Your Power to Heal: Resolving Psychological Barriers to Your Physical Health

DisclaimerThe names and distinguishing characteristics of people mentioned in this book have been changed to protect their privacy.

This book is not intended as a substitute for the medical recommendations of physicians or other healthcare providers. Rather, it is intended to offer information to help the reader cooperate with physicians and health providers in a mutual request for optimum well-being. We advise readers to carefully review and understand the ideas presented and to seek the advice of a qualified professional before attempting to use them.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1The Infinite Possibilities of Self-Healing

2Uncovering Hidden Causes and Benefits of an Illness

3Why We Need a Symptom: Seven Questions to Find Out

4Self-Testing to Discover the Unconscious Truth

5Past Traumas That Sabotage Your Health Today

6Tools for Clearing Traumas, Negative Beliefs, and Downloads

7Beliefs and Downloads That Make Us Sick or Well

8There Are No Idle Thoughts

9Emotions in Sickness and in Health

10Translating the Body’s Language

11Using Your Mind to Make Treatments and Medications More Effective

12Healing the Illusion of Separateness: A Lifestyle of Love, Forgiveness, and Miracles

Notes

Recommended Reading

Index

About the Author

About Sounds True

Copyright

Praise for Your Power to Heal

Acknowledgments

The following people have been instrumental in shaping my life so that I could write this book: Jim Young, my college professor and debate coach who taught me how to think for myself and not be consumed by past conclusions; Viktor Frankl, MD, PhD, who survived the concentration camps—in my class with him, when he came to Boston University, I learned the enormous power of our thoughts and how they can effect life or death; and quantum physicist David Bohm, PhD—when I attended his seminar in New York City, I learned how we and everything are interconnected in one unified field of consciousness and energy and that separateness is just an illusion.

Introduction

When I sat down to write this book, I wanted to create a resource that helps people break free from the rut of thinking about themselves as sick, as victims of their genes, or as powerless over their illnesses. Through my personal experience of dealing with my own illnesses and by working with hundreds of people during more than thirty years of practice as a mind/body/spirit psychologist, I have come to realize that conscious and unconscious traumas, beliefs, and thoughts can sabotage health in both subtle and sometimes dramatic ways we’re not even aware of.

Your Power to Heal offers you instruction for a journey toward health and happiness by helping you identify the hidden reasons for your personal health problems that may stem from childhood deprivations; pains and disturbances; damage or suffering handed down by ancestors (think slavery, political violence, or family history of cancer); and past lives; as well as uncleared adult stressors, beliefs, traumas, and needs. After you identify your unconscious barriers to healing, you will learn ways to stop them from controlling you and your health.

In this book, I offer a number of simple, powerful tools that you can use daily or whenever you need, including several forms of tapping or touching on the body’s acupressure points to help you let go of negative emotions or beliefs. One of these tools is my personal adaptation of the widely used Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), developed by Gary Craig in the early 1990s. This adaptation, which I call EFTA, includes several helpful innovations plus a form of breathing that readily calms down the survival brain—also known as the limbic system—which creates so much stress.

Over the years, I’ve seen people heal from catastrophic traumas, such as the September 11 attacks, and from being abused or neglected by their parents or other caretakers. I’ve seen them heal themselves from cancer, significant heart problems, multiple sclerosis, and other illnesses, or simply make their lives better by eliminating smaller health issues such as colds, viruses, backaches, allergies, and digestive problems. You too can benefit from following the practices in this book if you:

•want to get to the underlying causes of your symptoms rather than just treating the symptoms, as most medical interventions do

•desire to be free of current or chronic health problems such as back pain, migraines, autoimmune illnesses, or recurrent colds, as well as serious illnesses

•are interested in nontraditional methods of healing with no harmful side effects

•desire to move out of feeling powerless to a place where you can use your power to heal

•seek a way to use mindbody healing in partnership with treatments prescribed by your medical doctor, acupuncturist, or naturopath for all types of illnesses

•experience symptoms that are not responding to traditional medical treatment and are searching for a more empowering, alternative form of healing

•are looking for a way to nip many symptoms in the bud as they start

•are open to going beyond allopathic modalities to exploring the power of the mind/body/spirit connection that we all have, but often disown

Discovering Hidden Causes of Stress, Trauma, and Illness

In recent years, clinical research has revealed a high correlation between uncleared developmental and adult traumas and the onset of physical and emotional illnesses.¹ For example, people who experienced early childhood traumas were far more likely to have serious illnesses in early adulthood than those who did not suffer from such traumas.

