The BodyMind Concept: Two Surprising      Tips to Heal Your Body with Your Mind

I remember once feeling like I was offering my patients a warm, nurturing hug when I would give them a diagnosis, or confirm it, after a consultation. “It’s the nature of Bipolar Disorder,” I would say “…it’s just part of your lineage, a brain chemistry condition, that thankfully, we can manage if you stick with your medication.”

I never suspected that this diagnosis would ultimately be cold comfort,        and perhaps even something like a number on a prisoner’s jumpsuit.

A diagnosis is just that. It is a label that reduces a human experience to an impersonal pattern. A pattern that your doctor is trained to match up with a prescription or medical intervention. This pattern recognition makes no room for you – your story, your experience, the meaning of your symptoms.

Unfortunately, medical training has neglected to heed the advice of our forefathers like William Osler who said: “It is more important to find out what patient has the disease  than what disease the patient has.”

Hospital-based doctors are notorious for referencing their patients by their diagnosis –  the COPD exacerbation in room 401c – as if they are stick figures with signs hanging around their necks.

If you are simply a broken down machine that needs a tune up, then obviously, what      you eat, think, and feel, let alone the very personal significance of the symptoms, are totally irrelevant to the point of distraction from the matter at hand.

The “you” in your illness

It is clear to me now that there is deep meaning in illness, and a corresponding invitation designed especially for you.  In fact,  the medical literature is beginning to catch up with   the concept, publishing articles entitled Symbolic Diseases and Mindbody Co-Emergence.

In this way, how you interpret your symptoms is everything.

Mindset has become the bedrock of my transformational medicine practice. My patients are invited to explore, examine, and become deeply aware of their beliefs. These beliefs determine how they experience suffering and the potential for self-healing activation. These beliefs give them the ability to trust that everything is going to be exactly as it needs to be.

These beliefs even override elements and aspects of our biology that we think of as cause and effect. I’m talking about everything from less blood loss in surgery to also faster bone healing, to lessened use of pain meds if a soldier knew his injury would lead to a dismissal home.

What about infection? It’s about germ exposure, right? Perhaps it’s not so simple as    germ exposure equals illness…

Do negative beliefs lead to illness?

Cohen et al report that the response to this simple question was the most meaningful determinant of clinical experience of the common cold: “In general, how would you     rate your health?” After being inoculated with cold viruses, participants in Cohen’s      study demonstrated that negative health perception led to the experience of common    cold symptoms regardless of whether the immune system was reacting**.

In other words, if someone had a positive health perception, got exposed, and had antibody confirmation of immune response,  they did not manifest clinical symptoms of the cold (aka get sick). Now, it’s possible that positive and negative perceptions result from a sensed experience of an inflammatory state would lead to more frequent infections, but this relationship between thoughts, emotions, the immune system is tri-directional, each arm as significant as the other.

Mind as body, body as mind

When symptoms of overwhelm, sadness, and hopelessness do emerge, however, more  than a positive attitude may be required to suffer better, and to access the gift that the illness brings.

The resolution of these symptoms may not call for fighting, either. It may, in fact,              be the opposite of fighting: an attitude of acceptance and non-resistance.

When we accept and allow, we unite with our body and our illness. Your experience           is no longer one of a divided front with warring factions set out to kill at all costs.

In fact, I dug deep into the annals of medicine to find data from decades ago that was telling us that healing comes when we accept our health challenges.

In other words, allowing struggle, pain, and suffering to just be, led to immune system improvement in these patients. Based on the work of renegade scientist Dr. Candace Pert, we have known for quite some time that the mind/body division is a false one. Illness manifests out of both spaces and resides in both spaces.

2 Tips to Try Today:

When my patients are in the darkness of their transformational birth canal, and when    the struggle is crushing, and fear and hopelessness taunt them like some horrific circus clown, I talk to them as my midwife spoke to me when I was in the transition phase of active labor.

  https://scdlifestyle.com/2017/07/improve-your-mindset-to-heal-faster/

I tell them to watch for opportunities to unite with their experience rather than fight it:

1. Say yes when you want to say no

When your entire being is rejecting your experience, saying “I don’t want this. I can’t handle this. I could never bear a life of this.” Play with it and start a sentence with “Yes”. Try saying “Yes, I needed it to be this way to get where I am going next” or “Yes, this is hard. Really hard.” Or, simply, the word “Yes” over and over.

2. Do nothing when you want to do something

When your mind is saying “No”, you will almost immediately seek to fix the situation. Reach for a cookie or a beer, stay later at work, call that ex-boyfriend, give in to the medical intervention you know you don’t need.

You will reach for a way to take the edge off the discomfort. But if you just sit with it,           it changes. Just be with it. Watch it. And wait for the intensity of pain and sadness to transform. Float in the deep, scary water because if you flail around, you might drown     the you that needs to be saved.

Watch your mind when you are in crisis. Play with it so that you can look with curiosity instead of fear on your experience. Understand that illness, pain, and suffering may be   the portal to your more authentic self. All you have to do is allow it to unfold.

Commit to yourself… surrender to what is… and you will heal, transform,  and experience a joy that is far beyond the simple relief you thought you   were seeking.

Learn about my passion for root cause resolution medicine.

