Mind Body Healing For Excellent Health

Mind Body Healing means going beyond the simple message of look after your body, and it will look after you. This is the most commonly promoted and learned message regarding health. Though most often associated with the fitness and health movements, that became widespread from the 1970’s onward, there is nothing new in eating well, exercising, and living a life of moderation. Aristotle recommended this over two thousand years ago.

But this message has expanded into an almost fanatical belief that if you smoke, and drink, and have too much salt in your diet, you might as well cash your chips in now. Cancer is just one bad meal away. Though statistics will bear some witness to this message, medicine also tries to quietly ignore all those fitness fanatics, and health junkies, who also have high blood pressure and/or get cancer, or die younger than they should, of some other illness they worked so hard to avoid.

The look after your body, and it will look after you message, now also includes the mind, with mental health messages finally becoming prominent and common. I am all for talking about mental health, and watching this go from a taboo topic to a breakfast TV topic in my lifetime, is a great thing to witness, however, there is little discussion about how our physical health is related to our mental health, except in the much misunderstood area of stress.

Stress Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

Though stress has come to have negative connotations this is not necessarily the case. Stress is a part of being alive and the stress response part of living. The term stress was coined by Endocrinologist, Dr. Hans Seyle, in the 1930’s, and he used the term stress response to describe the body’s reaction to any demand placed upon it. Most of us understood the basic stress responses that are commonly termed fight, flight, or freeze, and which evolved to help us survive, either through fighting, or running for our lives, or just staying still, in life threatening situations. These are automatic responses that click us into action without the need to analyse the situation. See a sabre toothed tiger – either fight it, or run away, or stay dead still in the tree and hope it passes you unnoticed.

Where stress can become problematic is when our stress response is exaggerated in relation to the stressor, and particularly when the stress response is ongoing. This ongoing stress response – a lower level stress response that runs in the background of our minds and bodies so to speak, is generally called chronic stress, and has been linked to a host of psychological and physical problems. Though we are starting to understand the biological mechanisms by which our stress response influences illness, through the autonomic nervous system, which controls the fight, flight and freeze responses, what is less clear is why some people develop illnesses, and others, with similar lives, and diets, don’t develop any illness? For more on the autonomic nervous system’s role in illness see the books Cured, and When The Body Says No, which are reviewed in the Guides section of the website.

Stress is commonly seen as happening to us from outside, from our environment – a stressful situation at work, a stressful incident like a car crash, a fight with a loved one. We like to think that if we could smooth out our environments – more money so we don’t have to work, a “better” spouse, and certainly no car accidents, or really pain of any major type – we would be healthy and happy.

Of course this is a fantasy, life always gets in the way, as the saying goes. But even if life was easy, the truth is, we could still develop a chronic stress response. Why do you think people we imagine have everything – the money, the fame, the better man, or woman – still commit suicide or develop chronic illnesses. The reason is that how we view or lives, and the stresses in our lives, is as important, and perhaps more important, than the stressors themselves.

How we view stress is explored by Kelly McGonigal in her book, The Upside Of Stress, which is well worth a read, and the knowledge that how you view stress is important is happily gaining acceptance among the medical community. Dr. Jeff Rediger also explores this concept in Cured, suggesting that it is helpful to think of stress as challenge stress. However, he also points to the danger when stress is ongoing, leading to an ongoing, chronic, stress response. What is less accepted, and ultimately more important, is how we need to listen to our bodies as they tell us which stressors in our lives are worth holding on to, and which ones, if we don’t get rid of them, can lead to severe illness and even death.

Fight (Change) – Flight (Leave) – Freeze (Pause)

Before we look at the ways we can decide how to find and reduce the stressors in our lives, so we can decide which are worth keeping, and can then be seen as healthy, challenge stress, I want you to think of your fight, flight and freeze stress responses in a different way.

This new way is more appropriate to modern life without tigers. It is about learning to regulate your inner stress response system, so that the ongoing stresses of life don’t negatively impact your mental, and physical, health. By the way – if a sabre toothed tiger does come along, your body will act for you, just like it did millennia ago, you won’t even have to think about it, so no need to worry.

Fight means Change – Think of the background fight response as a Change response. This change can be external or internal, but either way it is about changing something. Externally you might decide to make a change in your life, like confronting an abusive partner, or asking for a raise at work. Internally you might want to make a change by becoming more accepting of yourself, and less critical. Whether external or internal, change can often bring struggle – remember this – because this is why it is your fight response in action, this will power you through the changes you need, and make the struggle worth the effort.

