Restoring Health—Healing

Excerpt from the new book: Blueprint for Holistic Healing: Your Practical Guide to Body-Mind-Spirit Health
By C. Norman Shealy, MD, PhD

Excerpt from Chapter 7:

Even with the best of conscientious habits, things happen. We have the potential of genetic predispositions, karmic influences, accidents, and many social as well as environmental influences that can lead to illnesses or diseases not the result of unhealthy habits. And, of course, we also have the possibility of problems that are definitely because we chose healthy habits too late in life! For instance, perhaps we smoked for five years in our early adulthood, drank excessively, did not exercise adequately, etc. All of these predispose us to virtually every conceivable illness. Hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer are significantly “caused” by those unhealthy habits. And they equally may have genetic or karmic roots. And, of course, chlorinated water and fluoridated water are major toxins that eventually take their toll, as do the not-so-obvious chemicals polluting our food supply. Then there are still dentists doing silver amalgam fillings which pour mercury into our bodies. And don’t forget plain old smog!...

Adrenal fatigue or burnout
Chronic fatigue is one of the best indicators of stress burnout... There is a simple home test that you might do to know that you are burned out:

Blood pressure and pulse
Lie down and relax for 20 minutes. Take your blood pressure and pulse. Stand up and recheck BP and pulse. Blood pressure should go up 10 or 20 points as should pulse. If BP falls and pulse goes up more than 20 points, you have adrenal fatigue. The best antidote is autogenic training, as discussed much earlier...

Autogenic training
Mental emotional stress requires both proactive and corrective approaches. For instance, it has been shown that 20 minutes of deep relaxation twice a day reduces insulin requirement and adrenalin production by 50% for the entire 24 hours. In 1929, Edmund Jacobson demonstrated that 30 minutes of progressive relaxation not only reduced stress but also actually improved 89% of most stress illnesses! And beginning in 1912, Johanne Schultz demonstrated that autogenic training, 20 minutes daily, reduced stress illnesses by 80%... Although I have examined the wide variety of mental approaches to stress reduction for over 40 years, autogenic training is still my favorite because of the tremendous research showing that athletes, students, business people, and those with most stress illnesses are managed well by this simple tool—coordinating the words with your slow breathing and creating visual images to reinforce the statements. Essentially, you get into a relaxed physical body position and repeat for about three minutes each of the following statements:

• My arms and legs are heavy and warm.
• My heartbeat is calm and regular.
• My breathing is free and easy.
• My abdomen is warm.
• My forehead is cool.
• My mind is quiet and still.

Get the sensory feedback, awareness from each part of your body—face, jaws, neck, shoulders, arms and hands, chest, breasts, abdomen, back, buttocks, pelvis, legs before and after 20 minutes of practice. Basically you can feel good and OK with no tense pain or discomfort and no feeling from each and every body part. The goal is the relaxed and OK feedback from each part! If after 20 minutes there are still areas that are not relaxed and OK, you can:

• Talk to the body part—e.g., ‘my back is relaxed and comfortable.’
• Love it—appreciate that part of your body.
• Tense and release the muscles in that part of your body.
• Breathe in and collect tension or discomfort from that part of your body and breathe out, releasing the undesired sensation.
• Breathe through the skin over that part of your body.
• Circulate the electrical energy from your heels up the back to the top of your head as you breathe in, and circulate the electrical energy down the front of your body as you breathe out.
• Expand the electromagnetic field around your feet and gradually up around every part of your body, toes to head, seeing and feeling yourself in a capsule of living EMF (electromotive force) energy. Start with one [inch] and expand gradually to 12 inches.

Three months of daily practice will retrain your brain and autonomic, automatic, nervous system. Then you may be able to continue with only five minutes daily.

Insight exercises
And, of course, in addition to autogenic training, there are a number of additional insight exercises worth doing:

After 10 minutes of autogenic training, sense your overall relationship with your mother. Do you have unfinished business with her? Anger, guilt anxiety, or sadness? Are you willing to forgive her? Are you willing to bless her for giving you life?

On another occasion, after initial AT, sense your relationship with your father. Is there unfinished business—anger, guilt, anxiety, or depression? Are you willing to forgive him? Are you willing to bless him for giving you life?

Continue this practice with all the people in your life with whom you need healing!

Once you have truly come to grips with all the people in your life, you are ready to get in touch with you! Are you willing to forgive and bless yourself? Then, the major exercise is to repeat and believe:

I have a body, and I am more than my body. I have emotions, and I am more than my emotions. I have a mind, and I am more than my mind. At my innermost being, I am magnificent, wise and loving.

Create a symbolic image of the real you, your soul—a magnificent sky-blue five-pointed star beaming down upon you its perfect soul power. Recognize that your body is indeed the temple of your soul!

Once you can do this and mean it, you are ready to connect with God, which you may imagine as a giant white six-pointed star beaming down upon you and the world as a perfect golden-orange light.