There are many diverse health belief systems that share a thread of commonality, they include an expression of beliefs in the power of our thoughts, words, prayers and affirmations to heal.   Our thoughts and words are energy, and energy affects matter.  Understanding this helps us make the connection to seeing how the healing responses found in energy medicine and mind/body medicine practices can manifest, and how cases of spontaneous healing are possible.  Our thoughts and beliefs about healing profoundly affect our ability to heal, and our actual experience of healing. Personal development coach, lecturer and writer James Arthur Ray, the author of  Success Certain Coaching, The Science of Success and Harmonic Wealth always reminds us that “Energy flows where attention goes” and many of us believe this. I will be exploring some of the holistic healing theories from various sources that support this belief.

In Germany between the years 1098-1179 there lived a women some consider the original holistic healer, Hildegard von  Bingen. Her family dedicated her to the religious life at the young age of eight years old and gave her into the keeping of what would later become a Benedictine convent where she grew up. Hildegard took over leadership in 1136 and began to write of her visions of the Living Light. Hildegard was a deeply spiritual and prolific writer who left behind a scholarly collection of letters, writings of her visions and illuminated art of them, songs, music, drama, critical studies and works on her regimen for spiritual well-being stressing the importance of balance and harmony in daily life as well as proper diet, fasting, herbalism, aromatherapy, sound therapy, praying and incantation, laying on of hands, light energy, hydrotherapy and material on the therapeutic use of twenty-six semi-precious stones. She often prescribed minerals and gemstones for healing, gold for arthritis, emeralds for heart pain, jasper for hay fever or cardiac arrhythmia, gold topaz for loss of vision, blue sapphire for eye inflammation. She studied, wrote and documented over 300 medicinal herbs found in Europe.  

 Her work was a combination of classical medicine, having studied Galen and Pliny, and the contemporary medical texts of Salerno, and included the tradition of monastic medicine of her time, the popular folk medicine and magical practices such as the use of charms and incantations, the old knowledge from antiquity. She believed sin and imbalanced humors to be the cause of disease, the energy of life came from God and that healing must be more than just a physical process.   Her approach to health was a holistic one that encompassed the mind, body, spirit and the cosmos. She believed that health was more than the absence of symptoms of disease, and called for balance and 
moderation in all aspects of life, and required the belief in heavenly grace to facilitate the  healing.   That was about 900 years ago and not exactly what we would call New Age.Our holistic health practices have long, deep, ancient roots in the natural and spirit world that are indisputable. 

What does the scientific approach offer to the discussion on healing? Let’s explore the work of Dr. Bruce Lipton, Ph.D. Dr. Lipton is a cell biologist who pioneered important studies at Stanford University’s School of Medicine and is the author of The Biology of Belief, in which he explains the new science of Epigenetics, revealing that we are not controlled by our DNA as was previously believed, but that the most
important way to influence our biology is with the energy of our beliefs. One example he provides to illustrate how perception controls biology is a lab experiment in which cells were placed in a dish, nutrients were added and the cells moved towards the perceived growth the nutrients represented, but cells placed in a dish with toxins moved away from the toxins in response to a perceived threat. He also
explains the chemistry of stress and love, and how the mind, body and immune system changes with each emotional state.

Dr. Andrew Weil, in his book Spontaneous Healing, shares his observation of the seven attitudes that he found common in many people who experienced spontaneous healing from terminal illness. The patients did not accept that nothing more could be done or take no for an answer; they actively sought help with healing therapies; they sought out others who had been healed; they formed constructive partnerships with health professionals; they didn’t hesitate to make radical life changes; they saw their illness as a gift; they kept active and had positive attitudes. They fully recovered from terminal illness after being sent home to die. Their desire to live and their positive outlooks and habits elevated their vibrations and returned them to health.  

Caroline Myss, PhD. is a Medical Intuitive and has studied for over 20 years why people do not heal. She explains in her Advanced Energy Anatomy CD series that illness can be a path to empowerment. Some people see their illness as a great gift that encourages major life changes and brings increased gratitude for the abundance of their lives. Letting go of negativity and unforgiveness, determining the cause of illness through self-assessment and reclaiming your personal power are key to healing. In her  CD Why people Don’t Heal and How They Can she suggests that people don’t heal because they use illness to gain intimacy and even personal power over others.   In her opinion, having the “victim” mentality is the first obstacle to healing.

