Healing Through Love, Medicine and Miracles
Love is the most powerful stimulant of the immune system
"Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world."
— Lucille Ball
As a young nurse, in 1986, I picked up a book by Dr. Bernie Siegel called Love, Medicine & Miracles. I was new to the healing arts and found his book very enlightening. It’s still in print here.
In nursing school, we discussed the integration of body, mind, and spirit. Still, nothing compares to the hands-on experience of this surgeon, whose primary job was to remove cancer and repair a broken body. Along the way, he managed to fix the broken spirit. That is the true art of healing.
His methods and approach to human healing were transformative at the time and still are today. However, we’ve moved further away from his thinking rather than closer to it. This saddens me because healing the human spirit is crucial to healing the body. They go hand in hand, and it isn’t easy to have one without the other. Good medicine incorporates the body, mind, and spirit, recognizing their relationship as one integrated system.
“The extent to which we love ourselves determines whether we eat right, get enough sleep, smoke, wear seatbelts, exercise and so on. Each of these choices is a statement of how much we care about living. These decisions control about 90 percent of the factors that determine our state of health. The trouble is that most people’s motivation to attend to these basics is deflected by attitudes hidden from everyday awareness. As a result, many of us have mixed intentions.”
—Bernie S. Siegel, MD
As crazy as it sounds, in the 1980s, you were allowed to smoke in the hospital, as a patient, and as an employee (as long as you weren’t around oxygen, of course). When Dr. Siegel walked into one of his patient’s rooms, he found her smoking a cigarette. This indicated that, even though this woman had breast cancer, she was ambivalent about living. She sheepishly looked at him, fully expecting he would tell her to stop smoking.
“No, he said, “ I’m going to tell you to love yourself. Then you’ll stop.”
That’s a compelling statement: Love yourself. Many people may falsely believe that’s a selfish and narcissistic way to think. And while some do love themselves, they may not like themselves.
Do you love yourself?
Over the years, I’ve posed this question to several loved ones at certain critical junctures, and their answers have always astounded me. When I got an immediate, visceral “no.” I was shocked. How could you not? You don’t or wouldn’t voluntarily do this to yourself, risking your health and well-being. I think we all experience a bit of self-loathing at some point in our lives, but the long-term discontent is damaging.
I can still hear the echoes of the nuns' voices from elementary school, telling us our bodies are “temples of God” and house our souls. Our bodies are sacred spaces, for now, and they house our spirits.
Our soul exists… inside us. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.
—Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
Disease and the mind
The heart and mind are so integral to the body healing itself that Dr. Siegel writes,
“Until the nineteenth century, medical writers rarely failed to note the influence of grief, despair or discouragement on the onset and outcome of illness, nor did they ignore the healing effects of faith, confidence, and peace of mind. Contentment used to be considered a prerequisite for health.”
Read that again: “Contentment used to be considered a prerequisite for health.” That’s another compelling statement. Siegel’s book is filled with them.
Modern medicine and pharmaceuticals have eliminated much of what we intrinsically know about our health and well-being. I suggest we deepen that connection with ourselves and develop each facet of our mind, body, and spirit, especially when we become unwell. That’s when the magic happens. It doesn’t happen by popping a pill.
The problem is with the solutions. The fix is always “products”. Health and wellness are not the result of using product A or going to spa B. Health and wellness are the result of lifestyle. That’s it. If you’re not willing to change your lifestyle and truly love yourself, no pill, retreat, doctor, or fitness guru will fix you. They may help guide you in the right direction, but you must be willing to change your lifestyle and mindset. Even if society doesn’t.
As
wrote in her recent interview with Dr. Pooja Lakshim of titled Real Self-care is Not a Thing to Do; It’s a Way to Be,“We have a proliferation of self-help books, influencer-led retreats and boot camps, and products (red light lamps, essential oils, crystals, etc.) that make people feel like they are one consumer product away from feeling well. Few, if any, of these offerings are solutions. At best, they might be a band-aid. At their worst, they cause physical or emotional harm and drive people into financial debt.”
I couldn’t agree more. The illusion is that the products will make us well. But true health and wellness are ways of being; they are lifestyles. They are the little things you do every day, the little things you think to yourself every day, and how you care for yourself over time.
Balancing the three amigos
You must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.
—Mary Oliver
Your body, mind, and spirit are all your friends. Please pay attention and care for them like a dear friend. Holding on to negative emotions such as hatred, sorrow, and grief can create significant stress, which often results in chronic inflammation and can lead to illness.
When we become unwell, we heal the body with the tools of medicine, the mind with the tools of thought, and the spirit with the tools of love.
If one of your three amigos is not well, the other two will support you until you get the third one back on track. But when two or three of the three are out of sync, you will have significant health issues to contend with. True health and wellness are when the body, mind, and spirit are congruent.
Dr. Siegal writes about a study showing that love boosts the immune system. In 1982, Harvard psychologists David McClelland and Carol Kirshnit discovered that watching movies about love can increase immunoglobulin-A levels in saliva, the first line of defense against colds and other viral diseases. They found that while a Nazi propaganda film had no effect, a documentary on Mother Teresa’s work produced a significant rise in immunoglobulin-A, particularly in individuals motivated by altruism. This effect was independent of the subjects’ conscious feelings toward Mother Teresa, suggesting that the images of love influenced the unconscious mind.
In their study, Abdurachman Abdurachma and Netty Herawati write, “The role of psychological well-being in boosting immune response and feeling good mentally has been proven to boost our immune system.”
Improvements in several saliva, blood, and plasma markers showed this. On the other hand, feeling mentally unwell can weaken our immune response. Many studies have also suggested enhancing our immune system through psychological well-being can make life more comfortable.
They concluded that psychological well-being can improve our body’s immune responses, enhance our resistance to diseases (including infections), and lead to a healthier and happier life spiritually and physically.
So, reclaim your sacred space. We’re all humans on this planet for a very short time. Love yourself, nurture your soul, nourish your body, and feed your mind. Find out what you must do to make those function optimally.
Loving yourself means becoming authentic to who you are. When you open up to your spirit, the part of you that knows, you will no longer worry about what others think. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross put forth the idea that when you make a decision based on cold reason alone, it’s usually made to satisfy others. Intuitive decisions are made for ourselves.
As Mary Oliver said, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
It is precious, and your life is entirely what you make of it.
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Thank you for sharing and your kind words. Healthcare today is “captured” by the pharmaceutical companies. I’m teaching a path for individuals to take back their health and happiness. Our lives belong to us and we, the individual are in control of them. Dr. Siegel’s approach is visionary and we need to bring that humanity back.
Bernie Siegel , what a blast from the past. I remember hearing a lot about him (even back then without the internet). It's a pity his work and the things you've written about hasn't penetrated the consciousness of the medical field seemingly at all. Although I do recognise that there are a number of doctors post-covid who have woken up to things beyond the limited conventional western medicine model.