H e a l t h T h o u g h t s

How our thinking affects our health

Why caring about Cecil the lion is good for our health

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@Glowimages: Lion (Panthera leo) sitting in a path, Okavango Delta, Botswana
© GLOW IMAGES

I live not far from the Minnesota dentist/big-game hunter who killed a treasured African lion by luring him out of his protected national park, wounding him with an arrow and then tracking him for two days before finishing him off with a gun.  My British Columbia colleague, Anna Bowness-Park, helps us understand that the uproar (pun intended) caused by this kind of brutal slaughter, indicates a moral shift that can have profound effects on both societal and individual health.  Here’s Anna…

The senseless killing of Cecil, the nationally beloved lion in Zimbabwe by an American big-game hunter has provoked a media storm of angry protest and controversy.  Closer to home last year, Cheeky, a grizzly bear beloved by the First Nations who shared his territory, was shot and killed by an unapologetic NHL hockey star.  This angered First Nations’ people as well as many other British Columbians.

But the critical newspaper articles and social media frenzy in response to what has been historically a commonplace practice – i.e., hunting – indicates that these instances (and others) have awoken something in our hearts.  Is it that the senseless killing of creatures for nothing more than the purpose of sport is beginning to make less and less sense as we grow in our understanding of the connectedness and value of all life?…

Cecil and Cheeky may be rallying points for public anger, but there is no doubt that the moral compass regarding how we treat each other and the animals with whom we share this planet is undergoing a major rethink in Western society.  But does it have any staying power amid our flighty attention spans?  I think it does, especially as we begin to understand that how we treat each other and our fellow creatures is essential to both individual as well as universal health.

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Defeating fear of Ebola will help defeat Ebola

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© GLOW IMAGES (model used for illustrative purposes only)
© GLOW IMAGES (model used for illustrative purposes only)

I’m not an authority on dealing physically with contagious diseases but I do know about handling fear.  I’ve learned that stopping fear of disease can go a long way toward stopping disease itself.

The Christian Science Monitor quoted Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank Group:  “There are two kinds of contagion, one is related to the virus itself and the other is related to the spread of fear about the virus.  Both contagions must be defeated.”

This Daily Mail article agrees that worry and fear are often unhealthy and linked to various health problems:  “Ebola: A crash course in fear and how it hurts us.”  (See related article, “Five Rock Solid Ways to Master Fear.)

Just how connected the contagion of fear about Ebola is to the actual spread of the virus is becoming more widely understood.  What happens in our thinking does not stay in our thinking.  Fears can be manifested in our bodies.  Protecting ourselves and our communities from Ebola and wiping it out, is as much about what we do mentally as physically.
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Is spiritual-based healing weird?

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prayer-booth-580 jpg
Photo courtesy Zach Alexander, licensed under Creative Commons

My Texas colleague, Keith Wommack, uses a simple analogy to explain how spiritualizing our thinking to heal our body can go from new and strange, to natural and effective.  Here’s Keith…

While in a meeting, a newspaper editor, after learning that I practiced spiritual-based healing, said, “Since Christian Science is weird, it … “

The editor stopped mid-sentence, looked at me, and said, “Oh, I’m so sorry.  I didn’t mean to say weird. I’m so sorry.”

After the editor apologized several more times, I said, “Forget about it. It’s okay,” and we went back to our pleasant discussion.

The editor’s “Weird” comment reminded me of ’73.  In 1973, I was in Brad Shearer‘s kitchen.  Brad and I attended high school together.  He was a star football player who went on to play for the Texas Longhorns and the Chicago Bears.

While in Brad’s kitchen, I watched as he took a large glass measuring cup and cracked eight eggs into it.  After whipping the eggs, he opened the door of a small machine, placed the measuring cup inside, closed the door, and turned a dial.  A minute or so later, he opened the door, took out the cup, and began eating the eggs with a fork.  Weird!