If you don’t fight/change a situation, you are at risk of this internal desire for change to become a chronic stress response, especially if you don’t, or don’t want to admit to, your own desire to make a change.

Flight means Leave – Think of the background flight response as a Leave response. No-one wins every battle. Sometimes you have to throw in your cards and leave the table. Again, this can be external, or internal. The external is obvious enough – you quit the job you hate, you leave the spouse you no longer love. Internally this means leaving behind guilt and shame, and leaving behind ideas of yourself that aren’t helpful.

Flight is linked to change, as by leaving something behind, you are changing. For example, if you change your view of yourself from being ashamed of your sexuality to accepting it you have made a change, however, unless you then leave behind that old shame, you may carry it with you your whole life without even realising, thus creating a constant underlying fight/change response within yourself than can lead to mental, and/or physical, illness.

Freeze means Pause – Think of the background freeze response as a Pause response. In Steven Covey’s brilliant book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families, (as well as in other of the seven habits books), Covey urges us to learn to, press the pause button, when something happens in life that will trigger us into an emotional reaction. At a cognitive level this can be a hard habit to learn and practice, but our body does this automatically when we have a freeze response, at times of extreme danger. What is less clear is that we are often in Pause mode in our lives. Like with fight/change, and flight/leave, freeze/pause happens both externally and internally. Externally we can pause before we decide to leave our job, or marriage. Internally we can think about our own thoughts, and emotions, before acting to change them, or leave them behind.

Pause is essential in life otherwise we would all run around in a daze of activity, lurching from one instinctual action or reaction to another. Though at times it may feel like that is what’s already happening, there is in all of us a lot of pausing. Except, too much pausing means no action, no change, or leaving, no fight or flight. This may be the worst of all situations, as our body gets stuck in a stress response that achieves nothing, leading to chronic illness as the body’s only way to tell us that something needs to give way.

It is only you who can decide the battles which are worth the fight/change; the battles from which you must take flight/leave; and the battles you must temporarily put on freeze/pause, before ultimately either choosing to change, or leave.

Know Your Battles

Knowing what you need to change in your life, or leave behind, or pause with for now, is key to creating a healthy Mind Body. This might not be as simple as it sounds at first. Though we can all point out obvious stresses in our life, money worries being a common example, these are usually external, and it can be the internal world where we need to focus, and which can elude us.

Knowing your battles means knowing yourself. What is it that you like and don’t like? What do you want in your life and what do you want rid off? Who do you want in your life and who is best left behind? Are you pushing down changes you want to make because it will upset others? Are you staying at a task that needs left behind because you fear the consequence of leaving?

When you do change something, and/or leave something behind, are you fully acknowledging to yourself what you’ve done and why, or are you packaging it up in socially more acceptable terms? For example you decide you no longer want to visit your over demanding mother on a weekly basis, but instead of being fully open to yourself about this, you convince yourself that you would continue to do it if it wasn’t for the extra demands of your job.

This honesty with yourself is vital. Without such honesty it can be hard to relieve the internal background stress response, and you are essentially suffocating the urge to change within yourself, and holding yourself back from leaving what you know is bad for you. You can be stuck in perpetual limbo, your pause button stuck in the on position.

The cause of your stress response then is ultimately acting against your deepest needs and desires. By understanding ourselves, and acting in line with what we value, we can do a great deal to prevent ourselves from getting sick, and to heal ourselves if we are already sick.

For more on learning who you are, and what you want, read Dr. Gazipura’s book Not Nice, as well as the article ALIIGNED, and the work recommended in Stage Four of The Roadmap.

All Stressors Are Not Created Equal

A major trauma like a car crash, or a physical assault, or a sudden acute illness, is obviously much more stressful than whether you should go to the Bahamas or the Maldives for this year’s summer getaway? Other ongoing stressors like looking after a severely disabled family member, or living at or below the poverty line, always scratching for a living, would generally initiate an ongoing stress response in anyone. Though even situations like these can be viewed differently by different people, and so not lead to the same detrimental effects on the body in all people, the environment is still a good place to start when looking to reduce your stressors, and so help you regulate your stress response.

Look at your life and ask where you can reduce your stressors? Do you work a job you hate, then can you change job? Do you need more money, then can you gain skills that could help this happen? If you are struggling with family commitments, then can you get help to give you respite? If you are in a daily, all consuming battle, with external problems it can be hard to find the time, and energy, to work on our response to these problems. It is essential to do this.

