Body Talk - Why You Really Get Sick and Why It Need Never Happen Again

By Rochelle Gordon

Body Mind Connection Guidebook

Updated Digital Edition

Good health is not a matter of good luck—the relationship between our mind, body & experiences is! We have more control over our health than we realize. With informed skillful use of our body-mind connection we can bring ourselves back to good health for good. This book provides a unique and holistic approach to wellbeing based on personal inner work, not outer medical care alone.

Part One: Self-Healing Guide

 * Over 33 tools, exercises, and processes to get you back on track

 * How to handle your symptoms rather than letting them handle you

Part Two: Body Talk Reference Guide

 * Over 150 individual explanations listed by body areas, symptoms, or health issues

 * More than 100 suggestions on how to restore inner balance and thus optimal health

• Language: English
• Publisher: Samantha McGowan
• Release date: Sep 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781516317622

Book preview

What Makes This Book Unique?

Part One

Why You Really Get Sick and Why It Need Never Happen Again

A Self-Healing Guide

* It explores the psychological connection not only between your mind and body, but your experiences as well. What goes on outside your body-mind system via experiences, significantly influences what goes on within it. This determines your state of health.

* It illuminates health concepts such as, We are powerless over our health. Just holding such a belief has the power to negatively affect one’s health.

* It provides over 33 self-healing techniques that allow you to take charge of your potent body-mind connection by altering your approaches to and perceptions of daily situations, as well as influencing your body’s responses to them. This can bring about much-improved health.

Part Two

Body Talk Reference Guide

* It contains explanations and suggestions for causes of illness taking in over 150 body areas and ailments.

* It describes the meanings and symbolisms attributed to these areas and ailments.

Sample Entries

Common Cold

You can catch a cold when you reach your wit’s end and need to express your frustration or despair over a situation. A cold allows you to cry in a socially acceptable manner. You will get rid of the cold when you are able to accept the situation as it stands or when the circumstances come to an end—whichever occurs first.

Lower Back

Problems in this area most often are connected to a relationship concern or fears for an important person in your life. If the low back condition is chronic and any relationship issues or worries for another individual no longer exist, it is possible that your body is still holding on to past fears or other unsettling feelings even though your mind no longer does. (See The Letting Go Exercise in Chapter 12)

* * *

What Others Say About Body Talk

Warning To Doctors

Health care professionals should also read Body Talk and give it to all of their patients. Body Talk is an absolutely wonderful book, and is good medicine for anyone who is sick and tired of being sick and tired. In a time of increasingly cold and confusing health care, Body Talk is a perfect antidote: warm, caring, and clear. In simple, elegant language, Ms. Gordon describes the incredibly important role of our beliefs in controlling our physical and mental health, and tells us the important steps for taking back the control of our wellness and wellbeing. Drawing upon research demonstrating that the brain is designed to get us exactly what we ask for, she shows us how we often make unconscious agreements with ourselves to be ill, and how we can break these agreements—forever!

I strongly recommend Body Talk for anyone who visits the doctor more than they should, or more than they want. Health care professionals should also read Body Talk and give it to all of their patients; but it may need to come with a warning label for physicians: WARNING: This book has been known to prevent your patients from ever needing to see you again!

~ DR. RICHARD KEEFE, Psychologist, Neuroscientist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, Duke University Medical Center.

An Invaluable Tool

Body Talk is an invaluable tool for anyone’s regiment of self-care. For anyone seeking to take charge of their health, this easy-to-read, easy-to-understand book offers practical suggestions for promoting a healthy body and mind. Rochelle provides straightforward advice and information that allows the reader to understand the relationship between physical ailments and the beliefs, emotions, and issues that so often underlie them. She then gives you the means to establish new beliefs that promote and maintain good health. There are exercises for releasing negativity and replacing it with beneficial self-talk and health-giving attitudes and approaches to life. I enjoyed this book and found any number of ways to use the wisdom in its pages. Body Talk is an invaluable tool for anyone’s regiment of self-care.

~ Nancy J. Napier, M.A., M.F., M.F.C.C., is a psychotherapist and author of Recreating Your Self, Getting Through the Day, and Sacred Practices for Conscious Living.

A Gold Mine of Wellbeing

Medicine is finally beginning to recognize the major role emotions play in our overall health. Ms. Gordon contributes valuable insights useful to those experiencing health problems, or who wish to maintain a state of good health. Her methods are meticulously researched and delightfully easy to follow. Practicing them can lead to a gold mine of wellbeing: relaxation, self-awareness, and betterment of the physical condition.

