Each patient carries his own doctor inside him.
I was not a typical surgeon, because I kept trying to help my patients in nontraditional ways. Although many doctors thought my methods were crazy, no one was against success, so if it worked for the patients, it became hospital policy. What I couldn’t do, however, was convince the administrators to use the TV in patients’ rooms to prepare them for surgery with guided imagery.
Mental imagery is not the same as just thinking about something. Analytical thinking happens mostly in regions on the left side of the brain, where language, planning, judgment, and numbers reign. Creative visualization, or mental imagery, is a process that engages mostly the right side, and other regions of the brain as well, since it involves using the visual, auditory, and olfactory senses, as well as memory, mood, emotions, and so on. The creative side of the brain can be used to prepare or train the mind and body for an experience, whether it involves learning a task, stabilizing mood, improving athletic performance, or healing a medical condition.
If you think about putting lemons on your shopping list, for example, the left side of your brain is activated when you are thinking, “I need to buy some lemons,” and you notice that they cost $1.99 a pound. As an example of a creative visualization exercise, imagine holding a ripe, fresh lemon in your hand. Feel the waxy surface of the rind against your fingers, and smell the warm citrus aroma. Now imagine that you take a sharp knife and slice the lemon into quarters. Some of the juice sprays out and the lemony aroma becomes even stronger. Place one of the lemon quarters between your thumb and fingers and squeeze gently. Watch as the beads of juice rise up and trickle down the moist, plump flesh of the fruit. Raise the lemon to your mouth and let the juice trickle down to the back of your tongue.
By now you should be experiencing the lemon on an entirely different level. Your whole brain has engaged in the process. Your glands have begun to salivate and the bitterness of the lemon may have made you shudder or pucker your lips. Your body is responding as if you had tasted a real lemon. The process of visualization convinced your brain that the lemon was real.
Considering the immediate reaction your body had to the thought of a lemon experience, imagine what you could do by visualizing yourself going through surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, and then healing without any negative side effects. I have witnessed this happening and heard amazing stories from hundreds of patients who used this wonderful mental tool to turn their fear of treatment into a powerful, loving, and healing experience.
Mental imagery is a technique that has long been used in the world of sports. Athletes have been coached to visualize a successful result of their movement such as a basketball shot or golf swing before they perform it, because when they do so they achieve better results. My friend who plays professional golf told me, “If my mind clearly pictures the ball landing where I want it to land, my body knows exactly what to do to produce that effect. I don’t have to think about the details of grip, stance, and swing. I just imagine the end result and trust the rest of the job to the club and my swing.”
Not until recent years could brain imaging, using technological aids such as fMRIs and PET scanners, measure and illustrate brain activity with great accuracy. These aids have become readily available and allow scientists to observe in real time what is actually happening in the brain. Alvaro Pascual-Leone’s experiments at Harvard Medical School in the late 1990s involved volunteers learning a five-finger exercise on the piano.1 One finding of his research was that volunteers who imagined doing the repetitive piano exercise experienced as much neural growth in the corresponding motor cortex of their brains as the volunteers who physically performed the exercise. Volunteers who practiced mental imagery fooled their brains into believing they were actually doing the physical exercise.
I had the opportunity to witness a similar phenomenon. One day before I performed a minor surgical procedure in my office, a patient and I got into an intense and interesting discussion. I picked up the scalpel while we were talking and made an incision. I noticed my nurse waving frantically at me. When she caught my attention she pointed at the syringe containing the local anesthetic which I had not used. I asked the patient how he was feeling, and he said he was fine, so I completed the surgery. I told him afterward that we had both been hypnotized by our discussion, and that I had not used any local anesthetic to numb the area of surgery. He was genuinely surprised. He had believed he was anesthetized, and so he felt no pain. Major surgery has also been done under hypnosis, and I have used hypnotherapists in the operating room as well.
My experience has also shown me that when people believed they were receiving radiation treatment, they had side effects and their tumors shrank, even though, because of a repair error, there was no radioactive material in the machine. You could say their belief became a form of self-hypnosis, or that they creatively visualized the radioactive material doing its job. No matter how you describe the process, their brains imagined that the treatment was actually taking place, and their bodies responded accordingly.
One woman wrote to me about her experience with a creative visualization technique she employed after she was diagnosed with lung cancer at age thirty-two.
My neighbor’s son was dying of bone cancer after being in remission for seven years. In spite of dealing with her own son’s disease, this caring woman, when she heard about my diagnosis, took the time to tell me about your first book, Love, Medicine & Miracles. She described how you wrote about eating the cancer out with Pac-Men via the imagination. I visualized this every day and imagined myself running a marathon while my lungs remained pink and healthy. Thank God, when I went in for my repeat x-rays, it was gone, just gone. It took my doctor half an hour before he came and told me, because he had been running all over his office shouting the joyous news to everyone else!
While helping my patients to visualize their bodies eliminating disease, I have learned to avoid using language with negative connotations, such as eating or killing the cancer. For some patients the aggressive approach does not work. Instead of asking them to visualize Pac-Men, or animals, eating their cancer like a piece of meat, I help them to remove their disease in a loving way, such as by visualizing God’s light melting a tumor that appears as a block of ice.
