If my Thoughts Can Make Me Sick, Can I Also Use Them to Heal My Body?

Cecilia Lucio··14 min read
Can my thoughts make me sick? | Evano Magazine
Photo by Luisa Denu

A personal story by the community member Cecilia Lucio.

Have you ever had the experience that your body is not well and you have no idea where it comes from? Like there is no real cause, but the symptom is there? Are you perhaps suffering from physical discomfort or pain that keeps coming back? This could start with regular headaches or stomach cramps, to inner turmoil or heart palpitations, up to intolerances, allergies, colds, being overweight or underweight, or other illnesses.

If your answer is yes, then read this article, because I want to tell you my own personal story about it. You see, I felt the same way for quite some time! What helped me and how I was able to heal myself after years of doctor visits and hospital stays, I want to share with you and encourage you to find the power in yourself and your own thoughts.

My philosophy

To do this, I would like to share a few points of my personal philosophy in advance. My subsequent story will then show you how I came to these realizations:

  • If my thoughts can make me sick, I can use my thoughts to heal myself.
  • My body is always a mirror of my inner world.
  • The world I observe on the outside is always a mirror of my inner state of being.
  • The body is the mouthpiece of my soul.
  • Toxic thoughts can lead to physical pain, positive thoughts can lead to a happy and healthy life.
  • Every thought triggers a feeling and when my thoughts and feelings match, they create my state of being.
  • I always have power over my thoughts, therefore I can consciously choose other thoughts and create a different life.
  • Never I am a victim of certain circumstances, of my body or my life. I am always the creator of my own reality, of my health and my happiness.

Introduction

When we grow up, we mostly learn to see our bodies and minds as separate things. The truth is, both always work together. The body is constantly connected to the mind and that’s why they have such a big impact on each other. So, it really makes sense to work on both, if we want to change something in our lives, right?

But there was a time I didn’t really believe in that. Or, well, I guess I actually did. I just didn’t want to believe it. Because that would have meant for me that I needed to change. And with change I mean everything: my way of thinking, my way of feeling, my daily habits and routines. The thing was, I didn’t want to change, change seemed hard, exhausting, and uncertain. How could I know if I’d really get better? I didn’t.
Still, I decided to go this path of healing myself. A path of getting aware of how my mind and body work together.

How the magic began…

The first years of my life were a little different from most of the children around me. Because for the first two years of my life, I spent more time hospitals than at home.
The symptoms were clear: asthma, pneumonia, high fever. But it was not only my parents who despaired of the cause; the doctors were also becoming increasingly perplexed.
When the assumption was made that I might not survive this time, the amazement was even bigger as my lungs suddenly healed.

Until today, no one knows the cause of my disease progression, nor of the food allergies that came afterwards. The only thing I know is that I hated going to kindergarten and having to watch other children eat strawberries and all the delicious things. Because I wasn’t allowed. I was only allowed to watch them eat.

However, the amazing thing about my early childhood are not my sick lungs or my allergies. The thing that had everyone baffled and still makes me think today is the fact that both disappeared overnight. I remember that not only did I find it terrible to watch the other children in kindergarten eating, no, over time I also found it unbearable to go to kindergarten at all. Because I really wanted to be one of the school children. I wanted to read, write and count. Every day I curiously watched the schoolchildren on their way to kindergarten and while playing outside I enviously observed them in the playground next door.

How a simple letter let me heal

Then, when I received a letter from the school – a year earlier than it was supposed to be – that I was finally allowed to go to the first grade, something must have changed in me.
Why? Because everything on the outside changed. Because since the day I read that letter to my dad, I can eat anything I want. For the first time in my life I felt like a normal child, healthy, without asthma, without allergies. I was a child who went to school.

I guess that was the first time in my life I experienced the fact that the body is directly connected to the human psyche and that I was able to impact my body with my mind.

What is the mind?

