3 Unconventional Healing Stories to Share at Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving brings family reunion and with that comes animated discussions of politics, sport and culture.
But it also brings unsolicited accounts of your aunt’s IBS and your uncle’s impending knee surgery.
You may have prepared your political talking points but it might be wise to arm yourself with some stories of healing that may be helpful to your loved ones or will at the very least be interesting discussion starters.
These three anecdotes reveal that the state of the mind is ground-zero in chronic health conditions and that nurturing mindfulness and optimism and addressing negative emotions and mindsets are more than nice-to-do’s —> they may actually be the key to regaining good health.
The American political journalist Norman Cousins famously cured himself of Ankylosing Spondylitis by belly laughing for 10 minutes per day and taking high doses of intravenous vitamin C. Norman had always been an optimist and was renowned for his kind nature and love of life.
From his book Anatomy of an Illness, he wrote the following.
"I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep…When the pain-killing effect of the laughter wore off, we would switch on the motion picture projector again and not infrequently, it would lead to another pain-free interval."
He later in life leveraged his unrelenting positive attitude along with exercise, vitamins and garden-fresh food to fight heart disease. He would eventually succumb to heart failure 36 years after being diagnosed with heart disease and 10 years after suffering a major heart attack.
While studying at University of Cambridge, Ashok Gupta experienced a routine viral illness that slowly devolved into chronic fatigue syndrome leaving him mostly bed-bound and unable to engage in academic or social life. After exhausting all medical options, he began to suspect that his continued suffering was the result of an overactive amygdala, an area of the brain responsible for regulating the fear and stress response.
Gupta slowly began incorporating mindfulness, meditation and visualization exercises aimed at re-wiring this part of his brain and calming his brain’s response to stressful stimuli. Within months, he began to notice significant improvements in his symptoms and within one year he returned to normal life.
He used this experience to develop a comprehensive brain retraining course (Gupta Program) that has been effective in giving thousands of people relief from chronic fatigue, long-Covid, Lyme disease, anxiety, depression and more. I recommend his program to my clients and see tremendous value in it regardless of whether you have a chronic condition or not.
Dr. John Sarno is a renowned physician who has assisted thousands in healing from chronic back pain by identifying the emotions (particularly repressed anger) that were causing their back pain.
Despite skeptics in the medical community, many of his patients have reported complete relief from chronic back pain as a result of his non-surgical and non-pharmacological methods. Many of these success cases were in patients who had previously undergone multiple surgeries or therapies before trying his approach.
His book “Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection” has sold over a million copies and has influenced many doctors, therapists and psychologists.
With gratitude,
Jack
Thank you !