When I was taking my master's exam in Calcutta, India, I didn't feel prepared for the exam at all; I became very anxious. The more I prepared, the harder I studied, and the more anxious I became. Then, the day before the exam, I developed a heart palpitation that wouldn't quit. Eventually, with the agreement of my family, I had to give up on completing the exam. Within a couple of hours of dropping out, the palpitation miraculously stopped.
This was my first experience with the effect mind has on the body, effects that are sometimes labeled “mind as slayer.” There are many such effects. For example, many people report that when they are mentally down or depressed, they are more apt to catch a cold or something; it is reasonable to theorize that this happens because depression makes their immune systems vulnerable.
Not only does your mind have hazardous effects on your health, but somebody else's mind can kill you if your belief system permits such a thing. It is documented that that's how voodoo works (Dossey 1991).
There are, fortunately, also mind-body effects called “mind as healer” (which are discussed in subsequent chapters), so there is recompense from the mind as well. But both these phenomena, mind-as-slayer and mind-as-healer, are suggestive of mind over body; they are new in Western medicine (Pelletier 1992) and are still distrusted by conventional Western medical practitioners.
What is the reason for the reluctance of the Western medical establishment in accepting and understanding mind-body disease or healing? It can be summarized in one word: dualism. Mind-body medicine, for a Western medical practitioner, conjures up images of a dualistic mind separate from the body (a discarnate soul, as it were) acting on the body. This is not palatable, because science elsewhere (physics and biology) is supposed to have eradicated dualism in favor of a monism based on matter—everything is matter (and its correlates, energy and force fields).
So the mind is looked upon as a part of the body—specifically the brain. In this view, the idea of mind causally acting upon body is circular—body acting upon body without a cause! Mind-body disease (or healing) is not permissible because of this circularity and breakdown of logic.
To state it for the umpteenth time, in a metaphysical foundation in which science is conducted within consciousness, separate mind and matter can work without dualism. Not so long ago, when asked, “What's mind?” the scientist would reply, “It doesn't matter.” And when asked, “What's matter?” the scientist would retort, “Never mind,” reminding you of the circularity of thinking about these things. But no more.
Mind and matter both are quantum possibilities for consciousness to choose from. “What's mind?” The new scientist says, “Mind consists of those possibilities of consciousness that, when collapsed, give you meaning and the experience of thinking.” And to “What's matter?” the new scientist's reply is “Matter also consists of quantum possibilities of consciousness, those, when collapsed, that give you the physical sensations of seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, and tasting.” Consciousness is clearly the mediator of mind and matter in their mutual interaction, and room is then made for mind-body disease as well as healing.
There are quite a few good books out now on the subject of mind-body medicine (see for example, Pelletier 1992; Goleman and Gurin 1993), but most of them suffer from a bad case of world-view jitteriness. There is a tendency in these books to pussyfoot around the idea of a causally potent consciousness and a mind separate and independent of the brain. I hope the psychophysical parallelism that I have outlined here cures this.
Let's be more systematic and discuss in detail the solid evidence accumulating in favor of the idea that mind can cause disease. But first, what do we mean when we say that mind causes disease?
In quantum terms, mind helps consciousness process meaning. So disease, once again, can be due to faulty representations in the physical body (the allopathic model). In the mind-body medicine model, disease can also be due to faulty processing at the mental level, giving faulty meaning to physical events, mentalizing feeling—giving meaning to meaning-neutral feelings.
Much of the data of mind-body disease (psychosomatic illness) say it is stress related. First, we need to define some terms. A stressor is an outside agent, such as a death in the family, a math problem or an exam, a boring job, and so on. Stress is how a person reacts or responds to a stressor, which means what mental meaning he or she puts to the stressor and how he or she mentalizes the feeling associated with the reaction to the stressor.
Of course, in a given culture, meanings become somewhat fixed, in which case the stress associated with many common stressors produces a similar stress response in most people, so that one can talk about an average response. Important research by Richard Rahe (1975) measures such average stress in “life change units” (lcu)—the degree of life adjustments a stressor requires. For example, in Rahe's study, a minor illness has a stress level of 25 lcu, whereas the death of a spouse counts for 105 lcu.
Stress can cause heart attack. In this way even a seemingly simple stress such as an exam can kill a person. More people die of heart attacks on Monday than on any other day. This is called the “black Monday syndrome.” Explanation? Monday is when we return from a relaxed weekend and we fantasize how awful the work we have to do is going to be, how boring, how difficult, and so forth.
Famous is the 1991 New England Journal of Medicine report showing a remarkable correlation between levels of mental stress and susceptibility to the common cold. In this research, psychologist Sheldon Cohen at Carnegie Mellon University injected volunteers with measured amounts of cold viruses or a harmless placebo. Among those who got the viruses (any of the five kinds offered), the chance of getting a cold was found to be directly proportional to the amount of stress in that person's life (according to their own estimate).
