Jordan Young had been dating author Tobin Blake’s daughter for two years when, days after his eighteenth birthday, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lymphoma. Within months, several rounds of chemotherapy had failed and top physicians determined that Young — now on a ventilator in the ICU — could not survive the widespread disease. But he did survive and, two years later, is cancer-free. This suspenseful narrative explores the anatomy of a miracle — the precise steps Blake took with Young on his journey back from the brink. Young’s path shows how methods based on spiritual laws can be used to transform fear, navigate the medical world, guide family and friends, and, most important, heal. It illustrates that with love, all things can be healed, hope is always justified, and nothing is impossible — no matter what the doctors tell you.
Jordan Young had been dating author Tobin Blake’s daughter for two years when, days after his eighteenth birthday, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lymphoma. Within months, several rounds of chemotherapy had failed and top physicians determined that Young — now on a ventilator in the ICU — could not survive the widespread disease. But he did survive and, two years later, is cancer-free. This suspenseful narrative explores the anatomy of a miracle — the precise steps Blake took with Young on his journey back from the brink. Young’s path shows how methods based on spiritual laws can be used to transform fear, navigate the medical world, guide family and friends, and, most important, heal. It illustrates that with love, all things can be healed, hope is always justified, and nothing is impossible — no matter what the doctors tell you.
The Healing of Jordan Young: A 21st Century Spiritual Guide to Health and Healing
280
The Healing of Jordan Young: A 21st Century Spiritual Guide to Health and Healing
280Paperback
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Overview
Jordan Young had been dating author Tobin Blake’s daughter for two years when, days after his eighteenth birthday, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lymphoma. Within months, several rounds of chemotherapy had failed and top physicians determined that Young — now on a ventilator in the ICU — could not survive the widespread disease. But he did survive and, two years later, is cancer-free. This suspenseful narrative explores the anatomy of a miracle — the precise steps Blake took with Young on his journey back from the brink. Young’s path shows how methods based on spiritual laws can be used to transform fear, navigate the medical world, guide family and friends, and, most important, heal. It illustrates that with love, all things can be healed, hope is always justified, and nothing is impossible — no matter what the doctors tell you.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781608683543 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New World Library |
| Publication date: | 11/17/2015 |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Sales rank: | 1,076,200 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Healing of Jordan Young
A 21st-Century Spiritual Guide to Health and Healing
By Tobin Blake
New World Library
Copyright © 2015 Tobin BlakeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60868-354-3
CHAPTER 1
Minding Your Mind
Before you can understand all that occurred with Jordan and how his healing came about, it is essential to comprehend some basic principles of the mind-body connection. Often, when a person becomes ill, it requires only a little consideration to uncover the major contributing nonphysical elements. When diseases occur, they almost always mirror corresponding dysfunctions on other levels of the patient's life — mental, emotional, spiritual, legal, economic, social, and so on. Furthermore, the larger the physical distress, the more massive the other problems tend to be. In Jordan's case, while he appeared exceptionally healthy in a physical sense before getting sick, there were obvious nonphysical parallels to his disease that were present before the lymphoma itself. The most prominent of these involved his troubled relationship with his divorced parents, who were still living in the same house together, along with Jordan and his older brother.
The specifics of their familial problems do not really matter, and I have chosen not to discuss them in too much detail while telling Jordan's story. The reason for this decision is twofold: First, Jordan has chosen to share a deeply personal story with the world, which is not an easy thing to do. Therefore, when I was able to protect his privacy without omitting key elements of the story or hampering the reader's understanding of the healing process, I have chosen to do so.
Second, as I suggested above, I consider the nature of the conflicts between Jordan and his family to be irrelevant. We all experience conflict, which certainly does influence the state of our physical health; however, the particulars aren't important in the least. Jordan's strained relationships were probably not much different than anyone else's. The point is, this book is not a "he said, she said" chronicle that seeks to point fingers or lay blame over causes. Rather, it is a true story about a life-or-death struggle that really occurred and ended happily. The book's main focus is on the key ingredients that allowed healing to happen.
