… offer people a friendship they can feel, just when they need it most.
… [survivors] have learned to live and give of themselves to the world. They are not denying their physical limits but rather transcending them.
… They refuse to play the victim. …
… They educate themselves and become specialists in their own care. …
… exceptional patients … willingly accept all the risks and challenges. As long as they’re alive, they feel in control of their dignity; content to receive some happiness for themselves and give some to others. … They do not fear the future or external events. They know that happiness is an inside job.
… seek peace of mind and give themselves up to a higher power. … A patient’s hope and trust lead to a “letting go” that counteracts stress and is often the key to getting well.
… become open to the healing gift within us … psychologists remind us that most of us use only 10 percent of our mind’s capacity. Let us then, as the Witch Doctor taught, use the other 90 percent. …
… come to believe in his own survival. By continuing at the job he loved, he refused to give in to the disease. Instead he began meditating and using mental imagery to counteract it. He worked to restore strained relationships with his family and achieved peace of mind by forgiving people he felt had hurt him. He loved his body with exercise, good nutrition, and vitamin supplements. And from that point on his immune system showed increased response …
… squeeze as much out of life as you can. …
… “Here’s a test to find out whether your mission on earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t. “
To become exceptional in caring for the body, one must take stock of the beliefs one has about it, especially those so ingrained that they’re normally unconscious. …
… We have to begin with change immediately, and the best way is by asking what to do with this short period of time.
… Sharing one’s fears and problems leads to relief and healing within the body. Knowing what you are fighting and how to fight are the keys. … carefully convert deniers into fighters.
… “Do you love yourself enough to take care of the body and mind?” The answer is contained in your lifestyle. Do you eat moderately, avoiding … sugar, caffeine, … Do you avoid … processed, additive-laden foods? … Do you eat a good breakfast and get adequate rest? Do you exercise? Are you self-motivated? (…) Do you seek activities that give you joy and satisfaction?
… no prescription for change will do any good without the courage to accept the challenge – to take control of your life, find your true path, sing your song, and regardless of your age decide what you want to be when you grow up.
All the research to date indicates that the power drive, with its constant anxieties continually activates the sympathetic (excitatory) part of the body’s nervous system, with a consequent deactivation of the parasympathetic (calming) nerves. This in turn keeps the fight-or-flight stress response of adrenaline continually switched on, diminishing the body’s ability to respond to another stress, such as illness. … “… one way to avoid the stress and illness associated with a strong power drive is to grow up, to turn the power drive into helping others. Maturity, love and detachment, reduce sympathetic activation and its potentially bad effects on one’s health.” There is nothing like meditation to give the calm and perspective needed for this growing up.
Survivors, then, act not only from self-interest but also from the interest of others, even in the most stressful situations. They clean up messes and make things safer, or more efficient. In short, they give of themselves, leaving the world a better place that they found it. Their relaxed awareness and confidence that it brings allows them to save their energies for the really important things. When things are going well, they let well alone, leaving themselves free for curiosity about new developments or potential problems. They may seem uninvolved at times, but they are “foul-weather friends.” They show up when there’s trouble.
… towards expressing love, both self-love and love for others. And, although personality change is hard, you can make each of these traits your own. This doesn’t happen simply by wishing, however. There are two major ways to make the change easier: By working within a supportive therapy group or by sharing honestly with your most trusted loved ones, you can confront your habits and behaviors. A friend once called this process “carefrontation” to combine the love and confrontation in one word.
The second way of facilitating these changes is by regular meditation …
… Nothing can be gained without effort, and, as William James noted, most people live too far within self-imposed limits.
There is a seeming contradiction here that traps many people. Most of us have been taught that self-love and love for others are incompatible, that we can’t satisfy our own needs and still give of ourselves. If we become survivors, we realize that our deepest need is to love and be at peace and, our motivation becomes spiritual or selfless, not selfish. Living with the knowledge that we’re going to die someday means that we may choose to give something to the world. In the process, we develop an inner sense of worth that helps us achieve goals that improve the quality of life. We find ourselves striving for the survivor’s paradoxical goal – to have things work out well for ourselves and[/] others.
I want to emphasize the difference between wishing, which is passive, and hope, which is active. Hoping means seeing that the outcome you want is possible, and then working for it. … Jung said, “Every problem, therefore, brings the possibility of a widening of consciousness and trust in nature,” …
To unlock the fountain of love and enter on the path of creative spiritual growth, we must let go of our fears (…). But this is very hard, particularly when it looks as though we’re not going to die tomorrow. When we don’t have that time limit its often harder to let go. To accomplish this “simple” change, we must work through our negative emotions and transcend them. This is impossible until we realize that no one makes us happy or sad. Our emotions don’t happen to us so much as we choose them. In fact, our thoughts, emotions, and actions are the only things we really do control. … all unhappiness arises from attempts to control events and other people, over which one has no power. The same futile attempt, born of our fears and resentments, weakens the body and leads to disease.
When you suffer a misfortune, you are faced with the choice of what to do with it. You can wring good from it, or more pain. …
The ability to see something good in adversity is perhaps the central trait needed by patients. As Viktor Frankl has written. “To liver is to suffer; to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.” Death or the threat of death has been called the ultimate teacher, for it goads us into appreciating to the utmost what we have or can do today.
… realize that the present moment is all that we have, but it is infinite. We see that there is no real past or future – regretting and wishing – we lose ourselves in judgmental thinking. In one of the countries where people repeatedly live to be a hundred, people have a saying: Yesterday is gone, tomorrow isn’t here yet, so what is there to worry about?”
