Mind over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself

When you focus on gratitude, positive things flow in more readily, making you even more grateful.

Love opens your heart, trumps fear, and paves the way for healing in all aspects of your life.

With all those negative emotions filling her mind and all those stress hormones coursing through her body, no vegetable, supplement, exercise program, or drug was going to be strong enough to counteract the harmful health effects of chronic stress responses on her body.

When you’re happy, relaxed, and free of stress, the body can accomplish amazing, even miraculous, feats of self-repair.

The body isn’t the foundation of your health. The body is the physical manifestation of the sum of your life experiences.

Whether you fear uncertainty and let it trigger stress responses or embrace uncertainty and let it elicit relaxation responses is your choice. Personally, I’ve come to recognize the beauty in uncertainty. While one face of uncertainty is the vast, scary unknown, the flip side of uncertainty is infinite possibility.

Diagnostic Exercise #1: What Does Your Body Need in Order to Heal?

Everything you need already lies within you right in this moment.

and found four essential components that could reliably elicit the relaxation response: 1) a quiet environment; 2) a mental device, such as a repeated phrase, word, sound, or prayer; 3) a passive, nonjudgmental attitude; and 4) a comfortable position.

I predicted that, in order to live a vital life, prevent disease, or optimize the chance for disease remission, you would need: Healthy relationships, including a strong network of family, friends, loved ones, and colleagues A healthy, meaningful way to spend your days, whether you work outside the home or in it A healthy, fully expressed creative life that allows your soul to sing its song A healthy spiritual life, including a sense of connection to the sacred in life A healthy sexual life that allows you the freedom to express your erotic self and explore fantasies A healthy financial life, free of undue financial stress, which ensures that the essential needs of your body are met A healthy environment, free of toxins, natural-disaster hazards, radiation, and other unhealthy factors that threaten the health of the body A healthy mental and emotional life, characterized by optimism and happiness and free of fear, anxiety, depression, and other mental-health ailments A healthy lifestyle that supports the physical health of the body, such as good nutrition, regular exercise, adequate sleep, and avoidance of unhealthy addictions

Gratitude keeps you optimistic, and as we’ve seen, evidence shows that optimism improves your health. When you focus on gratitude, positive things flow in more readily, making you even more grateful. As long as you keep your gratitude vessel full, you’ll avoid the unhealthy plunge into dark places.

The key is to remember that how our minds feel as we go about our day—how relaxed, happy, and fulfilled we are—gets translated into the physiology of the body.

The common definition of the word health doesn’t take into account whether you’re fulfilled at work or happy in your marriage or surrounded by a network of people who love you.

What about the person who smokes, drinks, eats pasta and pepperoni pizza, and lives to be 100 because his life is so full of love, vitality, and purpose that he doesn’t want to leave it? I had a sneaking suspicion that there is a lot more to optimal health than we think.

Whereas a physician used to do house calls, sit at the bedside, and touch the patient, we now offer 13-minute patient visits in a sterile white room where lab tests may take the place of a thorough patient history and radiological studies may even replace the hands-on physical exam. Without the healing power of listening, loving touch, nurturing care, and healing intention, what are we offering patients beyond straight technology?

It’s supposed to be a professional secret, but I’ll tell you anyway. We doctors do nothing. We only help and encourage the doctor within.”  — ALBERT SCHWEITZER, M.D.

I am whole, healthy, and free of symptoms.

Service is another part of the Healing Bubble. Dedicating our lives to serving the world connects us to one another and reminds us to focus on something bigger than ourselves.

the body is equipped with what Cannon named the stress response, also known as the fight-or-flight response, a survival mechanism that gets flipped on when your brain perceives a threat. When this hormonal cascade is triggered by a thought or emotion in the mind, such as fear, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis activates, thereby stimulating the sympathetic nervous system to race into overdrive, pumping up the body’s cortisol and adrenaline levels. Over time, filling the body with these stress hormones can manifest as physical symptoms, predisposing the body to disease over time.

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind.”  — THE DHAMMAPADA

You have to fill your cup and appreciate what you already have before you can face the truth about what isn’t working and what might need to change.

To screen out those considered to have “excessive placebo responses,” many randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trials of drugs are actually preceded by a “washout phase,” in which all participants take an inert pill and anyone who reacts favorably to it is eliminated from the study.

As it turns out, the difference between optimists and pessimists lies in how permanent, pervasive, and personal they perceive good and bad events to be.

(I debuted the Whole Health Cairn in a popular TEDx talk I gave in 2011 called “The Shocking Truth about Your Health.

And it wasn’t just Marla. I witnessed similar transformations in dozens of patients. I finally realized that the medical establishment’s nearly exclusive focus on the biochemistry of the patient’s body, often to the exclusion of the health of the patient’s mind, was doing our patients a grave disservice.

Let yourself be on fire with your desire for healing, then cast the burden of this intense desire over to whatever spiritual Source you trust and ask for help navigating your healing journey. Trust that if right action is required, you will be guided and shown what to do. Allow yourself to be bathed in gratitude for all the help that will come to support you emotionally, physically, and spiritually as you acknowledge the interconnected web of life by connecting to your Inner Pilot Light.

Go ahead and educate yourself about the statistics of your prognosis if it calms the part that wants to know and helps you manage your expectations and assess your situation with a realistic lens. But keep in mind that you are not a statistic. You are a unique individual who has an unknown and unknowable future. This is not about entering a state of false hope or denial. It’s about removing blocks to the doorway of healing and then walking all the way through that doorway into grounded hope.

It’s fine to acknowledge the uncertainty that accompanies any healing journey and allow yourself to feel the feelings that might come with uncertainty—fear, grief, disappointment, frustration, despair. But also remember that when you don’t know what the future holds, anything is possible, even a miracle.

When you’re dealing with an illness, being sick can be an opportunity for spiritual awakening, and when you awaken your consciousness, grounding and embodying your spiritual essence fully into every cell of the body, you return to your natural state of wholeness. This state of wholeness puts the mind and body in an optimally relaxed state so the self-repair mechanisms of the body can best do their job and life force can course through you, bringing with it the conditions that help the body restore optimal function.