I had a client last year, a woman in her 50’s who lived in the rough inner city. She was the “salt of the earth” kind of person, who lived with a lot of anger in her life. Her 16 yr old daughter was wild, and the two of them would have countless arguments between them. She also had Crohn’s disease which was flaring up quite a lot as well.
The meeting with me was probably the first time she was able to sit down and have any kind of a peaceful conversation with anyone. Now this lady is smart, street smart, she needed to be to get by from day to day.
Within about 30 minutes of talking together I had the opportunity of teaching her in very simple terms how thought works, that every feeling of anger that she was experiencing was simply created by her own thoughts, that she was in fact making these thoughts up, just like a Hollywood producer makes up a movie from the vivid imagination of their own mind.
And she saw it, very quickly. The affect was instantaneous, it’s as if all of a sudden the weight of the world had been lifted off her shoulders, and she knew that she was going to be ok from that moment on.
When she came back to see me a week later, she told me that her relationship with her daughter had improved dramatically, because she herself, had been a lot calmer during the week. Her neighbour commented that she heard her singing in the morning, and wondered what was up.
She only needed to see me one more session, as so much had changed in her life for the better. On top of that she said that the wrinkles on her forehead had disappeared, as well as the swelling in her ankles. Her Crohn’s disease also did not flare up anything like before.
The effect of a calm mind has huge implications for the health of the body. Our bodies are made up of about 50 trillion cells, and each cell is being turned on and off by the chemistry in the blood. Since the chemistry of the blood is changed moment to moment by our thinking, so our thinking is directly causing cells to turn on and off. Stressful thinking is turning good cells off and bad cells on.
And after a matter of only about one half hour of negative thinking this has changed the physical body itself. The word “disease” is lack of “ease”.
The trick is to marinate in the sweet spot of calmness, as much as possible, as that’s where all the goodies are, and that’s it in a nutshell.
Bryan Ryan (Mental Health Educator)