Power

 

How much of what happens is because we are expecting it to happen?

 

Our minds are so very, very powerful. Powerful enough to heal our bodies with sugar pills and medically “faked” procedures. A mere suggestion from a doctor can take us to new health heights, or find us dead in exactly the amount of time we were “given” to live. And while this and more falls under the term “placebo effect,” it is so much more than that limited phrase suggests.

Likely you have heard of the placebo effect; described as being an experience where the brain convinces the body that a treatment not known to cure what is ailing you, somehow has the capacity to do so. Taking it further, maybe you have even had the experience where you were thinking something or feeling something in your mind so strongly that something happened in your body. Negative or positive. An experience where you created health or disease; “just” by a thought, “just” by an emotion.

The first time this ever happened to me I was in my mid 20’s and I was coming down with some kind of womping respiratory illness that I knew was going to leave me very sick. I knew it because the symptoms that were arising were the indicators of how I would typically get sick; having already gone through multiple bouts of bronchitis that would lay me up for weeks, and sometimes even months. At the time I had been going through an enormous amount of stress, and was very unhappy.

Somehow I convinced myself that what I needed most was a night of some hard core partying to blow out the deadly stress and difficult emotions that had been building up inside. I believed fully, absolutely and completely that a night of smoking and drinking was what I needed to set myself straight.

It worked.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that health depleting practices like getting drunk and filling the lungs with smoke is a remedy for respiratory health. What I am suggesting is that I so fully believed it that my body responded in kind. With my expectations somehow internally producing the exact combination of chemistry and more to render me well.

Expectations have an enormous impact and effect on bodily functions and systems. Our minds make a prediction about what is possible with our health, and then make it come true through our own internal pharmacies and healing processes.

This then begs the question: If we have something so powerful built right into us, why is this not the leading approach in all that we do around health and well-being? A timely corollary being: Do we continue to experience what we are experiencing now because the “expert” predictions, the very same ones that so many of our minds have taken to be true, are creating expectations in our minds that our bodies go on to fulfill?

Think about it.

What if all around us, we were bathing in messages that made use of this power instead of ingesting messages that predict, plan and expect for ill health? Can you imagine it? Can you imagine charting your own health in this way? Not easy. Not at all.

But so very, very possible.

(I highly recommend Joe Dispenza’s book, “You Are The Placebo”)