CALM CURE FORWARD | By Dr David Hamilton
I first began studying the mind–body connection while working as a research and development scientist with one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. Fascinated by the placebo effect, I began to investigate how the mind – in particular, attitudes, emotions and beliefs – affected the body.
In placebo research, it is now very well understood that a person’s belief, or expectation, alters their brain chemistry in a way consistent with what they expect to happen. Even placing attention on any part of the body will activate the corresponding brain region, which then sends signals to the part of the body being focused upon. In a real sense, energy flows where attention goes.
It is also now well known that focusing the mind on the breath during meditation causes physical changes in brain matter and turns activity up or down in over 1,500 genes. A feeling of love can flood the arteries with oxytocin, a cardioprotective hormone that can reduce blood pressure. On the other hand, focusing on things that annoy us can flood the body with stress hormones instead.
The mind exerts a powerful effect on the body. Once thought of as just something that we interpret the world with and use to make a few decisions, the mind can now even be thought of as a force in that our thoughts, emotions and beliefs exert an actual force on our biology.
The mental practice of visualization has been shown to cause physical changes in the brain through neuroplasticity. Research and practice has been expanded to help people recover faster from stroke or sporting injuries, and many top sports people even spend time every day visualizing themselves at their best, knowing that doing so actually exerts an effect on their muscles.
There is now no question that the mind impacts the body. One of the things I love about Sandy Newbigging’s work is that he helps people to discover if there is a link between current symptoms of illness or injury and their thoughts, emotions, beliefs or assumptions and, if so, shows them how to heal by first finding peace in their mind. The idea is that if the state of the body is somehow mirroring the condition of the mind, then once the mind moves towards peace, so the mirrored state in the body may change such that the body then moves towards wellness.
I find Sandy’s Calm Cure method very powerful for when there seems to be a psychological link. I decided to try it out on myself, having felt frustrated by a lingering muscle strain that was preventing me from playing sports. Following Sandy’s method, I identified an area where I felt torn in my life, then made peace with it by identifying what my attachment was and what I was resisting. I was pleasantly surprised that after finding some peace with my inner conflict, I was swiftly back exercising again.
While researching through scientific journals in the writing of my own books I have, from time to time, found research indicating a correlation between a person’s psychological state or emotional expression and some illnesses or diseases.
For example, some research suggests that hostility, which can be thought of as expressed contempt, is linked with coronary artery calcification – a form of hardening of the arteries – in some people. In a sense, as we harden emotionally so we harden on the inside too, almost as if the biological state is a mirror of the emotional state.
Research by Lydia Temoshok, while at the University of California School, San Francisco, found a link between Type-C personality and the thickness of certain tumours. Type-C personality is characterized by suppressing negative emotion. It’s almost as if pushing negative emotion down, which can cause it to grow in intensity, was mirrored in the growth of the tumour.
On the other hand, research by James Pennebaker, social psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has shown that releasing stored negative emotion by simply writing about past hurts can elevate a person’s immune response to pathogens. Similarly, forgiveness has been shown to reduce blood pressure and increase blood flow to the heart. Stored negative emotion, and therefore stress, seems to correlate with illness, while releasing the emotion or finding some peace seems to be health giving.
Perhaps some of the most exciting recent research is where both meditation and emotional expression and support were
found to offset the loss of telomere length in the cells of breast cancer survivors. Telomeres are end caps on DNA that help stop it unravelling. They are vital to the life of a cell, but they gradually wear down, in part due to the stresses and strains of life. So, in other words, meditation and the release of negative emotion was having an actual protective effect on cells.
Given the growing understanding of the mind–body connection and how it can be harnessed to improve health, I believe that Sandy Newbigging has made an exciting and very important contribution to the field.
Calm Cure goes further. We all want to be kind and love ourselves, others, and life; we also have goals, hopes, dreams and aspirations. Regardless of our focus, however, our conditioning can get in the way. Sandy draws some intelligent conclusions about our relationships with ourself and the world, and shows how, by simply realigning some of our thinking, we can literally take control of our personal state of peace and happiness, and our personal experiences of reality.
In this book, he addresses how mind and emotions impact our relationships, careers, money, time and even how we feel about, and the impact we have upon, the wider world. It is almost as if our world, from our personal world to the wider world, is an extension of the body, so just as inner conflict impacts the body, so it impacts our lives.
Sandy shows that once we remove our inner conflict in each of these areas, we are better able to have great relationships, success in our careers, a steady flow of and abundance of money,
more time and even impact the wider world in a more honest, real and powerful way.
I believe that the many examples Sandy shares in this book will speak directly to readers, as they did to me. We can see the inner conflicts of the people featured in these examples as our own inner conflicts. As Sandy takes us through a step-by-step process for releasing these inner conflicts, we are set free to be more effective in almost any area of our life that we focus upon.
I wholeheartedly recommend this book!
David R. Hamilton PhD
Author of How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body and The Five Side Effects of Kindness