Inspired by some of the folks in our workshops who’d changed their health, Laurie went home and did her practice in earnest, feeling more vividly and intensely in her meditations the life that she could have. She stopped imagining herself with healed bones per se, and just imagined herself as whole in general—vital, glowing, resilient, youthful, and in energetic, good health. She mentally rehearsed and emotionally embraced having everything she wanted, which included a functional, walking body. She told herself that the old lady she’d been from ages 19 to 47 was just a story from the past.
New Mind, New Body
Over the next few months, Laurie simply began to feel happier, more joyful, freer, and healthier. She began to think with more clarity about her future. She rarely felt pain in her body and walked without any assistance.
When May 2013 arrived, she was feeling some trepidation about her appointment to retake the lab test. She postponed the appointment until June. Then Laurie discussed her hesitation and anxiety with an experienced workshop student, who asked her to think about some good things she could imagine related to walking into the hospital and taking the test. At this point, Laurie realized she had lots of positive, life-giving emotional resources to draw on. She began reciting a long list, including how clean the hospital was, how helpful all the staff always were, what an easy place it was to go to just be taken care of. It was exactly the shift in focus she needed.
On the day of the appointment, as she drove to the hospital, Laurie gave thanks for the sunshine, for how well traffic was moving, for her car, for her leg that was helping to operate the car, for her perfect eyesight, for the parking spot she easily found, and so on. As she later described to me, “I went inside, gave them my name, shut my eyes, and meditated in the waiting room until it was my turn. I peed in a cup, handed the nurse the bag, and walked out, giving thanks for the simple act of walking. And I let go of the result—entirely. I was okay, deep down inside, with either outcome. It enabled me to forget about it entirely, because I wasn’t expecting anything. I felt happy, in fact, obsessively grateful. I stopped analyzing and just trusted.”
She remembered my saying that the moment she began to analyze how or when her healing would happen, it would mean she was just returning back to the old self, because the new self would never think in that unsure way. Laurie continued, “And so, for no reason, I was simply grateful in the present moment ahead of the actual experience. I wasn’t waiting for the results to make me happy or thankful; I was in a state of authentic gratitude and in love with life as if it had already happened. I no longer needed something outside of me to make me happy. I was already whole and happy, because something inside of me was more whole and complete.”
She had almost nothing on any external “grand scale” by which to measure success, satisfaction, and security—not income, a house, a partner, a business, a child, not even any recent volunteer work she was particularly proud of. But Laurie had the love of her friends and those family members whom she could connect with. And she had a newfound love for herself. She’d realized that she’d never had self-love before—only self-interest. She told me later that it was a distinction that she never could have understood in her previous, narrow state of mind. She felt quite content with herself and her life. She said, “And for the first time since I began this journey, I just didn’t care about the test. I was happy with myself.”
Two joyful weeks later, the test results came back. The doctor’s assistant told Laurie, “Your results are perfectly normal. You scored a 40. Your values are down from an abnormal, elevated level of 68, just five months ago.”
Laurie had crossed the river and was on the shores of a new life. There was no evidence of her past living in her body any longer. She was free—born anew.
Laurie told me later:
It occurred to me in an instant that my identity as “patient” and “sick person with a disease” had become stronger than any other role I’d played in life. I had pretended to be that person, but all along I knew I wasn’t. All of my attention and energy were consumed with being a patient instead of with being a woman, a girlfriend, a daughter, an employee, or even just a happy and whole person. I now know that I had no available energy to be anyone else until I took my attention off my old personality and old self, and reinvested my attention and energy into a new self. I’m so grateful that now I’m me instead of that!
Laurie now has no regrets and no significant resentments, and she feels no loss over the past. As she puts it, “I wouldn’t want to judge or hold a grudge or feel forsaken from my past, because that choice would take away this feeling of wholeness. It’s as if my past condition was actually a blessing, because I overcame my own limitations and now I’m in love with who I am. I’m at peace. I am truly changed on the biological and cellular level. I am proof of the message that your mind can heal your body, and believe me, no one is more surprised than I am.”
Candace’s Story
Candace’s relationship, barely a year old, just wasn’t working. After their first few months together, she and her boyfriend became deeply embroiled in incessant fighting, volatile accusations, constant mistrust, and ceaseless acts of blame. They both felt jealous and insecure, so their communications were frustrating, at best. They each were haunted by unfulfilled expectations that the other had no hope of satisfying. In a rage she’d never known, Candace found herself in violent screaming matches, throwing uncontrollable tantrums. These fits left her feeling more unworthy, more victimized, and more insecure. All of this behavior was new to her; she hadn’t been an angry, frustrated, or upset person before, and she’d never thrown a tantrum in all the 28 years of her life.
Although she knew on a gut level that staying in those circumstances wasn’t benefiting her, Candace couldn’t escape the emotional attachment to this unhealthy relationship. Yet as she became addicted to her stressful emotions, this became her new identity. Her personal reality was creating her new personality. Candace’s external environment was controlling how she was thinking, acting, and feeling. She’d become a victim trapped in her own life.
