HEALTH: How happiness makes you healthy and how I really faced my cancer

A very good article about the connection of body and mind: how does your state of mind influence your health, re-posted from LiveStrong.com, plus a little bit of my story with the Big C:

How Happiness Makes You Healthy

By KELLY TURNER

Move over, Descartes: The debate over whether the mind and body are separate is officially finished. During the past 50 years, scientists have discovered not only that the mind and body are connected, but that they are intimately and inextricably intertwined.

What finally clinched the argument was psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), a field of science that studies the interaction between your mind, brain and immune system [1].

One of the first PNI studies was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1991 [2]. In this study, researchers asked a large group of people to fill out surveys and then gave them a nasal spray with either the common cold virus or saline (subjects didn’t know which one they were getting). The researchers found that the people who reported more stress developed a full-on cold, while the ones who were less stressed were better able to fight it off, regardless of the person’s age, weight, diet or other factors.

Read more: http://www.livestrong.com/blog/happiness-makes-healthy/#ixzz3haDEEHdr

And here comes my addition.

My answer to one of the questions at the end of the article:

“Have you ever gotten sick after you’ve been under a lot of stress?”

Sure I did! For example, I got cancer 9 years ago, but more than 1 year have passed after a surgery and that I was considered cured, when I found out that a hidden, constantly present situation had been literally eating me away. That time, when the cancer was growing in me, I wasn’t aware of what was going on exactly, so of course I didn’t have a solution for the upset and stress which kept sucking the life out of me.

It would be too personal to share details here, and I am convinced that each and every case is different, everyone of us has to find out for ourselves what is happening with us, therefore it wouldn’t be relevant to tell you what has caused the stress in my life that time.

This much I can tell: how I found out about what was wrong, and maybe this would be helpful for you as well.

Have you experienced that you were “getting sick and tired” of a situation? Or you feel that you just “can’t live like this” or “don’t want to live like this”? Or it is “sucking your energy”? Well, body and mind are funny fellows and they take such statements literally, so guess what will happen, if you don’t change the situation but do continue live like that!

It is well understood that illnesses have their physical causes: viruses, bacteria, improper nutrition, toxins and a host of other factors indeed exist and can have ugly consequences for the body.

However, there must be a DECISION first to get ill, by the person himself or herself. At the end of the day: WHOSE body is it? Who else is the boss to tell what is going to happen with his or her body?

Many people don’t believe in that the spirit and the mind would be controlling the body, but is there anyone who doesn’t know a kid who suddenly presented a bad stomach, a cold or other ordinary sickness out of nothing, just to avoid having to go to the kindergarten or school at a certain day and rather stay at home with Mom? Maybe even you did so…? I did that, of course.

Fast forward: When I was reading about how certain situations and stresses affect certain body parts and I had to face what had been precisely going on in my life that had caused my cancer, it was such a shock for me that I was just sitting there with the book and crying for long minutes, didn’t give a damn about that there were many other people there in the library. Can you imagine that?

One great book that writes about the emotional causes of illnesses is Heal Your Body, by Louise Hay.

For cancer, it is “Deep hurt. Long-standing resentment. Deep secret or grief eating away at the self. Carrying hatreds.” But read more about it in the book.

I was listening to some lecture by somebody else, along with reading the transcript, and it hit me with such a revelation to realize what the long-standing grief that had been hurting me so deeply that I had not been even really aware of it!

So I was sitting there in a library in Budapest, in 2009 and when I knew what it was, from that moment on it didn’t take very long for me to do the next steps and drastically change that situation around me – how free and relieved I felt afterwards! In fact, I started a completely new life.

Now I am cancer-free since 8.5 years 🙂 Not healthy as a horse, I do have symptoms here and there, and as I have mentioned it a few times, right now it is lymphedema and lipedema in my legs that are challenging me – but I am very hopeful and positive that I will be able to crack that, too, although both have been considered incurable – but isn’t cancer considered to be incurable as well, for many people?

Here is again the link to the article: How Happiness Makes You Healthy

— Andrea

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