How the mind and body work together for Optimized Health & Fitness
All healing is self healing. We have within us a wise physician. Albert Schweitzer, M.D.
Did you know that you can use the power of your mindbody to heal almost any disease, from cancer to hypertension, asthma, ulcers, diabetes, depression, chronic pain and even osteoarthritis?
It’s true. Medical research has proven this repeatedly over 40 years of clinical trials through the Food and Drug Administration’s requirements for drug manufacturers to demonstrate safety and effectiveness.
Most drugs and medical devices on the market today are tested through double blind clinical trials, where a real drug or device therapy is tested against the power of the mind – the power of suggestion – otherwise known as the placebo effect. The notion of using the mind to heal the body is woven into the very fabric of modern medicine.
The mind is a powerful healing inner resource. Everyone has the ability to remember and activate, deep within their bodies, the natural condition of wellness and optimized fitness. This process is not a mystery, although it may seem magical that someone can reclaim their health by addressing both the mind and the body in an optimal way.
While it might be tempting to dismiss this potent healing tool as simply “in your head,” plenty of proof backs the belief that it helps people recover from physical maladies in the body when given placebo therapies or hypnotic healing suggestions. This fact should awaken in us the need to remember wellness.
Remembering Wellness
After decades of clinical research helping people manage stress, he developed a profound understanding of how a placebo, which embodies the power of the mind and suggestion, can create a positive healing response. Understanding Dr. Benson’s simple explanation may require suspending certain beliefs regarding health and wellness. This small shift is easier than you might think.
It begins here: Wellness is your natural state.
What we call dis-ease is physical, mental and emotional embodiments of disruption of this natural state.
“ Nature has endowed us with wellness and balance as natural conditions of our existence, a function of our most basic level of survival. “
While this notion may be unfamiliar, your very existence is a testament to it.
Do you realize what an amazingly successful product of nature you are? There is an unbroken genetic chain between you and the first spark of life. Embedded in your genetic code are the survival and thriving successes of all your ancestors, many of whom survived saber tooth tigers, ice ages, plagues, famines and millennia of holy wars.
Nature has endowed us with wellness and balance as natural conditions of our existence, a function of our most basic level of survival.
Today’s most common maladies: heart disease, stroke, and cancer, didn’t even make the top 5 one-hundred years ago. That’s because we have over one-thousand times more individual stressors each day than our ancestors had just one-hundred years ago!
Yet many people fear or even expect that these challenges are a “normal” part of life. Just as a positive suggestion can foster positive results, this negative expectation of future illness suggests to your entire mindbody system that it will occur. But disease is not inevitable, wellness is, provided we stop disrupting our natural propensity for it.
Stop Dis-ease Now
We must do all we can to remember our innate wellness, which is our birthright. We must learn to process the challenges of modern life differently. That is why in the pages that follow you will be offered tips for optimizing health and fitness that include lifestyle issues and matters that can affect our happiness in life. Truly, the term I am using as one word herein, mindbody, should really be “mindbodylife.” This is because the mindbody dynamic, which is our very selves, is embedded in the context of our lives, and our lives interconnect and interpenetrate other lives and the living environment in which we all live.
Positive suggestions and the placebo effect work because a properly crafted, delivered and received suggestion (or a placebo drug), momentarily suspends the interpretation of the disruption in the mindbody as disease, dysfunction or discontent.
This interpretation is in itself a mindbody phenomenon, as explained by Peter Lambrou, PhD., consulting and clinical psychologist at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla California. Dr. Lambrou explains that in the instance of pain relief, a hypnotic or placebo suggestion produces relief quicker compared to the time it takes for the brain to deliver endorphins and squelch the pain.
“The activity and consequences of your thoughts and feelings are inseparable from the activity and function of your body.”
Why? Because thoughts, i.e., interpretations, are networks of neurons, which are connected to other neural networks, which are embedded in and influence every cell in the body on a continual basis.
The activity and consequences of your thoughts and feelings are inseparable from the activity and function of your body.
Reinterpretation can be instigated by a shift in attitude, positive suggestion, re-patterning beliefs, re-evaluating belief in the cause, or a placebo. In this instance, the potency of your remarkably efficient healing machine, your mindbody, remembers its natural condition of wellness. This momentary reinterpretation allows the flood of natural neurobiochemical substances to affect healing and return the body to its natural state.
This is why Dr. Benson’s refers to the placebo effect as Remembered Wellness. Thinking about wellness as a natural and normal condition of the mindbody will not only help you heal illness but enjoy wellness and fitness long into the future, without the many harmful side effects of drugs.