Stress is associated with most of our illnesses. Although a 2012 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 60 to 80 percent of illnesses reported to primary care doctors may have a stress component,² stress is more likely a factor in at least 80 to 90 percent of such cases. Stress has been linked to stomach issues; muscle aches and pains; joint and back problems; increased blood pressure; increased heart rate; higher cholesterol; increased risk of heart attack; mood problems such as anger, irritability, depression, panic, and anxiety; headaches; low energy; lower bone density; loss of libido; and especially reduced immune response, which makes all illnesses, including cancer, more likely.

Stress is actually a network of traumas; negative beliefs, thoughts, and emotions; interpretative perceptions; and even downloads of family patterns of how to deal with stress. Stress-induced illnesses don’t just happen out of the blue, and prescription drugs do not eliminate them—they only dull the symptoms and often create other illnesses nicely called side effects. If we truly wish for health and happiness, we need to deal directly with the causes of stress, far more important than just popping a pill.

What stresses one person may be easy for another to handle because stress has more to do with how we react to an event than the event itself. We all give our own meaning to people, objects, and events around us, and that meaning is colored by our past experiences and interpretations. For example, Bill grew up in a house where he had to do everything perfectly or his mother would become very upset. What’s wrong with you that you did that? was her characteristic response. Then his father would yell at Bill for upsetting his mother. Bill’s conclusion, like so many children, was, I am no good. I am not loveable. I can’t do anything right. Something is wrong with me! Thomas, on the other hand, grew up with similar parents, but he didn’t see himself as a problem child. Instead, he thought his parents were crazy. He stayed out in the neighborhood as long as he could, playing with other children. He hurried through dinner and rushed to his bedroom to do his homework. He made a point not to be around his parents any more than he had to.

Is it any wonder that Bill got sick several times a year because of terrible stress, whereas Thomas rarely got sick because he wasn’t stressed? For reasons we do not know, Thomas was able to see things very differently and felt some control over his situation, instead of taking his parents’ behaviors and attitudes personally. Bill, however, felt powerless to protect himself, so he became traumatized. The pattern of sickness for Bill and health for Thomas continued well into their adult lives.

The bottom line is whether we perceive ourselves as powerless in a situation or as having the power to deal with the situation effectively. When we see ourselves as at the effect of a stressor, we are most stressed or traumatized. And that can go right into our bodies and reduce our immune function.

Even minor stressors—if we interpret them negatively or feel powerless against them—can set off smaller symptoms such as colds, viruses, back pains, and allergies. Prolonged or accumulated stresses often lead to more serious ailments. A Johns Hopkins study reviewed data on ninety-five thousand American children and found that nearly half experienced trauma, including physical or emotional abuse or neglect, deprivation, substance-abuse problems, or exposure to violence. Children who had two or more of such experiences were twice as likely to have chronic health problems.³

While the good news is that the effects of traumas can be cleared—we do not have to live with them and let them make us sick—many people are puzzled about why in our relatively affluent society we still struggle to feel happy and physically well. This has led us to ask several important questions:

•Why don’t we often follow medical advice? (According to the American Heart Association, only 10 percent of us will maintain a heart-healthy lifestyle even though we know the measures. Also, only 5 percent of us who study meditation for stress reduction continue to practice it regularly for more than a few months.)

•Why do visualizations, affirmations, diets, and exercise regimens often fail—even when a person is intent on making them succeed?

•Why do physical symptoms or emotional problems seem intractable, even after years of talk therapy?

The answers to these questions lie in hidden beliefs, unresolved traumas, and family downloads. I think of this issue as a metaphor: first you pluck the weeds, then you plant the flowers. Just as flowers will not thrive in a garden full of weeds, so it is in our mindbodies. If healing tools such as visualizations, medicine, or alternative treatments are to work fully and deeply, we need to pluck the weeds of traumas, stresses, negative thoughts and beliefs, and negative parental downloads that act as huge barriers to health and healing.

