Using Your Mind To Improve Your Health

I spend about half my time traveling around this and other nations to address groups of Mind Control grad- uates. In the course of a year I meet not hundreds but many thousands who report truly wonderful self-heal- ings. These are now commonplace to me;

I think of them as wonderful in another sense. I am filled with wonder that everyone has not caught on to the power of their minds over their bodies. So many think of psychic healing as strange and esoteric—yet what could be stranger and more esoteric than the powerful prescription drugs with their health-threatening side effects? In all my experience with psychic healing, I have never experienced or seen or heard of a single harmful side effect.

Medical research is finding out more and more about the relationship between the body and the mind. Of all the different, seemingly unrelated research efforts, there is a fascinating consistency about the findings: The mind turns out to play a mysteriously powerful role. If Mind Control were perfect (it is not; we are still learning) I believe we would all have perfect bodies, all the time. However, it is an inescapable fact that we already know enough to strengthen with our minds the body’s repair forces so that illnesses can be combatted more successfully. Even the simple methods of EmUe Cou6 worked. Mind Control’s methods, which include Coup’s, work even more powerfully.

Obviously, as you develop more skill in self-healing you will require less medical attention. However, at this stage in the development of Mind Control, and at this stage in your mastery of what we have developed, it is far too early for the nation’s physicians to go into retirement.

What you should do is consult them, as you would normally, and follow their advice. What you can do is amaze them with the speed of your recovery.

Someday they may wonder where you went.