~ Gerard Sunnen, M.D., author of OmniForce.

* * *

Rochelle Gordon

About The Author

Rochelle Gordon has been a private counselor, teacher, and writer in the new thought and self-help movements for forty years. During that time she studied alternative health methods under top leaders in the field. She has conducted numerous lectures and workshops throughout the United States and on the cruise ship Queen Elizabeth II.

Rochelle is the former Editor-in-Chief of Body Mind Spirit Magazine, a leading voice in new thought publications, and former Assistant to the Editor of The Neurobiology of Aging, a medical journal.

She is a certified counselor in Wakeful Dreaming, a self-help therapy which employs hypnotherapy and visualization to access the inner realms of the mind for healing and change. She also is a certified Sedona Releasing Method instructor.

Body Talk is the accumulated knowledge of her years of study into the human health condition. Her latest two e-books are Foolproof Ways For Women To Have Lasting Diet Success and Foolproof Ways to Relieve Stress and End Anxiety.

* * *

Introduction

A number of years ago I met Arlene, a lovely woman in her early sixties. The first thing I noticed was the large medical dressing on her left leg. She had to use a cane to walk. I felt badly for her and asked her about her injury. Arlene removed the bandage to reveal an ulceration, a wound that would not heal. She said it caused her a good deal of pain, but that she had learned to live with it.

I asked her how long she’d had the ulceration.

Twenty-five years, she replied.

I was astonished. Twenty-five years! What do the doctors say?

Arlene shrugged. She had seen so many doctors that she had lost count, and had tried all sorts of remedies, antibiotics, balms, salves, you name it. None of the worked. Arlene simply resigned herself to enduring the pain, the cane, and the open wound for the rest of her life.

I could not imagine that an ulceration was incurable, yet I believed what she told me. It made no sense—until I met her daughter, Jane.

Jane, who was about thirty, wore a brace on her left leg, the sad legacy of a childhood bout with polio. I intuitively saw the connection between mother and daughter and realized that perhaps emotional pain, such as guilt or anger over Jane’s polio, lay buried deep in Arlene’s body and kept her own wound from healing. It was as if anguish over the daughter’s affliction had ignited a similar suffering in the mother.

* * *

Illness is not an isolated event. It is an integral part of the life process in which you actively participate, whether you know it or not.

Good health is not a matter of good luck,

and bad health is not because you have bad luck.

You can and do have enormous influence over your own health.

I firmly contend that you are never sick or injured when everything is running smoothly in your life. My purpose in writing this book is to show how the body, mind and emotions work as a whole. They influence each other for better or worse, and whether you know it or not, the choice is up to you!

I am saying that you do not have to catch, get, come down with, or succumb to anything. More importantly, you can live without fear of getting sick. And when you do get sick, you don’t have to feel out of control or totally dependent on health care professionals for your cure. I will suggest answers to provide insights as to why we do get sick or hurt, and ways to stay reasonably healthy through self-knowledge. Your body truly reflects what is really going on in your head and heart.

Your mind can lie, but your body never does!

You can fool yourself with rationalizations or denial tactics, but your body will give you away every time. Illness is a means of both feeling and expressing an emotion. We tend to think of our bodies and minds as completely separate. But the truth is your physical health is closely related to your emotional state and you thoughts. You may not realize it, but a vital energy exchange is constantly occurring between you and your environment. As a result, your brain, body and consciousness are always restructuring to fit circumstances. This is a moment to moment process.

Whether these changes result in heath or sickness depends on your perceptions. Your perceptions trigger the brain’s responses, which in turn affect your body. Scientific research indicates that the immune system produces chemicals that feed information back to the brain, in much the same way as the brain signals the immune system. In short, this means that how well you cope with, adapt to, and change with your everyday circumstances actually determines how healthy you will be.

Bout of Flu

In 1993, the CEO of American Express was force to resign after being dishonorably hounded from power, according to New York Magazine. This man spent most of his professional life working for American Express, so you can imagine how traumatic his forced resignation must have been. The magazine article tells that after resigning, the executive went home and crawled into bed with what his aides said was the first bout of flu he’d had in close to twenty years.

How you see and react to each situation

determines your state of health.