As we will explore, outer conflict is really only a symptom of inner conflict, just as physical distress is a symptom of emotional distress. The forms in which interpersonal conflicts are housed are never the real problem. This is something everyone needs to understand when it comes to relationships. Like the symptoms of any disease, the "issues" that exist between people, and which seem to be the cause of their discord, are actually only effects of deeper dysfunctions. This is always true, no matter what type of problem is visible on the surface of the relationship, and it brings up an essential rule of healing that is important enough to qualify as our first major principle.
This principle may sound obvious, but you might be surprised how often it is ignored. All it means is that you cannot cure an illness by treating its symptoms alone. If you had cancer, for instance, you could not heal it merely by taking pills in order to control the pain without actually treating the underlying disease itself — the cancer. It can be said that a disease "treated" in this manner is not truly being treated at all. Some illnesses may appear to resolve themselves when dealt with in this way, but all that has really happened is that certain specific symptoms have retreated. Unless the cause of a disease is addressed, it is bound to recur or shift in form. In some cases it may even arise again as a completely different sickness altogether, apparently unrelated to the original distress, but with the same psychical basis.
An additional point is that when we speak of illness, we are referring to disease on all levels. Suffering comes in many forms. Sickness on the physical plane is only the grossest and most obvious. Disease can also invade an individual's life in just about any area. Dysfunctions of various sorts can disrupt your relationships, work and career, financial and legal situations, sexuality, and so on. Obviously there are also mental and behavioral diseases, which, like physical ones, come in many forms and levels of severity. A few of these are depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, addictions, eating disorders, panic attacks, rage, narcissism, and psychosis, but there are many other forms of mental illness, and countless variations of each.
On a side note, society has a tendency to take "diseases of the mind" less seriously than physical illnesses, but mental illness can be equally disturbing to a patient's well-being, and sometimes also terminal. On January 21, 2011, a dear friend of mine, the poet Eugene Perri, ended his lifelong struggle with depression by hanging himself to death in his garage while his wife — who is also a close friend — was away at work. While I can still sense Eugene's presence within me, his earthly voice has surely been missed. If nothing else, this type of loss can serve to remind us that mental illness can have many serious, even devastating, consequences, and in order to be truly healthy we must tend to each other's well-being, along with our own, on every level, not just the physical.
The universe we live in is not one-dimensional, and neither are you. Therefore, disease in any form, on any level of your being, whether you judge it to be something relatively minor, severe, or even "impossible to heal," should be addressed with equal healing determination. True happiness and health, which actually go hand-in-hand and can never be fully experienced apart, is a total experience. Either the state of well-being is present or it is absent, for reason would suggest that "partial health" must imply the presence of "partial disease," which cannot be regarded as total health. Another way of saying this is, suffering is suffering, whatever the form, level, and cause.
Yet reason also bids us to ask ourselves what the point is of trading one symptom for another. All that happens when you follow the path of treating an illness from the wrong end — such as through physical treatments of the body exclusively — is to establish a confounding pattern of ever-shifting symptoms, which may occur in a blindingly complex web. It does not matter if you fix one problem; there will always be another right behind it. If not immediately, the wait is unlikely to be long. Each disease does seem to have its own unique cause and consequences. How else could the illness remain unhealed when its symptoms have retreated? Left untreated at its root, it must change in form or arise again at a later time. In this way a physical illness may shift its outward face many times over many years — in some cases across decades — and it can even transform into a mental disease, or vice versa, and back again. What is the point of chasing shadows?
This is why it is of critical importance to treat the whole person and not just their physical and circumstantial symptoms, including familial dysfunction. Look deeper, into the head and heart of the individual. Symptoms may appear on many levels, but the cause of every illness lies deep within the patient. In Jordan's case, one of his main sources of love had been disrupted due to his difficult relationship with his parents. In particular, as Brittany and Jordan became closer, his connection with his mother grew increasingly rocky, until it reached a state of disarray that mirrored the disaster befalling his body. This eventually became an acute downward cycle: the more troubled his relationship with his mom became, the sicker Jordan got.
