More Happiness: Using Both Your Mind & Body

I was truly projecting, which all human beings are prone to do. I planned to move the furniture on Tuesday, the day after I finished my exams, but my emotional projection was causing me to feel guilt, which psychosomatically was going right into my otherwise healthy body and mind—and specifically my sore throat. I then began to wonder about this unconscious mind body connection: Did I need to get sick with a bad sore throat and cold to punish myself with the guilt?

Amazingly, within twenty minutes of becoming aware of this mind body connection and making that decision to deal with the guilt instead of having my body get sick, my sore throat totally disappeared; and for the first time in years, it did not develop into one of those horrible colds; hence, healthy body and healthy mind.

And I had not even called my neighbor yet. I concluded that by resolving the emotional barrier, I had no need for the sore throat anymore; a holistic healing approach I have since learned usually applies to most physical health symptoms I get. Since then, anytime I notice a little sore throat or the sniffles, I use a mind body medicine approach and stop to ask myself those same four questions.

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Once I get the mental answer, I then choose a different way of dealing with the answer rather than paying the price of a cold. I find an answer to one of the questions, identifying the mind and body connection, and then come up with a healthy and productive alternative to being sick. Next, I make a firm commitment to carry it out, and the symptoms cease within minutes.

But that was when I started to see, as the new physics now teaches, that it is neither matter nor the body that rules. Although I began doing holistic self-healing in grad school, it never occurred to me to ask myself those mind body psychology questions about anything else other than colds. This is so typical of the egoic mind—the part of our mind that wants to keep us powerless, in ill health, in failure, unhappy, and without love. The egoic mind has been called by many names throughout the centuries: It wants to distract me and oppose me writing this.

Some years after my graduate school experience, I began to have a physical back problem. First, it was rather mild; but it gradually worsened until it took me over half an hour to slowly creep the six blocks to my office. Wanting to restore my healthy body, I went to chiropractors and massage therapists; I took medicine—muscle relaxants and anything else I heard about. Nothing solved the problem. The problem was inside, and I was seeking answers from outside. In essence, I was disowning my intrinsic holistic healing power and projecting the cause and cure to something outside me.

This is a major problem of our human condition, and our culture promotes this unhealthy mind body dis-connection perspective everywhere. Finally, the physical pain got so bad that I was stuck in bed, unable to move a centimeter without feeling like I was being jabbed with an ice pick and shocked with electrodes. My doctor said my X-rays showed that I had a severely degenerated disc.

I was shocked and traumatized by his prognosis and diagnosis. At that time, it was well known that 68 percent of the people reported feeling worse after back surgery. I had always loved being active in my sports-filled life. What could I do? My egoic mind, the internal enemy, had not let me make that mind body connection. Only when I was challenged with the possibility that I might never walk again did I remember that I could ask myself those body and mind questions.

This is why we all need tools to identify and get past our internal barriers to holistic healing. As I began reclaiming my power to self-heal, I asked myself those questions again:. As I reflected on my answers to those mind body medicine questions, I came up with four things I needed to attend to. There was a friend I felt abandoned by and a colleague whom I felt betrayed by. I needed to deal with these two emotional traumas constructively and directly, and I needed to work them out inside myself first and then with these two people in person.

I made a firm commitment to do this as soon as possible.

Then I became aware of two lifestyle issues that needed attention. I had always done many different sports and had been running regularly in Central Park for routine exercise, but I had never stretched. I also realized I had no constructive methods for reducing stress. Although I was never a big drinker, when I was upset about something, I would make myself a stiff Scotch on the rocks.

I needed something more healthful; so again I made a firm commitment—one I knew I would not break—to start a yoga practice for stretching and a meditation practice to lower stress. I also committed to talking with the two people I had issues with as soon as I could meet with them.

Now that I saw the mind body connection, I had healthy mind and body strategies in place. Once again, a most amazing thing happened! After making these firm mind body commitments, which I knew I would keep , I started to get better. It was the change in my mind that produced the change in my body! I was going to work again in a few days; I was largely pain free in a couple of weeks.

And two months later, I was skiing in Colorado! Now I have no trouble at all remembering—finally. I use them with every symptom I get, large or small, and have added several, other important ones, as you will see later.

In , when John Sarno, M. I will never forget his words to me: No part of the body is exempt from consciousness. A few years later, I met my friend Tim, a chiropractor, at his office to go out for lunch. Your story is so amazing. He poked around my spine, oohing and aahing. Then I got up to go to lunch.

Instead of thinking of my healthy body, you can guess which words I allowed to stick in my brain: Soon sciatic pains shot down my leg. Throughout lunch, the pain grew worse and worse and then increased as I drove the half hour home. I said to myself, I have done nothing to injure myself. Within a few minutes of catching the problem and changing the instructions to both my body and mind—making that mind body connection—the pain went away. Instead, I had no more need for it; I refused to keep sending that kind of message to my body, because my body listens to every word I think or say.

