“The body says what words cannot.”
— MARTHA GRAHAM
For many years as a physician, I operated under a false assumption. I spent 12 years training to become a doctor, ostensibly so that I would know more about the bodies of my patients than they did. Doctors are body experts, right? I was trained that patients come to doctors because they are broken and, supposedly, we know how to “fix” them.
Growing up with a physician father, I thought only doctors cured sick people. I didn’t believe they could cure themselves. As a medical student and resident, I believed it was my responsibility to diagnose what was wrong with a person’s body and prescribe the right treatment. If they got better, I credited myself. If they didn’t, I blamed myself.
As a practicing physician, I felt the weight of my job—to make the right assessments, settle on the right diagnoses, and deliver the proper treatments without ever making a mistake. Aside from hoping my patients would participate in lifestyle modifications like smoking cessation, exercise, and a better diet, I didn’t expect much of them. I certainly didn’t expect them to heal their own bodies. That’s what I was there for.
It’s only recently that I had a sneaking suspicion I might have it all wrong. After all, who knows the patient’s body better than the patient? While doctors may better know the names of the arteries in the hand or the muscles in the leg, in some cases, especially those related to stress, the patient is actually the best diagnostician. Perhaps, instead of believing we doctors know what’s best for the body, patients should be diagnosing the root causes of their illnesses and writing their own prescriptions for what needs to change in their lives.
As I mentioned briefly in Chapter 4, I invited some of my patients to write what I called The Prescription for themselves. If they needed antibiotics, I wrote the script. If they needed a mammogram, I ordered it. But once we dealt with the lab tests, drugs, and procedures a patient might need, I invited them to take their healing process a step further.
I didn’t just leave them to fend for themselves while writing The Prescription. Many were excited about the idea of partnering in their own care, but some expressed reservations or felt scared. My patients wanted direction and support as they navigated the process of making The Diagnosis and writing The Prescription for themselves. And in this chapter, I’ll guide you through the same process I use with them.
Certainly, as a doctor, I believe it’s my job to order the appropriate diagnostic tests and educate patients about the treatment options available. Herbert Benson promotes the idea of what he calls the “three-legged stool” of healing. One leg of the stool is medication, one leg is surgery and other medical procedures, and the third leg is self-care. His vision is that, one day, modern medicine will value all three legs of the healing stool equally, encouraging patients to play a vital role in their own health care. He suggests that treatment with self-care, using exercises such as the relaxation response technique we discussed in Chapter 8, would solve 60 to 90 percent of the problems that bring people to doctors, leaving the other two legs of the stool to round out the health-care experience.
After what I’ve learned in the process of researching and writing this book, I’m going to go out on a limb here and take Benson’s idea even a step further. I would argue that medications and surgeries shouldn’t even be given two whole legs of the whole health stool; that self-care, or, as I call it, “radical self-care,” should bear much more than one-third of the weight. In our current system, if it’s addressed at all, self-care is afforded little more than a brief mention after the drugs have been prescribed and the surgeries have been discussed.
Also, the self-care that may be discussed by physicians often stops short of addressing the many issues that contribute to disease. While nutritious food is medicine, exercise is vital, tobacco, alcohol, and illegal drugs can be poison, and taking your vitamins fills your body with what it needs to repair itself, these forms of self-care are not enough to counterbalance the effects of repetitive triggering of the stress response.
If you’re lonely, you’re stuck in a toxic relationship, you’re full of resentment for people who have hurt you, you’re cheating on your partner, you’re selling your soul at work, or you feel spiritually bankrupt, no amount of veggies, gym visits, 12-step programs, or vitamins is going to cut it. Radical self-care also involves things like setting boundaries, living in alignment with your truth, surrounding yourself with love and a sense of connection, and spending time doing what you love. You need radical self-care, not just in your health habits, but in the rest of your life.