Look at your upbringing, and ask what messages you have learned, and what your experiences may have taught you as the truth. I was brought up by a mother obsessed with health and who fawned on us when we were ill, making us essentially feel special for being sick. This I had to unlearn. You will have your own experiences. Some of you will have grown up in abusive, and/or neglectful, households, or maybe you had no kind of place to call home at all. But whatever your experiences have been, please know that you can heal yourself. The books, No Bad Parts, and Self-Therapy, testify to this.

You’re Making Me Blush

If you have doubts about how intrinsically linked our mind is to our physical health, think about something as simple and ordinary as blushing. You have probably never thought about the process of blushing in detail – if you have gotten embarrassed in front of other people, or just one other person, and blushed, you might even want to forget about that – resist the urge, because that in itself is a window into how our thoughts, and emotions, and physical health, run hand in hand.

Our current medical knowledge tells us that when we’re embarrassed we release adrenaline, causing our blood vessels to open to improve the flow of blood, and the delivery of oxygen. Because the blood vessels in our cheeks are close to the surface, and wider than in other parts of the body, our cheeks go red – we are blushing. This is all happening at an unconscious level in our autonomic nervous system, which is responsible for our fight, flight, and freeze, stress responses. Essentially an emotion directly causes a physical symptom.

Think about that, and now think of other everyday mind body links – anticipation, and/or excitement causes butterflies in the stomach, worry can causes an upset stomach. Fear can cause the urge to use the toilet. Would anyone argue with these examples? Then is it so big to trace this deeper? Let’s look at anxiety and worry as an example.

Imagine if you have ongoing anxiety about a situation, be it to do with finances, or a family situation, or your love life, (or lack of it), and this anxiety is not addressed. You find yourself worrying daily about how to resolve an issue, and this worry also comes with an internal, self-critical, dialogue that berates you for being unable to fix this situation, because you are so useless. You start to worry as well about how worried you are becoming. You are now in the vicious cycle of worrying, and being anxious not just about an external problem, but about your own worries themselves. You are worrying about worry. What is this doing to your insides?

I’ll tell you. Your insides are being washed daily with hormones and chemicals that are telling you to do something to fight/change the situation, or your psychological view of it, or flight/leave the situation, or your psychological view of it. By not taking action, either to change, or leave, you are stuck in a perpetual stress response, with a freeze/pause response in the mix as well. You are left cycling through change-leave-pause-change-leave-pause-change-leave-pause like a glitching screen.

This can go on for days, weeks, months, years or even decades. But eventually, something has to give, and if you don’t take action, either to change a situation, or leave a situation, or find a different way of viewing your part within it – finding acceptance of the situation and/or yourself, then your body will say enough is enough. This is when illness comes and sometimes with severe consequences.

Your underlying stress response can be a perplexing subject. Can our emotions and thoughts really lead to acute and ongoing illness and pain? More and more medical evidence backs this up and the work of Dr. John Sarno, whose book, Healing Back Pain, is reviewed in the Guides section, was devoted to showing the role of the emotions in causing pain. Rather than the example above of worry, which can be relatively easy to detect in oneself, he looked at the role of anger, and specifically of repressing anger, not allowing yourself to feel this anger. By not allowing yourself to experience an emotion such as anger your body is locked into a background stress response, and often this surfaces dramatically, with severe pain in the joints and back.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can learn to help yourself, to listen to your body and what it is telling you to change, or leave behind, and sometimes the change or leaving, (as in Sarno’s cure for back pain), can be simply to acknowledge your feelings exist, and are affecting your body.

Beyond Fight, Flight & Freeze

Homeostasis, in the context of human health, describes our minds and bodies in a healthy, self-regulated state. This is the state beyond fight, flight, and freeze. You are not trying to change anything, or leave anything behind, and you are not stuck on pause, waiting to make a decision. This is a state of being at peace, of contentment, of feeling at home with who you are, and where you are. This is a feeling of freedom. This is the feeling that comes in Stage Seven of The Roadmap. You know yourself, and your place in a greater reality, and you act daily within that knowledge.

Knowing yourself means being aware of what you need to change or leave behind. You can pause, but you’re not stuck. Living like this maintains homeostasis of mind and body. Think of gaining the freedom and peace of homeostasis in degrees. This is why The Roadmap has seven stages and not just one stage! This is why I recommend internalising the messages in ALIIGNED, and the importance of practicing the daily meditations in Meditation – 3 Ways. You don’t have to fix everything at once.

