The Healing Within

How Your State of Mind

Can Promote Health and Healing

Many of us don’t realize how much stress we are under, and what an impact this can have on our health. Sometimes, we discover this only when a medical crisis suddenly makes a major change in our lives. Then, under the guidance of doctors who can advise and monitor the practices which are best for our particular conditions, we may finally learn to cope.

Cancer patients and heart patients have the greatest motivation for handling stress and fatigue – they know it’s a matter of life and death. The doctors who help them have developed specific medical techniques, adapting age-old human behaviors to the present day, with the benefit of insights gained through modern medical technology and scientific research.

This booklet and DVD are about how, with your doctor’s advice, you can handle stress and fatigue better, based on a look at (1) cutting edge cancer treatments in Paris, and (2) the application of techniques refined in thirty years of cardiology practice, scientifically proven now explained by emerging scientific studies at Harvard Medical School.

It’s up to you – your health and happiness can benefit, and maybe you’ll avoid serious disease.

A Little Stress Is Good; Too Much Stress Is Very Bad

A little stress is a good thing. You can feel stress and anxiety when watching a sports event, or  playing a game, or doing a job, or raising a child. A little stress is exciting, interesting, fun; it motivates you to do things.

But too much stress is a bad thing. Dr Benson of Harvard Medical School uses this graph to show how increasing stress raises your performance and efficiency until you reach a certain point – after that point, more stress causes your performance and efficiency to decline; too much stress, and your performance and efficiency disappear.

Courtesy of Herbert Benson, MD and the Mind/Body Medical Institute www.mbmi.org

Chronic stress – stress that never lets up – is even worse than occasional stress. It can weaken your immune system, make you vulnerable to disease, and make it harder to recover from illness. Over 60% of healthcare visits are related to mind-body stress induced conditions.

There are ways to combat stress – to help prevent and cure disease.

Courtesy of Herbert Benson, MD and the Mind/Body Medical Institute www.mbmi.org

You can’t control all the stressful conditions in your life. Stressful situations arise in your job, personal relationships, or family. There is even more stress if you lose a job or a relationship. Any change is stressful. If you’re sick, that too is a source of stress.

So what can you do about the stress in your life?

You can learn to manage your own reaction to stressful conditions, so that they bother you less and you can cope better with your situation, to get done what you want to do.

The key is breaking the chain of stressful everyday thoughts, and becoming more aware of your own body and thoughts, your reactions to stressful situations.

The Body Reacts to Stress

Before modern civilization, people often needed to react physically to stressful situations, to actually run away or to fight in self defense. So when our mind signals danger, our body reacts with a “fight or flight” response; a cascade of biochemical events, including release of the hormone adrenalin in the blood stream, which cause the heart to beat faster, our blood pressure, respiration and pulse to increase, and our brain waves to speed up, all of which prepares our body for violent physical action – running or fighting.

Today, stress and danger rarely call for a violent physical response. If our boss threatens to fire us, or our spouse threatens to leave, that’s stressful and our body gets ready to run or fight. But this will make things worse, not better. We need to react with thoughtful words, even though our body is getting ready to run or fight. In a stressful situation we need to avoid getting too excited, and calm down our natural physical reaction to get ready to run or fight, so that we can cope with the situation in a constructive way.

Surprisingly, we often aren’t aware how stressed we are. We know we aren’t going to run or fight, so we ignore the fact that this is exactly what our bodies are preparing to do, and the muscles of our shoulders, back, neck, and face may tighten up and stay tight, along with other symptoms.

How To Manage Stress

To manage the physical effects of stress on our body, we first have to recognize these effects, and then learn to reverse them, with the guidance of our doctors.

Heart patients learn this to avoid their next heart attack, and cancer patients learn it to overcome the fatigue of their disease and its treatment, in order to better fight the disease.

The key to managing stress is breaking the chain of everyday thoughts. By doing this, we stop repeating the things that worry us. This evokes a relaxation response which is the opposite of the fight or flight response.

The relaxation response is a physical state with a clear biological definition. Our heart beats slower, our blood pressure, respiration and pulse all decrease, and our brain waves slow down. This calms us down so that we can deal with stressful situations effectively. It is exactly the opposite of what happens when our body prepares to run or fight.

There are many ways to evoke this relaxation response. A repetitive activity helps us break the chain of our everyday thoughts. The repetitive activity can be a dance, walking, running, karate exercises, or calisthenics, or merely sitting still and repeating a word or phrase, perhaps using worry beads or a rosary, or simply following our own breath.