It’s time for a serious paradigm shift, with doctors playing the role of educators, helping patients optimize all that Western medicine has to offer, teaching them about nutrition, exercise, and other preventive health strategies while also addressing lifestyle issues that may contribute to health problems, such as loneliness, work stress, financial worries, and pessimism. It’s also the responsibility of health-care providers to educate and encourage our patients to make lifestyle choices that improve health, such as meditation and other spiritual practices, creative expression, sex, and healthy social interactions. Once we do our best to diagnose, educate, and deliver any conventional medicine treatments the patients choose, perhaps we belong in the back seat, leaving the patient in the driver’s seat, with the doctor serving more as a trusted consultant than as the boss of the body.
I’ll dig deeper into how health-care providers and patients might work together to facilitate such a process, but before I do, let me take off my white coat so I can tell you my personal story, not as the physician, but as the patient.
How I Healed Myself
By the time I was 33 years old, I was stressed out, burned out, and living in a near constant state of fear, anxiety, and overwhelm. I was extremely unhappy in my job as a full-time partner in a busy obstetrics and gynecology practice, where I was expected to see 40 patients a day and work 36- or 72-hour shifts in the hospital, performing surgeries and delivering babies.
On top of my stressful job, I was also twice divorced, I had lost several people I loved to cancer, and I was feeling profoundly lonely and depressed. Basically, my stress responses were firing off all day long, and it should have come as no surprise that my body was breaking down. But, at the time, that never occurred to me.
By the time I was in my 20s, I had been diagnosed with multiple health conditions, including high blood pressure; cardiac arrhythmias; a painful sexual disorder called vulvar vestibulitis; severe, debilitating allergies; and precancerous changes on my cervix.
I was taking seven medications, getting weekly allergy shots, and had undergone surgery on my cervix. But in spite of all the drugs and procedures, my blood pressure was still out of control, my allergies were so bad I could barely leave the house, I couldn’t have sex without feeling like I was getting stabbed with a knife, my heartbeat was skipping around like a Mexican jumping bean, and my cervix still showed precancerous changes, even after surgery.
In short, I was a hot mess on my way to an early heart attack, and my doctors didn’t know what to do with me.
I wound up marrying Matt, the love of my life, and my health improved to some degree after falling in love. But I was still loading up on drugs every day, and my body was far from well.
Then January of 2006 rolled around, when the Perfect Storm I described in the introduction hit. I became a new mother, lost my dog, my brother wound up in liver failure as a rare side effect of a common antibiotic, and my father died of a brain tumor—all within two weeks. Talk about triggering your stress responses!
Just when I was coming up for air, Matt, who was the full-time caregiver for our newborn, cut two fingers all the way off with a table saw. Although the surgeon was able to replant them, Matt was unable to care for our daughter, Siena, for months. All hell broke loose in our lives.
These back-to-back events tipped my life upside down like I was a house ripped from its foundation in a tornado. With my stress responses on overdrive, it’s no surprise my body, as well as my mental state, began to downslide again. I was nearly paralyzed from the emotional and physical pain I experienced. I wound up feeling like I was squished from all sides, succumbing to pressures I couldn’t control that pushed me deeper and deeper down into a dark place, like I was stuck in the narrows of a birth canal, barely able to breathe.
But there was a bright side. The traumas I experienced during what I came to call my Perfect Storm put a crack in the armor I had been wearing to fit in and get by. When that crack ripped through me, I came to discover a long-lost part of myself I now call my Inner Pilot Light.
We all have this part within us. Your Inner Pilot Light is the radiant, sparkly spirit of you—call it your Highest Self, your Christ Consciousness, your Buddha Nature, or your soul. It’s that part of you that is a little piece of divinity fueling your life in human form. It’s that 100 percent authentic, never extinguished, always-shining-though-sometimes-dimmed part that lights the way back to wholeness, happiness, and health.
When I was deep in those narrows, I found within myself a brightness, a wisdom, a sense of knowing, like a perpetual nightlight or a guiding star. As the pressures from all sides grew more intense, the light within me grew brighter. And in those depths, I experienced an awakening, a homecoming of sorts, as if I was the prodigal daughter, finally returning back to my body after all those years of being gone.
My body had been whispering to me for over a decade, but I had been ignoring the whispers until finally, in order to really get my attention, my body began to yell. Once I started listening to my body and my Inner Pilot Light, I started knowing things about myself I just hadn’t realized before. I gained clarity about what might be making me sick, what needed to change in my relationships, how I needed to alter my work life, and many other transformations I knew were inevitable.