First Learn To Love Yourself

Learn to love yourself is such a cliche that it has lost all sense and meaning for most people. However it is essential to your health to learn the real truth behind this cliche. Indeed, much of this website is about the practical ways to learn to love and accept yourself, because the need to do this is so important, and deserves special emphasis.

As Dr. Jeff Rediger says in Cured, “For years, research has been accumulating showing that love—both for others and for yourself—and connecting with other people keeps you healthier, while an absence of those relationships and connections can spell trouble for your immune system.”¹

Love, as Rediger says, is the fuel of the parasympathetic nervous system that helps bring your body and mind to a state of peace and rest. Though it is vital to feel a love connection with other people, and this can come in many forms – friends, family, romantic, general goodwill, you can give this to yourself as well, and also feel it as a sense of connection with all of reality. In Meditation – 3 Ways I show you the practical ways to do this.

You Aren’t To Blame

Whenever physical illness is discussed in relation to our minds the concept of blame always seems to be in town, like a bully hanging around wanting to beat you up. Standing up to this bully means rejecting any sense of blame when it comes to illness. No-one wants to be sick, the feelings are just too horrible even if there is some perceived benefit – getting off school, out of a bad job, away from a difficult marriage – no-one wants to be sick.

Even though we are responsible for many of our illnesses this doesn’t require any sense of guilt, or shame, or blame. How can there be blame if you don’t even know why or how you are making yourself sick? I understand the concept of taking responsibility for illness is difficult to accept for some people, but it is actually a key to healing, and ultimately knowing we are responsible for our own health means we can do something about it, we just need the right tools and support.

But what about children? Though illness is much rarer in children than in adults, children still get a broad range of illnesses, like childhood leukemia, and ulcerative colitis, and asthma. Are children responsible for these illnesses? This is not easy to answer but it seems impossible to pretend that children would be any different to adults in this way. Putting aside, (both in children and adults), any known genetic conditions, such as Huntington’s disease, the mechanism for causing illness in children – an inability to self-regulate the body’s own stress response would happen in children in the same way as in adults.

In babies particularly, (though in all of us really), the stress levels of the mother during pregnancy would also come into play and there is now a growing body of research² demonstrating this fact. And this is just the stress response that can be measured, which is generally the cortisol level in the body. This is not the reasons, both external and internal for the stress response, or how the mother views the stressors in her life, or how open or closed she is to her own emotions and thoughts.

Some people want to reject the key connection between our minds and our physical health because they can only see it as blaming the sick person. This attitude only creates more pain and illness and hurts further the person who is suffering. Making the kind of paradigm shift in physical and mental health and well-being requires moving beyond blame, and really being able to help and support each person to heal themselves.

Why Aren’t We All Mind Body Healers Already?

When we ask this question we’re really asking – how can this be true?

It’s a question many people will ask, and I have asked it as well. If this is true, if there is such a massive emotional aspect to illness – to awful life-debilitating and painful illness – why is this not common knowledge? If it is right then millions, probably billions of people globally are suffering and dying needlessly. I had my entire large bowel removed on my thirtieth birthday due to acute Ulcerative Colitis and that didn’t have to happen.

This must be wrong. Please. If I only had known then what I know now.

A reaction like this is understandable, and was my own, for a short time. But then I saw the benefits of understanding the emotional aspect to illness. I healed myself of back pain and prevented an incurable condition called bronchiectasis from developing. Massive benefits. This truth about the emotional aspect to illness is a true paradigm shift. This is turning medicine on its head.

There are three key reasons why we haven’t yet seen this shift, and aren’t all already working on our minds to keep them and our bodies healthy. These are 1) evolution; 2) social change and 3) the current medical establishment.

Evolution

It can be uncomfortable to explore your past traumas. Though therapies such as IFS give you a path to heal these traumas, that doesn’t mean it’s easy work. It can bring insights that require you to make serious changes in your life, like moving away from your family or friends. In our evolutionary past this would mean leaving your tribe and would have been a death sentence for most. Sabre-toothed tigers are pretty hard to fight on your own, and they even harder to run away from.

Repression of our emotions has been an evolutionarily stable strategy for a good reason. Repression has meant pushing down our own individual wants and needs for the good of the tribe, which is for the good of our own survival, at least for long enough to pass on our genes to a new generation. But like in the modern world, just because your desires and needs are repressed, doesn’t mean those feelings of anger, desire, shame etc are gone.

