Saturday, July 19, 2008

The Body’s Power to Heal Itself

I read an interesting article a month or so ago called The Key to Natural Healing. One thing jumped out at me:

The Body’s Power to Heal Itself

Q: I find it hard to understand how pain points to the ultimate?

A: […] Another way to express this is to let the body be body. The body has an organic memory of health. You have the proof of this in the fact that when you cut your finger, it heals within a week. The body evidently knows precisely how to heal itself...

Understanding that the body has a built in blue print of perfect health and it will do all it can to heal itself, I feel, is a very reassuring fact. The human body has enormous intelligence which it has accumulated over centuries, it know exactly what to do and how to do it. Your job is mostly to listen to it, and assist it with it’s inbuilt healing capabilities.

When I read that, I was reminded that when our body heals a cut finger, it heals it just to the right amount and no more. There's an amazing process at work there, one that's not under our control. Yes, there are things we can do to help it along, like swab it with rubbing alcohol to kill the germs, but the healing is done for us. And when our finger is healed, we don't have to mentally address the body and tell it,"OK, good job, you can stop now." The body knows how to heal itself.

A similar process is at work when our spouse dies. The body knows how to grieve. And it will heal our grief to just the right amount and no more. This should offer us a great deal of hope. Pretty much every one of us has suffered a small cut somewhere on our bodies. And our body healed itself. You probably don't even remember the particulars about some of those cuts anymore, especially if they happened some years ago. Isn't it comforting to know that your body is busily at work healing itself from this grief wound as well? You know that your body can heal cuts, and you have the proof that the healing process works. This insight should help to alleviate some of our fears. Grief doesn't last forever.

Isn't it interesting that we feel pain when we are bereaved? We have no cut on our body, but it hurts like we've been attacked by a meat cleaver. I remember feeling like someone had buried a big hatchet in the middle of my chest and was busy wiggling it around. It hurt like hell.

Grief was devastating to me. Was it devastating to my body? No. Grief was devastating to my mind, and my mind caused the pain in my body. I needed to learn how to heal my mind. And when I learned how to heal my mind, the physical pain went away.

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