Mastering Your Mindset: Health, Healing, and Disease Volume 001

by Charles Barnard

It’s cancer. Two words that convey so much emotion. Two words that will test one’s mindset. I have been writing about mastering your mindset for some time. One situation I haven’t extensively addressed yet is health and healing. When you hear those words, whether it is about you, your spouse, a child, or other loved one, your ability or skill at mastering your mindset is put to the test. I know. I heard those words yesterday.

I am going to be sharing in this group and my website Success Institutes the journey my family and I now embark as my wife of twenty-eight years works to beat a formidable foe – negative beliefs, negative emotions, limiting decisions linked to those two words, it’s cancer, and.. we shall soon discover what else.

We just learned that the masses that were recently discovered on her liver are cancerous. More tests over the next few days will determine exactly what the source of that cancer is. The real enemy is the ultimate source – negative emotions and their impact on health and healing. Let me explain.

Over the past fifty-years alternative medicine has gained in popularity. With the popular writings of Dr. Norman Cousins and Dr. Deepak Chopra among many others, people have become more interested and fascinated by the possibilities of the mind-body connection when it comes to healing. Three great mindset obstacles to optimizing our full potential for healing are negative emotions, negative beliefs, and limiting decisions. These all can be quickly and relatively easily dealt with. The next great obstacle is building the habits into your life that foster healthy emotional management and attitude to your health and healing. These typically fall into the realm of “alternative” or holistic medicine.

We must not ignore, however, the great medical advances we have made and are making. We have learned a great deal from molecular biology, which has led to great advances in medicine. In fact, Dr. Ray Stevens, who I am privileged to call a friend, has started another new company (ShouTi) that has just started its first clinical trials on a new pill that they believe will allow diabetic patients the same or improved benefits at a much lower cost and much greater convenience than current pharmaceutical methods. In another example, just this past week in the New England Journal of Medicine a report on a small but very promising study on a new cancer treatment was published. It reported:

“…all 12 patients had complete tumor resolution with dostarlimab. At a median follow-up of 1 year, none of the 12 patients had needed other treatment, and none had had cancer regrowth. None of the patients had adverse events of grade 3 or higher.

These results are cause for great optimism…”

While we have made great progress in approaching the treatment of cancer and other diseases, the number of people who die from cancer and other diseases each year is heartrending. One understanding the medical community now seems to be in complete agreement on is the power of the mind to assist the body and the medical approach chosen in the healing process.

We now know that stress, nutrition, lack of exercise, and negative thinking can have profound impact on the formation of disease. Conversely, low levels of stress or the proper management of stress, good nutrition, regular exercise, and positive thinking can have a profound impact on healing.

Let me begin as a way of introduction with my thoughts on what I have deemed the mindset of a champion arch, which pictures a foundation of love, piers of faith and faithfulness, voussoirs of family, friends, mind, body, and the key stone of the human spirit or spirit of a champion. All those working together contribute to maintaining health or the process of healing disease.

While science is only now beginning to understand how love, faith, and faithfulness may impact healing through the production of biochemicals, people have long intuitively understood that those three things and the hope that comes with them had a powerful influence on healing. Yet, many of us know people of great faith who were deeply loved and loving people who died of some disease such as cancer. Why? That question I will address at some point.

We also understand that positive family and friend relationships are invaluable for shaping a healing mindset, as are thinking positively and good nutrition and exercise. The keystone to it all is the spirit of a champion. It is this aspect that can be hard to define. While it has obvious religious connotations, there are many people who consider themselves spiritual but not religious. We also have the notion of someone with a “fighting” spirit or the indelible human spirit. When you meet someone like that, you remember them. That kind of spirit can be trained.

Over the course of this journey no matter how long it is, I will share my struggles and the strategies I try to master my mindset. I will share my wife’s story and the approach we take with training her mindset and the struggles that may come with that. Maybe she will even share some of her feelings directly, though that would be a big step out of her comfort zone. I will share any struggles my children are going through that they share with me or maybe they will share them directly. In short, I will share the ups and downs of this journey. I know there will be tears and fears we have to deal with. I pray these writings will be of value to many of you and I am sure it will help me.

The writings I share during this trial will undoubtedly touch upon religious or faith based beliefs and values that some of you may share, or may not. The intent will be to inform by sharing what I have learned and learn from the fields of psychology, biology/medicine, theology, and spirituality. I hope the knowledge, wisdom, and experiences that I have gained and will gain in this journey will prove valuable to others.

I am asking and encouraging you invite as many people who may have been or may be touched by those dreaded words – it’s cancer – so they can either gain hope or maybe even ad their own wisdom, knowledge, and spiritual understandings to the “conversation.”

Sometime over the next couple of days I will share my first article. It will be an outline of the intended mindset training “prescription” Donna and I will go through and the rationale behind it. I intend on applying HEAT to her life – habit, emotion, attitude training. It began yesterday when she said, “well, today is the day we find out if it is terminal or treatable.” My response was all cancers are treatable. I don’t know one that is 100% fatal.” She agreed.  “It’s cancer” does not mean it is death.