Weird, because in ’73 I had never heard of, much less, seen a microwave oven.  How did those eggs cook in just a minute?

Just as the microwave seemed weird to me in ’73, the thought of providing prayer for illness or pain can seem the same to you when you first encounter it.  However, both are effective.  Both utilize laws.  The microwave transforms food. Spiritual treatments can transform people.  Both accomplish this from the inside out.

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To be healthy – focus on HEALTH, not disease

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@Glowimages PVL00559.
© GLOW IMAGES (models used for illustrative purposes only)

If your test comes back negative, you’re glad because “They found nothing.”

Is that really true?  Was nothing found?

Yes, the diseased condition or problem they were looking for isn’t there.  Then what is there?  Health.  And health is not nothing, it’s something.  Something was found.

It’s popular to think of health just as the absence of disease.  I remember being struck by this years ago while in a “health” food store.  Every product was geared not on wellness, but on treating or warding off sickness.

Most agree that our health care system is primarily designed for the treatment, management and sometimes prevention of disease rather than establishing and maintaining health.

Recent efforts to promote healthy lifestyles as a path to wellness mostly emphasize nutrition and exercise.  There’s been little shift in how we think of health.  People still see these lifestyle changes as strategies to evade disease.

Accepted logic says that disease is inevitable and you deal with it either through mainstream or alternative treatment, management and prevention.  But that’s upside down.  What about gaining a better understanding of health itself?

Health and wellness are our normal state of being.  Shouldn’t we begin with health as inevitable, lasting and powerful and disease as a detour?  Or at least with health as the rule and sickness as the exception?

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Dr. Eben Alexander Says It’s Time for Brain Science to Graduate From Kindergarten

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© GLOW IMAGES

In a previous post I wrote:  “I didn’t use to have any belief in spirituality….it was very upsetting for me to think about the possibility of death.  What bothered me most was the fear that I wouldn’t be able to think anymore….I’ve wrestled with the question of whether my consciousness is in my head, or something higher…and gained a conviction that whatever happens to my body or my brain, my conscious life will continue.”

What follows is an interview by my colleague, Ingrid Peschke, with Dr. Eben Alexander — a man who actually experienced my conviction.  What he says about God, unconditional love and immortality, has paradigm-shattering implications for healing and health.  Here’s Ingrid…

Anyone who openly declares that consciousness is not brain is going to get some attention. Especially when it’s from an established neurosurgeon whose knowledge of brain science includes 25 years of clinical practice, including 15 years at the Brigham & Women’s and the Children’s Hospitals and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Dr. Eben Alexander has collected his fair share of skeptics over the claims he’s made in his New York Times bestseller, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife.

After a year of being on the shelves for public consumption, his book has sometimes taken a beating from critics who have poked holes in his story of surviving a very rare case of meningitis, which virtually destroyed his neocortex (the side of the brain that makes us human) and nearly left him dead or at best a vegetable.

Still, no one can dispute the proof that he’s alive and well today.

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Healthy summer unplugging

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© GLOW IMAGES

 

Here’s my colleague Bob Cummings from Michigan (which also has a few beautiful lakes) on how to unplug for health.  He provides references at the bottom, giving you a choice to plug into them…or not.

Vacations – Unplugged And Then Some – For Health and Well-being

Today marks the official start of summer, and for many, summer is vacation time.

Research has found that vacations are beneficial for health and well-being, at least in the short run.

For example, one study¹ looked at fifty-three employees and measured physical complaints and the quality of sleep and mood both 10 days before and 3 days after vacations. These measures all improved. And then, again, five weeks after vacations, the employees still reported fewer physical complaints. The study concluded that vacations may improve well-being on a short-term basis.

Perhaps not surprisingly, though, it depends on the nature of the vacation. For example, other studies² have found that:

  • Health-related vacation outcomes depend on how a vacation is organized.
  • Choosing especially pleasant vacation activities is better for health and well-being.
  • Working during a vacation negatively influences health and well-being after vacation.

Stress has adverse effects on health, which means that reducing stress is good for health. So one point of a vacation is to vacate our work and it’s responsibilities and any related stress.

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Also featured in West Central Tribune

Curing the incurable

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Here is a guest post from my Australian colleague Beverly Goldsmith.  She tells from her own experience how incurable migraines were cured.

A spiritual response to: National Headache and Migraine Awareness Week

Do migraine sufferers want to just ‘manage’ headaches, or would they prefer permanent freedom from this complaint? I know what my preference would be!

In writing about National Headache and Migraine Awareness Week, September 17-23rd, Professor Paul R Martin, Adjunct Professor, School of Psychology and Psychiatry, Monash University, and Head of “Conquer Headaches – The Headache and Migraine Program“, suggests how people can learn to cope with headache/migraine triggers.

From early in my life I experienced migraine headaches. My parents tried to find a cure for them. Doctors were consulted, drugs prescribed, and treatments undertaken. Numerous theories were put forward as to the possible cause. There was even a theological notion that I had to endure this affliction because it was God’s will.  Finally, we accepted the medical diagnosis that the headaches were triggered by a particular food. I stopped eating it. The headaches diminished in number, but they certainly weren’t cured.

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The secret to a long and healthy life?

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The other day was my birthday.  I asked my wife who was born in the same year, “How old are we now?”

I asked because we try not to think of ourselves as a certain age and get bogged down with limiting predictions about getting older.

A few days later I read an article about finding the fountain of youth which had quotes from the great Hall-of-Fame baseball pitcher, Satchel Paige.  He asked, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?”  Hmm…I’m still pondering that one.

And in his inimitable, lite-yet-deep way, he gives us this wisdom:  “Age is mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.”

September is Healthy Aging Month, and I’ve been thinking about what’s needed to age healthily.  It seems that expectations for how healthy or active we will be at certain ages keep evolving as people live longer.  Our perspectives keep shifting.

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Our path to health – there must be something more than drugs

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Before we let go of summer, here’s a beach memory.

When I was a kid, my family rented a house on Fire Island, NY for seven summers in a row.  I remember long, slow walks on the beach with the constant sound of crashing waves in my ears.  Like a lot of people, I found those walks would help me get a clearer perspective on my life.

What is it about walking along the seashore and hearing that continuous sound that clears our head?  I think it has to do with a sense that the waves will never stop.  There’s something inevitable, almost eternal about that sound.

We know the ocean won’t change.  Short of maybe a nuclear explosion, there’s nothing on earth that could keep those waves from coming.  Hearing that steady rhythm gives us a sense of something we can always depend on.  And that feeling calms us and helps simplify all the temporary, changeable things we’re dealing with; we end up with peace and direction.

The other day here in Edina, I was standing in the Walgreens parking lot.  The steady sound of cars on York Avenue wasn’t as nice as the ocean waves, but for a minute it seemed to give me a similar clarity.  I looked half a block north and saw the new CVS.  I thought, “How can two almost identical stores survive right next to each other?  And the Super Target is right across the street selling all the same stuff!”

The answer hit me in a flash – drugs.

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Olympic observations – confidence is key

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As a wrestler in high school, one thing I noticed was that if you had total confidence in a certain move, even if the opponent knew it was coming and tried to stop it, he couldn’t.  I knew I could do my favorite moves on anybody – and I did.

Recently I was talking about this phenomenon with a local Minnesota high school wrestling coach who visited our church.  He told me how he teaches his team the advantage of the right mental approach to their matches.

He said some kids get it and some don’t.  The ones who do often go into “the zone” during a match and become impossible to defeat.  They wrestle at a level beyond what they have done to that point and even beyond what the coach believes they’re physically capable of.

As my wife and I have watched the London Olympics, we repeatedly saw athletes shattering their own personal bests.  The announcers sometimes described the special mental state of confidence these same competitors strive to cultivate both before and during their events.

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