Another important premise of spiritual therapy that must be clearly understood is that the mind and body are directly connected and influence each other to such a degree that, for practical purposes, they may be considered a solitary, unified system. This is not a conceptual play on words, but a fact. Your feelings and general mood affect your body directly. This influence is easily detectable through various basic measurements. For instance, when you are actively upset, your pulse rate, blood pressure, and respiration may all noticeably increase. These are just a few of the acute physiological changes we can detect using simple medical tools, but there are others. Many of these effects may be subtle, even undetectable day to day, but their impact over time is enormous. For example, if you are chronically stressed, you may gradually develop hypertension, which over decades can lead to heart disease — the number one cause of death in the United States and many other nations.
Likewise, what you experience on a physical level in turn affects your mood, creating a closed system that continuously reinforces itself.
Regardless of your personal spiritual beliefs, when it comes to health and healing, it is helpful to think of your body as a denser, material extension of your mind. As will be explored later, all bodily states have a correlating mental reflection. This doesn't mean that, if you are afraid of developing cancer, you will actually do so. The results of fear thoughts are not generally so specific. What it does mean is that there is a strong tendency for negative thought patterns to produce negative consequences in the body. Thoughts are just like everything else in the universe of time and space. That is, they are composed of energy, and energy has a great capacity for creating effects.
Despite the human penchant for viewing diseases as strictly physical phenomena, illnesses actually begin with internal judgments, which cause ripples of negatively charged emotions to spread across the fabric of the mind and out into the body. Essentially this is the same thing that occurs when you drop a stone into a pond and cause little waves to arc out from the point of splashdown. In the mind, these waves are actually comprised of creative energy, and they may be either healing or harming, depending on their nature. Your thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, emotions, judgments, and desires all fuse together with your will to cause a continuous energetic stream of creative potential, which passes through your body and into the world at large.
Much of this theory may at first appear to be just unproven metaphysical conjecture, but it isn't only spiritualists who have observed the connection between the mind and body. Scientists have also documented it. In her book Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine, Dr. Candace Pert — a pharmacologist with more than 250 published scientific articles and the co-discoverer of the endorphin system — summarized her own research on the subject in the following way: "Mind doesn't dominate body, it becomes body — body and mind are one. I see the process of communication we have demonstrated, the flow of information throughout the whole organism, as evidence that the body is the actual outward manifestation, in physical space, of the mind."
Even if you do not choose to believe that the body and mind are literally one, the influence of thoughts and attitudes on the physical state is hard to deny. A good example of this connection is the fight-or-flight response, which was first identified by Harvard physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon. In simple terms, the fight-or-flight response is a physiological reaction to a perceived threat, whether the threat is real or merely imagined. For instance, when a cat feels threatened by a dog, its hair may stand up on end, its pupils may dilate, and the animal's heart may begin racing, preparing it to either fight the dog or attempt a hasty escape. Of course, this is a natural enough reaction. The cat may very well have to fight for its life, or the dog may mean it no harm. In that moment, however, when confronted with an uncertain situation, the cat's primal instincts kick in and it's not going to take any chances.
It is a perceived threat that triggers the response, not necessarily a real threat.
Human beings experience a similar acute response to threatening situations: adrenaline fires into the bloodstream, digestion slows or may even stop, heart rate and respiration soars, certain blood vessels in the body constrict, and vision narrows to the immediate situation. All else vanishes. The reaction is as practical as it is instantaneous and absolute. Imagine crossing a street and seeing a bus racing around the corner: in that moment, you would probably move rapidly, in whatever way was necessary, to save yourself. You wouldn't even need to think about it. The effect can be tremendous. People have been known to leap out of harm's way with inexplicable agility, lift cars weighing thousands of pounds off pinned victims at accident scenes, and fend off bear attacks — all thanks to the fight-or-flight response. In basic physical terms at least, it is a valuable system for helping people survive real, life-threatening emergencies, but problems emerge when it is regularly activated due to trivial, or even imagined, events that don't pose any true threat.
Which brings up an interesting point: the human mind is not particularly good at distinguishing imagined threats from real ones. Perhaps you've noticed that just the thought of conflict can cause your heart rate to increase, your muscles to tighten, and your breath to become shallow and rapid. Indeed, the fight-or-flight response can be activated by the force of your imagination alone and even by minor day-to-day stressors. The reflex itself is neutral. It is intended for emergencies, not in order to compensate for harmful, long-term thinking patterns.