Though many views of the evolution of our stress response see our modern day, mostly social, woes as somehow replacing the fighting and fleeing from large, sharp toothed animals I think there were just as many social worries in the past, and just as much repression going on. Pre-historic peoples didn’t live long both because of their harsh environments, but also because of the need to constantly repress their desires and fears, leaving them open to disease and illness.

It is interesting that many of the sayings we use to describe emotional pain can reference physical pain, as if at some deep level this knowledge has always been commonplace, even if not overtly discussed. Think of sayings such as: busting your guts (to please someone or achieve something); a pain in the ass/neck etc (about someone or a situation you don’t like); stabbed in the back (about feelings of betrayal); you make me sick (about disgust); and there are innumerable other similar sayings.

Social change

For some of us it is much more difficult to do the inner work required to heal ourselves than it is to take a pill the doctor tells you will work. Inner work, opening up to repressed emotions and acting on their messages can alienate us from our tribe – as for our ancient ancestors, so for us. Most of us don’t want that level of change and have in fact evolved to not want it. The societies we have built, which are at heart reflections of our evolution, have developed ways to facilitate the repression of our emotions or channel them in socially acceptable ways through ritual.

Rituals have worked very well in the past for most people and work still in many societies. Tribal socities in the past and present for example have strict rituals that lead a person from childhood to adulthood, cementing their position in the group as either a man as hunter and provider, or woman as gatherer and caregiver. This is simpler when everyone agrees to the roles and the rules, and effectively helps the young person regulate their emotions, (which is what all teenagers have to do and most struggle with), and align themselves with a distinct World Identity.

These types of pre-ordained roles and rituals have been the norm right up until around the nineteen sixties when, in the west at least, they began to break down. It is not that ritual meant repression didn’t exist, after all the Victorians were famous for it, but it did mean that there was little mechanism for self discovery, for stepping outside of role and ritual, to even begin to think of our thoughts as effecting our bodies.³

The Medical Establishment.

Paradigm shifts are rarely accepted without a fight. Galileo was put under house arrest and Italian scientist Giordano Bruno burned at the stake for promoting Copenicus’s view that the earth orbited the sun and not vice versa. Germ theory put a lot of quacks out of business, and if mind body healing became the norm in society, a great many doctors and pharmaceutical companies would be out of business. Despite what Morpheus pushes in the Matrix films – there is no pill for self-discovery.

Science has always been slow to accept radical new theories and there is no conspiracy here, no organised suppression of mind body techniques by big pharma. There are just lots of people doing their jobs without wanting to rock the boats they’ve invested so much in to get onto the water and keep afloat.

Surgeons are performing surgeries they know some studies have shown to have similar results to sham surgeries. Pharmaceutical companies are selling some drugs they know are only as good as placebos. General practice doctors are prescribing painkillers to people they know are only numbing their pain and really need to change their lives to get better.

Though there is obvious greed involved for many, there are also lots of good doctors who are looking the other way because they don’t have the time, or energy, or support to help their patients get better without drugs. As the mind body approach to health is starting to gain ground among the general population it is these doctors who will embrace it and start to push it from within the medical establishment, and ultimately change that establishment for the better. For a view of what that future might look like please read the concluding chapter of Dr. Jeff Rediger’s, Cured.

Further Reading

This subject of mind body healing is vast. There are many books worth reading and many online resources worth exploring. Please find below some of the places to go and continue your education on mind body healing. No single resource will have all answers, or help everyone, but each are worth your time.

A word of caution – there are many charlatans promising to heal you with emotional snake-oil. These are the people who tell you to just think yourself better with positive energy, or to pay them to heal you, (from across the internet), or to heal yourself with energy crystals or some other external magic device. Any benefits that come from these approaches are generally due to the placebo effect, and short lived. Use your own judgement but always ask the basic question – does this sound too good to be true?

If it does, and particularly if it requires a lot of money, and very little actual effort, or inner work on your side, it is best avoided.

Resources

Though you may not see them on the news there is a very large and growing body of scientific research about the link between the mind and your physical health. I am not here to provide reams of evidence on this but feel free to explore it yourself and a couple of academic links are included below. There is also a link to the acclaimed Mount Sinai Health System’s website to show that mind body approaches are gaining ground within the medical establishment.

Introduction to Mind-Body medicine on the Mount Sinai website.

