May 07 2009
Can You Heal Your Body With Your Mind?
Does your mind have an effect on your physical health? Can your mind make you sick and can it make you well? Can you really heal your body with your mind alone?
Today, these questions have been answered: YES, your mind is a powerful, although largely unconscious, instrument. YES, your mind, via the quality of your thoughts, can act for good or for “ill” on your body. YES, you really can heal your body with your mind, alone, although it is best to combine “mind power” with “medical power.”
Dr. Herbert Benson, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, was one of the first medical professionals to study, and confirm, the effects that the mind has on the body. Developing a form of meditation in the early seventies that he called “the relaxation response,” Dr. Benson found that this practice, alone, caused significant changes in your body. On his official website, Dr. Benson lists some of these effects:
- Your metabolism decreases.
- Your heart beats slower and your muscles relax
- Your breathing becomes slower
- Your blood pressure decreases
- Your levels of nitric oxide are increased
His studies proved that these effects were elicited entirely by the relaxation response of the mind.
A little later, Dr. Bernie Siegel, a surgeon and Professor at Yale University, explored the mind/body link, via meditation, and his findings are intriguing. As quoted in “The Healing Power of Mind: Simple Exercises for Health, Well-Being, and Enlightenment,” Dr. Siegel found that meditation, “tends to lower or normalize blood pressure, pulse rate, and the level of stress hormones in the blood. It produces changes in brain-wave patterns, showing less excitability…Meditation also raises the pain threshold and reduces one’s biological age…In short, it reduces wear and tear on both body and mind, helping people live both better and longer.”
Still later, and much more recently, Larry Dossey, a medical doctor and author of the book “Healing Words: the Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine,” recorded what might be the first case of a person willfully changing her immune system. In a test study this woman, who had tested positive for chicken pox, changed the test results to negative then back to positive, using just her mind. Six months later, she repeated the same process with her mind and got the exact same results.
What does this mean for you?
It means that your mind is as big a factor in your health as is genetics, diet, and exercise. It means that you must monitor your thoughts as closely as you monitor your health. It means that you must exercise your mind as much as you’re supposed to exercise your body.
You do this through conscious thought control and meditation/visualization techniques.
More about this in future posts.
Photo courtesy of flaivoloka at http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1160562