Facing the life changes I knew I needed to make, I was terrified. Examining the truth about my life was like standing on the edge of a neck-breaking cliff and staring down into the vast unknown. I had a newborn baby, a temporarily disabled and unemployed husband, a mortgage, graduate-school debt, and no backup plan.
But my current life was killing me. When the pain of staying put exceeds the fear of the unknown, you leap. You do what it takes, even if you’re quivering with apprehension. I knew if I didn’t heal my life, I’d die young. As a new mother devoted to my family, I had much to live for, and I wasn’t willing to let my desire to cling to the illusion of safety and security keep me from making the changes I knew I’d have to make to save my own life.
Now, mind you, healing yourself is not for the faint of heart. I had to grab myself by the ovaries and make some scary-ass choices. When I reflect back, I’m proud of myself for being so brave, and I’m so grateful to Matt for jumping off the proverbial cliff with me, because we were both afraid. We risked everything to save my life. And thank God we did.
I wound up leaving my job, which required selling my house, liquidating my retirement account, and paying a hefty fee to cover my malpractice “tail” in case anyone ever sued me in the future. We moved from busy, crowded, chaotic San Diego to a small, sleepy town near the coast in Northern California, where I spent two years licking my wounds, writing, painting, bonding with my daughter, and healing myself.
During the time I later called my “waiting and becoming” years, I gained clarity on my life purpose, deepened my relationship with my husband and new daughter, reconnected in a rich way with a Divine presence, and expressed my creativity in numerous ways. I also spent a lot of time in nature, practiced yoga, hiked every day, and reconnected with old friends I had lost touch with.
After two years away from my medical practice, I started feeling the pull to once again be of service, to fulfill my role as a healer. But I was nervous about putting my improving health at risk again. Then I was offered a job in an integrative medicine practice in the San Francisco Bay area, which I was reluctant to accept because the last thing I wanted was to leave my haven in the country and move back to the big city.
But the lovely physician in charge of the integrative medicine practice offered me the world—as much time as I wanted with my patients, the opportunity to use the beautiful, healing space to lead workshops, an invitation to showcase my art, and free rein to create a sacred practice aligned with my healer heart. I lit up like a Christmas tree and jumped at the chance.
Matt and I found a quiet glen of houses right on the coast near the Golden Gate Bridge, where I could live far from civilization, right where the redwoods and mountains meet the ocean. I had found heaven, and it was only a 20-minute drive on scenic Highway 1 to my new job.
Living in Marin County led me further down my own healing path. I met with spiritual counselors, started drinking loads of green juice, explored my erotic self, and climbed the mountains daily, all while I simultaneously started blogging and discovering the tribe of people committed to radical self-care and healing the world—the people I had been looking for my whole life. Suddenly, I was no longer lonely. I knew my life’s purpose. I loved my work. My home environment was medicine for me. I was in love. And I was happier than I had ever been in my life.
One by one, I got off almost all of my medications and my health conditions either completely resolved or drastically improved. Today, I take only half the dose of one of my medications, I’m off all of my allergy shots, my cervix has returned to normal without further surgery, my sexual disorder is gone, my cardiac arrhythmia has disappeared, and my blood pressure has normalized. As an added bonus, I released 20 pounds of unhappiness weight, lifted my mood from depressed to frequent bouts of bliss, gained loads of energy, fulfilled multiple childhood dreams, filled my life with love, and wound up with more financial abundance than I had when I was working full time in my old practice. (For all the nitty-gritty details of The Prescription I wrote for myself, see Appendix C.)
My doctors were shocked. With little help from them, I had healed myself from conditions all conventional medical treatments had previously failed to treat. One doctor told me I had just added 30 years to my life. (She also told me I looked ten years younger. I didn’t believe her until I got carded that night when I ordered a glass of wine.)
How did I heal myself? Although I also made changes to my diet and exercise regimen, I primarily credit the healing of my mind. I believe yours has the power to heal you too.
