self-healing – Pam Grout

Your body has self-healing superpowers

April 22, 2016 39 Comments

“Life is not about healing; it’s about accepting that we are already healed.”–Annie Zalezsak

Yesterday, I invited readers to share a meme from the old paradigm, a meme they are now re-writing, thank you very much.

A wonderful reader named Bob brought up a meme that is in our face night and day. “Getting old means your body is supposed to fall apart.”

This meme is such a big player in the current paradigm that I thought it deserved its own post. We are constantly being slapped around with the crazy idea that our bodies are plotting against us.

Just watch an hour of television. The drugs ads warn us into great vigilance:

Better watch out for this symptom.

Make sure you’re aware of that problem.

It’s only a matter of time until your body is going to reach out and strangle you.

Here’s the ad I’d like to run:

Your body is a self-healing masterpiece. It is brilliantly equipped with natural self-repair mechanisms that fight infections, repair broken proteins, kill cancer cells and keep you in tip-top shape. The only thing that ever stops it from doing its job is your ridiculous belief that it is not your closest ally.

I got this story the other day from a reader of E-Squared. It was one of a long list of things she says she manifested:

“I regulate my own health. If I ever feel like I am going to have an allergy attack or something in my body hurts, I simply give myself command not to entertain it, and the allergy attacks and pain go away immediately. I used to pop anti histamine almost daily in spring and summer seasons. I have not taken any allergy medicine for a while now. I simply tell myself, I don’t believe in allergies and I am the overlord of my body and nervous system. My body obeys what I ask, nicely of course 🙂

“Using this, I have stopped allergy attacks, aches and pains, fever, upset stomach etc. experimenting with my own abilities is just so much fun! Anytime I meditate, I reach a new level of self control and enhancement of my ability to control my own health.”

And lastly, I thought I’d re-run this blog post from a year ago about this very topic. Enjoy!!

“It’s supposed to be a professional secret, but I’ll tell you anyway. We doctors do nothing. We only help and encourage the doctor within.”–Albert Schweitzer

At the party of “anything is possible,” there’s always the one cranky uncle who sits over in the corner. More times than not, the belief that stubbornly refuses to budge is the body as in “My mind has no control over my health, disease, aging, weight and any other fool thing my body decides to do.”

So today, I’ve got a packet of Reese’s Pieces and, like Elliott who was able to lure E.T. out of hiding, I’m hoping to lure out that curmudgeonly uncle to at least take a spin on the dance floor.

Reese Piece No. 1: Dr. Lissa Rankin’s book, Mind Over Medicine. After years of being a physician, Dr. Rankin finally got fed up with the seven minutes she was allowed to see patients and the refusal by her colleagues to acknowledge the most powerful component of a person’s health: their beliefs and their thoughts. Initially, she was as hard-nosed and closed-minded as any doctor, but after investigating 50 years of peer-reviewed medical literature (New England Journal of Medicine and Journal of the American Medical Association, to name a few), she found ample evidence proving that beliefs play a powerful role in a person’s biochemistry and to ignore those findings was irresponsible, a betrayal of the Hippocratic Oath.

Reese’s Piece No. 2: The body is wired to heal itself. Our bodies are self-regulating, healing organisms, constantly striving for homeostasis. But instead of teaching our children this all-important fact, we teach them they need someone or something outside themselves to heal. The minute they get a fever or an ear ache, we rush them to that all-knowing doctor. This, at a very early age, cements in the fallacy that our bodies can’t heal themselves. Most of the thoughts in our default setting are planted before age 5.

Reese’s Piece No. 3: Placebos are often as effective as drugs. Patients have been able to grow hair, drop blood pressure, lower cholesterol, watch ulcers disappear and cure about every other symptom after being treated with nothing but sugar pills. It was their belief they were getting “medicine” that cured them, not the medicine itself.

Dr. Bruce Mosely, a surgeon and team physician for the Houston Rockets, performed arthroscopic knee surgery on two of ten middle-aged, former military guys. Three of the 10 had their knees rinsed (without the scraping) and the other five had no surgical procedure at all. It was an exercise in just pretend. After two years, all ten believed their surgery was a success. What Mosely discovered is that the bigger and more dramatic the patient perceives the intervention to be, the bigger the placebo effect.

Reese’s Piece No. 4: Our beliefs are the hinge on which our bodies function. Rankin tells the story of a guy with tumors the size of oranges. After begging his doctor to try an experimental new drug he’d read about, he was treated with the drug and his tumors disappeared. Several weeks later, reports hit the airwaves that this new drug was not as powerful as originally thought. The tumors returned. His doctor, by now savvy, gave his patient a placebo, telling him it was a stronger form of the drug and that the ineffective trials had been using too little of this powerful drug. Once again, the tumors from his stage 4 lymphoma began to disappear. Finally, the FDA pronounced the drug ineffective and pulled it off the market. The patient, who had been rapidly recovering, died within a week.