The things you believe in can actually create good health or illness. This has been proven by scientific research, such as the experience of Dr. Robert Ader, a researcher at the University of Rochester in upstate New York. While conducting a study on laboratory rats, Dr. Ader accidentally discovered that the rats could be conditioned to weaken their own immune systems to the point of falling ill.

The original purpose of the study was to see if the rats would avoid a saccharine-tasting drink which contained a nausea inducing drug. This drug was also an immunosuppressant, a fact that was not relevant to the study. Dr. Ader found that even after the immunosuppressant drug had been removed, rats that continued to take the drink got sick and died. He wondered if the rats became conditioned to suppressing their own immune systems every time they tasted the saccharine—a guess he confirmed by repeated tests with control animals.

Your environment and society also affect your physical well-being. For instance, in the United States, aspirin is known to deter heart attacks. Yet a six-year study involving more than 5,000 British doctors produced no evidence that aspirin reduces the risk of heart attack. Why do people in England respond differently to aspirin than people in the United States? Thought-provoking questions like these challenge many of our beliefs about health.

Subconscious Awareness

Your autonomic nervous system, which is at a subconscious level of awareness, runs your body. This is where the processes of getting sick or injured and then getting well take place. Just because this power lies within the realm of the subconscious mind does not mean that all is lost. We can and do make the subconscious conscious. In fact, we do it all the time. We can affect, influence and work with our subconscious. It is not hidden from our awareness and we can access its vast thoughts and wisdom. This is where we begin to take charge of our health.

This is not to say that you are to blame for being sick, or that it is all in your head. Nor do I claim to have magical solutions to illness for everyone. My purpose is to offer ideas to enhance your self-awareness and understanding, and thus your health, so that you no longer view your body as a sitting duck waiting for an invasion of disease.

As a nation, we have become more health conscious, as evidenced by the decline in the number of people who smoke and eat red meat, among other lifestyle changes. However, most of our national health institutions still push us toward illness-phobia. We are trained to worry about our cholesterol, blood pressure, weight, fiber and fat intake; the list goes on and on. We need to find a balance here.

Heredity Versus Environment

Remember the perennial question, What influences us more, heredity or environment? It now looks as if they both influence each other, and we influence them both through our thoughts. New theories have emerged in the science of genetics which show that genes may be turned on or turned off at various short intervals. I propose the possibility that our perceptions trigger genetic changes, and that what we think and feel determines whether or not we will develop a hereditary condition.

When it comes to health, you are not a victim.

Sometimes it is not easy to heal the body, but it is never too late to heal the mind and heart. We can always take mental steps to protect us from disease or prevent a condition from worsening. So when it comes to your health, you are not a victim. You can live without fear of getting sick.

In this book you will find methods for becoming and staying healthier. Anyone can practice these methods, starting at any time. You do not need any special knowledge or experience to begin using them – all you need is an open mind, perseverance, and the willingness to change old habits or beliefs. Nothing suggested here is beyond anyone’s ability.

The information in this book is not meant as a substitute for proper medical care, but rather to complement whatever treatment you choose. The important thing to remember is that your own thoughts, and your feelings about your thoughts, play a large part in how well you are. Too often we go to the doctor expecting, even demanding, that he or she take away our pain. But the physician is not the one who made us sick. At best, he can find a cure for the symptoms of our distress. If we do not deal with the underlying causes of our illness, the cure may not last. If the underlying mental, emotional or spiritual reasons for the symptom remain unchanged, another symptom can surface to take its place.

We can and do heal ourselves.

You can discover, through our body’s messages, the emotional as well as the mental pain behind your physical pain, and you can make changes in your life to restore your balance and your health. It is not impossible to unravel the cause of any problem.

Please note that some themes and topics are mentioned in different forms throughout the book. This is done to provide expanded perspectives on their significance. Human nature is such that it usually takes up to three presentations of anything suggesting different ways of thinking or acting before we take it seriously under consideration.

Your body holds the answers,

and it always tells you the truth.

For those who find these concepts perhaps too radical or uncomfortable, I ask only that you keep an open mind, look into what I present, and then draw your own conclusions. The scientific minded among you may consider the case examples anecdotal or hearsay. However, the topics under discussion do not easily lend themselves to strict research guidelines for scrutiny. I have come by my understanding through years of study and experience in the laboratory of life.

The aging process slows us up, but does not necessarily have to debilitate or impair. How we play the cards of life determines whether we will be old and fall apart at sixty or young and together at ninety.

I humbly offer this book as a