The Placebo For Happy Endings

Illustration©rolffimages/123rf

By the time I was a ‘tween, I had concluded that life was just like an episode of many shows popular during the 70s — The Brady Bunch, Scooby-Doo, The Waltons, All In The Family. Ultimately it wraps up neatly, and usually with a happy ending.

Although I suffered no major childhood misfortune, I attended a fire and brimstone Catholic school that spared no details in impressing on young minds the tragic plight of starving children in Biafra that could be helped with the donations from our orange Halloween UNICEF boxes, or the horrors that awaited each and every one of us should the Communists suddenly invade our country.

The awareness of such hardship in a world so much bigger than myself made me determined to discover a better outcome, just like the TV shows I watched. Someday those children in Africa would have enough to eat, and someday I’d be able to teach the world to sing. I could choose to make a change.

Harnessing the power of positive thinking started early for me, and most likely seeded my beliefs and success with self-healing. Well, why shouldn’t I be able to heal my body with simple tools in an affordable way? My ancestors did.

A body heals from within. Even the most advanced energy technique, skilled surgeon or powerful pharmaceutical has no say over whether a body ultimately accepts or rejects treatment. The brain sends instructions throughout the body to its millions of cells to do their healing thing — still mostly a mystery to us — with the tools we provide.

Judging from the success of both western and alternative medicine to facilitate healing, it appears those tools can be surgery and drugs, as well as herbs and acupuncture, energy medicine and remote healing, bodywork and breathwork, drumming and tuning forks, prayer and ritual, and a thousand other ways to achieve the same result: homeostasis. The life force that powers and animates our bodies seeks balance at all times to stay alive and well. Just like a 70s show happy ending, our bodies are programmed to heal.

This is not to say that healing always occurs or in the time frame we envision, since our lives are subject to transcendent forces over which we have no control. We will all reach our expiration date, and must engage with the details of our individual destiny until then. For some, this will require lifelong focus with health challenges. For everyone, healing is a process of peaks and valleys, and not a straight line. The good news is that we are all natural born healers.

As my success with self-healing has increased over time working on a variety of symptoms and ailments, I can’t help but wonder how much of the remedy is purely belief, the most powerful placebo of all. The more success I have, my belief grows stronger. Is self-healing simply a belief in the ability to generate healing from within, that, like a light bulb in a socket remains dark until the switch is flipped on? Can our beliefs really be so powerful?

I believe they are. And yet, self-healing is only a stepping stone to realizing we can heal not only our bodies, but our world as well. We are not alone; we are in this together, and our beliefs matter.

Each of us is a perfect reservoir of untapped power we simply fail to use. The most important use of that power is quieting the mind. When the mind is still, insight arises for inspired action to occur.

Just as our bodies are programmed to heal and thrive, the larger organizing intelligence of humanity is love. Love is our sweet spot, the place our internal homing beacon responds to. While many apocalyptic plot twists are sure to unfold before the end of Earth’s story, I’m betting on a happy ending.

Carol Bedrosian is the publisher of Spirit of Change on www.spiritofchange.org

Visit the Spirit of Change booth at the Natural Living Expo in Marlborough, MA.