Making the Body Ripe for Miracles
Although my story may sound suspicious to you, I want you to understand that this is not woo-woo metaphysics I’m talking about here. It’s simple biochemistry. In my estimation, most of my health conditions were stress-related, so making life changes that alleviated the havoc of repetitive stress responses and replaced stress responses with relaxation responses altered the physiology of my body.
This was no easy task. In order to heal, I had to lead myself through the nausea-inducing, heartbreaking process of diagnosing the root causes of why my body was acting up. (Hint: it wasn’t just pressure in my arteries, a virus in my cervix, or histamine released into my bloodstream.) Armed with the scary truth about how choices in my personal life were translating into disease, I prescribed for myself life changes meant to transform my body from one under constant attack by the stress response to one primarily resting in a state of physiological relaxation.
Merely knowing what needs to change isn’t enough. The hardest part of the process is mustering up the guts to actually do what you know you need to do. When you’re happy, relaxed, and free of stress, the body can accomplish amazing, even miraculous, feats of self-repair. And in this state of relaxation, errors of DNA get fixed, enzymes catalyze repair processes, immune cells can get busy chomping up infectious agents, free radicals bite the dust, and repair cells spring to the rescue. The body is a miracle waiting to happen, if only we optimize its ability to do what it’s made to do naturally.
I now understand that this is how the body works. When aspects of our lives are unhealthy, stress responses are triggered, and the body starts to speak to us in whispers. If we listen to the whispers, tap into the truth of what the body is telling us, and make changes that reduce stress responses and elicit relaxation responses, we can prevent the whispers from escalating into full-blown diseases.
But when we ignore the whispers—or when we’re so dissociated from our bodies that we don’t even hear the whispers—the body begins to yell. What started as a headache becomes a stroke. What began as a vague tightening in your chest becomes a heart attack. What was just the sound of blood rushing in your ears becomes an aneurysm.
When are we going to start listening to the body’s whispers before the body breaks down? I beg you to start listening. Is your body whispering to you, or has it already started yelling? Are you ready to embark upon a self-healing journey of your own?
You might be thinking, Sure, Lissa can diagnose the real reason she’s sick and write The Prescription for herself. She’s a doctor!
But I promise you, you have everything you need to do this for yourself. If you’re ready and willing, I’m here to teach you how to do this at home.
If you’ve done what you can to optimize conventional medicine and you’re still sick, you’re wanting to eliminate side effects by trying to get off some of your medications, you’re hoping to avoid a non-urgent surgery, you’re trying to achieve a health goal such as weight loss, or you’re otherwise motivated to heal your body and your life, hop on the healing train and let’s chug this choo-choo through the process of getting your body in optimal shape to heal itself. All aboard!
The Whole Health Cairn
In order to help my patients determine what life factors might be contributing to their health conditions, I developed a diagnostic and treatment wellness model I call the “Whole Health Cairn” based on the findings of my research, which incorporates not just how the mind can heal or harm the body, but also physical and environmental health factors that contribute to whole health. (I debuted the Whole Health Cairn in a popular TEDx talk I gave in 2011 called “The Shocking Truth about Your Health.”)
In my medical training, I had been introduced to several wellness models—pie charts and pyramids that talked about nutrition, exercise, social health, mental health, and so forth. Most of the models included the body as the foundation upon which everything else in life builds. But something had always struck me as off about these models. Not only did I question whether the body was the foundation upon which everything else builds; I also didn’t resonate with being able to take out pieces of wellness, like you’d cut out a slice of pie. I envisioned something more intertwined, where all aspects of health were interrelated, and the body was the sum total of the balance of all aspects of a wholly healthy life.
The vision for a new wellness model first came to me while I was hiking on a coastal trail near my beloved Northern California home. As an artist, I’ve always loved cairns—those stacks of balanced stones you see adorning beaches and marking hiking trails and sacred landmarks. I love the Zen of them, but most important, the simultaneous strength and fragility of them. A well-built cairn can withstand the crashing of the waves upon it, yet if you move one stone too far out of balance, the whole thing topples. All stones depend upon the others for stability.
