Our
mind—what we think and what we believe—can make us sick. For
starters, if we believe that our illness is personal, pervasive, or
permanent, we won’t get well says Paul St. John, creator of
NeuroMuscularTherapy. Personal means we think our case of ‘x’ is
the worst case anyone has seen. Pervasive means we believe our illness
affects every aspect of our life. And permanent means we believe that there is no cure—for
example, that our illness is age-related and/or fatal.
St. Johns’
approach is to create doubt. He
describes a new patient who announced that he had a bum knee and
insisted there was nothing St. John could do for it. “Why?” asked
St. John. “It’s 72 years old,” said the patient. “How is the
other knee?” asked St. John. “Fine,” said the patient.
“And how old is the other knee?” asked St. John. With these
simple questions, St. John maneuvered his patient into entertaining
the possibility that his knee could heal—which it did.
More
problematic are the societal and familial sick-making tapes that many
of us run continuously. Although
we hear these messages in our head, they may be being broadcast from
anywhere in the body. These messages suggest that some
flaw—stupidity, ugliness, klutziness—is responsible for our
suffering. Together, body
worker and patient locate, expose, and deactivate the message,
sometimes replacing it with its antithesis.
One variant of
the flawed theory is the notion that our illness runs in our family.
Here the implication is that your flaw is your inheritance and,
more importantly, it is inescapable. Talk about self-fulfilling! This
prophesy is especially pernicious because every member of the family
is likely to repeat it like a mantra at every opportunity, until we
get sick—and even after.
This health
challenge that everyone in the family is supposed to have is often not
innate, but merely reflects learned behavior: how the family reacts to
life. Unless you buy the inheritance myth, or feel obligated to carry
on this great tradition, you can probably choose health. Even if the
problem is encoded in your genes, however, a growing body of research
shows that our minds can over-ride the gene.
I know people who have dialogued with, and turned off,
disease-causing genes.
Some of us
become attached to being sick or impaired, even though we hate our
illness and wish for health. This attachment can stem from our having
used the illness to gain attention, avoid unpleasant chores, duck
responsibilities, etc. Perhaps in the beginning that sickness seemed
to be our best, or only, option. But often that is no longer true.
Over time, we may gain safety, space, strength, wisdom, and permission
to say no.
People who
survive perilous childhoods tend to over-rely on thinking, and
specifically on the cerebral cortex. Brilliant as our cerebral cortex
may be, if it could think your way to health, you’d already be
healthy. Sometimes we just have to ignore the cerebral cortex, or
distract it. Like Daddy,
it doesn’t always know what’s best.
Another reason
that health eludes us is the myth that our feelings, emotions,
beliefs, and issues, are in our heads. However, the mind isn’t
limited to the head. Therefore, if we are going to “clean out the
attic,” we have to clean out the material where it is located. And
that clutter is often closeted throughout our body.
Many of us
think we have worked through these emotions: forgiven, forgotten and
moved on. And we may have, on a conscious level. However, all too
often that material remains in the body, without our awareness,
causing the same dis-ease it always has. Life has a way of keeping
these parked emotions fresh as the day they were born/borne. If you
are willing, you can free yourself once and for all from these toxic
emotions and issues.
Why aren’t
we aware that buried material is causing illness? Some of us simply
aren’t in touch with our feelings. Or, our cerebral cortex may be
over-protective (as in telling us, “You can’t handle this.”)
Frequently, the issues and feelings causing so much dis-ease
aren’t even ours. Indeed, it’s exceedingly common to take on the
issues of family members and others.
We can do this when we are quite young (even in utero and
infancy); therefore, it shouldn’t be any surprise that we don’t
recall having done this.
Upon
discovering someone else’s issue or emotion in their body, most
clients have little trouble evicting it and moving on. If a negative
emotion like anger, resentment, or a desire for justice (revenge)
forms part of the glue, the twin realizations that 1) the other person
can’t really work on their emotion so long as you carry it and that
2) carrying it only hurts you will help to dissolve the bond.
While
frequently ignored by physicians, an almost universal cause of illness
and injury is an emotional or spiritual injury.
Here again, we frequently manufacture personal responsibility
for the injury, concluding—usually erroneously—that some personal
short-coming occasioned the injury, maltreatment, or illness. These
emotional and spiritual injuries are often at the heart of what we
call core issues. We
might spend decades living and proving this falsehood—unless and
until we decide that the cost has become prohibitive. When we tire of
the high personal cost of maintaining the falsehood and move toward
health, we may find a rich spiritual path.
Too
often our culture encourages us to hammer our symptoms into
submission, using will-power, supplements, medicine, and surgery. As
often as not, however, symptoms are our body’s way of getting our
attention and leading us to awaken to our own true, perfect, if
all-too-human, natures. Typically, as soon as we realize the nature of
the original misconception, our lives improve dramatically.
Mike
Macy is a CranioSacral Therapist in Anchorage which provides
frequent opportunities for him to experience both the debilitating and
curative powers of the mind.
Contact: 258-7261 or mmacy@acsalaska.net
