How Healing Works

by Wayne Jonas

  Are you actively involved in an organization? Getting involved is critical if you want the organization to develop a healing culture. Opportunities such as PTA, clubs, committees, and volunteer activities are ways to inspire change. As a part of these groups, set a good example for others. Build healing relationships with your coworkers. This can provide you with opportunities to practice your own self-care and to share with others ways to support greater personal well-being—in family, school, and work environments and in other social situations.

  Foster a Culture of Healing

  Groups that foster a culture of healing have the following in common:

  • Respect for individuals, including their inner lives

  • A system of values that is present at all levels

  • Honest and open communication

  • A climate of trust

  • A focus on learning rather than blame

  • Opportunities for self-care, like exercise and yoga

  Do the groups that you belong to help you to heal or impede you?

  Lead or Follow

  Ask yourself: Am I a good leader? Am I a good follower? Good leaders and good followers walk their talk. They work on improving their communication skills, they treat others as they would like to be treated, and they are good team players. Examine your role in the groups that you are a part of and explore shifting them toward a healing culture. The best way to do this is to lead by example.

  Set a Social/Emotional Dimension Self-Care Goal

  Part of any relationship includes dealing with the moods and feelings of others. Self-care is important because it can be easier to deal with the emotions of others when you are taking good care of yourself. Once you are in a strong and healthy place, you will be better able to cocreate a healthy relationship.

  What is one thing you can do to improve a relationship in your life today?

  YOUR MIND-SPIRIT CONNECTIONS

  Who you are at the deepest level includes the thoughts, feelings, and wishes that come from your mind. It also includes your spiritual life and having a sense of meaning or purpose.

  The healing that arises from an experience of personal wholeness happens only when the mind, body, and spirit are in balance. A weakness or imbalance in one of these can negatively affect the others. For example, severe emotional stress can cause high blood pressure and other illnesses in an otherwise healthy body. Likewise, a physical illness or injury can cause depression in a usually healthy mind.

  Two elements are key to your healing journey:

  • Developing an intention and expectation for healing

  • Feeling the wholeness that comes from mind, body, and spirit practices

  Develop Healing Intention

  Healing intention is a conscious choice to improve your health or the health of another. It includes belief in improved well-being and the hope that a goal can be reached. Belief and hope set the stage for healing to occur. As we saw from the research on placebo, belief itself is a powerful healer.

  If you don’t truly believe that you can be healed, or if some part of you is holding onto the disease or condition, you might disrupt or limit your own healing on a subconscious level. Don’t underestimate yourself! By developing healing intention, you set the stage for healing to occur.

  Developing healing intention includes awareness, intention, and reflection.

  Build Your Self-Awareness

  Awareness addresses the question: “How do I feel?” It helps you learn what your body is telling you and to connect to what you think about to who you are.

  You can become aware of your body’s subtle signals, such as changes in energy level or mood. Bring these feelings to your conscious mind. This allows you to change behaviors that don’t contribute to your health and learn new skills to change your automatic responses. Physical symptoms are often messages from your body telling you how it is doing and what it needs.

  Some turn to active practices like walking, yoga, or repeating a centering word. Others use religious prayer, rituals, and services. You can also just take a few moments to be quiet or to meditate.

  This awareness of how the mind, body, and spirit work together gives you the information you need to guide you on a healing path.

  Once you know how you feel, it’s essential to know what you want. For those whose lives have diverged from what they had planned, this can be a challenge. But it’s key to rebuild this knowledge so you can create new goals and plans that may be different, but are also meaningful and fulfilling.

  On a spiritual level, once you connect with your inner self, you can direct your intention to bring this sense of peace and healing in your life.

  Take Time to Reflect

  The story you tell yourself about your life is powerful. It creates a mind-set that impacts your physical response to any stimulus or situation. This self-story can be a way to help you grasp the themes of your life and find meaning in them. When your sense of meaning in life is altered, it can lead to feelings of distress. Regaining that sense of purpose—even in suffering, or despite suffering—is vital for health and well-being.

  Meaning and purpose help you deal with loss and grief, create hope and dispel despair, and find joy and stop sadness. They allow you to accept a new normal, find a sense of well-being within it, and control your outlook.

  Journaling, creative writing, art therapy, and peer mentoring may be helpful as you reflect on questions of who you are and what role your illness has played in your life. Also important to your self-story are the questions: What is my purpose? How do I fit into my family, my community, my life? What are my values or spiritual beliefs?

  For many, spirituality, faith, and religion are central parts of who they are. They can influence how you cope with trauma, fear, or loss. They may help you find happiness and meaning within rather than from external influences such as wealth, belongings, work, fame, or fancy food, which may leave you feeling empty, lost, and alone.

