Dr. Judith Orloff MDWe all have a choice about our health. Your body and mind are linked by an intricate intuitive circuitry. Notice the pattern of any recurring beliefs or emotions that occur before an illness. They may well be premonitions. Your body responds to the minds beliefs, conscious or unconscious. Thoughts such as this job is eating me alive, life’s not worth living, I’m scared to death, you’re giving me a heart attack, I’m so tired I feel like keeling over, all can transmit potent messages, even self-fulfilling prophecies to your brain chemicals, tissues and cells. We need to be aware of our thinking, notice when fear takes over, and begin to reprogram our thoughts.
Thoroughly search yourself for negative beliefs. Visualize health, not illness. Cultivate a growing optimism that replaces fear-based thinking with hope and empowerment. Now, I am not implying that positive thinking can be solely responsible for either promoting wellness or destroying it. Such notions are simplistic and misleading. What I am suggesting, though, is that your attitudes about health shape your capacity to achieve it. You must strive to be more loving with yourself to sustain the most nurturing biochemical and psychic environment in which to heal.
It is this quality of love that penetrates to an unspoken life within you, a divine microbiology. On a subliminal level cells speak. As you grow more open, listen with your intuition. Your blood goes back generations. You are not only the genetics you carry; you hold your entire ancestral history. The beliefs your mothers and grandmothers had about their health, the illnesses they experienced and how they dealt with them, still affect you today.
Recently, going through a safe-deposit box containing documents belonging to my parents, I came upon a piece of paper dated June 23, 1976. My mother’s name was typed in capital letters on the top. It was a pathology report. It said she had a malignant lymphoma. I froze, remembering the suffering this disease had caused her, reliving her death four years before.
The loss of her, the unrelenting siren moaned right through me all over again. Was it so important to her for me to find years after her death? What was she trying to tell me? Yet there the notice was in the same stack of papers as my birth certificate, my report cards from grammar school (she must have kept every one), my first lock of baby hair. Lymphoma was one such milestone for my mother. And I couldn’t help but wonder, would it be mine also?
Our parent’s beliefs about illness cast light on our beliefs about ourselves. My mother, herself a doctor and very brave, nonetheless defined herself by her ultimately terminal lymphoma, giving it even more power than it had. I realized it was vital to disengage from such thinking. The illnesses of our lineage do not have to become our own. It is critical not to feel obliged to inherit something that doesn’t belong to us. It is just as critical to be careful we do not misread the bond with our loved ones as including their illnesses. Genetics may dictate the transmission of a disease, but we can do much to break our intuitive link to such a process.
Most important, notice your fears. It’s natural to empathize with what your loved ones are going through. Still, be careful not to over identify with their illnesses or the difficulties they have coping with them. Fear acts as a negative magnet. Do your best to let it go. Releasing fear offers it a reprieve. This alone could well liberate you from reliving even your relative’s genetic patterns.
Many of us spend a lifetime creating and listening to negative voices. Where do they come from? Why do they so inexorable persist? To begin with, they echo the words of parents, teachers, and other authority figures as well as normal individual insecurities. Further, body chemistry plays a role. When serotonin levels are low, depression can ensue. Also, our species’ history makes us anticipate danger to survive. In addition, we use anxiety to motivate ourselves or to defend against being let down.
If we expect the worst, it’s harder to be disappointed. The problem is, we become driven by negativity, addicted to it. Consider the endless mayhem in the evening news. Finally, bear in mind that in intuitive terms negativity has an inherently noisier, more frenetic, and stronger charge than the more even, subtler signal of the positive. Generally, as a novice, you pick up traumatic events and emotional upheaval before anything else. Even in ordinary life our attention is compelled more by the train wreck than by the system that works nearly all the time.
As you can see the negative voices have many sources, much power. To exorcise them requires reconditioning your focus, replacing fear with faith. First, expose the tirade. Hold nothing back. Go straight for the boil. Charge like a samurai: lance it. In one swift blow. Second, summon every ounce of compassion you can muster to combat these untrue, unkind beliefs. Don’t buy into the fear. Third, tell these insufferable voices, “Thank you for sharing” and keep moving on.
