[Healing] The Mind-Body ConnectionSample

Hopelessness to Hope

When God created us, He did so in a holistic fashion. The Bible describes us as soul, body, and spirit. You cannot dissect a human being and separate the three. Everything is interconnected. That is where the word holistic comes from; it relates to the belief that the parts of something are intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole. We cannot separate the effects of our living and thinking from our physical wellbeing. The Bible tells us in Proverbs 4:20–22 (TLB): “Listen, son of mine, to what I say. Listen carefully. Keep these thoughts ever in mind; let them penetrate deep within your heart, for they will mean real life for you and radiant health.” There is a mind-body connection.

What we think affects our physical bodies. Faith is the substance of things hoped for. Hope is like a refuge that protects us from the adversary. It is the anchor of the soul. When our thoughts change, our bodies change. Our positive and negative beliefs impact every area of our lives. Norman Cousins, an author, professor, and journalist, did ten years of research on the biochemistry of human emotions, which he believed were the key to human beings’ success in fighting illness. He strongly believed that if you encounter a patient with a terminal diagnosis and give them a negative report, hopelessness fills their mind, and their immune system will not fight. However, if you put a survivor of the same diagnosis next to the patient, and they see that there is hope, their immune system will start fighting. They go from hopelessness to hope. Again we see the mind-body connection. 

Many medical experts agree that our thoughts have an amazing impact on our health. A merry—cheerful, optimistic, excited—heart does good, like medicine, but hopelessness dries up the bones. Herbert Benson, MD, says that “negative thinking leads to stress, which affects our bodies’ natural healing capacity.” Everywhere in the Bible we find Jesus talking about hope and faith. We cannot have faith without hope. Our beliefs are like filters on a camera, changing how we see the world. Our biology—our physical being—adapts to those beliefs. In Mark 5 we see a woman with an issue of blood, who thought that if she could touch Jesus, she would be healed. That woman had seen in her mind that she was going to be healed. She said it within herself before it happened. And she was healed. Faith is the substance of things hoped for. When we understand the power of what we believe, we will change our beliefs to the positive.

Our physical body cannot distinguish between an actual scene and one lived out in our imagination. We can be somewhere and physically see it, or just close our eyes and see it in our imagination and it would have the same effect upon us. Have you ever heard of that? We do it with worry all the time. We do it in reverse. Worry is simply a bad thing played out in our imagination. Our fear goes up, our stress level goes up, and our high blood pressure goes up. That is the mind-body connection. We can shift from worry and fear of dying to trust and hope for living. This gives our bodies a chance to promote healing. Stress goes out and the peace of God comes in.