Tag: mind-body connection
-
Illness, Health and Self-Awareness
Scientific research increasingly shows that negative thoughts and emotions can make us ill and positive thoughts and emotions help to keep us well. Happy, contented, emotionally well-adjusted and optimistic people have more energy and get ill less often. They also live longer. How, then, can we use these insights to heal our bodies and stay…
-
Quimby: The Silent Healer
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby was born on February 16, 1802. He was one of seven children brought up in a modest family background. When he was still a toddler, the family moved to Belfast, Maine, where he spent most of his life. As a boy, he became interested in the sciences, but had no formal tuition…
-
Can Positive Emotions Keep You Well?
There’s no doubt that negative emotions can create and sustain illness. It’s been known intuitively and written about for thousands of years and increasingly recognised medically and scientifically over the last century. For example, Dr Sigmund Freud wrote: ‘Often repressed emotions will manifest either as behavioural problems or physical problems’. Although widely derided at the…
-
Toxic thoughts and emotions create illness
We’ve always known that there’s a close connection between the body and the mind. We’ve all experienced it. That’s why more and more sufferers of chronic physical conditions are referred for counselling, and why, in the UK at least, the ‘talking therapies’ are over subscribed. Some experts predict that they’ll soon be able to identify…
-
A Close Relationship Between Stress and Illness
Studies have consistently shown a close relationship between stress and illness. Stressed people get ill more often and when they do, on average the illness is more serious. Twenty years ago stress was said by doctors to be responsible for at least two-thirds of all illness; nowadays, the most often quoted figure is around 90%.…
-
Psycho-neuro immunology
We’ve always known that there’s a connection between the body and the mind – if indeed they are separate at all. But for hundreds of years Western medicine ignored – even denied – this connection. But since the 1980s all this has changed thanks to the relatively new science of Psycho-Neuro Immunology or PNI. The…
-
The Mind-Body Connection
We’ve always known that there’s a connection between the body and the mind – if indeed they are separate at all. For instance, anxious feelings can give rise to headaches, loss of appetite and an upset stomach – we’ve all experienced it. Sad thoughts bring on tiredness and lethargy, anger energizes, fear brings tension and…
-
Are you sure you want to be well? The problem of ‘secondary gains’.
When a patient fails to recover even when receiving the best possible treatment, we must question whether they really want to get well. Why? Some people like being ill. They enjoy the attention that comes with it. It may be the only time anyone takes an interest in them. When a person subconsciously depends on…
-
Healing and Creative Imagery
Creative Imagery (visualization) is an invaluable healing tool with proven health benefits. It can reduce chronic pain, anxiety, high blood pressure, cholesterol and the stress hormone cortisol. It boosts brain function, the immune system and the heart and circulation. When we relax and focus our minds, we stimulate the life forces within, allowing the body…
-
The remarkable healing of Myrtle Fillmore
Myrtle Fillmore was born in 1845. She was repeatedly told as a child that her health was poor and that she was prone to tuberculosis – believed fatal in those days. It wasn’t until her early forties when, having contracted tuberculosis, she attended a talk on healing by an influential teacher of the time. When…