There is now at least preliminary evidence that stress can cause disease of the gastrointestinal system. An example is stomach ulcer. Never mind what some allopaths say, that ulcer is caused by a bacterium. Stress can cause severe diseases of the respiratory system (e.g., asthma) and the immune system (e.g., autoimmune diseases, in which the immune system attacks the body's own cells) and maybe cancer.
Cancer is the uninhibited growth of certain cells of the body. The immune system, when functioning normally, should be able to kill off such abnormally functioning cells. But the mind under stress leads to malfunction of the immune system, thus causing cancer. This may not be the whole story of cancer, but it is a plausible model.
Can the mind acting in conjunction with the brain affect the immune system? This question needs special attention.
Two great physicians of ancient Greece, Hippocrates and Galen, believed that thoughts and emotions moved to the various systems of the body and directly affected them via contact interaction. Today's avant garde research is establishing the truth of that; thus the preponderance of such terms as psychobiology and psycho neuroimmunology in modern medicine.
Imagine that following a certain stimulus, you are angry, very upset. Your mind is giving meaning to the stimulus you received that is producing your anger. Your brain is mapping your mind, but can the brain communicate its maps to the body, specifically the immune system? The answer is yes. The brain does that through recently discovered molecules called neuropeptides. The new wisdom gained—mind affects the brain affects the immune system—has become the subject of an entirely new field, psychoneuroimmunology (abbreviated as PNI).
Before we delve into PNI, a little introduction to the immune system may be of help in order to understand why, before PNI, it was considered independent of the brain.
The organs of the immune system are also called lymphoid organs because they produce lymphocytes, the all-important white blood cells that are mediators of the immune response in the body. The initial production of the lymphocytes takes place in the bone marrow. One set of lymphocytes called T cells early in their development lives in the thymus gland (behind the sternum in the chest) and becomes the upholder of the “me-not me” distinction. Lymphocytes travel throughout the body, and of special importance are the small armies of these cells kept alert in the lymph nodes and the spleen. The immune system defends the body against intruders—viruses, bacteria, any foreign “not me” object. This seems independent of what the brain does.
The surprise came when a neurologist at the University of Rochester in New York discovered that all immune system organs have nerves all over them, so it is plausible the immune system communicates with the brain. Then neurophysiologist Robert Ader (1981) discovered that the immune system could be conditioned following the same procedure as mental conditioning.
You know the classic case of conditioning—Pavlov's fundamental research. Dogs are proffered food when a bell rings. After a while, the dog salivates whenever the bell rings, even without the food. In Ader's experiment, rats were used instead of dogs.
So let's consider the classic experiment of Ader that prompted him to coin the word “psychoneuroimmunology.” Ader was working on a Pavlovian conditioning experiment of teaching rats an aversion to saccharine-flavored water. The standard practice was to correlate the rats' drinking of water with the taking of a drug (psychophosphamide) via injection, a drug that induces nausea and vomiting. Rats quickly learned to associate the sweet water with the nausea. After the conditioning, the rats would have nausea with just sweet water, and the drug was not needed any more. But there was a peculiar complication. The rats also seemed to have learned to die as a result of drinking sweet water.
Ader discovered that the drug induced a suppression of their immune systems. As a result of the conditioning, the rats had learned to simulate (upon drinking sweet water) not only the nauseating effect of the drug but also the immune suppression effect. It was the suppression of the immune system that made the rats prone to disease and death.
Experiments soon followed at the human level. One of the first such studies correlated the infection rate of sailors while onboard ship with their life events. The sailors who were the most unhappy as a result of their life events were also found to have the highest rate of onboard infection. Perceived negative meaning produced stress, which produced infection via the suppression of the immune system—a clear case of psychoneuroimmunology.
It is now recognized that stress (for example, produced by a spouse's death) can lead to reduced functioning of the immune system by reducing its arsenal of killer T cells. There is also little doubt that grief is a factor contributing to breast cancer in women.
Don't get too worried by all this talk about how stress negatively affects the immune system. Don't forget the previously mentioned Mother Teresa effect demonstrated by the study in which watching a film of Mother Teresa lovingly taking care of destitute, dying people increased the students' immune system function as evidenced by the increase of an immune enhancement marker (increase of salivary IgA). This is psychoneuroimmunology, too.
What mediates the interaction of the immune system with the brain? In the 1970s, Candace Pert (1997) and others discovered that the brain secretes certain molecules called neuropeptides, which help mediate analgesia, hormonal changes, and other responses to stress and resulting illnesses.