Many graduates report they use Mind Control in emergencies to reduce bleeding and pain. Example: Mrs. Donald Wildowsky was in Texas on a convention trip with her husband. According to the Norwich, Con- necticut, Bulletin, she dived into a swimming pool and ruptured an eardrum. “We were miles from any town, and I didn’t want to make him leave in the middle of the convention,’’ she was quoted as saying. “So I went to an Alpha state, put my hand over my ear, concentrated on the pain area and said ‘Gone, gone, gone!’ “The bleeding stopped immediately and the pain left. When I finally got to a doctor, he was speechless with amazement.’' In self-healing, there are six fairly easy steps to take. The first is to begin—in Beta—to feel yourself be- coming a loving (and therefore a forgiving) person, and to consider love as an end in itself. This will probably require a pretty thorough mental housecleaning (see Chapter 8). Second, go to your level. This alone is a major step Using Your Mind to Improve Your Health / 75 sward self-healing because, as I mentioned much ear- lier, at this level the negative work of the mind—all its guilts and angers—is neutralized, and the body is set free to do what nature designed it to do: repair itself. You may, of course, have very real feelings of guilt and anger, but we have found that these will be experienced only at the outer, or Beta, level and they tend to disap- pear as you practice Mind Control. Third, mentally speak to yourself about step one: Express your desire to achieve a thorough mental housecleaning—to use positive words, to think positive- ly, to become a loving, forgiving person. Fourth, mentally experience the illness that is trou- bling you. Use the mental screen and see and feel the illness. This should be brief; its purpose is simply to focus your healing energies where they are needed. Fifth, quickly erase this image of your illness and experience yourself as completely cured. Feel the free- dom and happiness of being in perfect health. Hold on to this image, linger over it enjoy it and know that you deserve it—know that now in this healthy state you are fully in tune with nature’s intentions for you. Sixth, reinforce your mental housecleaning once again, and end by saying to yourself, “Every day in every way I am getting better, better, and better.” How long should this take and how often should you do it? My experience is that fifteen minutes is about the best length of time. Go through this exercise as often as you can, no less often than once a day. There is no “too muck” Allow me to digress for a moment. You may have heard that meditation is a fine thing but that you must be careful not to become so enchanted by it that you76 do too much. This, it is said, can lead to a withdrawal from the world and an unhealthy preoccupation with yourself. Whether this is true or not, I do not know. This is said of other meditative disciplines, not Mind Control. Our emphasis is on involvement with the world, not withdrawal from it—not with transcending practical problems or ignoring them, but with facing them head-on and solving them. You cannot do too much of this. To return to self-healing: There is no end to step one. Practice it in Beta, Alpha, and Theta. Live it. If you feel it slipping during the day, put your three fingers together for instant reinforcement Many of our Mind Control centers publish news- letters for their graduates. These are filled with reports from graduates on what Mind Control has done for them. Stories of how they control headaches, asthma, fatigue, and high blood pressure are too numerous to count. Here is one, which I select because the author is a practicing physician. From the time I was about eleven I had mi- graine headaches. At first they occurred occa- sionally and could be controlled, but then as I grew older they became worse and finally I was having “cluster headaches” lasting three or four days, with only a two-day interval between attacks. A full-blown migraine is devastating . . . usually involving one side of the face and head. The eyes feel as if they were being pushed out of their sock- ets. The pain is vise-like and the stomach turns somersaults. The attack is sometimes relieved by a specific preparation, a vasoconstricting drug, which has to be taken at the onset while the pain is Using Your Mind to Improve Your Health I 77 tolerable. Once the headache has progressed for some time there is nothing that will relieve it ex- cept time. I was getting to the point where I had to take the preparation every four hours and even then the relief was only partial. So I went to a headache specialist, who gave me a complete examination to be certain that I didn’t have any physical or neurological abnormalities. He gave me advice and treatment which I had al- ready been practicing; the headaches continued. One of my patients was a Mind Control grad- uate, and for about a year she’d been suggesting I go with her to Mind Control. I always told her I didn’t believe in that nonsense. Then one day I saw her on about the fourth day of a headache and I must have been looking green and she said, “Isn’t it about time you took Mind Control? There’s a new course starting next week . . . why don’t you come along with me?” I signed up for the course and went faithfully every single night, and sure enough, I didn’t have a headache that week. But a week after I finished the course I woke up with a terrible headache and a chance to see whether my programming would work. I went through one cycle and counted out . . . no headache . . . felt great. It was a miracle! Five seconds later the headache came back even worse. I didn’t give up, so I did another cycle, and the headache momentarily went away, then came back again. I had to go through about ten cycles, but I kept it up and didn’t take migraine medica- tion. I told myself I was going to do it, and the headache finally did go away. I didn’t have a headache for a while, but the next time three cycles relieved it I had headaches78 off and on for about three months after that, but I didn’t even need to take an aspirin. Since I took Mind Control I haven’t taken an aspirin. It really works! Here is another, from a nun, Sister Barbara Burns of Detroit, Michigan. I select this one because Sister Bar- bara has made ingenious use of her own triggering mechanism. For twenty-seven years she had worn glasses because of nearsighted astigmatism. As her nearsightedness in- creased, her lenses were made stronger, which reduces distance acuity. Before the improvement of her eyesight, bifocals became necessary. Then, in July 1974, she decided to use Mind Control. In deep meditation she told herself, “Every time I blink my eyes, they will focus accurately, like the lens of a camera.” During each meditation she repeated this, and in two weeks she began to live without glasses, though she still needed them for reading. She consulted Dr. Richard Wlodyga, an optometrist (and Mind Control graduate), who told her that her cornea was slightly misshapen. Sister Bar- bara inserted the cornea correction into her meditation