Preview Kelly Brogan M.D. –  [Functional Forum]

 

How Can I Help Your Body Heal Itself?

The human body knows how to heal itself. And it is always working toward a state of homeostasis, which is balanced and well. Conflict between the conscious and subconscious mind creates blocks in the information pathways of the body which block natural healing. The techniques that I use identify the conflicts sponsoring your complaints.

Once identified, the negative belief which is creating the conflict can be reset to the positive so that your conscious and subconscious are in harmony with each other.            The body then starts its own, natural healing process. http://www.healingthroughyourmindset.com/

Preview  Sally Tennant: Healing Through Your Mindset

 

 Can Positive Thinking Help You Heal?

Lissa Rankin, MD discusses a CNN article on positive thinking.

A big part of the book I’m writing Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof You Can Heal Yourself (Hay House, 2013) is about how positive belief, hope, and expectation can trigger self-healing superpowers that manifest physiologically in the body, so I was delighted to read this article on CNN (link is external) by one of my heroes, Dr. Deepak Chopra.

In this article, Dr. Chopra (can I call him Deepak?) calls attention to the warring schools of thought between the power of positive thinking camp and the conventional medical community regarding whether positive thoughts can affect the health of the body.

Some studies performed on very sick cancer patients have shown that it can’t. In fact, one of those studies was performed on the patients under the care of my friend and fellow Owning Pink blogger, Dr. Bernie Siegel (link is external), author of Love, Medicine & Miracles (link is external). When patients in his positive-thinking ECaP program for cancer patients (link is external)were studied, they were found to have no higher rates of cancer cure than those who didn’t complete the program.

So does this mean positive thinking doesn’t work? It’s enough to confuse anyone.

What does Deepak Chopra think?

Dr. Deepak writes:

Doctors are confused, too. It has always been part of a doctor’s kit bag to tell patients to keep their spirits up. Until a few decades ago, it was standard not to acquaint a dying patient with the gravity of his condition, which implies an unspoken agreement that hearing bad news isn’t good for patients.

At the same time, doctors want to protect their profession, so few want to cross the line and support the notion that how you think can work as powerfully as “real” medicine.

Let’s see if some of this confusion can be cleared up. 

First of all, thinking is “real” medicine, as proven by the placebo effect. When given a sugar pill in place of a prescription drug, an average of 30% of subjects will show a positive response. What causes this response isn’t a physical substance but the activity of the mind-body connection. Expectations are powerful. If you think you’ve been given a drug that will make you better, often that is enough to make you better.

But if studies showed that positive thinking didn’t effect cure rates, what do we make of this? Dr. Deepak says:

On the plus side, the studies that debunk positive thinking deal with very sick patients struggling to recover from major diseases. They do not comment on how positive thinking might prevent disease or how it might affect someone in the very early stages of illness.  The real point isn’t to rescue a dying patient but to maintain wellness… The upshot is that medicine cannot be definitive on how mood affects wellness. But if I wanted to enhance a state of wellness before symptoms of illness appeared, there is much to be gained and no risks involved in trying to reach the best state of mind possible.

Healing Vs. Curing

Published on Jun 16, 2017

Dr. Eddy Ramirez talks about how “the mindset is essential for your healing”
Not only in the physical part, but also in the emotional part.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4pNk4Is8kk

 Published on Jun 15, 2017

By Hilde Larsen

Knowing your why, having the right mindset for healing, will keep you on any diet. Hilde speaks about your power and your ability to take action.
Learn how to elevate and take charge.
There is no glory in giving up, and there is no glory in staying sick. Life is about living the very best way that we know how, and to realize that suffering does not have to be a part of it. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice. In my first book, From HELL to inspired, I take you with me on my own journey from feeling completely lost and sick, to living the life that I love. I have shared my experience on living with a so-called chronic illness, and my encounters with our so-called health care system. I am happy and honored to be able to share my path and my knowledge, and I am confident that if you are in the need of healing, on any level, you will find truth between those covers.

There is a misconception that our feelings create our thoughts however it is our thoughts that create our feelings.
Most of our thoughts are not real and most of our thoughts are the cause of our daily pain and struggles.
Our mindset is operating from a specific paradigm and this is creating our current results in all areas of our life.

Preview  Reprogram your toxic mindset so you can heal your life!” |

Nadia Leona Yunis, LLM

 

 Psychology professor Alia Crum’s      research focuses on the importance of mindsets in the healing process.
L.A. Cicero/Stanford News Service….

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Dr. Alia Crum’s research focuses on how changes in subjective mindsets—the lenses through which information is perceived, organized, and interpreted—can alter objective reality through behavioral, psychological, and physiological mechanisms.

Her work is, in part, inspired by research on the placebo effect, a notable and consistent demonstration of the ability of the mindset to elicit healing properties in the body.

She is interested in understanding how mindsets affect important outcomes outside the realm of medicine, in the domains of behavioral health and organizational behavior.

Preview YouTube video Change your mindset, change the game | Dr. Alia Crum | TEDxTraverseCity

 

Published on Jun 16, 2017

Dr. Eddy Ramirez talks about how “the mindset is essential for your healing”
Not only in the physical part, but also in the emotional part.

Preview “The Essential mindset to Heal”

Dr Eddy Ramirez – Chipsa Hospital