Smile, You Are Healed

I had a difficult question posed to me during a recent session with a counselor. I was talking to her about the pain from my pancreas, the exhaustion I’ve been feeling from chemotherapy and just a general sense of feeling lost in the middle of this mire. “I want to be well again. I want to be healed.” She responded, “what is it you’re healing from?” The most obvious answer was not, I was certain, what she was getting at. This wasn’t about cancer. This was more. I fished for answers, but nothing seemed to come to mind.

During my recent stay in the hospital, one of the nurses—Gigi—brought a copy of a book into my room: Quantum Healing by Deepak Chopra. The book argues that too often Western medicine ignores the powerful influence the mind can have in a person’s healing. I was made all too aware of this being in the hospital. In there, healing is IV’s, bags of chemotherapy, small pills that come at regular intervals. My body is checked frequently to make sure that I still have a regular blood pressure and temperature, or that my white cells and red cells are high enough to advance. It’s not that the doctors don’t care about my mind. They’re always asking how I’m doing. But how do you measure the mind’s involvement in the healing process? As I lay in the hospital, I thought more about the statement I made: I want to be healed. The mind is a powerful thing, an influential factor in a person’s well-being, and we bring things into existence from our mind.

More and more each day, I’m learning that healing is a question of mind over matter. Language is everything. Intention is crucial. So I’ve challenged myself a little. I’ve started meditating to the intention “I am healed.” It sounds paradoxical. In the eyes of some, I might not seem healed. In my own eyes, I feel sick, I feel achy, tired, nauseous, whatever. Yet I’ve begun to alter my thinking (and my language). It’s not that I want to be healed. I am healed. The difference is small, but important. I am trying to approach my position from a positive, more powerful place.

When I got home from the hospital on Sunday, someone had written a note on my bed. “Smile, you are healed.” I’m not sure what I’m healing from, what inside of me is being reconciled. When I said this to my counselor, she laughed. When I asked what the chuckle was about, she responded “God save us all from the healer who hasn’t healed themselves.”