You Can Conquer Cancer: The ground-breaking self-help manual including nutrition, meditation and lifestyle management techniques. Ian Gawler
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of the bone.” Together, these two phenomena graphically reveal the mind’s capacity to influence healing directly. Then we will learn what we need to do to gain the full benefit from the power of belief.
ii) The habits we live with will directly affect our potential to heal. Are you lazy in some ways? Do you have trouble exercising regularly? Are you habitually bound to eating certain things? Do you have difficulty sticking to what you know you need to do? Habits can be changed. We will learn how to identify what, if anything, does need changing, and then how to make necessary changes in a way that is empowering, sustainable and actually fun! This is a crucial element of recovery.
3. The Mind-Body Connection
Here we will examine how the mind can be mobilized to directly activate healing. We will learn more about how to apply the techniques of imagery and affirmation.
4. Meditation
Meditation establishes an ideal state of balance. From this balance healing flows free of effort, almost automatically. We have covered meditation thoroughly in the previous chapters.
Let us begin.
The Conscious Mind, Positive Thinking and Healing
Imagine a loving mother who is giving her all to being the best mother that she can be. Do you imagine she ever feels that she is managing 100 percent? But do you imagine she ever gives up trying? Of course she does not. That is what positive thinking is all about—always aiming to do the best we possibly can, acknowledging our strengths and weaknesses, being comfortable with what we do achieve and knowing we will become better and better at whatever we turn our attention to.
Positive thinking is all about using our mind intelligently. Specifically, positive thinking involves understanding how our mind works, and then getting the best out of its vast potential.
The crucial point in this field of mind training is to realize there is a big difference between positive thinking and wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking is where you hope for the best and do nothing about it.
Positive thinking is where you hope for the best and do a lot about it.
This is a fundamental distinction and opens up our understanding to the truth of what “positive thinking” really is. Positive thinking is way more than just that optimistic hope—“If he can do it, so can I.” That hope is real enough. It is true; it has to be done only once to show that it is possible. But what did she do to achieve what she did? And what are you prepared to commit to, to achieve the results you are after?
Positive thinking begins when we use our mind to choose a specific goal. But then we must act on that goal. We need to use our mind to commit to that goal and embrace all we need to do to give ourselves the best chance of realizing that goal. This is a very active process. Wishful thinking is a passive process that involves little active effort and clearly is not likely to make a big difference to anything we do. By contrast, positive thinking regularly results in the extraordinary.
Your Mind at Work
How then does positive thinking work? Let us begin with the role of the conscious mind. In practical terms, the mind is well described as a goal-orientated, decision making tool.* Here is how it works.
Imagine you ask me to come and share a meal with you and I agree. You say you live in Australia or Canada or France. Big places. A lot of homes to look for you in. So maybe you are a little more specific and you give me the district you live in—the Yarra Valley, the Rockies, the Bordeaux region. I am getting closer, but it is still going to be a while before I find you. So you give me a full address: street name and number, town, city, country. Now I will find you. I can use a map, a GPS, ask the locals. If I persevere, there is only one address that matches your home and I will find you.
The mind is goal oriented. The more specific the goal, the more potently it functions and the more reliably it works. If I have only your local region, it will be easy for me to be confused, to become disheartened, to give up. But with a specific goal, the prospect of success becomes very realistic.
However, clearly the specific goal is just the beginning. Once I decide to pursue that goal, to come to your address, I need to decide how best to make the journey and I need to actually complete the journey. So if I decide to come by car and the battery in the car is flat, I can either give up at that point or persevere. Having managed to start the car, I am then faced with many choices. As I begin to drive forward, I need to decide which direction to take, and I base that decision on what is most likely to lead me to your address. So I choose left, right or straight ahead, over and over, at one intersection after another, until I find you.
That is how it works. It is simple. The thinking mind is a goal-oriented, decision-making tool.
We are all positive thinkers. We all use our minds in this way many times over, day after day. However, some people become overwhelmed. “You want me to come to dinner? I don’t know about traveling on the roads just for a meal. What if I get lost? What about all the dangerous drivers on the road? Maybe it will be dark on the way home and I get scared in the dark.” Some people manage to talk themselves out of even simple things.
Of course, the truth is some people do set out in their cars each day fully expecting to reach their journey’s end and do not make it. Fatal car accidents are real. People do get lost, have flat tires, run out of gas and have minor accidents. Does this mean we stay at home and do nothing? Well, some do, but not so many when it comes to simple journeys. We accept the risks and persevere.
Consider this. Healing from a major illness like cancer can well be described as a journey. Often it is a lengthy journey, with many choices to deal with, many decisions to make, and often enough there are unexpected turns for better and worse. In my experience, some people do sense the scope of this particular journey and decide “to stay home.” Some may be paralyzed by fear. Others are deeply concerned by the fear of failure. What if I make all this effort and it does not work? Will I feel like a failure? Will I have let myself down or let down those around me?
Face the Fear and Do It Anyway!
The fear of failure is related to the notion of false hope. In many of the early media interviews that focused upon my work, presenters would ask if I was concerned about giving people false hope. Some doctors have also expressed a related concern—what happens to people who try hard to recover and still end up dying?
The answer to this is simple. Any major endeavor carries some risk. Recovering from a difficult diagnosis is not easy. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it and it would be commonplace. We know it is possible, but we do need to be realistic; it requires a good deal of effort. And the truth is I have seen people who have tried hard and still died of their disease. Long-term recovery is not easy, but it is possible.
When I had widespread secondary bone cancer in 1976 and was expected to live for a few months, I could have just accepted the disease as my fate and sat by hoping for the best, waiting to see what happened. My guess is that if I had done so, I could have died quite easily. But I dared to believe recovery was possible and, being realistic, knew that if I was to recover, I would need to do something dramatic. I knew I needed to do the best I possibly could with everything I took on.
When I became sicker before I began to recover, I simply became even more determined, more thorough. I knew I did not want to die with regret. I did not want to be near my last breath wondering if things would have been better if I had an extra carrot juice, or meditated a bit longer. Now, obviously there is a limit to how much carrot juice one should or could drink, and a balance in how much meditation to do. What all of us need to do is to decide for themselves how much carrot juice we drink, how much meditation we do, and then do it. That is the essence of positive thinking.
Commitment and Outcome
What can be said after many years helping people to face difficult situations is that these people fall into three broad categories. A number find that all this positive thinking and the lifestyle-based approach