Courtesy of Herbert Benson, MD and the Mind/Body Medical Institute www.mbmi.org

The medical point of this is to stop stressing ourselves with our everyday concerns.

Courtesy of Herbert Benson, MD and the Mind/Body Medical Institute www.mbmi.org

It’s easy to tell when this is working. Thoughts always come to mind, but we can let them pass through like a cloud in the sky, rather than becoming interested in them and following them up as a chain of thought. Our breath slows down and our facial muscles relax. We can feel this ourselves, without the need to take our blood pressure or pulse or to wire our heads with electrodes to measure the alpha waves our minds are generating. If our heads are wired with electrodes though, for example to play the brainball game, the change in our mental state can be displayed on a video screen. As we relax more, we score.

The brain photos below are from a scientific study. In the top two images the patterns of a person who is not meditating remain the same from left to right. In the bottom two images, the meditator’s brain pattern starts out similar to the non-meditator’s (lower left) but after a period of  meditation the brain activity has quieted greatly (lower right) and is dominated by the generation of slower alpha waves rather than faster beta waves.

Courtesy of Herbert Benson, MD and the Mind/Body Medical Institute www.mbmi.org

Anyone can do it, and by doing it daily for 10 to 20 minutes, we can practice achieving and recognizing this relaxed state of mind at will. Once we have accomplished that, we can do a “mini” meditation for a minute or less at any time, for example when stuck in traffic. When we do it, we can feel our minds and bodies relax, and counter the effects of stress.

Once we have learned to let go of everyday thoughts at will, we can use this technique to take a brief rest from stress, and we can become more mindful of our own mind and body. This mindfulness allows us to become aware of what we are telling ourselves that stresses us out, and to deliberately counter this with a more constructive train of thoughts.

For example, if we are stuck in traffic and do a “mini” (while the car is stopped in a safe place and in park!) we might become more aware of our own body and mind, and notice that our shoulders are tense and that we feel panicky that we’ll be late to an appointment. We might notice thoughts like “I’ll never get there; This always happens to me. My whole day is ruined,” the kind of thoughts that build stress. We might counter this anxiety by telling ourselves that everyone else is stuck in this traffic too just like us, and that there’s nothing any of us can do about it at the moment. I can handle it; it’s not a big deal. The worst that will happen is that we’ll be 5 minutes late.. We might remind ourselves that there is really no need or no benefit in getting upset about the situation, stressing ourselves out with worry, and we might as well relax and listen to some music on the car radio. And we might live longer as a result, as well as becoming more productive and efficient.

Many Ways to Do This

Most people find that formal meditation is the best way to do this. Sit quietly for a period of time, eyes closed or almost so, hands resting comfortably together in the lap, and when everyday thoughts intrude as they will, let them go and gently bring the mind back to a repetitive word, phrase, or thought which might be related to your own personal outlook.

There are other ways to do this as well; find what’s best for you, with your doctor’s guidance. Walking, running, dance, repetitive calisthenics such as those used in karate, are examples of repetitive activities. When everyday thoughts intrude, you can bring your mind back to the activity, fully conscious in a relaxed way of every part of your body, what you are doing, and everything around you. Of course, in these energetic activities the heart and pulse rate and breathing rate rise rather than fall, as appropriate to the physical activity itself. As with formal meditation, the brain waves will slow and you could (if properly equipped) measure the activity generated by your brain to confirm this.

In the case of cancer patients, doctors find for many patients that the right amount of this kind of physical activity is a particularly good complement to formal meditation. The disease and its treatment by chemotherapy or radiation therapy often lead to a deep fatigue, a fatigue which doesn’t end with any amount sleep or rest. Research has shown that certain types of exercise, like walking, help counter the fatigue.

The medical objective is to modify your physical and mental response to the stressful conditions of your life, to handle stress better. Break the chain of everyday thoughts that stress you out. Open your mind to awareness of your own body and mind, and find more positive thoughts to counter the thoughts that stress you.

A Traditional Cure

People have been doing this from the beginning of time. Many tribal peoples practice repetitive dance rituals. Worry beads have long been used in many cultures. Repetitive prayers are found in all religions – the Jesus prayer, the Hail Mary often with a rosary, Shalom Israel, Inshallah Allah, Om, Mani Padme Hum are just a few examples.

