Does the mind control the body or does the body control the mind?

As a nation, we in the United States of America consume five billion tranquilizers, five billion barbiturates, three billion amphetamines, and sixteen thousand tons of aspirin every year. This does not include other substances used, such as alcohol, nicotine, and various other stimulants we take each year to cope with the toxic emotions, and the resulting physiological pain it can cause in our bodies.

Unfortunately there is still something missing, these treatments, coping drugs, or medications don’t seem to be turning the tide. Studies are linking more and more modern diseases to an epidemic of toxic emotions in our culture. Heart disease, hypertension, strokes, incidences of cancer, ulcers, skin diseases, and headaches all seem to be on the rise, in spite of medicine, and decades of research and innovative treatments.

According to the American Institute of Stress, between 75 and 90 percent of all visits to primary-care physician’s result from stress-related disorders. In essence we have done very little to get to the core or root of a disease and actually practice prevention. It is possible to live a vibrant, pain-free, and disease free life-in body, mind, and spirit.

These are some guidelines to help you begin to address sickness, pain or disease in your life:

• What you feel emotionally becomes how you feel physically
• Deal with the physical pain on three levels, mind, body, and spirit simultaneously
• Good or bad stress can lead to sickness and disease, the body doesn’t know what caused stress, it only experiences it.
• There is a connection between what we think in the brain and what we experience in the body.
• Fear triggers more than fourteen hundred known physical and chemical stress reactions and activates more than thirty different hormones and neurotransmitters
• A fight or flight response can be a “red flag” to look at toxic thoughts and emotions.
• Addiction to stress is real and can be harmful to our physical bodies over time.
• When long-term emotional stress continues and reaches the chronic level, the body begins to internally damage itself.
• Rage, unforgiveness, depression, anger, worry, frustration, fear, grief, and guilt, are extremely damaging to our physical body if harbored over time.

Professional References: The Healing Connection by Harold G. Koenig