Our focus this month is on health. Wholistic health, to be specific: an attitude that sees our physical, emotional, and spiritual selves as part of a single, organic whole.
[A personal digression: I hate the word “wholistic.” For one, nobody can get together on how to spell it — with or without the “w.” Also, it’s a boring word, something you’d expect to come across in the field of accounting, or ornithology, hardly a rallying cry for a national movement. If the medical establishment, with its prevailing views about antibiotics and Cadillacs, is to be dealt a body blow, the partisans of wholistic health had better come up with something with more pizzazz. I have no suggestions. I am one of those people who merely criticize.]
In lieu of a stirring slogan, we have Dr. C. Norman Shealy — a highly-acclaimed neurosurgeon with unimpeachable credentials who is openly critical of the medical establishment and an articulate spokesman for ideas, no matter how daring, that work.
The author of several books on pain and personal health, Dr. Shealy helped organize and serves as first president of American Holistic Medical Association, the first all-professional wholistic health organization. Born in Columbia, South Carolina — the son of a butcher — he entered Duke Medical School at 19, and eventually became chief of neurosurgery at the Gunderson Clinic at La Crosse, Wisconsin. He drifted further and further from medical orthodoxy, and in 1976, opened his now-famous Pain and Health Rehabilitation Center near La Crosse, Wisconsin — a rustic and unlikely looking clinic set in the midst of a 565-acre farm, where Dr. Shealy lives with his wife, three children, and 50 Appaloosa horses. His techniques are becoming increasingly adopted by other more traditional pain clinics around the country, by doctors who are embarrassed by many of Dr. Shealy’s statements — he’s said, “If there were no more neurosurgeons or orthopedic surgeons, America’s health would improve; some people would die but we’d have a lot fewer pain patients.” — but impressed with how well his methods work.
A typical patient is someone who has run up medical expenses from $5,000 to $10,000 for each of the past five years, has undergone six operations, and for whom drugs have become a way of life. Ninety percent of his patients demonstrate significant improvement by the end of their 12-day stay — for which they pay $1,800 apiece. They are off drugs, and their symptoms are 50 percent to 100 percent improved. In follow-up evaluations six months later, 72 percent maintain their level of improvement, usually just by continuing the biogenic exercises Dr. Shealy explains below.
The following is an edited version of an address Dr. Shealy delivered last October at a conference called “Holistic Perspectives in Education and Health” sponsored by the Light of the Mountains community in Asheville. We are thankful to Light of the Mountains, and to Dr. Shealy, for permission to print it.
— Ed.
Last summer, I spoke at a ministers’ conference in Missouri, and I got one bit of negative feedback out of 300 people, which was that I made them feel guilty about their bad habits. I don’t know how to make people feel good about their bad habits. I don’t dwell on them excessively, but you have to know what bad habits are.
We know now that health is the result of habits. Virtually everyone is born healthy. Most people become ill through accumulated unhealthy habits. When I talk about some of the chemical and physical and emotional stresses, you need to remember everybody has a different tolerance. Each of us, when we chose our parents, chose a body that has a certain genetic and constitutional strength or weakness. Many people can tolerate tremendous quantities of stress before they break down. Each of us has a level we can tolerate. Each of us has to decide when that level has been exceeded.
It has been stated and restated that the next great advance in health of the American people will come not from laboratories or hospitals, but from what they learn to do for themselves.
Califano, whether or not you like him, did a wonderful service to this country in releasing last July, as he was thrown out of office, the Surgeon General’s report entitled “Healthy People.” It is a two-volume work, commissioned by the Surgeon General and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and represents a consensus among top authorities in the field of health. As such, we’ve got to consider what it means. Repeatedly, throughout the two volumes, certain comments are made: You eat moderately, don’t smoke or drink, and get plenty of rest and exercise. If an individual follows just those simple habits, the chances are that he will remain reasonably healthy through life.
An interesting statistic: An unmarried man living in New York City, and having the average habits of an unmarried man living in New York City, has a life expectancy 39 years less than an unmarried farmer living in rural Sweden.