Okay, enough candy. I could go on and on about how 79 percent of medical students develop the symptoms they’re studying. Or about the woman with a split personality who has diabetes in one of her personalities and normal sugar levels in the other.

But I’m not a doctor and would never dream of prescribing anything.

But I do know this:

We should teach our children that their bodies have self-healing superpowers.

And we should quit hexing ourselves by looking for disease.

And we should remember that if chimpanzees can lower their blood pressure at will, something Harvard doc, Herbert Benson, discovered in his research, there’s probably not much we CAN’T do to heal ourselves.

Uncle, are you ready for that dance?

Pam Grout is the author of 18 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality and the about to be released, Thank and Grow Rich: a 30-day Experiment in Shameless Gratitude and Unabashed Joy.

Why it’s time to get your “Frozen” on and “Let it go.”

March 19, 2016 22 Comments

You will find that it is necessary to let things go; simply for the reason that they are heavy. —C. Joybell C.

As a long-time journalist, I have been privileged to meet lots of amazing people–actors, artists, politicians and others you may not have heard of, but who are doing world-changing things. Like the principal who dances and sings with his students every morning.

The guest post below was written by a woman I was lucky enough to interview a few years ago for a story for CNN on medical tourism. Her name is Amy B. Scher and not only did she pioneer a healing path for herself, but she now works as an energy therapist who helps others find their way.

I was honored to endorse her new book How To Heal Yourself When No One Else Can and I’m honored today to share this post.

Enjoy!!!

4 Spirit Squashing Patterns You Can Change Right Now

by Amy B. Scher

Happiness comes from being who you really are and accepting yourself as that incredible human being, no matter what. After having successfully figured it out for myself following many years of misery (much of that misery being accidentally self-inflicted), I’m here to give you some short cuts.

As an energy therapist, my job is to help people be happy and free – and it always happens once they start honoring their already-awesome selves. There are several unhealthy life patterns I consider “spirit squashers,” which make ultimate self-love, acceptance, and well-being very difficult to achieve.

Are any of these patterns keeping you from being who you really are?

You Are Not In Need of Self-Help; You Are In Need of Self-love

Before we get to the good stuff, there is one question that I get often and want to address. Then we’ll start talking about – and releasing – unhealthy emotional patterns: “If we are supposed to love and accept ourselves for who we are, why are we trying to change so much about ourselves?” The answer is simple: We don’t want to change who we are, but we do want to change anything in our life that isn’t working for us. We don’t need to keep unhealthy patterns that have become part of our lives but are not part of our best selves. For example, I’m an impatient person by nature sometimes. When clients hear me say that, they wonder why I don’t “fix it.” But the truth is, that’s just part of who I am and it’s okay with me. It doesn’t inhibit my quality of life. I don’t want to spend my whole life nitpicking my personality. I want to spend my life living in the freest way possible, accepting all that I can about myself and changing only what really hinders my quality of life.

You are not in need of self-help; you are in need of self-love. Self-love is all about transforming only the things that prevent you from living your biggest, best life.

You may have practiced some of these unhealthy patterns for a very long time—quite possibly, for your whole life. They are probably threaded into your being to such a great degree that when you read them, you might not even recognize they don’t have to be that way. But that’s the beauty here. You can change any pattern that’s not working for you, no matter when you may have learned it.