Among the neuropeptides, perhaps the most well known are the endorphins, which attach to specific receptor sites in the brain and the body (as in a lock and key mechanism). How the endorphins (or the lack of them) can alter our experience of pain (or pleasure) has been well covered in the popular press.
Take the case of hot pepper. Why is hot pepper pleasurable (actually what one experiences is pain mixed with pleasure) when from its molecular composition it should only give us pain? The answer is endorphins. Researchers prove this by using an endorphin blocker. If you take hot pepper along with an endorphin blocker, what you experience is unadulterated pain.
In 1979, it was discovered that certain components of the immune system, the T-cell lymphocytes, have receptors for an endorphin called methionine-enkephalin. This established conclusively that the neuropeptides, like endorphins, are the mediators between the brain and the immune system. Conversely, researchers found that the thymus gland secretes a substance called thymosin fraction 5, which stimulates adrenal hormones that have effects on the central nervous system. Brain endorphins connect to the immune system, and the immune system molecule thymosin connects to the brain.
The two-way-ness of the psychoneuroimmunological connection between the brain and the immune system was thus established. Similar two-way connections have now been established between the brain and the endocrine system as well.
Journalist Bill Moyers did a series of TV shows on mind-body medicine (Moyers 1993) in which he showed the case of a Minnesota girl cured of lupus using Ader's PNI ideas. Lupus is an autoimmune disease that affects the connective tissues (tissue that connects, binds, and supports various structures of the body) and the blood. The problem with treating lupus is not that allopathic drugs that give relief from it are not known, but that all these drugs have dangerous side effects.
The girl was conditioned with the taste of cod-liver oil and the fragrance of roses along with the medicine, and the dosage of the medicine was gradually reduced as the conditioning took effect. In two years, the girl learned to manage with only half the dosage and eventually learned to produce the same effect as the medicine with just the taste and smell of the conditioning agents.
So what is going on? Conditioning to a stimulus is produced making use of our habit of experiencing stimuli only upon multiple reflections in the mirror of memory. Once conditioned, eliciting remembered behavior via reflection in the mirror of memory simulates the healing effect of a drug, even without administering the drug.
That sounds behavioral and brain-based, or does it? The questions are: Who learns initially? Who sees meaning? Who emotes? Who creates the memory? Who looks via the mirror of memory? The self is always lurking behind the behavioral language.
You hear somebody calling you an idiot, and you become angry. A trick of memory, certainly. But there is no effect if you don't know the meaning of the word “idiot.” So your reaction depends on the conscious mental processing that you did originally with the meaning of this word.
Memories are representations of mental meaning. When we understand that consciousness and the mind are involved in making memories and looking through the reflections from the mirrors of past memory, we also recognize that consciousness and mind can undo the effect of the memories. This undoing of the body memory is the mechanism by which such techniques as massage therapy and Rolfing work (more on this subject in the next chapter).
As the machinery of the brain-body interactions is becoming clear, it is also becoming clear that this “machinery” is only an instrument for consciousness to use. Ultimately, it is consciousness that experiences moods and mood swings, emotions, stress, disease, and healing. To be sure, some of our conscious experiences are conditioned, but there is always scope for new choice, for creativity. The crucial role of creativity in healing is discussed in chapter 16.
Before we can understand healing, we must address the issue of how people process meaning, especially emotional meaning, why different people process meaning differently, and how this affects their health.
The usual approach of proponents of mind-body medicine is first to demonstrate with data that mind does cause disease, then demonstrate through a discussion of psychoneuroimmunology and such the mechanisms of how mind affects the body, and then go into the techniques of mind-body medicine. I think we can do better.
The straightforward approach does not explain why everybody does not contract mind-body disease, why the response to stress is not universal. There are data showing that people who are optimistic, committed to their work and have control over it, and look at stressors as challenges to be overcome do not suffer from the ill effects of stress (O'Regan and Hirshberg 1993). Among us, there are also Forrest Gumps, the Hollywood rendition of mentally slow people who breeze through life without feeling stress.
I have heard that Forrest Gump dies and is stopped at the pearly gates of Heaven by Saint Peter. “Not so fast, Forrest Gump. I am impressed that you had a full life without falling prey to the emotional distress of stress, but that is not enough. I must make sure that your mind works at least minimally. You have to answer three questions to prove your mental IQ.”
“All right,” says Forrest Gump.
“The first question,” says Saint Peter. “How many seconds in a year?”
“Oh, that's easy,” says Forrest Gump. “Twelve.”
Saint Peter is puzzled. “How did you get that?”
“Count it. January the second, February the second …” Forrest Gump goes on counting.