Sometimes patients ask me why oncologists recommend chemotherapy when they know this therapy can kill the patient. I explain to them that chemotherapy can, and does, save lives. The reality is that everyone dies, but if you elect to go on a healing journey, the key point to consider is: what labor pains are you willing to go through to rebirth yourself and make the pain worthwhile?
When a person is focused on the negative aspects of treatment, he needs to be empowered and given the chance to make his own decision about what is right for him, not simply to try to avoid dying. Patients should not focus solely on the disease; doing so empowers the enemy. This is why I emphasize so strongly the importance of a full partnership between patient and doctor. In that partnership, the patient has the advantage of learning about treatment options from a knowledgeable physician, and the doctor has the advantage of helping him make a decision the patient can live with and be comfortable with. I meet many people who prefer chemotherapy to being on a special diet, for example, because the diet is more of a problem to them than the medical treatment.
The mind is powerful. When you see treatment as a healing gift, you won’t have all the side effects that can accompany that treatment. I ask people to draw themselves before they receive treatment; we can tell by such a drawing if the patient’s image of treatment is negative. For example, I had a patient once who drew a picture of chemotherapy as the devil administering poison, so I knew there was a problem. In an instance like that, we can use visualization techniques to help the patient’s subconscious turn the negative thought about chemo into a positive healing experience. If a patient can’t turn her belief around, I recommend that she not choose to have it.
I can’t say often enough that when you are facing a life-threatening illness like cancer, it is most important to find an oncologist you can communicate with openly, comfortably, and honestly. Most oncologists have never had chemo, and without firsthand knowledge of it they cannot fully understand the experience patients go through. The patient must be attended to with compassion, and his choices respected. If we retain our power as patients, the choice of physician and choice of treatment are ours to make. As I said, some people hate eating vegetables and prefer chemotherapy instead of a solely nutritional approach to treatment. Others want to let God heal them, and that’s okay too. It is important that all patients are comfortable with their choices and do not become angry at themselves if things don’t turn out as they had hoped.
To find a “good” doctor to treat your cancer, try to locate a “native” (that is, one who has had cancer), or one who has had a loved one affected by the disease. Also, choose a doctor who accepts criticism from patients, nurses, and family. Such doctors are the ones who see criticism as coaching and who learn from their mistakes. They don’t make excuses or blame their patients. If you know someone who has been treated for cancer, ask what his doctor was like and if he recommends her. Ask a nurse which oncologist she would go to if she had cancer.
The potential for self-healing is built into you; a cut finger that heals by itself is a simple example of that. When you practice guided imagery, you are reprogramming your body. Guided imagery can help you do anything, so use it to see yourself becoming the person you want to be and doing the things you want to do. This is a powerful way to give your body whatever it needs to be well. Studies have shown that an actor’s body chemistry changes according to whether the actor is given a comedy or a tragedy to perform. So mentally rehearse and practice visualization until you become the person you want to be.
Bobbie and I were down in Florida once, and we went to see a neurologist who is a friend. When we arrived, he was with a patient, so we sat in the waiting room. A few minutes later a nurse came in and said to me, “I’m putting a woman in the next room. She’s going to the hospital shortly. I’m just letting you know so you won’t make any noise, because she’s in a lot of pain. She’s had a migraine for over a week.”
When the nurse left, I thought, “What is there to lose? Maybe I could help the woman with guided imagery or something.” So I went into the next room and I asked, “What is the pain like?”
She said, “It feels like pressure.”
If she had been my patient, my next question would have been: “What is the pressure in your life?” But I said to her, “Let’s look at the pressure in your head and in your life and relieve it.” I did a little guided imagery exercise with her about relieving the pressure, and then I went out and sat down.
A few minutes later the bemused nurse returned to the waiting room. “She said her pain has completely disappeared and to tell you that the pressure was her marriage,” the nurse told me. “After that, she left.”
Our words create images, and our memories do the same thing. These images and memories are stored in our bodies, and when they are damaging they ultimately take their toll. So it is vitally important to feed our minds with healthy, positive images. It is very much the message of many spiritual teachers that we choose to see ourselves not as sick and disabled but as whole and filled with potential.
If we are ill because of these intolerable images, we get well because of imagination.
Find a comfortable position. Look up and let your eyelids close gently as you focus on your breathing, exhaling waste, inhaling inspiration. Allow a wave of peace to move through your body while you inspire life. When you feel ready, take a slow mental walk through your body. Find any wounds from the past. Love those areas; see them healing and becoming healthy and normal again. Picture your body doing what you want it to do. Continue mentally walking until you have journeyed throughout the whole body. Take time to enjoy the journey.
When you are finished, think about the places in your body where you now have, or have had, discomfort or other symptoms. Ask yourself what words you would use to describe your experience of the dis-ease or symptoms. Now think about relationships in your life that you could use the same words to describe. If a relationship or situation is affecting your health, drop the relationship or remove yourself from the situation. Think about what else in your life could be described the same way. When you pinpoint it, eliminate it from your life, and you will find relief from your symptoms too.
As you heal your life, your internal chemistry changes and your body benefits. Find the harmony and rhythm that are authentic for you, instead of accepting the ones imposed by others. Don’t be afraid to imagine your ideal self; your body has the potential to create whatever you visualize. And when your health is not the issue, see how love can heal your life and cure your disease.