Miraculous Health: How to Heal Your Body by Unleashing the Hidden Power of Your Mind - Hardcover

The Story Behind the Story

If I asked you to tell me your life story right now, what would you say? In all likelihood, you'd give me details about where you were born, how you grew up, the house you moved to when you were twelve, where you went to school, what you do for a living, and so on. Maybe you'd tell me about your first love or your first heartbreak.

But would you tell me about the signal events that made you who you are now? Probably not, because you're most likely not even conscious of these. Most people aren't. For example, consider one of my patients from 1997.

Erin, a successful healthcare professional, flew in to see me from St. Paul. She'd married late in life, and now thirty-nine, was trying to have a child. She had suffered three miscarriages in the past eighteen months -- one of which was very late term -- and understandably, she was extremely upset. Her most significant medical problem was that she had an inverted uterus, a congenital condition. Several gynecologists told her it would be nearly impossible to carry a child to term because of this.

During our first meeting, I asked her to tell me more about herself. Erin was born into a prominent family, but her mother died tragically when Erin was eleven. This event plunged the entire family into despair, disarray, and ultimately, for Erin, poverty. In the years that followed, Erin struggled with depression and a major back injury while doing everything she could to make her life successful. She put herself through two graduate degrees, visited a psychotherapist regularly, pursued philosophical and religious studies, and traveled the world. Now she was at a crucial turning point, desperately wanting to have a child and to build her own healthy, loving family. From her perspective, doing so was the most important goal in the world.

That was her history.

Her story behind the story was another matter.

As Erin spoke to me, I knew something more was going on than what I could learn from the bullet points of her life. Everyone has a deeper story that goes beyond the mere events in their lives. This deeper story has a tremendous effect on us, one that is so much more intense than what we normally associate with our life stories. Yet, most of us remain unaware of a deeper story because we can't figure out a way to reach it -- because we don't even know it exists.

To get to Erin's story behind the story, I guided her into a hypnotic state and asked her to go to the place in her mind where she would find the knowledge she needed to get well. She went to the day of her mother's death and experienced those moments as though she was there again. She told me who was there with her, what people were saying, and what she felt.

Suddenly, she gasped and said, "Pregnancy leads to death." I asked her to elaborate on this, and she told me her mother was seven months pregnant when she died. Since Erin was at the impressionable age of eleven, she linked the two events in her mind. She intertwined pregnancy and death and secreted this distorted "belief" in her subconscious from that day forward. Now this distortion was fueling her miscarriages because the subconscious mind has the important job of preserving our physical survival.

As soon as Erin found this distortion under hypnosis, she released it quickly (we'll discuss how this happens later in the book), breaking the link between these two concepts. At this point, the unfortunate connection she'd created between pregnancy and death could no longer do her physical harm. She'd found the part of her story that was preventing her from bringing a child into the world -- and she rejected it.

Within three months, Erin called me to say she was pregnant. Despite her inverted uterus, she carried her son to term and started the family she desperately wanted. And in so doing, she changed her story.

The Inextricable Connection between the Mind and the Body

Since you are reading this book, you are probably among the large percentage of people with health problems who have found that traditional medicine fails to deliver the quality of life they desire. Because of my expertise, many people who feel this way come to me for help -- often after their physicians have told them that chronic pain, depression, anxiety, dysfunction, disability, or even the specter of death are unavoidable.

Most of these people come to me in a state of despair for understandable reasons. They believe their illness has caused this despair. That is usually when I introduce them to the first lesson in mind-body science. "If that's what you think," I say, "you've put the cart before the horse." Most people who feel bad physically got that way and stay that way because, whether they know it or not, they were not satisfied with their lives to begin with. They were living stories that made them deeply unhappy in ways they could barely understand.

You might not believe this. You might point to a family history of diabetes, a congenital heart disorder, a fractured back in a car accident, or the degradations of twenty years of smoking. "These are the reasons I'm sick," you'll say, "not some vague concept about some story I'm living out." If you feel this way now, I ask you to stick with me because I'll prove that you're not seeing things as clearly as you think you're seeing them. All of the issues above might be relevant to the onset of suffering, but they are not the only causes of illness.

More importantly, they are not keys to a cure. The key comes in a simple but powerful revelation that I will repeat often in this book: disease in the body starts with dis-ease in the mind. Any health issue you have corresponds directly to some level of distortion in your mind. Therefore, to set free the hidden power of the mind for healing, you need to discover that distortion. You need to get to the story behind the story.

Every one of us is living a unique, epic journey, an adventure in self- discovery and self-knowledge. The plots vary widely, leading us through the extremes of poverty and wealth, triumph and despair, love and loneliness, strength and weakness, illness and health, grace and shame. Everyone's lessons in life are different. However, everyone's story has the possibility of a noble outcome, and everyone's potential is truly unlimited if they are willing to live their own story deeply and honestly.

Living outside your story -- failing to learn the lessons life is trying to teach you or misunderstanding or repressing your experience -- is the root cause of pain and suffering. When I say this, I do not mean to imply that you are purposely ignoring your life lessons. We human beings tend to repress any experience we find painful, terrifying, difficult, shameful, or otherwise challenging, so we can move on in life. We do it subconsciously because we have to in order to maintain our stability and forward momentum -- we have jobs, school, children, and other important responsibilities that need our attention. So we sacrifice our personal needs. Unfortunately, powerful feelings, thoughts, and desires that are repressed or "set aside" in this manner remain in the subconscious mind where they sabotage our psychological, physical, and spiritual wellbeing.

The good news is, if you can identify your story and live it out authentically, you can unleash miraculous mental power and attain great health, peace, and joy. Your age, station in life, race, culture, gender, or how much suffering you've had to endure doesn't matter.

It really is that simple.

However, getting to your story behind the story is not so simple. Because the human mind is a complex machine, you'll need some tools to get there. I will provide those tools in this book. These tools will help you get in touch with parts of your mind you've had little or no access to in the past. They will help you understand the themes, long-buried memories, and unacknowledged lessons you learned from others that have had a profound effect on your life. They will help you see the life you've lived in ways you've never seen before and help you decide which parts of that life you want to keep and which parts you want to change.

In short, these tools will change everything, for the better.

Most people are only aware of their conscious thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes, but conscious awareness is the smallest, weakest part of the mind. The subconscious mind is much larger and more powerful, and you are living out much of your story there. A rule of thumb we use in the field of clinical hypnosis is that the subconscious mind is two to two and a half times the size and power of the conscious mind.

In addition, there is the vastness of the super-conscious mind -- what people commonly call the "soul" or "spirit" (we'll discuss this at length later). Every human being possesses super-conscious awareness, and it is infinite in power. Some of your story is being lived out there in the form of your highest aspirations, your search for meaning, your yearning for what is sacred, and your knowledge that there is so much more to life. In a recent Gallup poll, 82 percent of people in the United States professed a belief in God and another 13 percent professed a belief in a higher power. When you experience the story behind your story, you'll encounter revelations that, if you are religious, you will see as coming from God. If you are a scientific humanist, you'll see these revelations as coming from deep within yourself. No particular point of view is needed to succeed with my methods. All of us, independent of belief, are capable of tapping the tremendous healing power contained in the super-conscious mind.

For each of us, the resources in the subconscious and super-conscious constitute a limitless storehouse of mental energy that has the ability to heal the body and mind, address the challenges of day-to-day living, and sustain an extraordinary life of fulfillment and joy. As I have done for thousands of my patients, I will show you how to tap into the know...