How much do you believe that you can influence your life and health? How much do you believe that your brain and body influence each other? If you don’t understand how these concepts might work, how ‘open’ are you to finding out more?

The ‘placebo effect’ very clearly proves the effect that our mind can have over illness. A positive belief and expectation is the foundation stone of healing. Your expectation will influence the outcome more than you know.

Your underlying beliefs will influence the benefit that you get from therapy. It is clearly easier to train or teach somebody who is prepared to take an active role in their healing.

I am sure there are people who have been healed and yet have had a negative outlook, just as I am sure that there are people with the most positive outlook that have not been healed. However, I do know that there has been much research to show that you are much more likely to get better if your attitude is generally positive.

While many people report ‘healing’ from faith and belief alone (and I do believe that this is possible), most mortals require a little more than that. Your feelings and thoughts can sometimes take a ‘dive’, but giving up hope is a killer. We need hope to allow ourselves to find healers, seek answers and do something about our problems.  This is the primary reason why depression is so hard to overcome – because the lack of serotonin and ‘feel good’ chemicals make a person feel hopeless and hope is the thing they most need.  Many depressed people do not seek help because they simply have no hope of an answer.

Sometimes we forget that our physical body is affecting our emotions, and that our unconscious patterns affect both our thoughts and our body. There is nothing more soul destroying to a depressed or an ill person than to be told that they should just ‘pull themselves together’ or that they are “making themselves ill by their negative thinking and behaviour”.  It may well be true, but you can’t undo a lifetime of learning, most of which is unconscious, by  ‘just pulling yourself together’! They are trying to do just that! And they would have done it in a nano-second a long time ago if it was that easy.

Ooops, I digress – sorry, but I touched on one of my hobby horses!

So you have hope, and you have a fairly positive outlook – what else do you need to heal yourself? Faith and persistence! Faith keeps us going.  Sometimes the journey to our own healing is a blessing in disguise as it takes us along a pathway of learning and discovery that would have been lost to us. ’Faith’ is knowing that there is an answer out there. Somewhere. ‘Faith’ is knowing that the journey is a part of our own personal life path, and that along the way we will find that all things do work together for good. ‘Faith’ is seeing evil and yet believing that with enough light we will put out the darkness. ‘Faith’ is believing that no matter how little your part is in the healing of the world, it is worth something.

I believe that LOVE underpins all positive thought. “We will win this war” is not positive. It is born of fear and hatred. It is one-upmanship.  “I will get rich” may sound positive, but it, too, may be born of fear of poverty. Our positive attitude, our hope and our persistence need light to succeed.

Love and hope cannot survive without faith to persist. Who can do anything if there is no hope? What is anything worth if there is no love?  Have faith in yourself to find the help that you need. Love yourself enough to do it, and let hope guide you.

The mind is a wonderful slave, but a terrible master! In order to be the master of our lives and destinies, we must first become master of our own minds!