Saint Peter stops him. “Okay, okay, I got it. I give you that one. Now the second question. How many days in the week begin with ‘t’?”
“How do you get that?” asks Saint Peter, once more in puzzlement.
“Tuesday, Thursday, today, and tomorrow,” Forrest Gump answers.
Saint Peter chuckles. “All right, all right. I will give you that one also. But this third one you must answer properly. What is God's name?”
“Andy,” says Forrest Gump without hesitation.
“How do you get that?” asks an exasperated Saint Peter.
“Well, I learned it singing hymns at church. Andy [and He] talks with me, Andy [and He] walks with me …”
Saint Peter is amazed. “Well, I'll be darned; I will grant you that one also,” he says, as he opens the gates.
I suspect that the lessons of individuality of vital body medicine—Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine, and homeopathy, all individually administered—are crucial here. There is individuality in our mental response to the stressors.
The question is this: How do we process our mind? Since mind is a quantum system, there are only three ways we can process it: fundamental creativity (the ability for quantum leaping from known contexts of mental meaning); situational creativity (the ability to create new meaning from a combination of known contexts); and conditioning (using known mental meaning). This gives us three qualities of the mind.
Recognizing these qualities of the mind was a profound accomplishment of Indian philosophy and psychology, in which the qualities are called gunas in Sanskrit. We have introduced this term before, in connection with how we process the vital body (see chapter 9). To avoid confusion, let's use the term mental gunas to denote the mental qualities. Easterners give names also to each of the individual qualities. The quality of fundamental creativity is called sattva in Sanskrit, situational creativity is called rajas, and conditioning tamas.
The importance of the concept of quantum qualities (mental gunas) of the mind—fundamental creativity (sattva), situational creativity (rajas), and conditioning (tamas)—can now be stated: Their unbalanced use produces certain defects, doshas in Sanskrit, in the physical body, in the brain. We will call them mind-brain doshas (to avoid confusion with their vital body counterparts, defects or doshas arising in the physical body due to the unbalanced use of vital body qualities; see chapter 9).
It is not hard to see what these mind-brain doshas are. Overactive, unbalanced mental sattva creates the intellectual—one who discovers new contexts only for more thinking, not balanced living. In other words, an intellectual becomes detached from the body. James Joyce wrote an enigmatic line about a character in one of his novels: “Mr. Duffy lived a little distance from his body.” This describes the intellectual perfectly.
I can't resist telling you a Nasruddin story in this connection. Mulla Nasruddin, a boatman in this story, was taking a pundit in his boat to a certain destination. As soon as they started their journey, the pundit started giving Nasruddin a sample of his knowledge, in this case grammar. But Nasruddin was bored and did not try to hide it. The pundit got irritated and retorted, “If you don't know grammar, half of your life is wasted.” Nasruddin let the comment pass. After a while, the boat developed a problem and began to capsize. Nasruddin asked the pundit if he knew any swimming, to which the pundit replied no, adding that the idea of physical exercise bored him. Now it was Nasruddin's turn. Said he, “In that case, all of your life is wasted. The boat is sinking.”
Overactive mental rajas give rise to hyperactivity at the physical brain level. Hyperactive people have a short attention span since situational creativity's demand for attention is considerably less than that of fundamental creativity; they also live a do-do-do lifestyle, being always focused on mental accomplishment.
Overactive mental inertia or tamas gives rise to mental slowness of the brain, a basic lethargy of the brain that keeps one from engaging in mental learning and processing.
Like the vital-physical doshas, these mind-brain doshas usually come in mixtures, giving us four more types: the hyperactive intellectual, the mentally slow intellectual (idiot savant), the mentally slow hyperactive, and the mixture of all three.
Although these mind-brain doshas reside in the brain, they govern our attitude toward all emotions. Of people of the three doshas, only the mentally “lazy” avoids the mind-brain duo and lives in the body, and not only in the three lower chakras, but also in the heart. Persons of the other two doshas mentalize their feelings. People of predominant intellectuality will suppress emotions and are prone to suffer from chronic depression as a result. People of dominant rajasic dosha—hyperactivity—are of the expressive kind; they are easily irritable and will be prone to quick anger and hostility in their reaction to stress. Hyperactivity may also be associated with anxiety.
In India, you get to wait a lot at airports because planes are seldom on time. To pass time, I sometimes watch people, and it is interesting how very quickly I find verification for the threefold classification of the mind-brain doshas. Some of the people will look stoic, but if you give them an opportunity, they will immediately start grumbling. These are the intellectuals. Then there are those whose anxiety shows; they are impatient and restless, very prone to bursting out in a bout of anger. These are the hyper-actives. But some people are content with the situation and appear to be stable. It is not necessary to assume they have arrived at the much-coveted state of mental equanimity. No, these people are just mentally slow to process things.
