THE MIND BODY CONNECT

Medical researchers are suggesting more and more about the relationship between the mind and the body. It is now almost settled that health and physical well-being is to a significant extent dependent on the impact of the mind on the body. It has been established that a large number of diseases have a psychosomatic origin. It is strange that despite this knowledge, authenticated by the medical researches, people still believe that psychic healing is more of voodoo stuff that is only for story books. But there is a need to think more logically.

Even if psychic healing is strange and esoteric, is it not more strange and esoteric that powerful pharmaceutical compositions of several drugs with known health-threatening side effects are depended upon? It is the power of marketing that helps the pharma industry make it possible. In fact, with huge money being put in corporate hospitals, the medico-business nexus is using marketing tools to not just proclaim miraculous healing but even perpetrate hypochondriasis, one of the most common diseases that doctors feel is afflicting the modern society.

A very basic lesson that doctors are taught in their initial semesters is the philosophical cannon of Kant that what the mind does not know, the eyes cannot see. This knowledge is these days exploited to the hilt by the marketing-savvy pharma industry and the profit-driven corporate hospitals. It is rather intriguing that even doctors know and talk about the importance of the healing power of the mind. But patients are yet to understand how to apply this power. Interestingly, the drugs also depend on the mind of the patient for being effective. Psychological experiments have proved this time and again. Faith-healing has been a subject-matter of study for long and hypnosis and focussed suggestion techniques have been effective.

The power of the mind is tremendous and one needs to train the mind in order to discover its healing abilities. It is a simple fact that the more skill one can develop in self-healing, the less medical attention he will be requiring. How to develop this is of course a million dollar question. Training the mind for self-healing is easier said than done. But that it can be done is definite. To begin with, one needs to develop self-awareness for which the basic step is to still the mind. The greatest distraction in this is the visual noise, the myriad of stimuli that bombard the mind from all directions. Rather, their impact is such that they impinge upon an individual’s mind even after they have ceased to exist.

Training the mind to quarantine the effects of visual noise will require a good bit of effort and an ambience that is even more difficult to find these days. There has to be solitude and quietude. The silence of the external environment has to be followed by silence of the internal environment that is mind. Once this is done, the mind comes under control and then it can control the thoughts. Once this state is arrived at, the self-healing process can be initiated. There are three broad phases through which it can be achieved. The first is imaginisation in which the mind has blurred yet useful images of the problem. It is some kind of a mental imagery that tells you where to go. The second is visualization. This is the step which tells where to direct the thought. And then follows realisation that is self-healing.