One late September morning in 1986, I was preparing to facilitate a session in the mind/body clinical program that I had co-founded and was director of at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital. The group consisted of about 20 participants. Some people who attended had cancer, a few were HIV positive, and most had an array of chronic or stress-related illnesses that ranged from high blood pressure to migraine headache to serious environmental sensitivity. I arrived in our sunny, spacious group room armed with an economy-sized box of tissues, having contracted our kids' back-to-school cold.
As I took my seat among the circle of chairs, sniffing and snorting, 40 eyes stared at me with dismay and outright disbelief. I could practically hear the thoughts: My God, she meditates, she's stress-hardy, she eats a low-fat diet with lots of fruits and vegetables, and she's sick! I felt a little bit like the Pope, caught walking out of a brothel. I couldn't help thinking of how different the response would have been had the group consisted of people interested in anthroposophic medicine—a form of natural healing that grew out of the work of the German physician, Rudolf Steiner. Anthroposophic physicians would have been delighted by my cold, even more so had I been running a fever, because they believe that such minor illnesses stimulate the immune system and help prevent chronic, autoimmune diseases such as arthritis or lupus.
The fact is that we don't really understand the health value of having a cold, or all the variables that predispose us to get one. But my patients' shocked, disappointed response upon discovering that I was human and perfectly capable of getting sick was great grist for the mill of our mutual learning and discovery. It reminded me of the response of the old testament character Job's three friends to his anguished question, “Why me?” after his children had been killed, his fortune decimated, and his health taken away. The three scared friends concluded that Job must have done something wrong, that he must have offended God, because otherwise bad things didn't happen to good people. The reasoning behind their attitude was that if we're really, really good and do everything just right, bad things won't happen. It's an interesting quirk of human nature that most people would prefer to experience guilt rather than the feelings of helplessness associated with not knowing why we've fallen ill.
In this book, we'll consider the intriguing questions of why we get ill and how we can participate in our healing. The day that I ran the mind/body group while alternately sneezing and blowing my nose, the participants and I had a wonderful discussion about the difference between curing and healing—a crucial difference that we will explore together in the pages to come. At the most basic level, to cure means to restore to health. When we are ill, naturally, cure is among our most fervent desires. As a former cancer cell biologist with a doctorate in medical sciences from Harvard Medical School, I know a lot about the pathways through which the body gets sick and how it recovers. I also know that there is no such thing as an incurable illness. Even when people have widely metastatic (traveling from one site in the body to another) cancer or AIDS, there are a few well-validated reports of complete cure. Researchers hope that by studying the few people who have “spontaneous remissions,” we may be able to learn important principles that will help others as well.
I put the term spontaneous remissions in quotations above because if you ask people who have had remissions to tell you how their recovery came about, they rarely use the word spontaneous. In contrast, most will usually relate a story characterized by hard work—that is, a sincere effort on their part to modify physical habits, to find the right physician or treatment, to heal emotional wounds, to forgive themselves and others, or to find deep spiritual meaning in life. Many such people will tell you that the illness was a catalyst for their healing, and that even if a “cure” hadn't been the end result, their enriched experience of life would have made the illness worthwhile.
In the chapters that follow, you will read about the fascinating scientific breakthroughs in mind/body medicine that teach us how healing can sometimes lead to physical cure. But you will also read the stories of people who healed their lives, even in the process of dying. I used to joke with my patients that if they were using mind/body techniques to live forever, they were going to be very disappointed. As that great American philosopher Redd Foxx once said, “All those health food nuts are going to feel mighty foolish when they'e lying there in the hospital dying of nothing.” Our time on this earth, in these bodies, comes to a natural end when our “lifestory” is complete.
Naturally, it's important to take responsibility for our physical health—through exercise, proper nutrition, and the body/mind approach, but healing is really much less about the quantity of our lives than the quality.
Take a minute and think about your answers to the following questions, and make sure to be honest with yourself.
Do you get up in the morning with a feeling of joy and excitement about the new day, or, on the other hand, are you often depressed or anxious?
Do you feel a sense of confidence and inner peace, or are your moods determined by what other people think of you?
Do you live your life in the moment, with a feeling of gratitude and connectedness to the world, or do you live mostly in mental movies about the past and the future?
Do you feel the breeze and see the clouds and leaves when you walk outside, or are you too busy thinking about your income taxes or something you could have said or done differently? Is your heart open? Do you tend to see the best in yourself and in other people, or is it clogged with judgments?
Remember John Lennon's old line, “Life is what is happening when you're making other plans”? The best measure of a full life is not in its length, but in its love. When philosopher and writer Aldous Huxley was dying, he was asked, in light of the great knowledge he had accumulated, what, if anything, he would have done differently. His response was, “I would have been a little kinder.” Kindness and compassion are, indeed, the heart of healing. It is a splendid confirmation of heart-knowledge that scientific studies indicate that love truly is the healer. The heart, the immune system, the hormones—they all respond in a positive way to the flow of compassion and connectedness we have to ourselves, to others, to nature, and to a larger Whole.