Movies such as Forrest Gump seem to portray the idea that only the simpleton can be happy, can be nice to others. There may be some truth to that in driven cultures like that of the United States, because most people in this country suffer from overactive sattva or rajas (or both) and thus from the doshas of intellectualism and/or hyperactivity, whereas only a few get to “enjoy” the niceties of tamas, mental slowness, at the brain level.
Finally, when considering correcting mind-brain doshas we should remember the concept of prakriti (see chapter 9). We all have (due to reincarnational and early developmental proclivities) a natural homeostasis of all three doshas, although one or two doshas dominate. This is prakriti. It is the deviation from prakriti that gives us health problems, and it is that which needs to be corrected.
The general rule of thumb is this. Excess intellectualism has the tendency to suppress emotions. Excess hyperactivity leads to the tendency to express emotions. This is further discussed in the next section.
How do we respond to emotions? In the West, especially in America, there is strong cultural conditioning against expressing emotions. Expressing emotions is considered a sign of weakness and hence, almost universally, Western men learn to suppress emotions. For women, on the other hand, the cultural conditioning against expressing emotions is not as deep.
Nevertheless, not all Western men suppress their emotions. For example, if one has an exaggerated notion of self-importance, one indulges in expressing emotions, not needing the usual social constraint of defending one's persona. You can see such people everywhere. Under emotional stress, these people have well-recognized responses of short temper or irritability. We can see the connection with mind-brain doshas here. The intellectuals almost universally manage to suppress their emotions. But not everyone with dominant hyperactivity as their mind-brain dosha suppresses emotions. This is especially true when excess hyperactivity, out of balance with one's prakriti, develops. Thus the dosha of hyperactivity, when in excess, can easily result in expression when confronted with emotional stress.
Here is something else. If one is fortunate, there is always another person to allow the ventilation of emotions; this other person can help dissipate the negative impact of the emotional expressions. In traditional societies, this used to be the rule, so the health impact of emotive expression was relatively minor. But now it is all changing.
What does unsupported expression of emotions under mental and emotional stress do to us? This is now fairly well understood (Goleman and Gurin 1993). Response to stress is a function of the autonomic nervous system, and this system has two components, sympathetic and parasympathetic. As its name implies, the sympathetic nervous system sympathizes with us and brings to bear the change in physiology that we need to “survive” the stimulus responsible for the stress. The parasympathetic system controls the “relaxation response” designed to bring the body back to equilibrium.
So what does prolonged exposure to stress stimuli do to us if we allow emotional expression in response to an excess of the mind-brain dosha of hyperactivity? In general, expression produces an imbalance in the activities of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system so that the end result is that the system is left in a permanent state of sympathetic arousal.
What happens then? Chronic irritability and nervous tension can lead to sleeplessness. This is only the beginning. Chronic irritability, which comes from hurriedness, combined with competitiveness gives rise to hostility. Eventually, what was previously mental hyperactivity expressed through conditioned programs of the brain becomes manifest in the physical organs, which all begin to function at a hyperactive level, producing disease of these organs. Often, the disease settles in one organ only.
In this way, chronic arousal due to the expressiveness of the emotional response has been associated especially with heart disease and hypertension. But heart disease is not the only result of this expression. If the expression occurs through the gastrointestinal digestive system, the result is ulcer. If the expression is through the elimination systems of the body, the diseases are irritable bowel syndrome or bladder disorders. If the expression is through the immune system, causing excess immune reaction to antigens, the result is allergy. If the expression is through the respiratory system, the disease is asthma. And so on it goes.
Why does the expression settle in one organ as opposed to another? This is the million-dollar question. I am convinced that this has to do with the response of the vital body where feelings originate in the chakras.
Recall that different types of emotion are felt at different chakras. For example, irritability and anger are felt at the navel chakra. This happens when we are not getting what we want, when our ego is being affronted. The mental stuff, the processing of meaning as according to the mind-brain dosha, amplifies the vital feeling at that chakra. In this way, chronic irritability expresses itself in the organs of the navel chakra, most often as peptic ulcer.
But when irritability gives way to hostility, an advanced response of people with excess mind-brain hyperactivity, where is the vital energy felt? Hostility is looking at the world as enemy, as not me. This happens when vital energy in the heart chakra is depleted and goes into the navel chakra. Thus hostile reaction inevitably leads to disease of organs in the heart chakra. If the hostile reaction is directed at people, the organ affected is the heart. If the hostile reaction is directed toward the environment, the organ affected is the immune system.
