From the Heart: Whenever You're Ready

I met a fellow who had been diagnosed with a rare debilitating disease. For seven years Stan consulted with over a hundred doctors, submitted to endless tests, ingested more than a hundred pills daily, and tried a wide range of treatments, none of which helped. He kept losing weight until he was down to 120 pounds. A final experiment with a risky drug failed. His doctor told him, “You will soon die.”

At that moment Stan got fed up with depending on doctors to save him and instead he turned within. He affirmed over and over and over again, “I am healed.” After six weeks of intensive introspection and affirmation, Stan began to feel better and his symptoms started to disappear. He gained weight. Eventually he was restored to perfect health and he felt fantastic. Now Stan looks radiant, lives a full life, works from home, and spends many valued hours a day with his wife and children. He is a walking miracle.

A Course in Miracles urges us to remember, “I am under no law’s but God’s.” It tells us that the many laws we believe we are subject to, such as nutrition, economics, and reciprocity, are not the ultimate dynamics that govern well-being. There are vaster, deeper universal principles that make our lives work. When we discover and live by them, we enjoy a freedom that lesser laws cannot deliver.

The Course explains that it is the mind of the patient that chooses to be healed, or not. We enlist doctors and medicine as agents, or permission slips, to serve our inner choice for wellness or sickness. Such professionals and methods are not the source of our health, but channels through which life force delivers our well-being. We can also access healing energy directly, without employing an external agent. This principle does not discredit doctors, who help in huge ways. More fundamentally it empowers patients.

I know a massage therapist who was assigned to work on a terminal cancer patient in a hospital. Emma supposedly had a week to live. While Jane was massaging Emma, the patient revealed that she had had a fight with her sister 25 years earlier, and the two had not spoken since that time. Jane used some coaching skills to help Emma admit that she really loved her sister and wished to reconcile with her. She decided to phone her and make amends.

A week later Jane was in the hospital and she passed Emma’s room. To her astonishment, the woman was standing before a mirror, dressed nicely, applying makeup. “What’s happened to you?” asked Jane, amazed at Emma’s vitality. “I’m going home,” she replied. “I had a heart-to-heart talk with my sister, and we made up. I can hardly describe the relief I felt in releasing this burden. The next time I went for x-rays, the doctors found no sign of cancer, and released me.”

We have been taught that external conditions determine our state of mind; favorable conditions make us well and happy, and unfavorable conditions damage or depress us. Yet it is the other way around: It is our thoughts that create or attract conditions, and our internal choices that make us happy or not. While some people interpret this dynamic as a cause for guilt or blame for negative events, it is actually supremely empowering. If in the past you have used the power of the mind to cause problems, you can redirect that very power to create solutions. As author Mike Dooley says, “Blame is not in the vocabulary of a spiritually evolved person.”

While it appears that things happen to us, they actually happen from us. If everything is a choice, why would some people choose illness? No one, of course, would conscioiusly choose illness, but there are subconscious motivations that might make illness attractive. You get out of going to school, work, or other activities you would rather not do. You get attention, sympathy, and favors. You get money. You get to be “right” or gain revenge by blaming someone who hurt you. You get to “prove” that your body has power over your life and mind. This is not to say that people who get sick do not deserve time off or emotional or financial support; compassion sees beyond blame and gives love where it is called for. Yet at a deeper level, choice plays a far greater role in health than most people recognize.

If you are dealing with a lingering physical, emotional, financial, or relationship challenge, consider how an attitudinal upgrade might accelerate your healing process. Healing functions at an entirely different frequency than illness. Fear, anger, resentment, and blame match and sustain the illness frequency. Love, including self-love, joy, creativity, passion, and forgiveness match and sustain the healing frequency. Your radio cannot be tuned to two different stations at the same time. Like Stan, who found apparently impossible healing by claiming wellness, your choice for wholeness could prove be the turning point you seek.

Alan Cohen is the author of many inspirational books including A Course in Miracles Made Easy. Join Alan for his life-changing Holistic Life Coach Training beginning September 1, 2020. For information on this program and Alan’s books, videos, audios, online courses, retreats, and other inspirational events and materials, visit www.AlanCohen.com.