  Experience Personal Wholeness

  Personal wholeness is the feeling of well-being that occurs when your body, mind, and spirit are aligned and moving in harmony and balance.

  Think about a time when you felt most authentic, most whole, most complete and happy. Perhaps you were doing something that you felt was important and meaningful. It could include reaching a major milestone or completing a difficult task. It could also be something from daily life, like cooking a tasty meal or teaching a child to ride a bike. When the experience of complete wholeness arises, a healing presence or unity occurs.

  Activities that connect your physical body with your nonphysical mind and spirit help to integrate your biological responses with your psychological responses. From these practices, you can experience a sense of wholeness that enhances recovery and resilience.

  Add a Mind-Body Practice to Your Toolbox

  The same mind-body practices that help you develop a sense of self can counteract stress and its harmful effects. The most important thing to know about mind-body practices is that there is no single right way. These practices go through cycles of popularity. However, all have the same intended effect of breaking the train of everyday thoughts and inducing deep relaxation. What doesn’t work for someone else may work for you.

  Consider these factors when picking a mind-body practice:

  • Physical energy: Do you enjoy being physically active? If yes, consider a moving meditation like tai chi, qigong, yoga, walking, and running, or an active meditation like art therapy or journaling. If no, consider breathing techniques, meditation, or mindfulness-based stress reduction, loving-kindness meditation, or progressive muscle relaxation.

  • Self-based or practitioner-based: Practices such as acupuncture, chiropractic or osteopathic manipulation, massage, and other bodywork require making time to see an outside practitioner. For some, that time out can be relaxing, while others may find it stressful. Some practices require nothing more than your attention and a few seconds (breathing, mantra repetition). And there a
re various others that, once learned, can be practiced on your own, such as acupressure, Reiki, yoga, or tai chi.

  • Time: Consider what fits into your schedule. Do you have thirty seconds? Five minutes? An hour? There is a mind-body practice for every time frame.

  • Belief and conviction: Choose a practice and terminology that fits into your belief system. Whether it’s making time for prayer, meditation, or quiet reflection, you are practicing self-care. It is not important to be convinced that the practice will work for you. However, it is important to stay open and to do it. Approach it in a spirit of experimentation. Check it out.

  Schedule this time regularly. Just knowing that you have time set aside just for you can be helpful.

  Think Positive

  Positive thinking is a mind-set that turns anxiety into opportunity. It builds healthy self-esteem and self-value. Remember the experiments of Stanford Professor Crum showing that how one framed stress—either as resilience building or draining—produced the dominant effect that stress had on a person. These skills can keep you from doubting yourself during the ups and downs of life:

  • Start each day with the intent to learn something new.

  • Give yourself permission to be wrong.

  • Start with “thanks” or a gratitude practice.

  Self-talk is the stream of thoughts running through your head from the moment you wake up until you fall asleep. If your thoughts are mostly negative, it’s more difficult to cope with stressful situations.

  Instead of expecting the worst outcome of any situation, focus on the best. When you deal with life’s difficulties in a positive and productive way, you’ll reap health benefits including a longer life span, greater resistance to illness, and better mental and physical well-being.

  Live in the Moment

  Notice how much of your day you spend thinking about the past or the future. Thoughts of the past can keep you from being present and making the most of this day—distracting you from the present joy.

  Many people think of mindfulness as being in a calm, Zen state. And it can be. But more realistically, it’s about being present to your best self. Mindfulness means being aware of what your mind is up to in each moment but not getting caught up in or controlled by your thoughts. It can help to remind yourself: “My thoughts do not control me.”

  Trust Your Inner Guidance

  How often do you ignore what your gut is telling you? You may think, “I should call a friend for support,” but decide not to because it’s late. Or you may think, “I wish I could reschedule those plans,” but attend to them anyway and regret it later.

  Over time, as you become mindful of your thoughts and feelings, you will begin to trust your inner guidance. You may notice that when you follow your instinct, you feel better. On the other hand, when you fall back into old patterns of holding back and doing what you think you should, you feel worse.

  PAUSE AND TAKE A STEP BACK

  Now that you’ve seen how the four dimensions of your life can affect your self-healing abilities, pause and take a step back. See where your journey began and where it has taken you.

  You have seen that self-care means:

  • Surrounding yourself with healing spaces (physical environment)

  • Making healthy life choices (behavioral dimension)

  • Maintaining strong social connections (social/emotional needs)

  • Building a strong sense of identity (mind/spirit-connection)

  I hope this book has inspired you to begin your healing journey. Perhaps you’ve already taken your first steps. When you’ve had time to make some progress, I invite you to return to consider these questions and observations, and reflect on how far you’ve come and what you’ve learned. If you have kept a journal, go back and read your first few entries. Have you learned anything about yourself or others along the way?