Instead of hostility, advanced stages of irritability and competitiveness can also give rise to frustration, which is a throat chakra feeling (arising when the throat chakra is depleted of vital energy). When mind gets into the action, the feeling of frustration is amplified. Repeated amplification of frustration expresses itself as a throat chakra disease, e.g., asthma.
If the emotion expressed is fear or insecurity, the chakra involved is the root chakra. When amplified by the mind, this may lead to problems of the root chakra organs, such as diarrhea and irritable bowel syndrome.
When the feeling involves the sex chakra, as in the feeling of unfulfilled lust, mental amplification gives rise to diseases of the second chakra (sex chakra). The enlargement of the bladder, responsible for urinary problems in many males age 60 and older, is a disease of this kind.
What does suppression of the emotional response of the mind do to us? As Freud and psychoanalysts correctly theorized, mental suppression or repression may be represented (psychoanalysts call this “conversion”) as certain brain states that cause (false) physical symptoms even though there are no physiological changes. This has been called a defense mechanism, because the mind and the brain “defend” the organism from embarrassment from a cultural point of view. This, of course, is what was originally recognized as the only psychosomatic disease—disease without any physiological basis. (Unfortunately, many people still think of all mind-body disease as without physiological effects.)
We can try modeling “real” psychosomatic disease in the same way. For example, the psychiatrist John Sarno writes:
My patients have shown that the underlying psychology is the same for conversion and mind-body disorders. It is as though the brain has decided that the conversion symptoms were no longer convincing as disease, so it began to produce processes in which there were obvious physiologic reactions. This was done by involving the autonomic and immune systems in the production of symptoms (Sarno 1998, p. 46).
However, in such a model, a question is left unanswered and mysterious: How does the brain, being a machine, decide to produce a psychosomatic reaction and how does it choose its location?
Seeing the role of consciousness in decision-making and the role of the vital body in the choice of the location of the psychosomatic reaction in emotion solves this mystery. Every emotion has a vital-body counterpart, a feeling associated with it. The feeling is connected with vital-physical body movements at a certain chakra. The physical representations of the vital movements that we feel involve the corresponding organ(s) and also the muscles in which the organs are embedded. When mind suppresses the emotion through the intermediary of the brain and its connection to the physical organs through nerves and neuropeptides, the vital body movements in the corresponding chakra are suppressed along with the programs that run the functions of the physical representations, the organs. This is what is responsible for the somatic effect, the experience of illness at a specific organ site because of an actual change in physiology there.
Psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich was a specialist in the problem of suppression due to intellectualism for which he described the symptoms thus:
… loud, obtrusive laughter; exaggeratedly firm handshake; unvarying, dull friendliness; conceited display of acquired knowledge; frequent repetition of empty astonishment, surprise, or delight, etc.; rigid adherence to definite views, plans, goals; obtrusive modesty in demeanor; grand gestures in speaking; childish wooing of people's favor; boastfulness in sexual matters; display of sexual charm; promiscuous flirtation; pseudo-exuberant fellowship … (quoted in Grossinger 2000, p. 433).
How does a therapist deal with this kind of behavior in a patient? The Reichian therapist's answer is by confronting. Here is an example:
For instance, the patient may acknowledge that, of course, he has shown contempt for people in the past, that aloofness is one of his vices. The therapist may answer, “No, right now. You are being contemptuous right now. Even as you pretend to participate in this session, your expression says that you are merely indulging me, showing contempt for me.” If the outraged and embarrassed patient denies this, the therapist can respond, “Feel your mouth. Your lips are frozen into a leer. You have no sensation of them anymore.” Upon checking the patient is astonished to realize this is true. Automatically, he grins foolishly. One therapeutic method might then be to massage the lips in order to restore feeling (Grossinger 2000, p. 434).
This emotional repression by the mind, by mentalization—giving meaning to a feeling and, in this case, making it into something to be avoided—when chronic, becomes repression of organ functions at the chakra corresponding to that feeling. Crucial in this process is the connection of the brain to these various organs via the nervous system and neuropeptides (as in psychoneuroimmunology).
In particular, if the immune system function is suppressed, we may get various autoimmune diseases. Cancer may be the result of reduced immune system activity. Suppression at the brow chakra may be responsible for tension headaches and migraines. And suppression at the crown chakra leads to depression at the psychological level (see also Page 1992), which is a contributing factor in chronic fatigue syndrome.
However, repression most commonly is memorized in the muscles. This is because when we are defensive, we tend to tense our muscles. As we repress the mental-emotional experience, we also repress the muscle tension and never fully relax the muscles. In this way, repression of the mind translates as the repression of muscular activity. The muscles retain a “body memory,” so to speak, of the emotional trauma suppressed. I think it is fair to say that a muscle is holding a memory when the muscle is fixated in a certain position and cannot relax that position.