Flooded with the strong energy of survival emotions, Candace began to operate like an addict, needing that emotional rush of feelings and believing that it was something out there that was causing her to feel and think and react in certain ways. She couldn’t think or act greater than how she felt. Imprisoned in this emotional state, she was re-creating the same thoughts, the same choices, the same behaviors, and the same experiences over and over again.
Candace was actually using her boyfriend and all of the conditions in her outer world to reaffirm who she thought she was. Her need to feel anger, frustration, insecurity, unworthiness, fear, and victimization was associated with that relationship. Even though it wasn’t serving her greatest ideal, she was too afraid of change to remedy the situation. In fact, she became so bonded to those emotions, because they reaffirmed her identity, that she would rather feel those familiar toxic feelings constantly than leave and embrace the unfamiliar—to step from the known into the unknown. Candace began to believe that she was her emotions, and as a result, she memorized a personality based on the past that she’d created.
About three months after things began to really go downhill, Candace’s body couldn’t sustain the stress of that heightened emotional state, and her hair started falling out in very large chunks; within weeks, almost a third of it was gone. She began experiencing severe migraines, chronic fatigue, gastrointestinal issues, poor concentration, insomnia, weight gain, consistent pain, and myriad other debilitating symptoms—all of them quietly destroying her.
An intuitive young woman, Candace innately felt that this “dis-ease” was a self-inflicted product of her own emotional issues. Just thinking about her relationship would physiologically knock her out of balance in preparation for another conflict. Candace was turning on stress hormones and her autonomic nervous system by thought alone. And when she thought about her partner, or talked or complained about their rela
tionship to her family and friends, she was conditioning her body to the mind of those emotions. It was the ultimate mind-body connection, and because she couldn’t turn off the stress response, eventually she began downregulating genes. Her thoughts were literally making her sick.
Six months into the relationship, Candace was still living in utter dysfunction, at the highest levels of stress. Even though she was sure by now that the symptoms in her body were a warning sign, she subconsciously continued to choose the same reality, which was now her normal state of being. Barraging her body with negative survival emotions, Candace was signaling the wrong genes in the wrong ways. She felt that she was slowly dying from the inside out, and she knew she needed to take control of her life but had no idea how to go about doing it. She couldn’t find the courage to leave the relationship, so she remained in it for over a year, living in a habitual mire of resentment and anger the entire time. Justified or not in feeling those emotions, Candace watched her body pay the price.
Candace Pays the Piper
In November 2010, Candace finally saw a medical doctor, who diagnosed her with Hashimoto’s disease (also referred to as Hashimoto’s thyroiditis or chronic lymphocytic thyroiditis), an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the thyroid gland. The condition is marked by hypothyroidism (an underactive thyroid) with occasional bouts of hyperthyroidism (an overactive thyroid). Symptoms of Hashimoto’s include weight gain, depression, mania, sensitivity to heat and cold, numbness, chronic fatigue, panic attacks, abnormal heart rate, high cholesterol, low blood sugar, constipation, migraines, muscle weakness, joint stiffness, cramps, memory loss, vision problems, infertility, and hair loss—many of which Candace was experiencing.
During the consultation, the endocrinologist told Candace that her condition was genetic and she could do nothing about it. She would have Hashimoto’s for the rest of her life and would need to take thyroid medication indefinitely, because her antibody count would never change. Although Candace discovered later that she actually had no family history of this illness, the die seemed cast.
Having an actual diagnosis gave Candace the unexpected gift of awareness. She’d clearly needed a wake-up call, and this was it. The physical breakdown of her body had caused her to reflect on her past and really see the truth of who she was being. It dawned on her that she was single-handedly responsible for creating an autoimmune illness that was slowly destroying her physically, emotionally, and mentally. She was living a life in constant-emergency fashion. All of her body’s energy was going toward keeping her safe in her external environment, and no energy was left for her internal environment. Her immune system couldn’t manage itself any longer.
Despite the gut-wrenching fear of change and of the unfamiliar, Candace finally chose to leave the relationship five months later. She fully understood that the relationship had been unhealthy and not served her. She asked herself, What’s the trade-off? Stay in the dysfunction and propel myself deeper into darkness? Or choose freedom and possibility? This is my chance for a new and different life.
Candace’s adversity became the genesis for her personal evolution, self-reflection, and expansion. She found herself standing on the edge of the cliff, wanting to leap into the unknown. Her decision to jump and to change became a passionate experience. So jump she did, into what she saw as endless possibilities and potentials, compelled by a desire to finally stop doing what was no longer loving to her so that she could rewrite her biological code.
This was a turning point in Candace’s life. She’d read my two previous books and been to one of my beginning workshops, so she knew that if she embraced her diagnosis and the emotions of fear, worry, anxiety, and sadness it inspired, she would be autosuggesting and believing only in thoughts equal to those feelings. She could try to think positively, but her body was feeling bad, so that would have real consequences. Making that choice would be the wrong placebo, the wrong state of being.