What an experience to illustrate the power of words in creating a healthy mind and body. Just as placebos are effective, the nocebo which is the opposite, the negative is also powerful, as I learned.

That egoic voice is like Velcro to the negative and like Teflon to the positive. For many years, my back continued to be pain free as I lived my active lifestyle, cognizant of the mind body connection that manifested my back problem. I had honored my commitments with myself: I had dealt with the issues between me and the two other people, and I continued practicing yoga and meditation to maintain a healthy mind and healthy body. Now, ten years later, I went to the doctor for a routine physical. I told him I wished to avoid unnecessary radiation, but he convinced me his new equipment was much better, with far less radiation.

After the X-rays, the doctor returned to tell me that my lungs looked fine and healthy. Then he began to stammer: This is not possible! It seems that the changes in my body and mind, which led to changes in my lifestyle, gave messages to my disc to return to its normal state, the essence of mind body medicine. I no longer needed the degenerated disc.

That psychosomatic need was taken care of in a healthier way because those cells had gotten a different message from my mind than they had in previous years. In the years that followed, I did holistic self-healing on several other symptoms. On Christmas morning when my youngest son was about three years old, I was playing with him on the floor as he opened his presents. As I sat enjoying the time with him, I started to develop a sore throat and some sniffles despite my otherwise healthy body and mind.

Brain Power: 100 Ways to Keep Your Mind Healthy and Fit

On top of that, my back began to hurt. I asked my wife to come back from the kitchen and take over with my son while I went into another room to make the mind body connection, to meditate and reflect on why I might need those symptoms. I did not want to get sick and ruin Christmas Day with my family. As I meditated, asking those questions, the only answer I could get was that I needed rest. I had been unusually busy that fall, with a lot of traveling and speaking, in addition to my full clinical practice. It was understandable to me that I needed rest, but I had no plans to give it to myself.

I do not ever cancel my patient appointments. I instantly knew she was right.

Ways to Keep Your Mind Healthy | www.newyorkethnicfood.com

If I had a need to rest but did not attend to what my mind and body needed, I would certainly get sick, cause and effect in the mind body connection. So I committed myself to calling and canceling all my appointments for the next day so I could stay home and rest. Within a half hour of that new commitment to myself, my backache and cold symptoms were gone, holistically healed. I did not need them any longer, for I had chosen a different way of taking care of myself.

In the years after healing my back, I attended a seminar with esteemed physicist David Bohm, Ph. In fact, Bohm argued that nothing is separate in the universe, supportive of a mind body connection. There is just one unified field, and everything is interconnected, a holistic model.

This means that nothing is separate from the All That Is, which religions have referred to as God. I later learned that quantum physicists are now saying that it is consciousness—not matter—that rules the universe. These experiences of self-healing with mind body medicine kept me inspired to expand my thinking. What is the nature of healing and ensuring a healthy mind and body?

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Is it just a way to get rid of bodily symptoms, which is mostly why we go to a doctor? But is that the true healing? If a doctor fixes a physical symptom with a medical intervention of some sort, have we truly healed? Since we have not gotten to the root—to what created the symptom—the cause is not healed. Most likely we have temporarily freed ourselves of just the symptom, not the cause, so repetitions are more likely unless we holistically heal the body and mind. I began to realize that true self-healing involved several dimensions of understanding and changing to the mind body connection, which I have listed below.

The first two are experiences that moved me out of a feeling of powerlessness, where symptoms happen to me and in which the cure is outside me. True, holistic self-healing with mind body medicine involves:. Through these steps to holistic healing, we begin to change our false self-identity—that we are small, powerless, and separate from the All That Is—and then to embrace our True Self, which houses immense potential for creation, and restores a healthy mind, body and spirit.

A few years later, I found that I had a hernia that the doctor said needed repairing. I tried unsuccessfully to do body and mind self-healing and ended up having surgery. Does this mean that perhaps I became frightened of my inner power and could not avail myself of it this time for mind body medicine healing? Most of us are quite afraid of embracing our true inner power, though we chase after it outside in the world all the time.

The software is actually acting like my ego mind! Now I also see that the various symptoms and my ways of doing other self-healings were quite diverse. Most of us need to take back our intrinsic power in increments. For instance, I once had a bone spur on my heel, and the doctor said that surgery was necessary.

Six Ways Happiness Is Good for Your Health

I identified the mind body connection and emotional factors involved and dealt with it successfully, but my bone spur remained. Blueberries can help improve memory and can reduce the effects of Alzheimer's and dementia. And, a mere cup of strawberries packs a full-day supply of vitamin C, which contains skin-firming properties.

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