My role model for the compleat healer is a 12th-century Christian mystic, a Benedictine nun by the name of Hildegard of Bingen. Hildegard was the premier physician of her day, a pharmacologist with a wealth of knowledge about the herbs from which most of our modern-day pharmacopoeia was derived. She also described the circulation of the blood well before English physician Sir William Harvey did, although the discovery is usually attributed to him. Furthermore, Hildegard was a mystic who had many divine visions, during which she often heard the celestial music that people sometimes hear during near-death experiences.
An excellent composer, Hildegard transcribed this music, much of which is available today. My favorite cassette of her compositions is called A Feather on the Breath of God. Listening to her music, I feel a shift in my emotional energy—one that is no doubt accompanied by an outpouring of small proteins called neuropep-tides—which send a message of peace and well-being throughout my body. Hildegard also had the artistic sisters in her convent paint her visions, many of which are sacred circles, or mandalas. While gazing at her art, one can also feel a shift to a deeper level of peace, a place where we feel a connectedness with the vastness of possibility that we may call God or Universe.
Hildegard believed that a complete understanding of healing had three parts. First, she said, we need science. I wholeheartedly agree. Prayer, emotional healing, and spiritual awakening are all a part of healing, but they in no way displace the proper role of science and medicine. The second aspect of healing is what Hildegard called a healthy mysticism—that which inspires us to wholeness. It is my hope that the stories of healings you will read about in these pages will not only present you with a healthy mysticism, but also inspire you spiritually. Hildegar’s third aspect of healing was the use of art, for although science and mysticism lay the foundation for healing, she believed that it is the artist's special role to be the awakener of the people.
What did Hildegard mean by awakening? She believed that each of us carries our destiny inside us like a seed, and that as we encourage that seed to grow, we come into our fullness as co-creators of the Universe. The joy of creativity, and what Hildegard called “the awakening of the heart from its ancient sleep,” is what we might think of as being fully alive. All of us have experienced moments of aliveness, often those times when we find ourselves fully present in the moment rather than being lost in fears about the past or worries about the future.
One New Year's Day when our grandson Aleksandr was about seven months old, we were taking down the Christmas tree. I was unstringing a length of gold stars, and as I crossed the room to give them to him, his entire body began to shake with excitement. That's being fully alive! His excitement was contagious, and I found myself in one of those timeless moments where colors seem brighter than usual, as if a thin veil has fallen away and revealed the true splendor of the world. I felt a sense of union with myself, with Alexsandr, and with the larger Whole. These moments of wholeness, or holy moments, are also healing moments when we exit the limiting cocoon of the stories we usually tell ourselves about life and enter into the sphere of unlimited possibility.
Holy moments are doorways where chronos—linear clock time, meets kairos—eternal timelessness. I believe that these are the moments when curing can sometimes occur—both through physical pathways, and through a grace that transcends the physical. For example, every so often I hear about a healing that defies medical science. Among the more than 60 “spontaneous remissions” that were meticulously documented at the shrine of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, there is a case of a woman, blind since birth as the result of a shriveled optic nerve, who could suddenly see. Now, standard medical training tells me that a shriveled nerve cannot regenerate, yet it must have. At our current level of knowledge, we would have to call this a miracle. Perhaps in the future we will discover physical pathways for such instantaneous healings. For now, I attribute them to the power of faith to bring us into a healing moment where the two worlds touch.
Much of the research and insights in this book are the combined work of my husband Miroslav (Miron) Borysenko and myself. So far, I've been talking to you (Joan, that is), but at other times I'll be speaking for us both, replacing the “I” with “we.” Even when I seem to be expressing sentiments that are exclusively from my own experience, Miron is a silent partner. He's been there, by my side, for nearly my entire adult life. Together we've made sense of our lifestories and found some of the wisdom in our wounds. Together we've healed and learned about healing. Let me introduce my partner and co-author Miron to you now.
Like me, Miron is a Ph.D., a medical scientist. We met and became a couple in 1971 when he was an assistant professor of anatomy and cellular biology at the Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, and I was a graduate student at Harvard Medical School, just finishing my dissertation. After I finished my Ph.D. and a postdoctoral fellowship, I joined the Tufts medical faculty in 1973. Miron and I taught together at Tufts for almost a decade, pursuing independent research. My specialty was cancer, and Miron's was immunogenetics and then comparative immunology—a study of the evolution of the immune system.
In 1978 I returned to Harvard Medical School to complete a second postdoctoral fellowship in behavioral medicine. Since Miron was eligible for a sabbatical, he took a visiting professorship at Harvard at the same time. Both of us became fascinated with the fledgling field called psychoneuroimmunology. For the first time, we shared a common research interest. I went on to finish my training in clinical psychology, and in 1981 (in collaboration with Herbert Benson, M.D., and Ilan Kutz, M.D.), I had the pleasure of co-founding the Mind/Body Clinic at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital that you've already been introduced to. That clinic grew out of Benson's pioneering work on the relaxation response (the integrated set of physical changes that accompany the meditative state); the work of Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, whose relaxation and stress disorders clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester was an inspiration and early model for our own clinic; as well as Dr. Kutz's tremendous insight as a psychiatrist and my own long-term interest in yoga, meditation, cancer, and healing.
