OUR THOUGHTS, OUR BODIES

Our bodies hear every thought we think and respond in kind As I began to understand this fact, I left my work as a pathologist and retrained in psychiatry.

On my departure from pathology, I had spent more than a decade peering through a microscope at body tissues on a cellular level and diagnosing cancer and other life-threatening illnesses. I was ready for a change.

Prior to this decision, I studied the works of Louise Hay and Drs. Bernie Siegel and Gerald Jampolsky. They described miraculous recoveries from often fatal illnesses through the healing power of love, prayer and positive thought and concluded that we can regard any life-threatening illness as a spiritual wake-up call to examine our thoughts and belief systems.

Likewise, I had studied many enlightened masters who had long held that the mind and its thoughts controlled the body. In recent years, cell biologists began to unravel the biological mechanism of this ancient truth.

In his book, The Biology of Belief, Dr. Bruce Lipton describes how our beliefs and thoughts about ourselves and the world around us determine our health. He describes each person's body as an orchestrated ballet composed of trillions of cells, with each cell being extremely sensitive to the mind's thoughts, perceptions and feelings.

For years, conventional scientific thought held that each cell's brain was hard-wired and resided in its nuclear DNA. However, cell biologists observe, in the absence of a nucleus, a cell can live, grow, move and communicate normally for over two months. Therefore, the nucleus cannot be the brain of the cell.

Lipton emphasizes the cell's nuclear DNA has no intelligence and is not the source of life. The DNA's only function is to provide the blueprint sequence for the cell to assemble the 21 essential amino acids to form the 70,000 proteins necessary for the construction, maintenance and health of each cell of the body.

Cell biologists have determined the brain of the cell is its outer covering or cell membrane, and this membrane responds to the human mind's thoughts or beliefs.

Based upon the cell membrane's receipt of a signal or thought perception, it relays a message to activate the genetic DNA necessary to produce proteins to maintain the cell under the human mind's perception of its environment.

In addition, genes cannot self activate so for example, a "cancer gene" cannot turn itself on. The gene's activation is secondary to the cell membrane's response to the human mind's thoughts.

For instance, I frequently hear people describe their various illnesses - such as ulcers, heart disease, diabetes and cancer - and offer as fact, "it runs in my family," as a reason for their illness. In doing so, they take little or no responsibility for the impact of their own thoughts and behaviors on their bodies.

Cell biologists have also demonstrated that through our belief system and our thoughts about our internal and external environments, the body's cell membranes can select and even effect a rewriting of the genetic code to produce the protein necessary to respond to our thoughts about our world.

So our thoughts and perceptions control the behavior of each cell in our body, the expression of each of our cell's genes and can even change the genetic coding within each cell. Translated, our thoughts create the physical state of our bodies.

Lipton's research is astonishing in its impact and validates what the healing community has long observed to be true. The human mind is extraordinarily powerful, and what we choose to think and how we choose to perceive our world determines the behavior of every cell in our bodies in every moment of every day of our lives.

This information is the basis of Lipton's disclosure that 95 percent of cancer is related to our thoughts about our environment and not to heredity.

When we live angry, fearful, stress-filled lives, every cell membrane of each of our bodies' trillions of cells receives signals based on these negative thoughts. Our bodies respond by going into a "fight or flight" mode, which shuts down our immune system and our bodies' potential for growth and health.

Every day, billions of our bodies' cells wear out and must be replaced. When we choose angry, critical or frightening thoughts which result in similar feelings and actions, our bodies' healthy processes of growth, repair and replacement of those worn out cells or parts of cells is suppressed, and our bodies deteriorate.

Lipton also writes that loving and kind thoughts and actions and looking for the positive affirming aspect in all of life's circumstances promotes growth, repair and replacement of cells and enhances our cellular genetic makeup. In essence, our bodies are continually recreating themselves based upon our belief system. So, if we perceive our environment as nurturing and supportive and ourselves as healthy, strong, vibrant beings through all the years of our lives, that is the message our bodies' cells will receive and create.

What we think, which results in our feelings and actions, sends signals to every cell in our bodies. Depending on what we choose to think, our bodies' cells receive life-enhancing signals generated by loving and peaceful thoughts or the toxic, destructive signals generated by thoughts that create anger, fear and self-hate.

When we pollute our bodies with negative emotions, the cell membrane's translate these signals into susceptibility to infections, autoimmune disorders and cancer. In other words, toxic thoughts create toxic feelings that destroy us emotionally, spiritually and - finally physically.

The research of Dr. Masaru Emoto, on the simple water molecule, completes the picture. Seventy percent of the adult human body is composed of water. In his book, The Hidden Messages in Water, Dr. Emoto provides evidence of the impact of our words and thoughts on the crystalline structure of water.

With water exposed to word or phrases, either written or spoken, such as "Love," "Gratitude" or "You're beautiful," it forms beautiful, balanced crystals. The same is the case if the water is exposed to the music of Beethoven, Mozart or Chopin. Whereas, under the same conditions, if the water is exposed to the words "You fool," "Hate," "War" or heavy metal music, the crystals are malformed and fragmented.

Emoto's and Lipton's works emphasize the body's exquisite sensitivity to every thought, spoken or unspoken. Often, we pollute our minds, bodies and spirits with self- or world-negating words or thoughts, which generate similar actions and feelings. Along the same lines, we place ourselves in situations filled with chaos, anger and negative information blasting from radios, computers, televisions and people. Our subconscious minds hear and store this information as fact, and our bodies respond in kind.

Too often, we walk through our lives in hypnotic states induced by our childhood belief systems and media programming. Illness or "dis-ease" is a spiritual and emotional wake-up call to examine our thoughts, the company we keep and the information we allow our minds to internalize.

My work over the last 20 years continues to validate my decision to leave pathology and become a psychiatrist, and I continue to enjoy helping people choose happier thoughts that create healthier bodies.