring what is on our mind and how we deal with stress is much more difficult making Mind Body medicine a challenge. Doing everything right, watching what you eat, eating a low cholesterol diet, running and lifting weights, and abstaining from cigarettes and alcohol are not necessarily a guarantee for staying well. On the other hand, this does not mean that you should throw all the lifestyle rules out the window. What you have to realize is that if by doing all of these positive behaviors you are full of negative energy and stress, your body might look healthy but your mind is sick. When the mind is sick, the body suffers and yet by trusting that we have a choice of what we want to think, the power of healing is in our own hands. We have the capacity to restore our physical, emotional and spiritual health by simply desiring to be well. This kind of healing goes deeper than taking medicine or having surgery to repair or remove a sick part of the body. We have to believe that we can change our cells by changing our thoughts and when our thoughts are negative the body will suffer.