We are bodies, minds and spirits. Health necessarily involves all these components, and any program intended to improve health must address all of them. Conventional medicines only pay attention to the physical body.

To achieve health, you must work on the whole picture of health. You need to make changes in all the components of lifestyle that contribute to health, not just to improve your diet and increase your exercise. You must work on many different fronts all at once.

To optimize the function of the healing system, you must do everything in your power to improve physical health, mental and emotional health, and spiritual health. Think about your own experiences of healing. Make a list of illnesses and injuries or problems you have recovered from in the past 2 years. Note anything you did to speed up the healing process.

Scientists have found that the areas of the brain that control emotion are particularly rich in receptors of neuropeptides. The brain also has receptor sites for molecules produced by the immune system alone. What we see is an intricate 2-way communication system linking the mind, the immune system and all the other systems, a pathway through which our emotions, hopes and fears, can affect the body's ability to defend itself.

While stress and helplessness can depress the immune function, clearly we don't get sick each time we are stressed. Stress is one of the many factors that can tip the balance toward illness.

Behaviours

Our ability to realize our hopes and goals depends on having control over events that we initiate and over those that come into our lives unbidden. People who feel in control of life can withstand an enormous amount of change and thrive on it. People who feel helpless can hardly cope at all.

A side effect of healing is a reconnection to the values that are important: an openness to love, an attitude of forgiveness toward ourselves and others, and peace of mind.

Control

The more you try to control life, the less control you have. Not knowing when to let go is a major cause of stress. Developing the discrimination to tell when to hold on and when to let go is the key to responding freshly to life's challenges. This means being flexible and self-aware. To learn more about how disease starts in the body, read Cancer Free For Life.

Stress as opportunity

We have many metaphors for death and resurrection, and they are metaphors for escape from our past conditioning and outmoded ways of thinking.

Why then do we hold on to the old so fiercely? What is the block to letting go in the moment? That block is fear, lack of faith in ourselves and in life. If I give up a bad relationship, maybe no one better will come along. If I look for a new job, maybe I will get a worse one. If I let go of my suspicion, I will be hurt and disappointed by people. It is fear that masquerades as the need to control, and fear that deprives us of the chance to be free.

Happiness is inborn. It cannot be learned, but it can be forgotten. Authenticity is an attitude of awareness in which we are willing to experience our thoughts and feelings as they are.