About eight years ago, I seriously thought about quitting medicine, and just farming, because I was so unhappy with the status of medicine. I see many physicians, as they approach their fifties especially, begin to question whether or not they can tolerate 15 or 20 more years of doing what they’re doing. Now I can tell them that if they do it the way we do it, they can restore the fun of practicing medicine.
I want to give you some dull but important definitions. Wholistic health is not something you can give someone. You can teach the principles — personal responsibility for our bodies, our minds, our emotions, our spirits, and for the environment, the quality of air and water and the earth. But wholistic health itself is a state of being.
Wholistic medicine, on the other hand, is a system of health care which includes comprehensive diagnosis, treatment, and education to help individuals achieve and maintain wholistic health or high level wellness.
I emphasize these aspects because it is important that wholistic medicine is not understood as foot massage or herb teas. That’s the flakey aspect of wholistic medicine. Not that there’s anything wrong with herb teas and foot massage. They’re wonderful, but they’re not wholistic. You cannot do wholistic massage. I don’t care if you do massage the whole body. The body is not wholistic by itself.
A physician practicing wholistic medicine must do everything that a standard physician does, plus an intense look at lifestyle. When I talk about lifestyle analysis, I’m talking about a whole wide array of things, including spiritual values, and a physical exam, and a lot of tests — the same tests that one might do in any standard medical practice plus some extras.
When it comes to treatment, it would be foolish to go to a healer who doesn’t have penicillin, if you have meningococcus meningitis. It would just be foolish to think that you can cure meningococcus with homeopathy. We must use drugs, when appropriate, and surgery when appropriate. If you have a broken leg with a bone poking out through the skin, you need a good orthopedic surgeon. If you have an abscess, the treatment, of course, is to drain it. We must consider, “Is this an appropriate treatment for the given patient?”
Basically, the most important principles of this are what I call the holy trinity of health: nutrition, physical exercise, and self-regulation. Under those three, we can put virtually everything else.
I can tell you everything you need to know about nutrition in one sentence. “Good nutrition consists of eating a wide variety of chemically unaltered foods.” That throws out 90% of what you’ll find in the grocery store. It emphasizes minimizing sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and probably salt, considering how much of that is eaten these days. It emphasizes real food.
This was written 82 years ago by Sir William Osler, the father of American medicine: “A common cause of ruined digestion, particularly in young girls, is the eating of sweets between meals and the drinking of abominations dispensed in the chemists’ shops.” Remember when ice cream sodas were sold only in pharmacies? They’re more chemical today than they were in Osler’s day. There are 156 non-food chemicals in the average commercial ice cream today, including propalene-glycol — antifreeze. As an anti-freeze agent, there’s no doubt that propalene-glycol is wonderful, but it’s not very nutritious. Eighty-two years ago, Osler recognized that one of the most important factors was the quality of food, and the way in which we eat food. He emphasizes, “Excesses lead invariably or inevitably to impaired health.”
An unmarried man living in New York City . . . has a life expectancy 39 years less than an unmarried farmer living in rural Sweden.
And look what’s happened since Osler’s day. We now have these non-food products. There’s no food in Egg-beaters. Food is material that is raised in nature. When it is chemically altered, it is not food. If you take any food, as it comes off the farm, and pour a batch of gasoline or other things into it to change it, it is no longer food; it is a chemical. There’s a big difference. Egg-beaters have been accepted and pushed by the medical industry for reasons that are unknown to me. I’ll show you a picture of twin rats. Guess which twin ate the Egg-beaters? The rat on your left had been on Egg-beaters only three weeks. At four weeks, all of the rats fed Egg-beaters were dead. The rat on your right was fed nothing but whole eggs. I ask you, “How harmful are eggs, compared to Egg-beaters?”