How I write about the mind, it may be helpful to first define what it actually means. Because it is important to know that our mind is much more than just the brain itself. It includes all mental states such as thoughts, emotions, beliefs and attitudes. Our brain can therefore be seen as the hardware of all our mental states. No matter if a mental state is fully conscious or unconscious, we are constantly reacting to every thought and belief with a certain emotion.

…and how my mindset created my reality

As I got older, I went through a lot of phases where I was crying nights over nights out of desperation. I felt so tired and exhausted by seeing teenagers my age being strong and healthy while I came back to those old issues: I was regularly fighting with a sore throat and it felt like I was just living from one cold to the other. It went like that until my early 20ies.
As other people took their daily supplements, I took monthly antibiotics.

I hated going to the doctor, because I was constantly looking in the same facial expressions: Helpless and with pity. It made me angry. I didn’t want to have any pity. I just wanted a solution for my sick body.
While constantly busy working on the surface of the problem with medicine, I started to develop a chronic sore throat.
Being sick became my normal state of being. Maybe you can imagine how exhausted I got by the time, how tired and hopeless I was.

I was a prisoner of my own toxic belief system

“I just got a really bad immune system”, I always said. And that became my reality.

Today I can clearly see how I put myself in a circle of toxic thoughts having a toxic impact on my body. Sometimes I wish someone could have clarified to me earlier that it is not normal to have a weak immune system, that medicine and antibiotics won’t heal me long-term and that the reason I was sick all the time did not start in my body, but in my mind. 

Instead of that I was sent from doctor to doctor and they were all saying the same: Your body is functioning well, you seem pretty healthy, it’s just that your throat is constantly sore. Damn it, I really started to wish for doctors finding something inside of my body.
The symptoms were wandering from my throat up to my ears and head, and I was lying awake for so many nights with more and more issues and pain. But nothing could be diagnosed. So there was also no medicine that could free me from my pain.
But healing started to become my biggest desire. And exactly that desire was the beginning of a big change in my life.

The change

Suddenly, I realised that all this time I was searching for something on the outside to fix what was inside. I knew I needed to stop asking others to change my situation but to start changing by myself.

What if it is all in my head? Maybe all of my physical pain has a psychological source. Maybe, I should not work on going to doctors and taking medicine, maybe I should start to work on my happiness and shift my thoughts from sick to healthy. Because if my thoughts are the ones who make me sick, maybe I can also use them to heal myself.

Maybe my immune system was so weak, because I was constantly thinking that it was weak. Maybe, my throat was constantly sore because my thoughts were sending exactly those signals to my body. 

What if I was the reason, I got sick all the time? These thoughts really frightened me. But I came to the point where I knew I had to force the truth:

I was never a victim of certain circumstances, of my body or my life, but the creator of my own reality, of my health and my happiness. 

Can my thoughts make me sick? | Evano Magazine

The connection between mind and body

How do I start healing when I come to the realization that I have to change my inner world to change my outer world? How does this work? Does this really work? What do I need to do? What if I fail? All those questions and a lot more came with this new life chapter of life I was starting to write.

I knew if I wanted to change my body, if I wanted to change my health and my reality, I had to start thinking different thoughts. Not only once, but daily.

It sounds pretty easy, right?

For sure, it is simple, but it was not easy at all. As I recognised that those toxic thoughts and beliefs were so stuck in my mindset, I knew it was going to be a long time of conscious work. I had to sit down every day, thinking thoughts like “I am healthy”, even if I was sick. I had to start sending different signals to my body.

On some mornings I was sitting there, trying to think positive thoughts and getting so angry because all I really wanted to do was to cry and to be sad. On some days I hated my practice and believe me: There were so many days where I just wanted to give up! It costed me such an effort to keep going anyways.
After months of holding on, my body finally started to react: My body started to heal.

Today I can tell you: It worked. I didn’t need any medicine. My new thoughts were my medicince and they started to create a completely new neurobiological body.

How does it work?

Our mind is always directly connected to our body.
What we do with our physical body, what we eat and how much we exercise always impacts our mental state.