Article in Scientific American on The Science of Healing Thoughts

Research Letter in Science Direct Nature, Mind, and Medicine: A Model for Mind–Body Healing

All of Dr. John Sarno’s Books are worth reading and his work inspired formation of The PPD/TMS Peer Network who sponser the TMS Wiki which is a great resource for support and discussion of many aspects of mind body healing.

Gabor Mate’s work is referenced throughout this website and all his books are worth reading. He also has his own website drgabormate.com and there are many of his seminars, talks and interviews on youtube.

Dr. Lissa Rankin’s bestselling book Mind over Medicine is an excellent overview of the field of mind body healing and her own personal experience of this as a physician. Rankin’s website lissarankin.com has many free resources and also details about her other books. Rankin, who is a long term friend of Cured author Dr. Jeff Rediger has a focus on spirituality in her work on mind body healing.

Dr. Deepak Chopra has written several books on healing and talks extensively on the subject. His website is deepakchopra.com. He is a pioneer of alternative medicines and champion of the ancient Indian traditional techniques of Ayurvedic Medicine. I have no direct experience of this and don’t believe it is necessary for health but Chopra’s focus on how we view our bodies, our lives and our place in the universe is certainly conducive to healing

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee is a well respected UK doctor who is on a mission to demystify medicine and return the focus on healing illness to asking why we are ill in the first place – what is it about our lifestyle and psychology that creates ill health. On his website is drchatterjee.com he says, “The majority of people don’t need a pill, they need a lifestyle prescription.” He also recommends using IFS techniques as a way of healing past traumatic events and knowing ourselves more fully.

SIRPA (Stress Illness Recovery Practitioners’ Association) is a UK based not for profit organisation dedicated to rasing awareness of Sarno’s mind body approach to healing chronic pain and illness. This group of health practitioners includes physiotherapist and doctors tired of the flawed approach to treating chronic pain and illness of modern medicine. Their website is sirpa.org where you can also find their online recovery program for healing chronic pain and illness

SIRPA has a database of health practitioners trained in mind body healing techniques and one of these is Jonty Hikmet. His website jontyhikmet.com is worth checking out. Jonty’s personal story of healing is inspiring and he also uses Internal Family Systems (IFS) techniques as part of healing.

The Centre for Mind Body Medicine, cmbm.org, is another not for profit organisation dedicated to teaching and spreading awareness of Mind Body techniques for healing. It was founded by Dr. James S. Gordon and carries out work globally. There are lots of resources on the website worth your time.

The Pain Cure Clinic www.paincureclinic.us is run by John & Laura Thornton who have developed a system to heal chronic illness and pain based on Sarno’s work. They have a great many testimonials to their work including Dr. Aziz Gazipura who they helped escape from a diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis. As well as a paid program they also provide many free videos on mind body healing of pain and other chronic conditions.

The Great Pain Deception is a book by by Steven Ray Ozanich (steveozanich.com) who is a practicitioner of Sarno’s techniques. The Great Pain Deception is both a critique of the medical establishments’s approach to health and also a story of mind body healing through Ozanich’s often traumatic personal journey from physical wreck to full recovery and health.

The Body Keeps The Score is a best selling book by Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk is about the relationship of the mind and brain in healing both physically and psychologically from extreme traumas such as war and abuse.

A book about the science behind aging, The Telomere Effect by Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn and Dr. Elissa Epel, though not specifically focused on mind body healing does cover how you think and feel has a direct effect on the way you age. It is a fascinating read.

Louise Hay’s best-selling book You Can Heal Your Life is a book I must mention as it is the tip of an iceberg of copycat books all pointing in the same direction – thinking yourself out of illness and pain. First published in 1984 it has gone on to sell over fifty million copies and a great many people testify to how it has guided them to healing themselves from a variety of chronic pains and illnesses. Though I would recommend this book, and agree with most of what Hay’s says in the books first chapter titled What I Believe, my recommendation comes with a strong caveat.

Hay’s pushes us to look at our own ways of thinking and living for the answers to our life and health problems and that is good, and there is a great deal of good and usefulness in You Can Heal Your Life but Hay’s approach to healing is to think yourself better with a strong reliance on the use of affirmations. Though I agree affirmations have a place in retraining our minds they must be grounded in understanding of why we developed unhealthy thinking in the first place. If this doesn’t happen then their results may only be short-lived placebo-like responses or actually make matters worse through ineffectiveness leading to a sense of failure and further self-criticism.