Although a fictional story lacks objective reality, it can directly impact on our thoughts, feelings, and body. We can observe this when watching a sentimental or horror movie. We can feel it in our emotions and physiology. Fortunately, this is short lasting as we soon stop reading or watching a movie and then return to daily reality. In the same way, a mentally created personal self, although fictional, can have a direct and at times highly destructive impact on our body. The difference, short oof awakening to the true self, we hold a steadfast belief in the personal self over much or all of our life. So the impact of our belief that we are the personal self has a lifelong impact on our mental and physical health.
Intentional Healing, my first book, explored the intricacies of the mind-body connection. As an Internal Medicine physician, my approach to patients had already shifted. Early in practice I realized the limitations of a medical model that reduces health and disease solely to biological factors. It seems quite obvious that we are not mere physical bodies. We are inter-connect beings – our biology, psychology, social relations, and spiritual essence are inseparable. Focusing on only one aspect of our experience diminishes our capacity to understand disease and reach towards a comprehensive whole healing.
Intentional Healing reviewed the research I was pouring through at that time. I began with Hans Selye, the Canadian physiologist who wrote the seminal text The Stress of Life. His conclusions are so obvious now. Relentless modern stress exhausts and destabilizes our physiology and biology. The mental factor of stress is inseparable from the physical aspect of our being.
In the 1950s the Menninger Clinic Researchers, Elmer and Alyce Green, returned from India where they developed the field of biofeedback. In short, they discovered that it was possible, through mental imagery, supported by enhanced physiological feedback, to control aspects of our biology that previously seemed inaccessible to mental effects. These functions now include: blood pressure, muscle tension, pulse, body temperature, bowel motility, bladder motility, and brain waves, to note a few. All of which can be altered through mental factors.
The core of Intentional Healing was centered on the newly emerging field of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI.) Rober Ader a researcher at the University of Rochester detailed how the mind, beyond its ability to impact on bodily organs and tissues, could also be trained to upgrade or downgrade the activity of the immune system.
And then there is the placebo effect. In 1959 the National Institutes of Health employed a cardiologist in Seattle, Dr. Leonard A. Cobb, to conduct a novel test of a technique to increase cardiac blood flow to patients with heart disease. Cobb operated on 17 patients. Eight had the actual surgical procedure and the other nine got incisions, nothing more. In 1959, the New England Journal of Medicine published his findings: The phony operations worked just as well as actual surgery. The mind healed the cardiac pain as well as the surgery!
Supplementing this research are the many social interaction studies that demonstrate in large populations the impact of stress, distress, social relations, and emotional states on the body.
It was left to Candace Pert, a researcher at Georgetown University, to describe a key piece – the chemical messenger molecules (the neuropeptides such as endorphins) – that were the intermediaries between the mind and our biology. These messenger hormones carry information through our body, from one organ and tissue to another, and could explain the mysterious connection between mental factors and physical changes.
More recent research in the field of neuroscience and epigenetics further elaborates how mental and environmental factors affect the mind-body continuum. This even applies to our genetic disposition whose expression in our physiology is in part mediated by these factors. That is to say that genetics are not fixed fate, but can be modified by the conscious choice of a lifestyle that supports or inhibits particular genetic expressions.
It was a natural leap from the recognition that the mind is inseparable from the body to realize that the mind of others I interact with may similarly impact on my body. If I react to another’s dramas with anger, annoyance or other negative emotions, my reaction impacts on my body. In that way my mind and body are inter-connected with others. And further, if the values and practices of our culture, the character of our educational system, the nature of our economic systems, or our social systems impact on my mental or biological state, that extends our inter-connectedness to all aspects of life. We are not a single isolated mind-body. We are one interwoven mind-body with others and our cultural environment.
I have reviewed this research and its implications to share with you how I arrived at my focus on the mind, expanding the mind and tapping into its rich resources through self-remembering and living in our whole self.
Although I applaud the genius of biological science, it is the mind that remains the most under-valued and unexplored frontier in health and healing. That is why my focus is on fully developing and expanding our understanding of the mind and its resources.
Now, let’s still the mind, return to the center of our being, and experience the feeling of a harmonious mind-body.