What do I mean by downloads? All children imitate the behaviors of people around them. A dramatic example is cited in most mid-twentieth-century psychology textbooks. A baby, abandoned in the woods in Mexico, was raised by a wolf that had just given birth to pups. Ten years later, the girl was discovered running on all fours with a pack of wolves and making wolf sounds. Wolf-child stories like this one, though rare, illustrate what we all do: download the positives and negatives from our parents, who did the same thing from their parents. This is why we cannot blame them—or ourselves—for holding thoughts or beliefs that may not serve us. Fortunately, there are tools we can use to clear downloads we do not wish to keep, just as we clear unwanted programs in our computers. You will learn some of them in this book.

As to the plethora of weeds we need to pluck in order to create and sustain the health that’s possible for us, I’d like to share a brief story about how widespread the unconscious weeds are in our culture.

Before I started a training seminar for a group of psychotherapists and health-care professionals in Boston, I made the intuitive decision to open the seminar by asking the audience, How many of you would like to have a totally happy and healthy life? Every hand went up instantly, and everyone agreed this was indeed what they wanted. Then I asked them to inquire further about whether they believed they deserved to have a healthy, happy life and whether it was safe to lead such a life. The results were startling. One hundred percent of the attendees had at least one of two negative belief barriers: either they believed they didn’t truly deserve to be happy and healthy or that it wasn’t safe to be happy and healthy. In addition, 82 percent had both of these negative beliefs. What do these results reveal? That the majority of the self-aware people in that room unknowingly had at least one strong, implacable block to having a fully happy and healthy life—even though they said they wanted that life.

These results were not just from Bostonians; I repeated this survey in ten other cities across the United States and Canada, getting virtually the same results. When I asked each audience at the end of each survey, How many of you have a totally healthy and happy life? only an occasional hand went up. This reality confirms how easy it is for us humans to deceive ourselves.

When I was studying with psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, he often quoted philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who said that the person we lie to most is ourselves. This is not because we are bad people and liars; it is because 95 percent of all our behaviors, both positive and negative, are unconscious. Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Candace Pert, PhD, expressed it for all of us in the title of her audio CD Your Body Is Your Subconscious Mind. She urged the need to translate the language of our bodies to understand what is truly going on, rather than just fixing a single body part like we do with automobiles.

How to Use This Book

If you’re looking for a way to heal, prevent illness, and reduce stress in your life, Your Power to Heal offers practical solutions for plucking the weeds that keep us sick and unhappy and stop us from carrying out health-enhancing practices on a regular basis.

If you will follow the steps and practices outlined in this book you will:

•move from re-covering to dis-covering or uncovering—that is, you will discover what interferes with your total health and happiness instead of re-covering the causes of sickness, which is what most of us do with the medical treatments or drugs we use when we re-cover the cause of the problem

•identify the real sources of stress that make you sick and keep you sick, both physically and emotionally

•tune in to your unconscious body language, translating the language of its symptoms and other expressions so you can heal at the core level, not just rid yourself of a symptom temporarily

•learn powerful tools for healing the underlying causes of symptoms and for ongoing health and happiness

•take steps to integrate a new way of thinking and acting that will enhance your faith in self-healing and your power to create happiness and health

•stop blaming yourself or outside sources and embrace your power to stay committed to daily health-enhancing practices and thoughts

Remember, on a subconscious level we may actually create sickness—not because we are bad people who want to make ourselves miserable, but because there are very real but not-so-conscious reasons that have contributed to the sickness.

Some of the tools in this book will help bring more of the negative and unconscious messages into your conscious awareness so that you can make healthier decisions about how to deal with them and then heal using the other tools provided more effectively. The following tools will help bring your issues into conscious awareness:

1.the Self-Awareness Questionnaire for Abundant Health and Healing (chapter 2)

2.the Seven Questions to ask when you begin to get a physical symptom, including both small and large things such as pain, the sniffles, a migraine, a panic attack, or a serious diagnosis (chapter 3)

3.a Dialogue with Your Disturbed Body Part (chapter 3)

4.a Trauma Checklist (chapter 5) to help you identify past traumatic events that may have impacted your health

5.a Checklist of Negative Beliefs and Downloads (chapter 7) to help you identify which less-conscious and automatic beliefs are operating in creating your symptoms, plus tools to change them from the negative to a positive

You will also learn tools for clearing traumas, negative beliefs, and negative downloads, as well as ones to create new habit patterns of thinking and acting.