Like a cairn, the body is awe-inspiringly strong and resilient, and at the same time, fragile and easy to tip out of balance. If whole health is a stack of balanced stones, the body is the stone on top, the most precarious, the most likely to tumble if other stones shift. And as I learned on my own self-healing journey, the foundation stone, the one upon which everything else builds, is your Inner Pilot Light, that inner knowing, the healing wisdom of your body and soul that knows what’s true for you and guides you, in your own unique way, back to better health.
Atop the Inner Pilot Light lie all the other contributing factors that affect health—relationships, work/life purpose, creativity, spirituality, sexuality, money, mental health, and the environment. The very top of the Whole Health Cairn is where your body’s physical health rests. The Whole Health Cairn is surrounded by the “Healing Bubble” of love, gratitude, service, and pleasure—the glue I believe holds everything in balance. Love and compassion—not just from loving family, friends, and health-care providers, but especially for yourself—are paramount when you’re embarking upon a self-healing journey. Love opens your heart, trumps fear, and paves the way for healing in all aspects of your life.
Gratitude is also important. Without gratitude, you may focus only on what’s lacking in your life, rather than what you appreciate. When that happens, this process can spiral you downward into overwhelm and despair, which only increase stress responses. You have to fill your cup and appreciate what you already have before you can face the truth about what isn’t working and what might need to change. Gratitude keeps you optimistic, and as we’ve seen, evidence shows that optimism improves your health. When you focus on gratitude, positive things flow in more readily, making you even more grateful. As long as you keep your gratitude vessel full, you’ll avoid the unhealthy plunge into dark places.
Service is another part of the Healing Bubble. Dedicating our lives to serving the world connects us to one another and reminds us to focus on something bigger than ourselves. Cami Walker, author of 29 Gifts, treated her multiple sclerosis with a practice of giving one gift per day for 29 days, which sparked an entire movement. (Join others who are doing this at 29Gifts.org.) Committing your life to serving and healing others, even in small ways, can be big-time medicine for the body, mind, and soul.
And pleasure just makes the whole darn thing more fun, while also perking up the body with health-inducing hormones such as endorphins, dopamine, nitric oxide, and oxytocin. The healing process, while scary at times, should be pleasurable, so make sure you throw in a dollop of laughter, sensual pleasures, playfulness, and fun.
Each stone in the Whole Health Cairn is vital to the healing process, and the Healing Bubble contributes to the healthy hormonal milieu that provides just the right Petri dish for our minds to shift so our cells can heal. Keep in mind how important it is to keep your inner chatter positive during this process. If you let your inner critic (whom I call the “Gremlin”) try to beat you into taking care of your body, it just doesn’t work. If you’re constantly telling yourself how fat, ugly, addicted, noncompliant, sick, lame, undisciplined, or worthless you are, this process simply won’t work. You have to practice radical kindness with yourself, or you’ll lose hope and fall into bad habits.
The only way to truly heal is to engage in radical self-care born of genuine love and compassion for yourself. Listening to the wise, caring voice of your Inner Pilot Light will help you do this. As you learn to send your Gremlin to time out, you’ll find that you are your own best friend, and as you trust the knowing voice of your truth, your body will relax and your self-repair mechanisms will be able to kick in.
Most wellness models teach that the body is the foundation for everything in life, that without a healthy body, everything else suffers. But we’ve gotten it all backwards. The body isn’t the foundation of your health. The body is the physical manifestation of the sum of your life experiences. When your life is out of alignment with your Inner Pilot Light and the stones of your Whole Health Cairn are out of balance, your mind gets stressed, and when your mind is under stress, your body suffers. The good news is that, if you’re not optimally healthy, you can make changes that may profoundly affect your body’s health.
As a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, Kelly A. Turner became fascinated with those who experienced spontaneous remissions, and for her thesis she decided to travel the world interviewing two groups of people: patients who had experienced unexplainable remission from cancer and the non-allopathic healers who often helped this cohort of patients whom the medical establishment was otherwise unable to help.
Seventy interviews in places like the United States, China, Japan, New Zealand, Thailand, India, England, Ireland, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Brazil were translated into more than 3,000 pages of transcripts, which she then analyzed to ferret out recurring themes. She identified more than 75 “treatments” for cancer, 6 of which were “very frequent” among all 70 subjects.