for the few weeks’ interval before another examination by Dr. Wlodyga. The following is part of a letter to us from Dr. Wlodyga, which Sister Barbara asked him to write: Sister Barbara Burns was first examined by me on 20 August 1974 I examined Sister Burns again on 26 August 1975. She had not worn her glasses for one year [The] patient has had a reduction in the amount of manifest myopia to a level where glasses have become unnecessary. Using Your Mind to Improve Your Health I 79 Of course the physician with migraine and Sister Barbara Burns were not suffering from “dread diseases” of the kind we are trained to fear. Can Mind Control help if one of these should strike, or must we simply take our medicine and wait for time to pass? Let us take a look at what is probably the most feared disease of all, cancer. You may have read about the work of Dr. O. Carl Simonton, a cancer specialist. Marilyn Ferguson de- scribed some of it in her recent popular book The Brain Revolution, and in January 1976, Prevention Magazine published an article about him, “Mind Over Cancer,” by Grace Halsell. Dr. Simonton, who was trained in Mind Control techniques, has successfully adapted some of these to treating his patients. When he was in charge of radiation therapy at Travis Air Force Base near San Francisco he studied a rare but well-known phenomenon: persons who, for no rea- son known to medicine, recover from cancer. These are known as “spontaneous remissions,” and they constitute a very small percentage of all cancer patients. If he could learn why these patients recovered, Dr. Simonton reasoned, perhaps he could find a way to cause remis- sions to occur. He found that these patients had something very im- portant in common. They were often positive, optimis- tic, determined people. In an address at the Boston Convention of Mind Control in 1974, he said: The biggest single emotional factor identified by investigators in the development of cancer in gen- eral is a significant loss six to eighteen months prior to the diagnosis of the disease. This has been shown in several long-term stud- ies by independent investigators with control80 groups. . . . We see that it is not just that loss that is a significant factor, but it is the way that loss is received by the individual. You see, the loss has to be sufficient to cause a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness that per- sists on the part of the patient Thus, it would seem that his basic resistance goes down, allowing the malignancy to develop clinically. In another study at Travis Air Force Base, reported in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology,* Dr. Si- monton rated the attitudes of 152 cancer patients in five categories, from strongly negative to strongly pos- itive. Then he rated their responses to therapy, from excellent to poor. For 20 of these patients, results of their treatment were excellent—though the condition of 14 of them was so serious they would have had less than a fifty-percent chance of living five years. What tipped the balance was their positive attitudes. At the other end of the scale, 22 showed poor results from the treat- ment; none of these had positive attitudes. However, when some of the more positive patients returned home there was a turnaround in their attitudes, “and we saw their disease change correspondingly.” Clearly, their attitudes rather than the severity of their illness played the stronger role. Dr. Elmer Green of the Menninger Foundation was quoted by the Journals editor as saying, “Carl and Stephanie Simonton are . . . getting remarkable results in cancer control by coupling visualization for physio- logical self-regulation with traditional radiology.” In his Boston speech, Dr. Simonton quoted the Presi- dent of the American Cancer Society, Eugene Pender- grass, who said in 1959, “There is some evidence that » VoL 7, no. 1, 1975. Using Your Mind to Improve Your Health I 81 the course of disease in general is affected by emotional distress. It is my sincere hope that we can widen the quest to include the distinct possibility that within one’s mind is a power capable of exerting forces which can either enhance or inhibit the progress of this disease.” Dr. Simonton is now Medical Director of the Cancer Counseling and Research Center in Fort Worth, where he and his co-therapist Stephanie Mathews-Simonton, train patients to participate mentally in their own treat- ment “You see, I began with the idea that a patient’s at- titude played a role in his response to any form of treatment and could influence the course of his disease. As I explored this, I found that Mind Control—bio- feedback and meditation—concepts gave me a tool to use in teaching the patient how to begin the interaction and become involved with his own health process. I would say that it is the most powerful single tool that I have to offer the patient emotionally.” One of the first steps Dr. Simonton takes in training his patients is to banish fear. Once this education is begun, “we realize that cancer is a normal process going on in all of us, that we have cancerous cells developing malignant degeneration all the time. The body recog- nizes and destroys them the way it handles any foreign protein. . . . It is not simply a matter of getting rid of all the cancer cells, because we develop cancer cells all the time. It is getting the body back winning again, handling its own processes.” Dr. Simonton’s address was followed by one from Mrs. Simonton. She said: Most people . . . visualize a cancer cell as being a very ugly, mean, insidious thing that can sneak around and is very powerful; once it gets started there is nothing the body can do. In reality a82 cancer cell is a normal cell that has gone c r a z y . . . . It is a very stupid cell—it reproduces so rapidly that many times it will encompass its own blood supply and starve itself. It is weak. You cut into it, or radiate it, or give it chemotherapy, and if it gets sick at all, it can’t regain its health. It dies. Now compare that to a healthy cell. We know that in healthy tissue you can cut your finger, and if you do nothing more than put a Band-Aid on it, it will heal itself. We know that normal tissues can repair themselves . . . they don’t devour their own blood supply. Yet look at the mental image we have of those things. You can see the power we ascribe to the disease by our fears and the mental imagery we use in our fears. Referring to the relaxation and visualization tech- niques they use along with radiation therapy, Mrs. Si- monton said: Probably the single most valuable tool we have is the mental imagery technique. There are three basic things we ask patients to do. We ask them to visualize their disease, visualize their treatment, and to visualize the body’s im- mune mechanism. [In our group sessions} what we talk about is picturing what we want to come about. Before we believe it will come about It seems to be important to picture it that way. One of the main things we talk about is the meditation. How often are you meditating? What are you doing in your meditation?