How I Learned to Heal Myself

My work with self-healing and helping others to do the same has come out of a lot of personal experience with profound successes in self-healing, not just some airy-fairy theories. It all started back in my early twenties—which is hard for me to believe. How could I have begun to be interested in that when I was so young?

From my mid-teens until my mid-twenties I routinely had severe sore throats and debilitating colds three or more times a year. Then, when I was in graduate school at Boston University, I remember a below-freezing day when I was outdoors repairing a fence so my dog would not get out and run onto the busy highway nearby. I had comprehensive exams coming up in a couple of days, and I had been giving up weekends for several months to study and prepare for them.

As I worked in the icy wind, I started to get a sore throat, which always developed into one of those horrendous colds, and I was concerned about being too sick to take my exams. Damn, I said. This is the last thing I need right now! I could have easily blamed the sore throat on the weather or the person who sneezed around me the day before, which is what most of us humans do when we disown our power. In the past, I usually raced to the doctor for antibiotics. But this time I let myself think something else. I didn’t blame it on something external or seek an outside cure. Instead, I began to see that the body can’t be separated from the mind. This moment was a major turning point on my journey into self-healing.

I suddenly remembered the directed study I had worked on the previous semester about the mindbody connection—there were no such courses offered in graduate psychology programs at that time. In the decades after World War II, researchers believed that a handful of illnesses were mindbody-related: ulcers, asthma, skin disorders, and a few others. As I fixed the fence I wondered: How could there be a mindbody connection with only a few physical problems but not others? How could any part of the body be excluded from the influence of the mind? It didn’t make sense. So I began to ask myself three questions in relation to the early signs of a sore throat:

Why might I need this symptom now?

What would the symptom get for me?

What would it get me out of doing?

With the third question, my immediate thought was that being sick would get me out of taking the comprehensive exams. But I then quickly realized that I clearly did not want that. I was eager to have the exams behind me, and because of my disciplined studying, I was 97 percent prepared. I was looking forward afterward to having time for family, friends, relaxation, and play, so I knew I was not looking for a bad cold to get me out of the exam.

I then moved to a fourth question:

What emotion is being expressed in this symptom?

With that question in my head, I saw my neighbor standing at her kitchen window, which overlooked my backyard, and I felt a deep pang of guilt. Wow, I thought. I must be onto something important! Then I questioned why I felt guilt. I realized that I had projected onto my neighbor that she was angry as she watched me work in this horrible weather when I had not yet helped her father move furniture, as I had promised. I had no idea whether my neighbor even saw me, nor did I know what she was thinking. I was truly projecting, which all human beings are prone to do. However, I did know I wasn’t trying to wriggle out of my promise to her father, for I always keep my word. I planned to move the furniture on Tuesday, the day after I finished my exams, but my projection was causing me to feel guilt, which was going right into my body—and specifically my sore throat.

I then began to wonder: Did I need to get sick with a bad sore throat and cold to punish myself with the guilt? No way! I told myself. I don’t want to pay that price. To reinforce my guiltlessness, I said to myself, When I finish my fence work I’ll call my neighbor and explain that I have not forgotten my promise to her father, that I’ve been preparing for comps, and that after I take them on Monday I’ll be over on Tuesday to move furniture.

Amazingly, within twenty minutes of making that decision to deal with the guilt instead of having my body get sick, my sore throat totally disappeared, and for the first time in years it did not develop into one of those horrible colds! And I had not even called my neighbor yet. I concluded that I had no need for the sore throat anymore, which I have since learned usually applies to most symptoms I get.

That was the last time I’ve gotten sick with a cold, and it has been decades! Since then, any time I notice a little sore throat or the sniffles I stop to ask myself those same four questions. Once I get the answer, I then choose a different way of dealing with the answer rather than paying the price of a cold. I find an answer to one of the questions and then come up with a healthy and productive alternative to being sick. Next, I make a firm commitment to carry it out, and the symptoms cease within minutes. Over the years, I’ve added additional questions to cover more possibilities, as you shall see later in the book. But that was when I started to see, as the new physics now teaches, that it is neither matter nor the body that rules. It is consciousness.

Although I