6 TREATMENTS THAT FOSTER SELF-HEALING
(compiled from the Ph.D. thesis of Kelly A. Turner1)
These are the kinds of life changes that can make or break your fight against not just cancer, but any illness.
An Invitation to Heal
You don’t have to wait until your body starts yelling with some life-threatening illness to make the same sorts of life changes. In the next chapter, I’m going to teach you a six-step process I use with patients, which has resulted in spontaneous remissions that can only be explained by the processes I’ve taught you up to this point in this book. This process is based on what I learned from the scientific data, and the results can be dramatic—not just with massive changes in health and happiness, but in whole-life transformation.
Before we move on to the six-step process, I should warn you that most of my patients cry. For many people, going through this process reveals blind spots they may have had for years, resulting in profound insights, psychological shadows from the past, grief in the present, and worry for the future. The Gremlins of self-doubt, self-criticism, and self-loathing can rear their ugly heads too. As I’ve said, healing yourself isn’t for the faint of heart.
Why should you put yourself through what might be an uncomfortable process? Because you often have to break down to break through. This process offers you the opportunity for rebirth. As sung by the former Cat Stevens, Yusuf Islam, “To be what you must, you must give up what you are.”
If you’re fearless enough to face the truth about yourself, your life, and your illness, you’ll have the opportunity to awaken to the bliss that comes with living in alignment with your Inner Pilot Light. And when you do, you relax your body, flip on your self-repair mechanisms, and make the body ripe for miracles. Remember, anything is possible.
But if you’re not ready for this, don’t worry. You’ve already learned a lot about what you might be able to change in your life to optimize your health, and if it’s not the time to dig deeper, that is okay. Go in peace, and may you find optimal health in your own way.
If, however, you’re ready to dig deeper, I want to encourage you to seek support from someone you trust, with whom you can share what might come up for you. Ideally this will be someone trained and experienced in the process of helping people navigate emotional issues when they arise, such as a therapist, counselor, psychiatrist, spiritual advisor, or life coach. As we discussed in Chapter 3, nobody should have to go through a healing journey alone, especially when we’re talking about healing the mind.
Ideally this will be someone trained and experienced in the process of helping people navigate emotional issues when they arise, such as a therapist, counselor, psychiatrist, spiritual advisor, life coach, or graduate of the Whole Health Medicine Institute (WholeHealthMedicineInstitute.com), where health-care providers are trained to help you navigate the six self-healing steps outlined in this book.
Keep in mind that terms like “healing yourself” and “self-healing” are misnomers, because they imply that you can do this all by yourself. What we should probably call it is “healing the body with the mind” or “mind-body healing,” but that gets cumbersome. I’ve helped enough people through this process that I can guarantee you the process will be more effective and more pleasurable if you do this with someone.
Although I’d love to suggest that you enlist the help of your physician, unless your physician doesn’t accept insurance and is able to devote a lot of time to you, I recommend finding someone with more than seven and a half minutes to devote to your healing process. The reality is that, as much as they might want to support your journey emotionally, most doctors simply don’t have the time you’ll need. You’re probably better off finding someone who can spend a whole hour with you fairly frequently, someone like a therapist, health coach, or life coach. But if you discuss it with your physician and your doctor is up for it, more power to ya. And hallelujah! Nothing would make me happier.
Please trust me on this. If you decide to read the next chapter and do this process for yourself, find someone to be with you, someone who can allow your experience to be your experience without projecting their own fears, limiting beliefs, and life experiences onto you. Make sure you feel trust, lack of judgment, safety, and nurturing care, so that, if necessary, you can fall apart, knowing someone will be there to help put you back together again.
I also want to encourage you to be infinitely compassionate with yourself during this process. This is not an excuse to beat yourself up or shame yourself sick. It’s an opportunity to illuminate what might lie at the root of your illness so you can make changes in your life aimed at optimizing your body’s chances of feeling vital. Since I can’t be with you, know that I am cosmically with you in spirit, and know that you are held in Divine Love, in the highest possible vibration, with an open heart and the faith that you can do this.
You have nothing to fear, my dear, and everything to gain. Everything you need already lies within you right in this moment. I’m just going to hold up a mirror so you can see what’s right inside you. There within your answers lie.