  Note how a change in one area of your life impacts other areas. If you resolved conflicts with others, how did that make you feel about yourself? If you started taking walks, how did it affect your sleep or stress levels or pain?

  You might have noticed that some of the changes you made affected those around you in a positive way. By looking deeply into your life and relationships with others, you can work toward peace and healing. That peace and healing will spread to those around you.

  Amplify your healing by sharing your experiences with others along the path of life. As I learned from my first patient as a student chaplain before medical school—a 74-year-old man dying of lung cancer—the healer and healee share one goal and one mutually beneficial process. The healing process benefits both and all others with whom they are connected. And that, on the greater human scale, is how healing works.

  Additional Reading on Integrative Health

  The Cochrane Collaboration: cochrane.org

  A respected international online resource for evidence about health care practices. They have an integrative medicine (CAM) section.

  The National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health: nccih.nih.gov

  A good source for information on complementary and integrative practices.

  Natural Medicines: naturalmedicines.therapeuticresearch.com

  A good source of information on natural products—their effectiveness, safety, and quality.

  Choosing Wisely: choosingwisely.org/

  A good source of information on what you and your doctor should not be doing and what does not work.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  The concepts and data in this book have been drawn from hundreds of readings and references—mostly from the peer-reviewed medical literature. However, because of space limitations, I have selected key references for readers, choosing to include those that illustrate the main points made in each chapter, support some of the lesser-known facts, or provide readers with information and concepts that meaningfully supplement the text. For readers interested in more references on specific topics such as placebo, optimal healing environments, evidence-based medicine, whole systems science, complementary and integrative medicine, the HOPE note, or healing in general, please go to my website: DrWayneJonas.com.

  CHAPTER 1: THE PARADOX OF HEALING

  One of the most striking observations about healing practices is their tremendous diversity of models, beliefs, practices, and traditions around the world, from spiritual healing to herbal treatments, physical manipulation, surgery, and drugs. Theories of disease are equally diverse, ranging from spirits to consciousness to energy to chemicals. Despite this diversity, all claim to work, and observational studies often support those claims. For further reading about this, I suggest a classic in medical anthropology by Arthur Kleinman and a clear comparative review of different healing systems by Stanley Krippner. These can be found at:

  Kleinman, Arthur. Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

  Krippner, S. “Common Aspects of Traditional Healing Systems Across Cultures,” in Essentials of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Jonas, W. B. and J. S. Levin (eds.). Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 1999.

  I was startled by Norma’s response to the placebo. However, this is common in patients—and research studies. Some useful information sources mentioned in this chapter are the following:

  Many treatments that have produced 60% to 80% improvement when delivered under normal practice conditions are found later to work no better than placebo when studied in randomized controlled studies. For a good summary, see Roberts, A. H., D. G. Kewman, L. Mercier, and M. Hovell (1993).“The power of nonspecific effects in healing: Implications for psychosocial and biological treatments.” Clinical Psychology Review 13(5): 375–391.

  At the time I was treating Bill, the best data showed that acupuncture was no more effective than placebo acupuncture. That was true until Andrew Vickers and colleagues from Sloan Kettering collected individual data from all the top studies in the world
and pooled this data for analysis. This proved that the effects from acupuncture were not all due to placebo—something still not known by most physicians. See Vickers, A. J., A. M. Cronin, A. C. Maschino, et al. (2012). “Acupuncture for chronic pain: Individual patient data meta-analysis.” Archives of Internal Medicine 172(19): 1444–1453; and, Vickers, A. J. and K. Linde (2014). “Acupuncture for chronic pain.” Journal of the American Medical Association 311(9): 955–956.

  It is hard for people to imagine that most of the effects from surgery might be due to factors other than the surgery, so studies are rarely done to test those other factors. In chronic pain, data shows that 87% of the effect of surgery is coming from factors other than the surgery itself. For summaries of surgery studies and why it heals see Beecher, H. K. (1961). “Surgery as placebo. A quantitative study of bias.” Journal of the American Medical Association 176: 1102–1107; and, Johnson, A. G. (1994). “Surgery as a placebo.” The Lancet 344(8930): 1140–1142; and, Jonas, W. B., C. Crawford, L. Colloca, T. J. Kaptchuk, B. Moseley, F. G. Miller, L. Kriston, K. Linde, and K. Meissner (2015). “To what extent are surgery and invasive procedures effective beyond a placebo response: A systematic review with meta-analysis of randomized, sham controlled trials.” BMJ Open: e009655. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2015-009655; Jonas, W. B., C. C. Crawford, K. Meissner, and L. Colloca. “The Wound that Heals: Placebo, Pain and Surgery,” Placebo and Pain. L. Colloca, M. A. Flaten, and K. Meissner (eds.). Boston: Elsevier, 2013; 227–233.