In his book Being in Balance Dr. Wayne Dyer takes this another step forward by suggesting that it is not what you eat that makes you unhealthy, it is what you think about what you eat that makes you unhealthy. If your beliefs are thoughts and your thoughts are energy, and if you’ve convinced yourself what you’re about to eat or do is going to have a deleterious effect on your body, then you are believing in something that is not yet a material reality, only a thought, but by holding on to that thought you facilitate the process of making it a material reality. According to Dr. Dyer believing passionately in something positive that doesn’t exist right now, like a perfectly healthy body, is also possible to manifest by adopting the idea that your brain and body can turn any fuel into health happy cells, and then looking around for evidence that supports this belief rather than attaching yourself to non-health producing belief systems. You simply develop your powers of manifestation sufficiently that you can manifest thought into form. 

Doreen Virtue, PhD., in her recent book Divine Magic, the Seven Secrets of  Manifestation discusses the Classic Hermetic Manual known as the Kybalion, a teaching manual for understanding the use of alchemy and divine magic. The teachings are based on the Hermetic principles, named after Hermes Trimegistus, the great spiritual teacher of ancient Egypt who wrote books and lectured about the power of the mind to create and heal. Most students of the Kybalion and of metaphysics understand that thoughts create reality.    The Kybalion teaches a method of focusing the mind for greater powers of  manifestation called mentalism.

In an article entitled Prayer Can Save your Life, in Prevention Magazine October 2002, Ellen Michand wrote of a study conducted on heart patients at Duke University, led by cardiologist Dr. Mitch Krukoff, MD that seems to confirm the power of prayer to heal. Dr. Krukoff conducted a study of 150 men, all of whom had a heart catheterization and were very ill. The men were divided into five groups, one of the groups received stress relaxation training, another group received imagery training and a third group received therapeutic touch, a fourth group was prayed for by a variety of people including Baptists and Buddhists, the fifth group was the control group and received none of these. Compared with the control group results, the groups that received imagery, therapeutic touch and relaxation training had a 20 – 30 % reduction in complications, the group that was prayed for had a 50% reduction in heart abnormalities and a 100% reduction in clinical outcomes such as heart attacks.

From a holistic health perspective mind/body medicine techniques are behavioral medicine, because they are believed to assist the individual with rebalancing themselves and creating health by replacing limiting negative beliefs with positive thoughts, behaviors and attitudes, breaking old harmful cycles of stress, anxiety, symptoms and disease patterns.   The individual becomes more empowered in the situation and it is believed this has a positive effect on their beliefs about healing, which then facilitates the healing. Some types of mind/body medicine that can be learned for self-healing are breathwork, meditation, yoga, visualization and guided imagery. Others that may require
a professionally trained practitioner are hypnotherapy, neuro linguistic programming (NLP), emotional freedom technique (EFT), biofeedback and psychoneuroimmunology (PNI).

Breathwork is a safe, effective, powerful method of self-healing for accessing both the inner self and the higher self through relaxation, making it very easy to heal suffering caused by unconscious trauma, old emotional wounds and unresolved feelings which have been kept buried in our subconscious minds and have a serious impact on our emotional, psychological and physical health, obstructing healing.

Meditation contributes to one’s psychological and physiological wellbeing because it brings the brainwave pattern into an alpha state. It is an active state of  consciousness, reached at between 8 and 13 Hz or waves per second. Alpha waves frequently occur during daydreaming, and are associated with a state of meditation which is known to promote healing. Alpha is associated with relaxed reflection. Alpha waves become stronger when your eyes are closed.

Guided Imagery is another excellent example of a mind/body medicine technique that is powerful and very effective. More than visualization, in guided imagery even the sounds and smells are recalled to bring the imagery to life.   In an article entitled Imagine Your Way to Better Health featured in Alive Magazine in October 2008 freelance writer Handan T. Satiroglu, a devotee of guided imagery, writes from personal experience with the healing properties of this technique of engaging the subconscious mind and the imagination to create desired mind/body responses.   Dr. Georgianna Donadio of the National Institute of Whole Health in New England is quoted in the article, “Specific thoughts create specific neurotransmitters, which in turn create specific manifestations in our health – or disease”.

There are many conditions capable of blocking healing energy including negative attitudes, unwillingness and fears. Mental attitudes play a major role in blocking healing. Focusing your attention on worries and fears will normally attract like vibrations and outcomes, and the same is true for focusing on positive thoughts and outcomes. Mental stress, anger and negative thoughts and feelings may cause this state. Inability or unwillingness to assert self-control contributes to the problem. One can learn techniques such as meditation, affirmations, and chakra clearing practices, breathwork and guided imagery to induce deeply relaxes states of mind naturally. 

Holistic health practitioners healing beliefs have not changed that much since ancient times. The belief that our thoughts and words are energy that can alter matter to a harmonious state of balance will endure. We will continue to seek, teach and perfect our methods and abilities in holistic healing practices. With our undying curiosity and creativity wewill continue to discover new sciences that prove that our thoughts affect our biology.   It seems to be ancient wisdom that energy flows where our attention goes. 

Moira Khouri