All Is Well: Heal Your Body With Medicine, Affirmations, and Intuition (3 page)

Chapter 11: All Is Well Tables ............................................................. 183

A Final Note from Louise .........................................................................
221

Endnotes ..................................................................................................
223

Bibliography .............................................................................................
237

Acknowledgments ....................................................................................
245

About the Authors ....................................................................................
249

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A Welcome

from Louise

It thrills my heart to present this book to you, dearest reader,

whether you’re new to my work or a longtime follower.

All Is Well
looks at my teachings from a fresh and exciting

angle. My co-author, Mona Lisa Schulz, whom I love and adore,

has been promising me for ages that she would pull together sci-

entific evidence to support what I have been teaching for years.

While I personally do not need proof to know that these methods

work—I rely on what I call my “Inner Ding” to evaluate things—

I know there are many people who will only consider a new idea

if there is science behind it. So here we present the science to

you. With this added information, I know that a whole new seg-

ment of people will become aware of the power they have to heal

their bodies.

So let this book be your guide. In the following pages, Mona

Lisa will show clearly, step by step, how you can move from illness

to wellness—outlining the connections between emotional well-

ness and health and the prescriptions we give for healing. This

book combines medical health, holistic health, nutritional health,

and emotional health in one nice, tidy package that can be fol-

lowed by anyone, anytime, anywhere.

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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 indi-

viduals who have helped lead the way, few would argue with the

fact 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.

Who knew what a turn my life would take because of this

little blue book, but it truly has changed everything. It helped me

sculpt my own medical practice, and its theory has guided me

along the path to better health for my patients and myself. As you

can imagine, I was thrilled—actually beyond thrilled—when Hay

House proposed that I write a book with Louise that brought to-

gether the healing power of intuition, affirmations, and medicine:

both traditional Western medicine and alternative therapies. It’s

the ultimate healing system! To work with this material . . . and

with Louise! How could I say no?

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A ll i s w e ll

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. I used it when I cried through the ups and downs

of my medical and scientific training. And the times I didn’t cry

and came down with sinusitis and postnasal drip. I would look up

in the book the associated thought pattern: postnasal drip, also

known as “inner crying.” When I got nervous about taking out one

student loan after another to pay tuition, I started to get sciatica,

lower-back problems. Once again I turned to the little blue book.

Sciatica was associated with “fear of money and of the future.”

Time after time, the book made sense, but I could never fig-

ure 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 train-

ing 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 con-

cerns? 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 sys-

tem, 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 intui-

tive consultations and an equal number of years as a physician

and scientist. But it wasn’t until Louise and I started down the

path of writing this book that I realized how powerful combining

the healing methods I use with Louise’s affirmations could be.

The Importance of Intuition

Back in 1991, I had finished two years of medical school

training plus three years of my Ph.D., and I needed to go back to

the hospital floor to finish my studies. Armed with a white coat,

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Integrating Healing Methods

stethoscope, and lots of little books, I entered the floors of what at

that time was Boston City Hospital.

On the first day, my resident came to me, gave me the name

and age of my first patient, and said simply, “Work her up.” That

was it. I was terrified. How was I supposed to figure out what was

wrong with her when I had no information other than her name

and age?

In the elevator on the way down to the emergency room, I

fidgeted nervously. I knew only the rudiments about how to work

up a patient, let alone how to operate the stethoscope around my

neck. Momentarily trapped in the elevator, I stood with clipboard

in hand. And there, in an instant, I saw in my mind’s eye an image

of the patient I was about to evaluate. She was moderately obese,

in lime-green stretch pants, clutching the right upper part of her

abdomen, screaming, “Doctor, doctor! It’s my gallbladder!”

Wow!
I thought.
In the event that the patient I am about to meet

does have a gallbladder problem, how would I evaluate that medical

problem?
As the elevator slowly crept between floors, I flipped

through the pages of the numerous manuals stuffed in my pock-

ets and quickly researched how I would work up a patient with a

gallbladder problem. On my clipboard, I sketched out the classic

workup one does for a gallbladder problem: check an ultrasound

of the liver, check liver enzymes, observe the whites of the pa-

tient’s eyes.

The doors opened. I ran down to the emergency room and

threw open the curtain, and there, to my surprise, was a woman

lying on the gurney in, yes, lime-green stretch pants, screaming,

“Doctor, doctor! It’s my gallbladder!”

It had to be a coincidence, right?

The second day, once again, the resident barked out the name

and age of my patient, telling me to go down to the emergency

room. Again an image of the patient popped into my mind, this

time with a bladder infection. So, I ran the drill again: how would

I treat a patient with a bladder infection. Lo and behold, it was a

bladder infection. On the third day, I repeated the process again,

and again my impressions were accurate. After three days, I real-

ized that there was something unique about my brain, that my

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mind’s eye could see ahead of time what my trained medical eye

would eventually see on the floors of the hospital.

I could see just how useful intuition was in helping me as-

sess my patients, but I soon realized that intuition played an even

larger role than I initially thought.

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 pos-

sible. 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 ill-

ness 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 hy-

pertension and resistance to blood flow. Cardiac medicine tells us

that joy and love tend to have the 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 joy-

ously 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 emo-

tions travel everywhere in the body, they affect organs differently

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Integrating Healing Methods

depending on what is happening in your life. This is where intu-

ition comes in.

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 feel-

ings: 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 addition-

al information. For example, you may anxiously receive an intui-

tive image, a clairvoyant flash that a friend is in danger. Or 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. You may get that famous “bad taste in your mouth”

or feel like you “smell something suspicious” right before some-

one asks you to agree to a bad business deal. Or you may experi-

ence 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.

In addition to the commonly understood intuition that guides

us in these matters where we have insufficient information—like

the intuition that has helped me throughout my medical career—

our bodies also have innate intuition. Our bodies can tell when

something is out of balance in our lives, even if this knowledge is

unclear in our conscious minds.

If we are to fully heal, we must bring our attention to the mes-

sages 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 with-

out logic breed disaster. We must use both of these tools to create

health. Throughout this book we will discuss how to do this, fo-

cusing on four approaches:

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1. Becoming conscious of our emotions and those of

other people in our life, making note of the warnings

that come with fear, anger, and sadness

2. Figuring out what thoughts accompany these feelings

that keep swirling around our heads

3. Identifying symptoms of distress and locating them

in our bodies

4. Decoding the intuitive/emotional thought-pattern

information underlying the symptoms and

understanding that every illness is also in part due to