So Candace chose instead not to accept her illness. She respectfully declined the physician’s diagnosis, reminding herself that the mind that creates illness is the same mind that creates wellness. She knew she had to change her beliefs about the condition given to her by the medical community. Candace chose not to be suggestible to her doctor’s advice and opinions, because she wasn’t fearful, victimized, or sad.
In fact, she was optimistic and enthusiastic, and those emotions drove a new set of thoughts that allowed her to see a new possibility. She didn’t accept her diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment; believe hastily in the most probable outcome or future destiny; or permanently surrender to the diagnosis or treatment plan. She didn’t condition her body to that future worst-case scenario, expect the same predictable outcome that everyone else did, or assign the same meaning that everyone else with the condition did. She had a different attitude, so she was now in a different state of being.
Candace Gets Busy
Even though Candace didn’t accept her condition, she had a lot of work ahead of her. She knew that to change her belief about her disease, she’d have to make a choice with an amplitude of energy that was greater than the hardwired programs in her brain and the emotional addictions in her body so that her body could respond to a new mind. Only then could she experience the necessary change in energy that she needed to rewrite her subconscious programs and erase her past neurologically and genetically—which is exactly what began to happen.
Although she had heard me say all of this before and knew the material intellectually, Candace had never embraced the information from personal experience. In the first workshop she attended after getting the diagnosis, she looked exhausted and kept falling asleep in her chair. I knew she was struggling.
When she came to her next workshop, she’d been taking thyroid medication to regulate her imbalanced chemical state for a little over a month, and she was more alert and interested. Candace was incredibly inspired by the stories I told during the weekend. When she heard that others weren’t going to be victims of the circumstances in their external worlds and that uncommon healings could happen, she decided that she was going to be her own science project.
So Candace embarked on the journey. Having an understanding of epigenetics and neuroplasticity from my workshops, she knew she was no longer a victim of the disease and, instead, used her knowledge to become proactive. She assigned a different meaning to her future and so had a different intention. She awoke every day at 4:30 A.M. to do her meditation and began to emotionally condition her body to a new mind. She worked on finding the present moment, which she realized had been lost to her before.
Candace wanted to be happy and healthy, so she fought hard to regain her life. Even so, she struggled in the beginning and got very frustrated when she couldn’t sit for any extended period of time. Her body had been trained to be the mind of frustration, anger, impatience, and victimization, and it understandably rebelled. As though she were training an undisciplined animal, Candace had to keep settling her body down to the present moment. Every time she went through that process, she was reconditioning her body to a new mind and freeing herself a bit more from the chains of her emotional addiction.
Every day in her meditations, Candace worked on overcoming her body, her environment, and time. She refused to get up as the same person who’d sat down to do the meditation, because the old Candace was the one who became angry and frustrated and was so chemically addicted to her external circumstances. She didn’t want to be that person anymore. She listened to her meditations, emulated a new state of being, and wouldn’t stop until she was in love with life—in a true state of gratitude for no particular reason.
Candace applied all the knowledge that she’d learned from my workshops and from listening to every audio CD, reading every book (more than once), and studying her notes from the courses. She was wiring new information into her brain to prepare herself for a new experience of healing. More and more often, she found that she could refrain from firing and wiring the old neural connections
of anger, frustration, resentment, arrogance, and mistrust and that she could begin to fire and wire the new neural connections of love, joy, compassion, and kindness. In doing so, Candace knew she was pruning away the old connections and sprouting new ones. And the more times she made the effort with a level of mental fortitude, the more she would transform.
In time, she became incredibly grateful to be alive, realizing that where harmony existed, incoherence couldn’t abide. She told herself, I am not the old Candace, and I’m not reaffirming that existence any longer. For months on end, she persevered. And if she found herself being driven to that lowest common denominator, being angry or frustrated at the conditions in her external world, or feeling sick or unhappy, she would very quickly make a conscious shift. By swiftly changing her state of being, she could shorten the periods in which those emotions had a hold on her so that she was overall less moody, less temperamental, and less like her old personality.
Some days Candace felt so bad that she didn’t want to get out of bed, but she got up anyway and meditated. She told herself that whenever she transmuted those lower emotions into elevated emotions, she was removing herself biologically from her past and priming her brain and body to a new future. She began to realize how worthwhile doing her inner work was, and it soon became less like effort and more like a gift.
Thanks to her daily persistence, Candace noticed a huge shift very quickly, and she started feeling better. She started communicating with others differently once she stopped looking at the world through a mind of fear and frustration, and instead looked through a lens of compassion, love, and gratitude. Her energy increased, and she was able to think more clearly.
Candace realized that she didn’t react the same way to the familiar conditions in her life, because the old fear-based emotions were no longer within her body. She was overcoming her knee-jerk reactions, because she now saw that the people and conditions that used to upset her existed only in relation to how she was feeling. She was becoming free.
You Are the Placebo Page 24