Remember that childhood cut on your finger or scrape on your knee? Did you completely ignore it while you kept right on playing? Did it heal by itself? Isn't this how you acquired your trophy scabs and scars?
We have a self-healing mechanism in our bodies. Yes, we do possess the ability to heal ourselves. Is this fact surprising to you?
We've been brought up utterly reliant on medical practitioners, and we usually submit ourselves passively to them. The thing is, in modern medicine, medical practitioners are like mechanics and our bodies like cars. When a part malfunctions, the mechanic goes in and fixes or replaces it. Which is why the medical system we rely on is called mechanistic and invasive.
The quick fix we get is a cure. The body part repaired is cured. Job done - next!
Often when a body part malfunctions, the whole body is affected. Curing that part does not fix the problem of the person not being "quite the same." Clearly, curing is not enough where healing is needed.
A friend of mine was hospitalized for a simple surgical procedure. He was put under, and the operation was completed successfully in a few minutes. But when the hospital staff tried to revive him, he had breathing problems. They had to perform a tracheotomy - inserting a breathing tube through a hole they cut in his throat. He ended up staying a month in the hospital - not just a day as planned. To this date, he experiences double vision, and he has memory lapses. He hasn't healed.
You've heard of birth complications - a baby doesn't get enough oxygen and ends up in an incubator. The baby grows up with some motor skills blunted. A long healing process is needed here, a rebuilding in fact, to develop compensatory skills for the birth damage.
Oftentimes when outside intervention falls short of the desired results, the affected party resorts to self-healing. The following are three self-healing methods worth exploring.
1) Remembered wellness - popularized by Harvard Medical School's Dr. Herbert Benson who prescribes the booster pill of an energizing memory. Here are examples of healing memories - Mom's blessing when she first sent us off to school, how strongly we sang at a choir, how elated we felt at the birth of our child. He encourages us to draw on the vigor we felt at the healthiest points of our lives.
2) Meditation and exercise - both geared toward the Oriental focus on energy flow. Yoga, Tai Chi and Zen are examples of mind-body activities that lower blood pressure, ease chronic pain and stabilize immune systems.
3) Love and touching - positive reinforcement needed for good health, thus the saying, "Babies who are not touched, die." By the same token, adults lacking in love and physical contact, are prone to illness. Mother Theresa said that loneliness is a poverty of the West because people in the close-knit communities of the East don't have the North American loneliness resulting from a culture of ego and competition. Love is a powerful healer and without it is an emptiness people try to fill with excessive eating or substance abuse.
Basketball star Magic Johnson, diagnosed with AIDS about two decades ago, lives on. He credits his survival to family and friends whose support tipped the scales in his favor, stopping the virus. "If you're not in the right frame of mind," he said, "it can kill you."
Endocrinologist Dr. Deepak Chopra said that during anxiety, our bodies produce adrenalin and cortisone - during tranquility, they produce vallium - during joy, they produce interleukens and interferons which are anti-cancer drugs.
We certainly have it within us to heal ourselves.