The physicist Fred Alan Wolf (1986) clarified the mechanism of how the muscles retain memory. Each muscle, which is an array of long cells up to one foot in length, contains many cell nuclei and many small fibers called myofibrils. Myofibrils are made up of repeating units of sarcomeres in a lengthwise arrangement along the long cylinder axis of the muscle. Muscle bioenergetics depend on the free flow of calcium ions. When a muscle is tensed (as when an emotional trauma is being defended against and suppressed), the muscle sarcomeres are flooded with these ions of calcium. Even after the traumatic incident is over, some excess calcium may remain in the sarcomere. This continues to maintain the tension in the muscle, becoming a memory of the suppressed trauma.
What does repeated suppression of an emotional response mean in terms of muscular tension memory? Quantum mechanically speaking, in subsequent experiences of that stimulus, just as the mind is not allowed to collapse certain mental states of awareness of the emotional response, the particular muscle memory is never “collapsed.” So this particular muscle is not reactivated by subsequent emotional experiences if the mental defense mechanism is always aroused.
It is likely that suppressed emotions all over the body give rise to serious diseases such as fibromyalgia, a state of widespread muscle pain. A related disease is called chronic fatigue syndrome, in which the main physical body symptom is total fatigue. If feelings are suppressed in all the body chakras, practically all the corresponding vital body movements will be suppressed. This may manifest as a general lack of vitality, explaining chronic fatigue. If the feeling suppression involves more of the structural parts of the body in which the organs are embedded, but not the organs themselves, the lack of vital energy may be felt as pain all over the body—fibromyalgia.
A comment about pain. A past issue of Newsweek had a banner headline on the cover that promised breakthroughs in our understanding of pain. A look at the article inside, however, was disappointing. The article fell short of reporting any real breakthrough. Fibromyalgia, the article said, is real, because a new imaging technique (MRI) confirms that when a patient of fibromyalgia is crying out in pain, certain brain areas become active. Good. But then the article has nothing much more to report except that there may be a genetic connection to fibromyalgia.
Pain is interesting because being a feeling it must have a vital energy connection, yet the role of the nerves is also undeniable, since by numbing them (local anesthesia), we can numb pain also. So pain is a mentalized feeling, a feeling connected with the suppression of vital energy at any structural part of the body and interpreted by the mind as pain, because it is undesirable. This is a very persistent mentalization, obviously millions of years old, and has much survival value.
Is there such a thing as a personality type that develops a specific mind-body disease? For example, coronary heart disease is connected with the type A personality, people who react quickly with anger and hostility, especially hostility, to a stress-producing situation. Is such a connection valid for other kinds of disease in which the mind may be involved?
At one point, there was a considerable amount of literature connecting cancer to the type B personality, associated with the inability to express emotions and nonassertiveness, even hopelessness. But such a connection has not been clinically demonstrated without controversy.
Thus there is no typical cancer-prone personality. This is understandable. All people of type B personality do not get cancer because, for some, the type B personality is close to their prakriti, their nature; even type A people can get their immune systems out of order and hence get cancer if they direct their hostility inappropriately.
Conversely, it is also true that not all cancers originate at the mental level, as I have been saying all along. Some cancers originate at the vital level; they are due to vital energy imbalances at the heart chakra. Some cancers have a genetic origin, and there are any number of combinations of physical, vital, and mental imbalances that can contribute to cancer.
There is clinical support (Freedman and Booth-Kewley 1987) for the idea that there is such a thing as a disease-prone personality. Freedman and Booth-Kewley were motivated to study the specific connection of personality types with asthma, coronary heart disease, ulcers, headaches, and arthritis. They found little evidence of any specific connection of any of these diseases to a personality type. Instead, their data showed the existence of a disease-prone personality with characteristics such as depression, anger/hostility, and anxiety.
I think this finding is entirely consistent with the idea of mind-brain doshas. As mentioned earlier, some people have a mixture of mind-brain doshas that manifests as a personality with more than one predominant disposition toward emotion, both suppression of emotion (depression) and expression (irritability, hostility, and so on). All we can say about such people is that they are disease prone.
Here is a question: If I have a disease-prone personality, doesn't it seem that I am responsible for my disease? Should I then feel guilty?
Many New Age teachers will squarely put the blame on your shoulders for your ailments (Why are you hiding behind your heart disease?), but in truth, do we really know that your disease has been produced at the mind level and not at the vital or the physical level? (And even if it is at the mind level, it is conditioned mind that is responsible. You are a little helpless.) The fact is, we don't usually know; we cannot know without the power of deep intuition.
At the same time, what prevents me from taking responsibility for healing myself if I do want to be healed? When I take such responsibility, only then can I truly engage with the advanced techniques of mind-body healing (see chapters 15–17).
