Excerpt from "All is Well: Heal Your Body with Medicine, Affirmations, and Intuition"

The following is an excerpt from All is Well: Heal Your Body with Medicine, Affirmations, and Intuition, by Dr. Mona Lisa Schulz and Louise L. Hay, published by Hay House, available March 1, 2013 in bookstores or at www.hayhouse.com .

Integrating Healing Methods

Healing the mind and body with affirmations, medicine, and intuition is territory that has been increasingly explored over the last 30 years. And though there are many brilliant and gifted individuals who have helped lead the way, few would argue that the first pioneer in this field was Louise Hay. In fact, this movement began en masse in the 1980s, when we all bought her “little blue book,” Heal Your Body: The Mental Causes for Physical Illness and the Metaphysical Way to Overcome Them, and discovered the thought patterns that led to the health problems we all had.

I had dragged Heal Your Body along with me to medical school and later as I spent long years researching the brain in pursuit of my Ph.D. Time after time, the book made sense, but I could never figure out where Louise got her affirmation system. What motivated her, nearly 35 years ago, to start her “clinical observation study” on the association between human thoughts and health? How could someone with no scientific background or medical training observe client after client, see a consistent correlation between certain thought patterns and their associated health problems, and then write a book that so accurately addresses our health concerns? Her prescriptions worked but I didn’t know why or how. It simply drove me crazy.

So, as necessity—or aggravation—is the mother of invention, I decided to delve into the science behind her affirmation system, mapping out the emotional aspects of illness in the brain and body. And the correlations I found helped me create a treatment system that has guided me through more than 25 years of intuitive consultations and an equal number of years as a physician and scientist. But it wasn’t until later that I realized how powerful combining the healing methods I use with Louise’s affirmations could be.

The Body’s Intuition

The human body is an amazing machine, and as a machine it requires regular maintenance and care to run as efficiently as possible. There are a variety of reasons your body can break down and get sick: genetics, the environment, diet, and so on. But as Louise found in her career—and published in Heal Your Body—every illness is affected by emotional factors in your life. And decades after Louise presented her conclusions, the scientific community has put forth studies that support them.

Research has shown that fear, anger, sadness, love, and joy have specific effects on the body. We know that anger makes muscles clamp down and blood vessels constrict, leading to hypertension and resistance to blood flow. Cardiac medicine tells us that joy and love tend to have opposite effect. If you look at Louise’s little blue book, a heart attack and other heart problems are “squeezing all the joy” out of the heart, a “hardening of the heart,” and a “lack of joy.” And her affirmation to reverse these problems? “I bring joy back to the center of my heart,” and “I joyously release the past. I am in peace.”

Specific thought patterns affect our bodies in predictable ways, releasing certain chemicals in response to each emotion. When fear is your dominant mood over a long period of time, the constant release of stress hormones, specifically cortisol, triggers a domino effect of chemicals that lead to heart disease, weight gain, and depression. As with fear, other emotions and thoughts follow a typical pattern as they are projected onto the body in the form of illness. In my work, I have also found that while emotions travel everywhere in the body, they affect organs differently depending on what is happening in your life.

Often if we are not aware of an emotional situation in our life or the life of a loved one, this information comes to us through intuition. We have five earthbound senses that can evoke our feelings: seeing, hearing, body sensation, smell, and taste. And we have five parallel “intuitive senses”—clairvoyance (seeing), clairaudience (hearing), clairsentience (body sensation), clairalience (smelling), and clairgustance (tasting)—through which we can gain additional information. For example, you may feel dread when you hear the phone ring in your head five minutes before it actually does, relaying bad news about a loved one’s death. Or you may experience a bad feeling in your body, whether it’s that “gut feeling” or that “heartache” warning you about a problem you will be facing in your relationship.

If we are to fully heal, we must bring our attention to the messages our bodies relay through intuition. But we also need logic and facts to fully understand which imbalances in our lifestyle are affecting our health. Just like needing both tires inflated on a bicycle, you need to balance emotions and intuition with logic and fact. Both extreme logic without intuition and intuition without logic breed disaster. We must use both of these tools to create health.

Just as we need a balanced diet to be healthy, we also need to make sure we have healthy sources of love and happiness. By working to invest our energy among various areas of life—family, money, work, relationships, communication, education, and spirituality—we can create physical and emotional health.