In 1987, Dr. Benson's Division of Behavioral Medicine, which was the home of the Mind/Body Clinic, moved to another of the Harvard teaching hospitals, the New England Deaconess. In that year, my first book, Minding the Body, Mending the Mind, which was based on our clinical program, was published. To our great surprise, it was a bestseller, probably because it is clear, accessible, and very practical. I still get grateful letters from people who learned how to meditate, to use creative imagination, and to begin the process of emotional and physical healing by working with that book. A year after its publication, I decided to leave Harvard for a variety of reasons—to make more time in my life for family and friends, to write more books, and to teach and travel. My growing interest in spirituality was also best pursued outside of the academic setting, although Miron and I have lectured at a large number of hospitals that are very receptive to the marriage of medicine, psychology, and spirituality.
In 1989, Miron left his tenured faculty position at Tufts Medical School, and together we founded a company called Mind/Body Health Sciences, Inc. Our vision is “healing society through healing the individual.” We teach together in many settings—hospitals, retreat centers, places of worship, and a wide variety of civic organizations.
Over the years, I have written several other books: Guilt Is the Teacher, Love Is the Lesson takes a deeper look into the psychospiritual framework for healing. It is a book about transforming the wounds of childhood into wisdom and compassion so that we can begin to operate out of our Higher Self rather than our perceived limitations. Fire in the Soul: A New Psychology of Spiritual Optimism, is a book about the questions that arise in our hearts when we are diagnosed with serious illness or go through a crisis that puts us face to face with our most deeply held beliefs. Albert Einstein was once asked what the most important question was that a human being had to answer. He replied, “Is the Universe a friendly place or not?” Fire in the Soul is a companion to that question, and, I hope, a guide to finding spiritual optimism in the darkest nights of the soul.
During the time that I worked at the Beth Israel and New England Deaconess Hospitals, several people encouraged me to go over to Children's Hospital, where a remarkable healing mural graced the otherwise frightening and austere radiation therapy room. The artist, a woman by the name of Joan Drescher, had created a border of kites around the top of the room. The children lying on the radiation table could enjoy the kites, each of which contains a healing image from a different culture.
Without question, our body responds to the images that we create internally, and it also responds to the images that we see in our environment. When a leukemic child is told that he or she is to have a bone marrow test, it is often heard as a “bow and arrow test.” Children have awesome, and sometimes terrifying, imaginations. Creating a healing environment where symbols of hope abound gives the child a positive message for their imagination that reassures them and that may even contribute to physical healing.
I was so impressed with Joan Drescher's work, and with the contribution of art and beauty to healing, that we co-created a book called On Wings of Light: Meditations for Awakening to the Source. Joan Drescher's painted images are deeply evocative, and the text leads the reader inward, to an experience of universal love.
My fifth book is called Pocketful of Miracles. It is a book of daily spiritual practices that is keyed to the energy of the changing seasons, the Great Medicine Wheel, and the four Archangels. Drawing on the wisdom of a variety of spiritual traditions, from Tibetan Buddhism to Kabbalistic Judaism, from Sufism to Christianity, and from Native American teachings to Hinduism, the book is a structured series of short, daily practices and reminders for peaceful living.
In 1994, the Nightingale-Conant publishing company released an audiocassette series that I wrote and narrated entitled The Power of the Mind to Heal. It is the most comprehensive collection of both Miron's teachings and my own. It encompasses much of what I've covered in previous books as well as new material, tempered by the long years we have spent in this field and the remarkable experiences that we have had with people who were in the process of healing and also of dying. Hay House was very excited by the series and asked Miron and me to adapt it to book form. We are delighted to have been given this opportunity. In adapting the material, I've tried to keep some of the feeling of the tape series—the personal tone of a friend, or in this case, of two friends, speaking directly to you. In addition, the book covers significantly more ground than the tape series.
Miron and I share the belief that healing is really the simplest of matters. We are already whole. All we need to do is peel away the layers of fear that keep us out of touch with who we really are. The Buddhists have an image of the Higher or Spiritual Self as a sun that is perpetually shining even though the clouds of pain and illusion may temporarily hide it from view. Whether you call this sun the Inner Physician, your intuition, Essence, or Higher Self, our task as human beings is to discover and live from that place of wholeness. When we are in that place, we feel peaceful and spacious. The inevitable hurts and stresses of life are less taxing because we don't close down around them in fear. Rather, we stay more open to love and the infinite possibilities that are unfolding in every moment. We become a little kinder, a little lighter, and through our own healing we heal those who will come after us, and also those who have gone before. It's all a matter of remembering who we are and that when all is said and done, the entire awesome pageant of life is a drama about learning to love.
Joan and Miroslav Borysenko
Gold Hill, Colorado
Summer, 1994