Do you realize that when you get Kraft’s process cheese, American junk cheese, it may have up to two-thirds of the cheese solids replaced with chemicals? You can pretend, in looks and taste, but you can’t pretend in quality of food, and that’s the important concept. Don’t eat Kraft’s processed, or any other processed cheese. Unfortunately, it can even be made to look like cheddar.
We have artificial foods because of the Egg McProfit concept. Look at this nonfood here, in this photograph. There is no real food in that photograph. The muffin is chemically altered flour. It’s no longer real food. The cheese is obviously extended cheese. That looks like Egg-beater eggs, not real eggs. I’m not opposed in any way to eating small bits of meat, but the ham has been severely chemically altered by adding nitrates and nitrites and huge quantities of salt to it, so that is not food.
Chocolate may not seem to you like an important nutrient but at least if you eat chocolate, you’d like to know that it’s real food. It is, at least, a condiment, and 90% of the stuff sold as chocolate is no longer chocolate, it’s just chemicals that have been mixed in a laboratory with no food value whatsoever. I suspect that the concept of being allergic to chocolate is really an allergy to some artificial chemical that is sold as chocolate.
“Durkee improves on the fickle tomato.” I don’t see any food in Durkee tomato sauce. Sucrose is not food. It is a chemical that has been taken out of food. Sugar beets is food, sugar cane is food, fruit is food, but sucrose is not food, because it has been totally deprived of the vitamins and minerals that are essential for you to metabolize it. You can’t use sucrose unless you steal vitamins and minerals from some other food that you eat. They have added a little ascorbic acid, which is questionable food. But imagine all the tomato sauces that are sold commercially and used in all our fast food places across the country. This is what you are getting. It’s not food.
Before you begin to feel too comfortable, if you go to the health food store and buy that texturized vegetable protein, I’d like to tell you how it is made. It’s made from ground up soybeans. Now ground up soybeans are wonderful food, very high quality food, a little low in zinc, but other than that, very good food. And yet, to make this stuff they grind up the soybeans and wash it with gasoline. If you don’t want to pour gasoline on your steak, pour a little alcohol on it, and see what it looks like. These kinds of chemicals denature the protein, they kill it. And they destroy a lot of the essential amino acids. Vitamins and minerals are removed in the flushing process. So when you wind up with hamburger helper and a lot of artificial products, they are not good food, but highly chemically altered and deficient protein. And the other thing is excess calories. If you won’t get rid of that fat for your own sake, have some consideration for your pallbearers.
Before this century, we had a problem with inadequate food. Now we have a problem with poor quality but surplus food. Sixty percent of Americans carry around excess weight, many of them very significant. Statistically, if your weight is 30% above your ideal, your life expectancy is decreased 18 years.
When you go into the average restaurant, the chances of getting any real food are poor. And they’re even poorer in the grocery store. But you have to be careful not to become a faddist about this, and to recognize that everything you buy in a health food store is not necessarily healthy, either, as I indicated about some of the so-called meat substitutes.
Physical exercise. Yes, we hear a lot of talk about emphasis on physical exercise, but still, only 15% of Americans today are getting adequate physical exercise to be healthy. Seventy-nine percent of the teenage population flunk a simple physical fitness test. In Europe, only eight or nine percent of the children flunk the same test.
Some physicians are aware of the need for cardiovascular strengthening through aerobics-type exercises, but forget that the body also has to be limbered. As the body becomes stiff from the lack of physical limbering, the autonomic nervous system that controls all of the internal functionings, including the glandular functions, begins to lose its ability to be autonomic. It begins to be stiff and rigid, just as the spine and the rest of the body does, and so limbering exercises, either yoga or good Western-type yoga, which is calisthenics, are essential. You can’t be healthy sitting and meditating twenty-four hours a day.
The essentials for adequate physical exercise will take — if you do it in the great American way, really pushing yourself — two hours a week. You can do the limbering in about ten minutes a day. You can actually keep the body adequately limbered with about 10 minutes of proper exercise of a limbering nature each day, and then you need to do a minimum of 10 minutes six times a week, or 20 minutes three times a week, of exercise which doubles your heartbeat. Now obviously you have to build up to that over a period of months, if you’ve not been doing it. But it doesn’t take much time, it just takes a little will power.
Self-Regulation. There are many different kinds of self-regulation. The kind we do which integrates a lot of the others is called biogenics. It includes a wide variety of techniques for relaxing. It doesn’t matter whether you relax saying, “Abbadabbadoo,” or “OOOoahrooo,” in Sanskrit, or anything else. What matters is that you focus your attention on something that is pleasant, but not so pleasant that it is emotionally exciting. You can sit and look at the sunset. You can count your breaths. Anything you do that is simple like that will help you to relax. But the relaxation does not necessarily balance a disturbed body, so one needs to use conscious attention to focus on areas of the body, feeling the body. It’s what I call sensory biofeedback. Learning to feel inside your body those areas which are out of balance. And learning to balance the emotional distress in your life, releasing, and letting it go. Examining past events in a detached way and making intelligent, rational choices. Positive affirmations alone can help with that. Programming what you want to become, with words and images. The autonomic nervous system early in this century was called “the imaginative” nervous system, because it was known that it responds to imagination, which is imagery. And of course, getting in touch with your ideals, reaching beyond body, mind, and emotions to your inner being, being in touch with that. This is what I call voluntary self-regulation. There are a lot of techniques that can be included under that grouping.
Relax. Even our animals are tense today, and the real reason is that they are fed artificial food. They are fed non-food food. It is very high in salt content. Only one commercial dog food in the country today has the normal amount of salt recommended for dogs. All of the others are excess in the salt. I own no stock in the company. It is Kennel Ration Burgers, that is the only one commercially available that is reasonably safe, at least as far as salt content. The rest of it doesn’t look too healthy to me. We’ve taken to cooking our dogs’ food. We make up a big patch of cereal grains (our dogs prefer oatmeal and corn) and mix it with meat, which we put through a blender so it will disperse the flavor in the cereal. They are very healthy and love it. We put no salt in it. They will not eat commercial dog food.
If you take any food . . . and pour a batch of gasoline or other things into it to change it, it is no longer a food; it is a chemical.
Edmund Jacobsen, who sort of invented relaxation as a concept in medicine, after the publication of his first book on progressive relaxation wrote one called You Must Relax. Isn’t that the great American way of doing things?
We teach people how to relax, and we use biofeedback to reinforce it. For example, temperature feedback is something we think everyone can benefit from learning because it teaches you several principles. It teaches you how to control blood flow, first of all. That’s a very important concept. It teaches you also how to control a sensation. In learning to control temperature, both heat and cold, you have controlled a first cousin of pain, because pain and temperature sensations travel together. So when you learn to control temperature you’re learning to control pain. We teach people to control the temperature of a finger because you have more nerves per square millimeter of space in your fingers than in any other part of your body except your lips and tongue. In fact, your fingers, lips, and tongue together have more nerves than the rest of your body combined. And so we teach them to control it there first and then we move the thermister to a part of the body which is diseased or where there’s pain. And if you can learn to control the temperature in your knee or your back or your abdomen then you’re really getting close to learning to control pain in that area. It’s a very important part of our training program. It’s also the greatest faith builder I know. By hooking a patient up to a biofeedback device and proving to them that they can control temperature and circulation then they have faith that they can control their internal milieu.
Now part of it is controlling emotions and we deal with this on the Social Readjustment Scale or what I call the Life Stress Scale and these normal events, many of them, in the lives of most people are stressful. Statistically, if you have 350 points of stress on this scale in a given year your chances of becoming ill are 80%. Nobody studied the most important information after 12 years of really elegant research which confirmed a lot of what Holmes and Rahe did. Nobody studied the 20% of the people who remain well despite 350 points of stress. Nobody has studied the 20% of people who become ill despite a very low stress level under 150 points. Those, I think are the most fruitful stress-related research projects that can be done at this point.
Seventy-nine percent of the teenage population flunk a simple physical fitness test. In Europe, only eight or nine percent flunk that same test.
People have hang-ups. And then they have bad habits that go beyond those hang-ups. I have no doubt that if we dumped a bucket of water onto the head of the average smoker every time he lighted up a cigarette, within six months 90% of them would stop smoking. The other 10% would smoke more because their rights were being inhibited. The really good news is that if you give up smoking before you develop cancer of the lung, heart disease, emphysema, or cancer of the bladder — all of which are very significantly associated with smoking — within three years your life expectancy returns to normal. No matter how long you’ve smoked, if you haven’t developed those illnesses yet, then you can regain your health. Now a person who smokes one pack of cigarettes a day has a decreased life expectancy of seven years, three packs a day, 18 years. You can regain all of that if you stop smoking before you develop one of those serious illnesses. The Surgeon General’s report emphasizes that the single greatest contribution that can be made to the health of the American people is to stop all smoking. It would have more effect on health than all the other things that we can do combined.
Stress is a combination of chemical, physical and emotional factors. It’s the total stress in your life that determines whether or not you will be ill. It’s not just whether you smoke, or eat a lot of sugar, or drink a lot of coffee or alcohol, or are exposed to a lot of toxins — if you live in New York City you’ve already got the equivalent of smoking one pack of cigarettes per day just breathing the air. You don’t need to add another pack to it. Trauma, physical accidents, are a major stress factor. Lack of physical activity is a tremendous stress. Heavy work if you’re not in good condition. Even weather changes are of tremendous importance. And, of course, fear, anger, guilt, depression and anxiety are stressful. But each of us has a stress reserve. And I estimate that the average American uses up about 50% of the stress reserve with chemical stress, about 40% with lack of physical activity, and that doesn’t leave much for emotional stress. And that’s why an emotional crisis is often the precipitating factor in whether or not someone becomes ill. But if they were to reduce the chemical stress, increase the physical exercise, then emotional stress would be tolerated better.
Rarely, at our clinic, do we use drugs. Valium and Darvon, for example, are at least as bad as narcotics because they inhibit the body’s natural ability to heal itself. They inhibit or block either the production or the activity of naturally occurring endorphins — the morphine-like substances that are a natural reaction to stress and that help you cope with stress. And as long as a person is taking any one of those drugs or narcotics, they will never be free of pain. And it is impossible to have acupuncture work lastingly, or transcutaneous nerve stimulation, or physical exercise, or biofeedback training on people who are hooked on those drugs.
As a matter of fact, the average drug is only a placebo. It has a lot of bad effects but as far as good effects, it’s only a placebo.
Let me tell you how I reason that. The average drug has an effectiveness of about 70%. It doesn’t matter what drug it is or what you are treating, with rare exceptions. That means 70 people out of 100 will get the desired therapeutic effect — but 25 people will not be able to take the drug. They will have complications. That reduces it to 45%. The average placebo is between 35% and 50% effective. The most interesting aspect is that if the physician is enthusiastic about the placebo it raises efficacy to between 80% and 90%.
The most wonderful study I have seen on this appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine the last week in July 1979 called “Angina Pectoris and the Placebo Effect.” Dr. Benson discussed a wide variety of techniques and drugs that have been used to treat angina, heart pain. He determined that every one of them that has been subjected to real scientific study was found to be only a placebo. Yet for years some of those treatments were reported to have 80% to 90% efficacy because the people using them were enthusiastic about them. Most drugs have very little therapeutic effect. I’m talking not about the drugs that are necessary to maintain life or to save life in acute severe illnesses, but chronic drugs in general.
Let’s talk about cancer for a moment. For many cancer is a stress disease. When you add up the total stress in a given human being it is likely to be found to be the cause of the cancer. That means you can have viruses and a lot of chemicals in the environment and all kinds of other things that add to weakening your immune system that allows you to develop cancer.
Now I’d like to give you my concept of how one develops cancer. First, you chose a set of parents that had some minor weaknesses, perhaps in the immune system, and you were born very healthy. Then you go through life and if you eat poorly and you are unfortunate enough to live near Three Mile Island and you smoke and you work in a plant where they have a lot of chemicals you are likely to develop cancer.
You see what I mean? It is an additive thing. All stress is additive. We will never find a cause of cancer. There is no single specific cause for cancer. There is a cumulative stress in people who are predisposed to it through an inherited weakness or environmentally acquired weaknesses.
And the spiritual aspect, which I think so many people are concerned with. The person who does not have meaning in life is not likely to be healthy. It’s so important. Freud spent the first part of his career developing psychiatry as a specialty in medicine, promoting the concept that all neuroses, all psychological problems, were the result of repressed sexual problems. Halfway through he suddenly decided that the most important thing was the death wish. That’s when the Vienna Conference broke up, because his colleagues thought sex was more fun than death.
Freud was right on both accounts. What I see in most people with serious chronic illnesses is that they wish they were dead because of an unresolved love relationship. Not sex but an unsatisfactory or stressed love relationship. It can be a poor love relationship with a spouse or a parent or a child or an aunt or an uncle. There can be these conflicts and people begin to wish they were dead.
Eric Byrne stated that everyone sets their own life script as to what age they will die and of what disease. He told his colleagues that he had set his life script to die at age 60 of a heart attack. And he died at age 60 of a heart attack some years later. I always wondered why he didn’t change his life script, because to me if you can set one you can change it, as long as you do it three years before the event. One of my psychology friends once said, “But, Norm, what better way to prove his point?”
Sir William Osler stated that if we put in one pan of a set of scales all the drugs of the world and in the other pan we put faith, then faith will tip the scales. He went on to say that far more important than what the doctor does is the patient’s belief and the doctor’s belief in what the doctor does. Just two years ago Franz Inglefinger, the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, said 80% of all illnesses are either self-limited (meaning they get well by themselves) or not treatable by modern medicine or surgery. Slightly more than 10% are miraculously cured. Alas, the other 9%, give or take a point or two, are made worse. Thus, we wind up barely on the positive side of zero. On the other hand, well over 50% of people feel a great deal better when they see their physician and are reassured. In other words, five times as many people feel better after seeing the doctor than are cured. Just because they have faith in what the doctor says. Faith is the final leveler.
I’m not talking about returning to the Dark Ages but I’m talking about scientific facts that we know today influence health. They are important to take into consideration in determining your own lifestyle.
A person who smokes one pack of cigarettes a day has a decreased life expectancy of seven years, three packs a day, 18 years.
I want to show you the results of treating people with this comprehensive approach. This is an MMPI, a psychological test on a man who had been an invalid for several years, three unsuccessful back operations, and so on. Ten out of ten of his personality traits are elevated at or above the upper limit of normal, including his ability to be consistent. Some psychiatrists would look at this and say it’s an invalid test because he wasn’t consistent. I’d say it’s an extremely valid test. He isn’t able to be consistent. He is psychologically distressed. Fourteen months later, he is free of pain, back at work, and divorced. In his case, that was an essential for him to get well, because he had a horrible love relationship.
Now, we use something that we call the pain profile. Here’s a profile of a man who, after only nine days at the clinic, is almost back to normal. A month later, he has an average pain profile of about 3% disability. The average patient when he or she comes to the clinic has an 82% disability. Six months later the average is 21%. That includes 28% of people who don’t improve significantly at all because they don’t practice. Seventy-two percent of the people, however, do improve strikingly. Thirty-five percent of them do return to work. The other 37%, although they are off drugs, their mood is improved, their pain is reduced, can’t get a job because nobody will hire them. As to medical expenses, this is typical: A man says that he is now walking without a system. He came in using a walker. He is 75% free of pain. He has lost 40 pounds. He is on a rigid exercise program. After five years of being an invalid, he is about to go back to computer school to return to work. Average medical expenses are decreased 85% over the two to three years subsequent to going through this training program.
Our clinic is located in the middle of a 565-acre farm in Wisconsin. It’s very similar to the area around here. Mainly, I want to emphasize that although we as a staff thought this was an ideal place in which to do therapy with these chronically ill people, it has made no difference whatsoever in the therapy. The patients who are chronically ill are too depressed and irritable to appreciate the beauty of nature. They would do just as well in a cold impersonal office building in town. The people who are not so bad benefit tremendously from this retreat, but once the person has passed a certain stage they don’t seem to be able to appreciate it.
The person who does not have meaning in life is not likely to be healthy.
Now, what does this all mean to you? How is it applicable to your life? Well, first, it is applicable because you can choose good habits, if you wish. It’s your choice. You can choose to minimize sugar, caffeine, nicotine, and chemicals in your diet. It’s not necessarily easy but it’s cheaper. It’s much less expensive to eat real food than to eat TV dinners or any of the other chemically altered junk you can find in the grocery store. It takes a little more time but it’s better food. You may have to go to a food coop to get it.
What should your food consist of? At least 75% of the food you eat should consist of the following: whole grains (they can be ground up or rolled or mashed, as long as they aren’t chemically altered; this includes wheat, buckwheat, rice, corn, millet, oats, and rye), and beans and peas and all of the root vegetables, carrots and parsnips and potatoes (in South America they have more than 56 varieties of what we call Irish potatoes), nuts and seeds and fruits. A minimum of 75% and probably 80% to 90% of your food should come from those products, not in a box that has been processed or chemically altered, but just as it came from the farm or at least rolled or ground. Now, for most people the eating of eggs is a very fine addition to the diet. The eating of small bits of meat. Meat should be a condiment, not an entree. The entree should be your grains, beans, peas, root vegetables. That should be the entree. One or two or at most three ounces of meat in a given day. Fish or chicken or turkey or beef, those are all fine foods if eaten in great moderation, and of course milk products, especially fermented milk products like yoghurt and real cheese.
Secondly, by doing limbering. A minimum of 10 minutes every day. Plus some type of cardiovascular strengthening exercise. It can be running up and down stairs, or jumping rope. I can tell you what mine is: I do mostly standing jogging, because I travel a lot and I would not jog outside in any city in this country. I do standing jogging at home in the winter, and outside in the summer, and in the fall and spring I may jog outside. But in the winter I jog on a trampoline because it’s more fun. And when I’m traveling I jog on the bed, because it’s more fun. It’s also better for my body than jogging on something hard. But whatever you do, it has to double your heart rate.
Third, you can practice a minimum of 30 minutes every day of mental self-regulation. And I would like then to spend the rest of my time guiding you in one of our mental self-regulation exercises. There are many varieties of this. I’d like you to experience the kind of things I’m talking about.
So if you would get into a comfortable position. Put down your pens. Sit up and let the back of the chair support your back — you don’t have to have a rigid spine but let the back of the chair support you. Put your feet flat on the floor. If they don’t reach, put something under them so they’re not dangling. Put one hand on each thigh. It doesn’t matter whether it’s up or down or on the side — whatever the angle of your elbow is comfortable doing and if you’re too wide for these chairs, you can let it rest on the arm of the chair, but generally it will be more comfortable on your thighs than on the wood. Take off your glasses. If you’re chewing gum, take it out. Loosen your belt, because those physical encumbrances do things to you. If your tie is the least bit tight, loosen it. If your shoes feel the least bit tight, take them off. Because you’re going to get attuned with your body. And close your eyes. Because you want to block out the sensory stimulation from outside. And take a deep breath. And let it go. You are announcing to your body that you are initiating the process of relaxation. And as you breathe in, say to yourself, “I am.” And as you breathe out, say to your self, “Relaxed.” Your body knows what that means. Don’t try to be relaxed; just allow it to happen as you say, “I am relaxed. I am relaxed.”
And you begin to feel relaxed, you get the feedback that, “Yes, that feels good, I’m beginning to feel relaxed.” And then without doing anything about what you feel turn your attention to examining with your mind each part of your body in a systematic way. Make a mental list of those parts of your body that are tense or where you have no feeling at all and we’ll come back to those in a moment.
Feel your face. Does it feel good? Okay. Relaxed. Your neck and throat. Your shoulders, arm and hands. Your chest. Your breasts. Your abdomen. Your back and spine. Your pelvis. Your sexual organs. Your buttocks, thighs, calves, and feet. And the chances are you found at least one area which feels tense or absent. Turn your attention to that for a moment. Talk to it. Love it. It’s yours. And just tune in to how it feels when you love it.
And there are many different ways for balancing the feelings in your body. You can tune in to the feelings in your body. You can tune in to the feelings of the pulsations of the heart beat. Every cell in your body pulsates every time your heart beats. Or you can collect the tension, and breathe it away, like a vacuum cleaner just sort of gently sucking it up and releasing it. Or you can imagine that you’re breathing in and out through the surface of your body. Or you can circulate the electrical energy within it. Or you can expand the electro-magnetic energy field around it. They’re all the same technique, basically. Talking to the body, imaging, relating to, loving, balancing. The sensory feedback. And when your body as a whole feels good, you turn your attention then to your mind, and your attitudes. And you ask yourself if there’s anything that has been stressing you, or distressing you. And you examine that. And if you begin to feel stressed in your body you detach from it for a moment until you can really examine it as if it was someone else’s problem. And then you ask yourself, what am I going to do about it? Am I going to be upset and commit suicide? Shall I assert myself, write a letter, have a conversation, try to change the situation? Or is it so bad that I must separate myself from it? I will divorce that individual with joy for being free from an oppressive situation. Or, do I recognize that that individual perhaps was not consciously, intently, trying to harm me. It was only a part of his or her imperfection. And I’m not perfect either, and therefore I accept the fact that it’s a simple conflict between us and I forgive that individual. Can I choose to rebuild our relationship? Assert. Divorce. Accept. And forgive. Those are my choices. And when I’ve made an intelligent choice, to do what I know I should do, I do it.
And then I turn my attention to programming any changes that I wish in my body, mind, emotions, or life in general. And I affirm my right to those. In a positive way I choose an affirmation that allows me to embrace that which I claim. And I create an image in my mind in seeing myself having accomplished it. And I realize that I have a body. It’s a magnificent creation which I love dearly and treat well. I enjoy using my body to help me experience the world. And of course I have a mind. I appreciate my mind and I enjoy using it to learn and to experience the world. And I have emotions. My emotions are messages between my body and my mind; they tell me when I’m living my life in harmony with my ideals. I have a body, a mind, and emotions. And the real “I” is that inner essence. My higher self. My inner being which is magnificent, wise, and loving.
Now I place myself in perfect attunement with that higher essence of my own being. The real me. And I create a symbolic image of this perfect part of myself as a magnificent sky blue, five-pointed star, beaming down upon me its perfect blue light, filling my body, my mind, and my emotions with its perfection. And I realize that this inner perfect part of me is really only a receiver and a transmitter of an even more powerful energy. And I attune myself to this ultimate perfect source, and create a symbolic image of it as a giant, white, six-pointed star beaming down upon me, a golden orange light that fills my entire being with its perfection. And I know that I have the ability to express this inner perfection in my body, mind, and emotions as I go through my daily activities, by keeping myself attuned to this inner vision. And with these thoughts I take a deep breath and slowly, pleasantly, I open my eyes and stretch, feeling that perfect energy flow throughout my being.
And by putting yourself in harmony in that way, exercising adequately, and eating normally, you can attain and maintain perfect health. Thank you.
Dr. Shealy can be reached at the Pain and Health Rehabilitation Center, Route 2, Welsh Coulee, La Crosse, Wisconsin 54601, or by calling (608) 786-0611. For further information on conferences sponsored by Light of the Mountains, write Light of the Mountains, Rt. 2, Box 166, Leicester, N.C. 28748.
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