We are not dealing here with religious meditation, or any of the many types of meditation practiced for spiritual goals. Here, we are dealing solely with an application of an ancient human behavior, for medical purposes. A religious person might find a repetitive prayer very appropriate for this type of meditation. A nonreligious person might just as easily use the word Peace, or Love, or the number One, or any other word or phrase that seems right to relax and quiet the mind. 

Medical advances in the field of drugs and surgery have been so impressive in the last 150 years, have done so much good in curing illness and disease, and are so necessary and fascinating today that we have lost sight of the importance of these traditional methods of self care.

People are widely aware of the importance of exercise and diet in preserving health. Practices specifically aimed at stress reduction are less widely understood, and just as important.

Stress reduction complements proper use of drugs and surgery, rather than replacing them. When you’re having a heart attack, you need a heart surgeon. When you have cancer, you need an oncologist to battle the disease. With stress reduction techniques approved by your doctor as right for you, you can act yourself to help in your own cure, and to help prevent relapse.

The State of Research

It has been scientifically proven time and again that a relaxation response can be invoked by the methods set out here. Further, hospitals and clinics throughout the United States are now making stress management programs available to their patients, and insurance companies are beginning to recognize that these programs benefit patients, and lead to improvements in their health with a corresponding reduction in the cost of medical care.

The exact method by which the body evokes the relaxation response is now the subject of an extensive study under the direction of Dr. Benson, who hypothesizes that nitrogen oxide (NO) is released into the blood stream as a result of these practices, leading to a cascade of other biochemical and physical processes in the body which produce the measurable physiological effects of reduced rates of respiration, pulse, brain waves, and so forth.

Dr. Benson’s methods are achieving general acceptance in the mainstream medical community, with the National Institutes of Health sponsoring his research and studies of his work, and with Medicare evaluating training in these methods as a reimbursable medical expense.

Dr. Bouillet’s work is at the cutting edge. Several studies by other researchers have shown that exercise helps breast cancer patients overcome the fatigue from which they suffer. This not only leads to a more positive state of mind in fighting the disease, it allows the patient to tolerate stronger treatment so that the cure progresses faster and better. Dr. Bouillet has found karate and meditation training highly effective for his patients in his practice. The means by which this comes about has yet to be subjected to rigorous scientific study. Dr. Bouillet has communicated his findings to the oncological community.

Many doctors and researchers are studying or practicing methods similar to those used by the doctors presented here, neither of whom claims to have discovered anything entirely new, or to have a monopoly on the right method. The particular interest of Dr. Benson’s work is its very specific focus on evoking a particular biophysical response, with methods which can easily be learned even without access to his clinic or a similar clinic, and with no agenda other than that of science and medicine, incorporating whatever religious or nonreligious point of view you may already have. The particular interest of Dr. Bouillet’s work is his use of the moving meditation of karate to reduce fatigue in cancer patients, as a cutting edge application of the principles also identified by Dr. Benson, which have existed from the beginning of time.

Do It Yourself?

If you are fighting cancer, heart disease, or any other illness, you need your doctor’s advice to decide how to incorporate these methods into your treatment, and which is best for you. Don’t try to do it without your doctor’s help. Many doctors today are aware of the value of stress reduction, though not so many are trained in the specific methods used by Dr. Benson and Dr. Bouillet.

Dr. Benson’s methods are spelled out in this video and booklet, and in his books. Some people, like Chris in our DVD, have learned from his books, with the knowledge and approval of the doctor monitoring their medical condition.

Dr. Bouillet’s methods can be pursued by finding your own exercise program or class, which supplies a supportive environment. Not every karate teacher or exercise instructor is attuned to these objectives. It’s important to get the right amount of exercise for you, not too little or too much, and to be in a supportive situation which builds your confidence rather than challenges it. Finding the right environment is important, whether it’s a particular yoga, tai chi, or karate class, or simply the right exercise class. Again, your doctor’s help is important in choosing the right methods and monitoring your progress.

Even just walking can work, if you use it to break the chain of everyday thoughts, and become more aware of your own mind and body.

There are doubtless stress reduction programs at your local hospital or clinics near, and you can explore these resources to see which is right for you. It’s good to have the support and knowledgeable help of medical professionals.

You are the person who can do this for yourself, and be healthier and happier for it, with the guidance of your doctor and local medical resources.