4 Unhealthy Patterns That Squash Your Spirit

Draining vocabulary : These are words like “chronic,” “busy,” “overwhelmed,” and “anxiety.” All these words are stressful. And what you tell yourself matters. If you don’t want to be stressed, don’t tell yourself that you’re busy, overwhelmed, and anxiety-ridden, or chronically ill. Not too relaxing, right?
Negative self-talk : Imagine for a moment that our bodies obey each thing we tell our- selves as if it’s a command. It does not filter or translate; it simply takes it in and acts. Now, the scary part is, you don’t have to imagine. You are, with your internal self-talk, commanding your cells to believe or do as you say—either verbally or internally. Make sure you don’t have a “shitty committee” in your brain running the show, okay? When I hear mine, I say out loud, in my most fun and loving tone, “I call bullsh*t!” That’s it. It’s a light and silly way of holding yourself responsible for changing this pattern.
Victim mentality: This is a pattern that I had somehow mastered, although it took years for me to realize it. My personal pattern was fairly subtle, but once I saw it, boy, did I see it! I’ll go so far as to say this pattern can be an addiction for some—the pattern of blaming outside circumstances, playing the part of “poor, pitiful me,” or claiming little to no responsibility for one’s life circumstances. The difficulty with identifying this pattern is that it shows up in so many ways, and they aren’t always obvious. Consider making a pact with yourself: Don’t have conversations (with yourself or others) that support this pattern. Simply refuse to let yourself go there.
Taking things personally: We were all born as wonderful, self-centered works of art. As human beings, we tend to be self-focused, and that’s okay a lot of the time. But it can get us into big trouble, too, because we tend to interpret everything as if it is personal. It’s all too easy from our human vantage point to see the opinions and actions of others as direct reflections of our own wrongdoing.I also use the visualization of a burning forest fire when I’m having difficulty with taking things personally. I imagine the person whom I am being upset by as a burning fire in a large wooded area. In this visualization, I draw a circle around the fire with a stick. I then know that I can be anywhere in that forest (symbolic of my own life and my own energy field) and be safe from the heat and sparks. I allow the fire (symbolic of the person in this specific situation) to be angry or do whatever it needs to do to burn out or dissolve. However, I don’t allow myself to be affected. This is very helpful for me in staying grounded when others are upset, either in general or specifically with me.

Now that you know about these patterns, do something about them, okay? Because there’s only one guaranteed way to be happy – and that’s to let that big beautiful spirit of yours soar.

Amy B. Scher is a leading voice in the field of mind-body healing and author of How To Heal Yourself When No One Else Can: A Total Self-Healing Approach for Mind, Body, and Spirit (Llewellyn Worldwide). She has been featured on healthcare blogs, CNN, Curve magazine, Elephant Journal, Cosmopolitan, and the San Francisco Book Review. Amy lives by her self-created motto: When life kicks your ass, kick back. She can be found online at www.AmyBScher.com.

Why it’s only prudent to give every event in your life a five-star review

July 21, 2014 29 Comments

“Our thoughts have the power to instantly release positive energy, or to entangle energy.”—Michele Longo-O’Donnell

I’m reading Dr. Joe Dispenza’s book, You are the Placebo. Here’s the fifth sentence: “On a beautiful Southern California day in April, I had the privilege of being run over by an SUV in a Palm Springs triathlon.”

Say what? The privilege of being run over? That day, when he broke six vertebrae, changed his life forever. The work he’s doing now as a speaker, author and researcher would never have happened without the experiment he conducted after doctors told him his one chance of ever walking again was to have a very complicated Harrington rod surgery.

He was 23, just cocky enough to think, “I am going to heal myself. I am going to put all my conscious attention on this intelligence within me. I am going to surrender to this greater, unlimited power and allow it to heal me.”

Doctors, of course, thought he was plum nuts. But nine and a half weeks after the accident, he walked back into his life—without a body cast or surgery. Within ten weeks he was again seeing patients at his chiropractic clinic and training with weights.

No matter what happens in our lives, we have the choice of how we will interpret it. For me, it only makes sense to proclaim “This is the best thing that ever happened to me.” No matter what it is.

Yesterday, a treasured member of one of my power posses told two stories that perfectly illustrate this principle.

She lives on a farm, by herself, and noticed last week there were hundreds of wasps swarming her grill. Sure enough, she opened the grill and found a wasps’ nest as big as a Frisbee. At first, like any sensible person, she panicked and began pacing. But only for a short time. Only long enough to remember this important truth: “I have control over the energy I put forth into the universe and this is not what I want to emit.”

She calmly let go of her wasp dilemma and said to the universe, “Okay, this is your deal. I’m going to trust this will all work out.”

On Friday, she noticed the wasps were no longer circling. Very gingerly, she opened the grill and the Frisbee-sized wasp nest was gone. Disappeared. No longer.

That same week, her car broke down on the side of the highway. Her phone, she noticed, had two percent power left. Once again, she started to panic. But again realized, “I only want to put out clear, trusting energy.”

On a hunch, she pulled down her visor and a card fell out. She’d completely forgotten she had AAA roadside assistance. And with her 2 percent phone power, she called and patiently waited while a very slow-talking operator finally took down her details. Within 10 minutes, a tow truck showed up, delivered her car to a repair shop and took her safely to where she needed to be.

The next day her car was ready and, when she pulled out a card to pay, was told: “No charge. Your car’s still under warranty.”

“Under warranty?” she said. “My car is more than 10 years old.”

Not only that, but the tow truck driver asked her out on a date.

So I ask you? What energy do you put out when things do not appear to be working in your favor? It’s always your choice.

Pam Grout is the author of 17 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality and the soon-to-be-released sequel, E-Cubed, 9 More Experiments that Prove Mirth, Magic and Merriment is your Full-time Gig.