But also the other way around: Every thought creates a feeling, and every feeling leads to a physical reaction.
Why? Because by thinking a thought we set off a cascade of cellular reactions in our nervous system which influence all the molecules in our body. That means that our cells can be changed by only the power of our own thoughts. 

And toxic thoughts that lead to toxic feelings will create an unhealthy and toxic state of being. Positive thoughts that lead to positive feelings create a healthy and happy state of being.

Dr. Joe Dispenza

It is scientifically proven, that all of our beliefs, thoughts and emotions have a direct influence on our genetic expression. That means, that all those things have a huge impact on our health. Yeah, thoughts can make us sick. Like the hormones of stress push the genetic buttons that create disease. But if we can turn on the stress response by just a thought, it can be possible to heal our bodies by thought.

The Mind-Body therapy

Let me share with you what I was learning and experiencing the last few years. Basically: What changed my life into a totally different dimension.

As an adult, 95% of who we are is a set of memorised behaviours. You can see the human being as a computer, with a hard- and a software. The hardware is who we truly are, it is our unwritten soul, which gets installed by a computer program – the software – over the years. This software is made out of unconscious belief patterns, emotional reactions and perceptions.
Can you imagine, that almost 90% of those unconscious thoughts are the same every day? This means that we work by an installed program without even thinking about it anymore.

First step: Think differently, feel differently

Before thinking differently, we first have to become conscious of how we currently think, act and feel. Then we can replace our toxic thoughts step by step with positive ones.

If the brain was used to toxic thoughts for years, only one happy thought won´t lead to a happy state of being.

Dr. Joe Dispenza

That is where the work starts: To think happy thoughts, even if the body is not reacting yet.
By keeping the practice, the brain continues to send all those signals to our body until we slowly create a new state of being.

If it is hard for you to think happy thoughts, like it was for me, these two tools helped me:

  • Think of a moment, situation, time or place where you once felt pure happiness. Remember this moment or place and try to remember the feelings
  • Try to look into the future and ask yourself: “How will it be, when I reached this state of happiness? How will I feel? How will I look?” Try to create a future image of the version you want to become and allow yourself to be excited for this moment, even if you don´t know yet how you will get there.

The second tool is the work of Visualising and for me one of the most powerful things that changed my life in so many ways.

Affirmations

We tend to think about what we don’t want to happen instead of what we do want to happen. But the brain does not react to the little word “not”, it just gives us what we focus on. That is where positive affirmations can be really helpful. With positive affirmations we form sentences from “I am not” to “I am”.
For me, using affirmations was such a powerful tool. I worked a lot with the books and the philosophy of Louise Hay. She gave me hope in the times where I was so close to quit.

If you want to read more about affirmations and the body connection, I can really recommend her books that will be listed at the end of this article.
I also find Louise´s website very inspiring. Feel free to have a look there!

Meditation

In the state of meditation, we can take time to work on creating new thoughts and positive affirmations. Meditation is perfect to focus on what we want to be and what we want to happen. The realization that the brain does not know the difference between a real experience and a created one was a game changer in my meditations! My body was not reacting to what was on the outside, but just to my own thoughts!
I went into very deep meditations with Deepak Chopra. For a whole month I was daily using his guided meditations.
I can recommend especially this one for working on the mind body connection.

Self-Love

Self-love is the root of everything, Louise Hay taught me.
I guess, this was my biggest learning during this process of healing. I had to learn to love myself to allow myself to create a new reality.

The body is like a mirror of our inner world.

With the philosophy of Louise Hay, I found out that my sore throat was the mirror of all my fears, of depression and doubts, that I was not able to speak up for myself and especially: That I didn’t love myself. That is why my body got so loud. It was just showing me where I had to work on the inside.

The biggest shift for my physical health was to work on my self-love. And here I am today, saying:
I know how powerful my own mind is, I believe that I am the creator of my own reality.

My reccomendations

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Sources

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