I was chatting with a friend today about miraculous healings, which led to the story of Morris Goodman who was in a plane crash in 1981 and told by doctors he would never walk again and would only ever be able to blink his eyes to communicate. Then eight months later he walks out of the hospital. (You can find his story on YouTube: Morris Goodman - Miracle Man).
My friend and I agreed that there probably isn't a physical state of decline or damage that we can't influence once we understand how the mind and body interact. Many of us view certain health issues as permanent simply because that's the prognosis. This mindset makes those rare occasions when recovery happens seem miraculous, when in fact, optimum health is our natural state of being. We're suppose to thrive! I'm certainly not suggesting that illness is all in our heads, only pointing out that our mental and physical health are intertwined.
Bruce Lipton, a recognized leader in bridging science and spirit had this to say about the fundamental ways our mind works:
"The cells of your body are merely following instructions given by the nervous system; by the brain. The nervous system does the interpretation. You can easily see this when you see two people reacting to the same stimulus with very different reactions, one positive and one negative. As your perception changes, you change the message that your nervous system communicates to the cells of your body. Your mind controls your biology. That’s what the placebo effect is about; the mind believes the pill will work and so it does."
He goes on to explain that a routine of daily meditation interrupts the old tapes running in our subconscious, which overtime pulls us out of the past and more and more into the present moment, thus eliciting our own recovery. He explains that undertanding the concepts of this way of healing is very different from integrating it into our everyday lives. It is by consistently disrupting these old thought patterns that we can achieve self-healing. It's not challenging to do, but requires trusting our intuition and moving beyond the old stories running on repeat in our heads, which most of us base life decisions on without realizing it.
How many of us realize we have such power? Morris Goodman puts it this way, "Man becomes what he thinks about." This is true for most of our circumstances. At the core of any 'mode of being' are the thoughts and feelings that helped make it so. The good news is, if we created it, we can un-create it! We can free ourselves from overwrought thought patterns by choosing a different response when we notice them reemerge. By changing our thinking, we create fresh neural-pathways that then become routine and essentially rewire our brain to a whole new way of being. The greatest belief blocking our restoration is: "I am powerless."
Once we reclaim our power, stop believing everything we're told, meditate daily, become conscious of what we put into our bodies and bring into our environment, rest well, exercise, nurture ourselves and KNOW that we can recover - the odds are certainly in our favor!