A feeling is a feeling is a feeling. It is not inherently good or bad. The values we give to feelings, our likes and dislikes, are mind-created through the mind's “job” of giving meaning to everything it is able to process. This is one way we mentalize our value-neutral feelings.
Anthropologists have found that some Eskimo natives they encountered did not have a word for anger. This must mean that anger, as an emotive expression, was not a part of the social world of these Eskimos. Of course, this changed after their interaction with American anthropologists began: They had to coin a word for anger to describe the irritability and frustrations they saw in the behavior of the anthropologists.
Consider a feeling like fear. If a tiger comes into my periphery, fear, the draining of vital energy out of my root and navel chakras, gives me the physical adrenaline rush that helps my “flight” or (rarely, in this case) “fight” response to a tiger in my den. It is a necessary feeling, necessary for the survival of our species, and, no doubt, Darwinian evolution has helped to make it an instinct. But what if I fantasize a tiger in my living room and become afraid as a result of my fantasy? I may get a shiver through my body and butterflies in my stomach because of my fantasy fear, and even an adrenaline rush, but it is a case of mind over vital body, an unnecessary mentalization of an otherwise useful natural feeling (see Dantes 1995).
Something like the September 11 destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York happens, and fear, indeed, is an immediate natural reaction for New Yorkers. It protects them from the immediate danger that the events might have meant—more terrorist assaults. But then the media react, the politicians react, the event is played on TV over and over, and what happens to the national psyche? Many children in New York, many people around the whole country, could not sleep at night for months after because they continued to suffer from fear because of September 11. This is an unnecessary mentalization of fear on a large scale, driven by media and politics.
The bottom line is this: Mind gives meaning to both the physical and the vital. How the mind processes meaning depends on the three qualities we bring (maybe even from past lives): sattva (fundamental creativity), rajas (situational creativity), and tamas (conditioning). These create three mind-brain doshas: intellectualism, hyperactivity, and mental slowness in the brain processing.
The first two doshas, when aggravated beyond prakriti, the natural homeostatic level, produce a tendency for the suppression and expression, respectively, of emotions. Both of these tendencies can give rise to disease at the physical level. In addition, unnecessary mentalization of feelings, giving meaning and value to feelings generated by mental fantasies, may produce disease in people of all three mind-brain doshas.
Knowing that meaning contributes to our illnesses and diseases, if you fall sick, you may be tempted to contemplate whether the sickness could have been caused by you, whether you are to be blamed. Alas, this will only further aggravate your situation.
If meaning is something inherent in how the mind processes things, if we are helpless, giving disease-causing meaning to our experiences in the world, including the diseases we suffer through, what is our best strategy in dealing with the mind? Some people say that thinking of disease objectively is the best from this point of view alone. But as Dossey (2001) correctly points out, denying meaning is also assigning meaning, a negative meaning.
Denying the meaning of our illnesses is like atheists denying the existence of God. Now if we could be truly agnostic!
So what is a good strategy? As Epictetus said, “Things in themselves are always neutral, it is our perception which makes them appear positive or negative.” If we put a negative mental meaning to an event, it causes an incongruence with our normal state of happiness. Instead, suppose we interpret everything so that congruence is maintained?
The East Indian mystic Swami Sivananda gave a wonderful overall strategy for dealing with the meaning-giver mind, which I will share with you.
A king had a companion/minister whom he liked very much except for one thing that irritated him to no end. The minister had the habit of saying, “Everything that happens is for the good,” to whatever happened around him, good or bad. So one day, the king cut his thumb while playing with a knife, and the minister, who was there, promptly said, “Everything that happens is for the good.” This comment made the king very angry and he threw the minister into jail. To console himself, he went hunting in the forest alone.
He must have gone quite a distance and beyond his kingdom, because he came across a tribe that took him captive. Unfortunately for the king, this was a tribe who offered humans as sacrifices to their deity. So the king was taken to a priest to be offered as a sacrifice. The priest, while bathing the king, discovered his cut thumb and, since a defective person cannot be offered to the deity, rejected the king, who was then released.
While returning to his palace, the king had second thoughts and he realized that the minister's saying was correct. Indeed, the cut thumb had saved his life. So as soon as he was back, he released his minister and said to him, “You were right about me; everything that happened to me was for my good after all. But I threw you in the dungeon for what you said; so it did not seem to do you any good. How do you explain that?”
To this the minister said, “Oh, great king. Your throwing me into jail saved also my life. Otherwise I'd have accompanied you hunting, been taken captive, and since I do not have any blemishes, would have been offered as the sacrifice.”
This chapter has been about how the mind causes disease. Take the following summary information with you for further deliberation and application: