In How To Say Yes When Your Body Says No, psychologist Lee Jampolsky examines how people become overwhelmed, and often unable to cope during a health challenge. He discusses the importance of focusing on inner work in addition to medical treatment, pointing out that the mental diet we feed ourselves has profound effects on our physical well-being. Jampolsky shares his personal health challenges, from spending months in a body cast as a young man to going deaf from an autoimmune disease. He shows how learning to alter one's thoughts and beliefs about health is the key to physical well-being.
How to Say Yes When Your Body Says No is filled with meditations and exercises to develop an attitude of openness and healing, no matter what physical and emotional challenges we face.
In How To Say Yes When Your Body Says No, psychologist Lee Jampolsky examines how people become overwhelmed, and often unable to cope during a health challenge. He discusses the importance of focusing on inner work in addition to medical treatment, pointing out that the mental diet we feed ourselves has profound effects on our physical well-being. Jampolsky shares his personal health challenges, from spending months in a body cast as a young man to going deaf from an autoimmune disease. He shows how learning to alter one's thoughts and beliefs about health is the key to physical well-being.
How to Say Yes When Your Body Says No is filled with meditations and exercises to develop an attitude of openness and healing, no matter what physical and emotional challenges we face.
How to Say Yes When Your Body Says No: Discover the Silver Lining in Life's Toughest Health Challenges
248
How to Say Yes When Your Body Says No: Discover the Silver Lining in Life's Toughest Health Challenges
248Paperback
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Overview
In How To Say Yes When Your Body Says No, psychologist Lee Jampolsky examines how people become overwhelmed, and often unable to cope during a health challenge. He discusses the importance of focusing on inner work in addition to medical treatment, pointing out that the mental diet we feed ourselves has profound effects on our physical well-being. Jampolsky shares his personal health challenges, from spending months in a body cast as a young man to going deaf from an autoimmune disease. He shows how learning to alter one's thoughts and beliefs about health is the key to physical well-being.
How to Say Yes When Your Body Says No is filled with meditations and exercises to develop an attitude of openness and healing, no matter what physical and emotional challenges we face.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781571746641 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Red Wheel/Weiser |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2012 |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
How to Say Yes When Your Body Says No
Discover the Silver Lining in Life's Toughest Health Challenges
By Lee Jampolsky
Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Lee Jampolsky, PhDAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57174-664-1
CHAPTER 1
My Journey
"This can't be happening. There's got to be a mistake."
My mind raced, jumping frantically from one thought to the other, trying to make sense of what was unfolding.
"Pay attention," I said to myself with some force. I tried to stay focused on what the doctor was saying, but the sound of my heart beating in my temples and the sinking feeling in my stomach were winning out. I didn't want to pay attention. I wanted to run and not look back.
Then, suddenly, I wanted to puke.
The doctor left the room for a few minutes, leaving me sitting alone in my hospital gown. The sterile environment of the university hospital exam room filled my every cell, every pore. Aware of little more than my bare butt cheeks against the cold steel of the exam table, I stared blankly at the floor, shaking my head. "Shit," I said.
Ten minutes later, the doctor entered the room again, looking at my chart as though I either did not exist or was somewhere between the pages of his notes.
"More tests will be needed to confirm and to rule out other causes," he said. He spoke as matter-of-factly as a car mechanic discussing a needed tire rotation. But the phrase other causes echoed in my mind and landed another blow to my gut. Then I went numb. I'm sure I looked as if I was listening, but I could not remember anything else the doctor said.
I had come into the hospital with what seemed like normal, everyday health problems. Now I was sitting on the edge of the exam table and on the edge of my life as I knew it. My life might be forever different and possibly a lot shorter than I had planned. It simultaneously felt as though this were not happening and as if it would be over in a moment.
I was here. This was happening. And I thought there was not a damn thing I could do about it.
Living Unconsciously
Before my visit to the hospital, I had spent a fair amount of effort to get and keep my life "together." I had done a good job of convincing myself that I was living my life effectively and consciously. I thought of my health challenge as severely and abruptly interrupting my conscious, together life; it certainly wasn't contributing any sort of good. If I could get rid of this seemingly insurmountable problem, I thought, I could get back to my life as I believed it was supposed to be.
I did not want to admit that I really wasn't living a conscious life. I didn't realize I had become a bit computerlike, with my programs preset. There was little need for me to have much conscious awareness as long as everything was running more or less smoothly in my life. But when things went "wrong," when I became ill, my circumstances woke me up. Even then, I hit the snooze button the first few times and just focused on getting my life back to "normal."
The truth is, until I became aware of the ways I habitually thought about my life and health, how I automatically responded in preset scenarios, how I unconsciously and instantly reacted to a multitude of situations, I was unable to make any real and meaningful choices about my health. As long as I made health decisions from fear, I was making unconscious and lousy decisions.
It was only with the third or fourth health challenge that I finally got the message. Then I actually started to live more consciously, with more awareness of Life. I realized that I could wake up more permanently, more intentionally, more consciously, and more proactively; make more conscious choices; and move through my health challenge more effectively.
Posttraumatic Growth
As a psychologist, I have always been less interested in the pathology end of my field, which primarily focuses on what goes wrong, and more engaged by the situations where, despite terrible circumstances, individuals are able to heal, grow, learn, give, and become better people. In everyday language, I'm interested in the question, Can an individual be taught how to turn a negative into a positive? This question is the basis of what I believe will be an emerging area of increased study, posttraumatic growth.
If you look at any severe health challenge, you can easily find people who have faced it and encountered nothing but setbacks and suffering. However, if you look hard enough, you will also find people who have emerged from the same (or a similar) health challenge wiser, more compassionate, and more appreciative of Life.
How can we choose what kind of experience we will have in the face of a health challenge? This is a very important question to answer, because most of us will, at some point in our lives, be faced with a health challenge.
University of North Carolina psychologists Lawrence G. Calhoun and Richard Tedeschi describe posttraumatic growth as "a positive change that comes about as a result of the struggle with something very difficult. It's not just some automatic outcome of a bad thing." My work is based on this. Specifically, our struggles with tough health challenges can bring about positive change, but this change is not automatic. This book can be your stepping-stone to this positive change.
Researchers have found—and my own health-challenge experience, as well as those of many of my patients, confirms—that those who undergo posttraumatic growth are first confronted with the barrage of details about what happened or is happening. At some point, they experience strong emotion, often including fear and anger. Then they begin a much more intangible and subjective process of finding some higher meaning in what has happened. This book is concerned with the second and third of these stages.
My Personal Search for Answers
In addition to being a psychologist, I know firsthand about illness and its effects on every aspect of life. In my fifty-four or so years, I have had my share of health challenges. As a young man, I lived in body casts month after month in the hospital. In my teens and twenties, I was in the throes of addiction. Early in my career as a psychologist, I went deaf from an autoimmune disease. I had the male midlife scare of prostate surgery, and just a few years ago, I was not far from death due to severe bacterial pneumonia.
At different times, my body has been poked, prodded, cut, and invaded in more ways than you would want to hear, including with surgery, chemotherapy, and high doses of steroidal treatment that affected my mental status. I've had bedsores and aching arms that looked like pincushions because they'd been pierced by innumerable needles. Weight loss, constipation, diarrhea, and vomiting alone in the dark hours of the night are all experiences etched in my memory. Meanwhile, I felt fear, anger, loss, and despair, and I wondered how I would pay the hospital bills and support my family when I wasn't able to work.
As I sought a means of dealing with my own health challenges and the stress and emotions surrounding them, it seemed to me there were two main approaches: traditional medical approaches, which left out the emotional, mental, and spiritual components of dealing with a health challenge, and approaches that largely abandoned science. Few approaches seemed to address the very real, very overwhelming emotional reactions we experience during a health challenge, what we can do with our thoughts to help our physical and emotional condition, or how our challenge can lead us to grow.
Yet hard science from institutions such as Stanford University tells us that our lifestyle, attitudes, behaviors, emotions, and thoughts can not only help us recover from an illness, but also serve as very strong preventative medicine. This research has shown us a simple yet extremely powerful fact: Our psychological and emotional states play central roles in our physical health. Studies have shown, and few medical professionals would dispute, that problems ranging from minor aches and pains to high blood pressure, and even heart disease and cancer, can be caused by a lack of emotional well-being. Further, though many doctors are reluctant to discuss the role of love in health, in private many report believing that there is a deep connection between our health and how much stress and upset we have in our lives, or, put more positively, how much we experience the calming effects of love in our lives.
In my own life and in the lives of the many people with whom I have worked, I have found that the effects of our emotions, attitudes, and thoughts are far-reaching. They affect our general level of energy and our productivity in all areas of life. In the January 24, 2005, issue of Fortune magazine, Dr. Norman B. Anderson, CEO of the American Psychological Association (APA), was quoted as saying, "Businesses used to think productivity was only a function of how motivated the employee was. Today research is showing that a person's physical and emotional well-being is often a more accurate measure of how productive he or she is going to be."
The idea that the mind affects the body is becoming mainstream. For example, the APA has a public education campaign "to raise awareness that tending to emotional health and well-being of individuals can not only have a direct and positive impact on physical health, but can have an equally positive impact on organizations as well." When we also add the care of the soul and spirit to this raised awareness, not only our physical health, but also our work and our relationships benefit.
Life-Centered Consciousness versus Fear-Based Consciousness
This book discusses the ways in which universal spiritual principles such as compassion, forgiveness, and love can help us work through the hardest of times. But I purposely do not always apply spiritual terms, and I try to use language that is as neutral as possible. When I do use words such as love, spirit, and inner wisdom, I am not promoting a singular or closed belief system. On the contrary, all these terms point to the common thread that runs through all spiritual traditions and religions: the belief that there is a power greater than ourselves that can lovingly guide us on our path in life, including during physical and/or emotional challenges.
When we are in line with this power, we are in a state that I refer to as Life-centered consciousness. When we are not in this state, we are residing in fear-based consciousness. By extension, our thinking is also either fear-based or Life-centered. Fear-based thinking and the physiological responses that result from it create or contribute to a host of problems and to a state of dis-ease.
What keeps us from saying yes to Life when our body says no is, always, fear. It comes in many forms, disguises, and textures—fear of loss, fear of pain, fear of how our situation will affect our loved ones.
Growing beyond the fear I experienced during my later health challenges took venturing beyond my old thinking and beliefs. Without examining my beliefs about my condition, I continued to stay where I was, mostly afraid and increasingly depressed and angry. My health challenge required me to approach life in a way entirely different from what I was accustomed to and in a way that very few doctors even mention.
The first step was to ask what I was telling myself and believing about my health challenge, and what my thinking and beliefs meant about how I would live each day. My second step was to make room for my emotional reactions without overanalyzing them, which meant I needed to let myself be a mess sometimes.
I wish I could say that I got some profound answers during this time, but most of my thinking contained some form of "This sucks and isn't likely to get better anytime soon—maybe never." I still felt scared. I felt like a victim with no choices. My illness was not what I wanted, that was for sure.
But somewhere along the way came a quieter realization, one that said, "This does not have to mean the end or only a bad situation. I can become a better person from this."
Exercise: Planting the Seed
Saying yes to Life is a means of going from "This is horrible, and I am about to lose so much or suffer endlessly" to "There is something here for me to learn, some wisdom and meaning from this trial." This one shift may not seem like much—and from where you stand now, it might not even seem possible—but I assure you that it is everything, and I am living proof it is possible.
Even if you don't yet believe your health challenge can be an opportunity for growth, you can, right now, plant the seed for this awareness to grow. Ask yourself the following questions, giving yourself time to contemplate and elaborate on each:
1. What are my beliefs about my condition, my body, and what it will mean for my life? Is it possible that my beliefs are not accurate?
2. What are my feelings?
3. Am I willing to be a mess some of the time while I deal with this news?
4. Is it possible for me to become a better person through what lies ahead?
CHAPTER 2Empowering Yourself for Healing
Discovering Your Power to Heal
I have spent more time in doctor's offices, clinics, and hospitals than I care to think about. I have gone to the best of the best clinics and seen some of the leading experts in the country. In every case, the one thing I found most irritating was the medical professionals' assumption that I was a passive participant in my healing and overall condition. Nothing pissed me off more than traveling long distances to see experts, waiting forever and a day to meet with them, being told next to nothing about what they thought, and having them react with irritation when I asked for more information. It was a rare experience when a doctor and staff treated me like a coparticipant in my healing and treatment.
Our health-care culture expects patients to be passive participants and views experts as godlike. The experts are seen as having the answers, and the patients do not really need to know much other than what time to show up for treatments. This summation may sound harsh, but it is often the norm, as you may have already experienced. Many people don't question this medical model because it requires very little responsibility on the patients' part. We get diagnosed, get treated, and hope for the best. We take a pill, have a surgery, go to more experts. Somebody else holds the answers, the power of our healing, and so we don't need to do much work on our own.
But Norman Cousins, author of the well-known book Anatomy of an Illness, points to a new direction in health care: "It is reasonable to expect the doctor to recognize that science may not have all the answers to problems of health and healing." Cousins does not suggest you stop seeing doctors, nor do I, for modern medicine and technology are quite remarkable in many ways. But I do suggest that you discover your own power to heal by saying yes to Life and thus becoming an active—even primary—participant in your healing and growth.
Though I believe that saying yes to Life can and will help you heal your body, physical healing is not the main concern of this approach. Health, as noted in the introduction, can be defined as an extension of inner peace, and healing is about letting go of fear and returning to the core of who you are—nothing more and nothing less. As Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen says, "Healing may not be so much about getting better [physically], as about letting go of everything that isn't you—all of the expectations, all of the beliefs—and becoming who you are." Thus, your power to heal yourself is really the ability to reach a state of mind in which you can let go of fear and discover Life.
What Does Taking Responsibility Really Mean?
When I mention responsibility in connection with a health challenge, I am frequently asked if I think that we create our own illnesses. I don't like this question for a variety of reasons. For one, if I say, "Yes, I do think we are responsible for many of our illnesses," I am often dismissed as New Age or unscientific, despite the quite significant data demonstrating the effects of emotion, stress, diet, spiritual outlook, and lifestyle on certain aspects of our health, and the fact that many of the major diseases that kill us are largely preventable. Additionally, I find this question to be counterproductive to healing, especially in the early period after an accident or diagnosis, as it can lead to guilt, blame, and more emotional upset.
When I lost my hearing, some of my well-meaning friends, and even some people who barely knew me, said things like "Sometimes illnesses are created by us. Have you thought about what you don't want to hear?" Others asked if my hearing loss might be stress related, and still others asked if it might be a result of prior drug use. The honest, gut-level response I wanted to give all these people was "Have you thought about why you would want me to tell you that you're an insensitive moron?"—hardly the "effective response" you might have imagined from a psychologist. Frankly, I felt it was callous of them to even suggest that I did something to create my deafness right when I was facing it for the first time. Early in my health challenge, I needed to learn how to deal with my fear and physical condition, not wonder how I'd caused it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from How to Say Yes When Your Body Says No by Lee Jampolsky. Copyright © 2012 Lee Jampolsky, PhD. Excerpted by permission of Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction Saying Yes to Life,
Part I: Laying the Foundation,
Chapter One My Journey,
Chapter Two Empowering Yourself for Healing,
Chapter Three Getting the News and Going Forward,
Chapter Four Beginning Life-Centered Living,
Chapter Five Initial Decisions,
Chapter Six Health-Inhibiting and Health-Enhancing Beliefs,
Chapter Seven Facing Our Schemas: Seven Truths to Change Our Thinking,
Part II: The Six Steps of Saying Yes,
Chapter Eight Step One: Finding a Better Way,
Chapter Nine Step Two: Letting Go,
Chapter Ten Step Three: Settling Down,
Chapter Eleven Step Four: Practicing Wisdom Contemplation,
Chapter Twelve Step Five: Getting Better,
Chapter Thirteen Step Six: Deepening Wisdom Contemplation,
In Closing,
List of Exercises,
List of Key Concepts,