I ruefully appreciate from my own experience how tenacious negative voices can be. They feed on our apprehensions and on the part of ourselves that is reluctant to be large. Just when you think they are gone- they’re ba-ack. Nonetheless, there comes a point when you must decide if you want a life that is fear-driven or one founded on love and hope. Establishing this premise is tantamount to bringing your healing to the next level. Remember, each gain will be incremental. You’ll catch the negative voices faster; you’ll dismiss them more quickly. Significant improvement, but its also true that the process is ongoing.
In all types of illness, from cancer to a cold, never fail to remember the mind’s capacity to heal, even what has been deemed un-healable. By lovingly learning to focus your intuition, you can strive to cure or at least improve any health situation.
This brings us to an appreciation of a world where positive beliefs, emotions, and actions are prime factors in getting well, can even stimulate our immune response. A world where our defense against illness is related to a body-wide communication network we can take an active part in programming. A mix of science, instinct, and mystery, this is how intuitive healing can benefit you.
We can’t always regulate what happens in life, but the quality of our passage is up to us. Become accustomed to looking at your beliefs as intuitive guideposts, both as precursors to illness and as ways of deflecting it. Prevention is more within your grasp than you may think.
Exercise: Questions To Help You Create Positive Beliefs About Healing
- Do your beliefs give you strength during illness? If not are you ready to find ones that do?
- In a health crisis, what role does intuition play? How far would you go to trust it?
- How do you treat yourself when you get sick or are in pain? If you’re self-critical how can you turn that into self-compassion?
- Do you believe love can heal? How about humor? Are you willing to put them to the test?
Questions and Answers with Dr. Orloff
Question:
I have just recently been diagnosed with a thyroid nodule that requires biopsy as it is a solid mass found on ultrasound. This has come upon suddenly. I am going through many life changes — I am in a second career and working towards a master’s degree at 46 years old; my teenage son has chosen to live with his father 2500 miles away; I am in the 4th year of a wonderful new marriage yet I feel like a duck out of water many days in my world. This thyroid issue has me in a mess of depression, doubt and feeling “mortal”. Next step: biopsy and likely surgery and/or meds that I don’t want. Please give me some direction. All of my healthy choices (diet, exercise, vitamins) have me feeling like they are for naught. Where to go from here?
Answer:
I believe it’s important to use traditional medicine when it’s appropriate and alternative medicine when it’s appropriate. Here, it sounds like you’ve taken the right steps to heal the thyroid problem. Healing comes in all forms–sometimes through surgery and medications. Don’t look at this as a failure in any way. You are doing what’s necessary and smart to help yourself. We are all mortals—it’s important to get used to that. Be kind to yourself in the healing process.
Question:
For the past two years I have created an energy dynamic of food binging and addiction. My cravings and impulses to eat are so unconscious that I find it a challenge to stop myself before the behavior begins or even during the act! This energy drains my personal power and causes me so much pain and yet I have continued to behave in this manner which is not what I want for myself. Please help me end this cycle of giving away my power to food.
Answer:
A dynamic that many people who fail diets aren’t aware of is this: we eat to buffer the negative energy around us. It’s subconscious. Not only do you overeat in response to emotional stresses, there are energetic stressors too. We eat to buffer the negative vibes we absorb from people and situations. Case in point: The turn of the century faith healers were typically extremely obese women. They said that had to keep the weight on to prevent absorbing the symptoms of the patients they treated–not a healthy or necessary coping device. Instead you need to pinpoint energetic triggers–such as going though airport security, a nasty boss, an uncomfortable party–wherever you pick up negative vibes. Then you must learn coping techniques to protect yourself such as visualizing a protective barrier of white light around you, grounding techniques, setting boundaries, walking away from energy vampires, designing a life where you’re not drained by others. All this can effect your food intake. I highly recommend reading my new book Positive Energy–I go into this in great detail. It will be out early 2004. Now, please read my book Guide to Intuitive Healing, the chapter on Centering and Protection. It will get you started.
You can do it!