When you honestly examine the relationship between your thoughts and your body, it is easy to see the connection. The bond between the mind and body is so intimate and interwoven, where one begins and the other ends is impossible to distinguish even through serious scientific scrutiny. In simplest terms, this is why filling your mind with stress-causing thoughts makes you more susceptible to physical pathologies. Such thoughts may appear in many forms, such as anger, hatred, jealousy, fear, regret, guilt, greed, envy, sacrifice, victimization, sadness, self-loathing, competition, ego, and many others. The takeaway of all this is simply that consistently harboring negative thoughts causes a lot of stress and tension in the short term, and it can cause sickness of the body over a lifetime.
One more important point to consider is that every thought that crosses your mind has some energetic charge to it, which is either positive or negative. There is no in-between. Thoughts are energy, and energy causes effects. When it comes to the body, every thought reinforces either sickness or health. If a thought is positive in nature, it will strengthen the body and cultivate a general state of wellness, or at minimum it will do no harm. If it is negative, it will feed disease. Therefore, if you want to heal your body, you must first heal your mind.
The Waterfall of Thought
Some spiritual teachers recommend that we should dismiss our thoughts as unimportant, and in one sense, this is correct. The shift into the present moment, the origin of healing, does not actually involve thought, or time, or any notion of self-awareness at all. This switch can be performed in any given moment because it is an internal transition into a state of being that is always present, no matter what circumstance you happen to find yourself dealing with. By definition, the present moment cannot be experienced in the future. As long as you believe it can, you will be unable to experience the endless, joyous release that accompanies the state of being. Any given student could achieve so-called enlightenment, which is a state of perfect healing, in any given instant. Even relatively new students along a conscious spiritual path could do so simply by realizing that it is only a single shift in awareness — from a focus on the past and future to an acceptance of the present — that separates them from their goal. The journey to Self realization is indeed short, and being a shift into timelessness, it requires no time at all to accomplish. Any instant will suffice as long as the student is willing.
With this in mind, however, I would like to ask you to try an experiment. Set this book aside and sit quietly for the next few minutes, observing your thoughts. Let your mind wander in whatever direction it feels naturally drawn, but pay attention to the basic content and types of thoughts that cross your mind. Try it now.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Healing of Jordan Young by Tobin Blake. Copyright © 2015 Tobin Blake. Excerpted by permission of New World Library.
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
Foreword by Dr. Bernie S. Siegel,Introduction: The Guy Who Survived,
Part One: Principles of Healing,
Chapter One: Minding Your Mind,
Chapter Two: The Seeds of Disease,
Chapter Three: Mind Over Matter,
Chapter Four: Into the Desert of Fear,
Part Two: Special Principles of Healing,
Chapter Five: The Patient Must Believe Healing Is Possible,
Chapter Six: The Patient Must Want to Heal,
Chapter Seven: New Hope: "Smart" Chemo and Bone Marrow Transplants,
Chapter Eight: The Patient Must Feel They Deserve to Heal,
Part Three: Methods of Healing,
Chapter Nine: Reprogramming the Waterfall of Thought,
Chapter Ten: On a Wing and a Prayer,
Chapter Eleven: A Guide to Meditation,
Chapter Twelve: The Art of Visualization,
Chapter Thirteen: The Intensive Care Unit,
Chapter Fourteen: The Power of Prayer and Affirmations,
Chapter Fifteen: "You Mean I'm Not Going to Make It?",
Chapter Sixteen: Laying Hands, Holding Presence, and Unity,
Chapter Seventeen: The Mystery of the Melting Tumors,
Chapter Eighteen: Support Networks and Spiritual Relationships,
Chapter Nineteen: A String of "Co-Incidences",
Chapter Twenty: A Brief Guide for Friends, Family, and Healers,
Epilogue: Jordan Lived!,
Acknowledgments,
Appendix: Principles of Healing and Special Principles of Healing,
Endnotes,
Recommended Reading,
About the Author,