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Welcome!
In this free newsletter, Neil F. Neimark, M.D., board-certified family practitioner, brings you his heart-felt and uplifting advice on how to create greater health and healing in our lives by applying the principles of mind/body medicine. Mind/body medicine is a new approach to health and healing which honors the patient as a "whole" person, not just some "body" which is ill or diseased. The mind/body approach teaches that we must reach out for the best that medical science has to offer and reach within to mobilize our own internal resources for healing.
Read below to see a preview of each issue's content and then click on the desired issue to view the complete newsletter.
Mind & Body: Issue 1: Introduction to mind/body medicine. Within each one of us there is a healing system which has its own inner wisdom and deep intelligence. This healing system orchestrates all other body systems in their attempt to fight off illness, heal our wounds, and optimize our health. Norman Cousins says "The doctor has a role beyond the prescription pad to invoke the patient's own bodily resources for healing." Mind/body medicine stretches us to expand our understanding of what is possible for us through the power of the mind. In the human potential movement we say, "As new realities are demonstrated, new capacities come into being." We learn from physician and healer, Rachel Naomi Remen M.D. that "there is an impulse, a yearning in each one of us, towards our own wholeness.
Mind & Body: Issue 2: We think of healing as a physical cure, but when we move beyond a cure, we move into the "healing process", which is about our physical health AND our emotional, mental and spiritual health. So healing becomes anything that moves us towards a greater sense of wholeness, acceptance (of self and others) and inner peace. When we cut ourselves, the pain brings our attention to the cut. In that attention, we clean the wound and bring the edges together. In this coming together, the healing process begins. The healing itself is a mystery. Bernie Siegel, M.D. says we "don't have to yell into the wound to tell it how to heal." We rely on the body to heal. We need only to bring the edges together, to close the gap, to transcend the isolation. Like physical healing, we also heal on an emotional and spiritual level.
Mind & Body: Issue 3: We all crave a deeper sense of health and vitality in our lives. The master key for unlocking our healing system teaches us that we must participate in our own healing by developing a passionate involvement with life. We must engage life, taking steps towards creating the life we choose and the legacy we will leave. We cannot live life from the sidelines. The meaning of the Latin root for the word "passion" means "to suffer". Being passionately involved with life means that as we pursue our dreams in life, we may "suffer" by experiencing failure, rejection, loss or pain. Yet, at the same time, we realize that the pursuit of our dreams is more powerful than our fears. This allows us to find meaning beyond our suffering. This takes dedication, discipline and perseverance.
Mind & Body: Issue 4: Learning how to live more passionately defines for ourselves a deeper sense of our own wholeness and purpose in life. An inspiring story of gardener John Florios (from Bernie Siegel's book Peace, Love & Healing), illustrates the importance of developing a passionate involvement with life. In following what is most precious to us, we realize our own potential to make the world more beautiful. We all must learn to do those things which bring to us and to the world a deeper, richer sense of what is good and meaningful in life. We must learn to follow our hearts and refuse to be defeated by difficult circumstances. In so doing, we are reminded that even in the face of our own personal tragedies, we can help to make the world a more beautiful place.
Mind & Body: Issue 5: All forms of healing (physical, mental, emotional and spiritual) ultimately require us to wrestle with the question of who we are and what we were put on this world to accomplish. Healing, in its essence, is a search for meaning in our lives, a search for what makes each one of us utterly unique and unrepeatable. The first key for unlocking our healing system teaches us to develop a rich inner life, by following our true longing. Our true longing is not about following what poet David Whyte calls our "surface desires" (money, power, beauty, fame, sex, etc.) but rather it is about following our deeper yearnings to love and be loved. We cannot abandon our deeper desires and longings in the pursuit of "making a living". We must learn to weave our deeper desires and true longings into the daily fabric of our lives. Developing a rich inner life requires us to balance our responsibilities in the outer world with the life-enhancing forces of our inner world.
Mind & Body: Issue 6: We often view our state of physical health as being determined solely by our genetics, our physiology and our chance exposure to toxins, viruses, infections and the like. Working with a model developed by John Travis, M.D. and Regina Ryan, we learn that our state of physical health and illness is only the "tip" of the iceberg. In order to completely understand our state of physical health, we must look beneath the surface to the lifestyles we choose, our psychological choices (the thoughts, feelings, attitudes and beliefs we hold) and the spiritual choices we make (our inner life, our belief in a higher power and our degree of acceptance and love of self and others). We learn, that on some level, the lifestyles we choose work for us, even the apparently unhealthy ones. By becoming more aware of our deeper need for love and acceptance, we can learn to find it appropriately and avoid making unhealthy choices in our lives. For lasting change to occur, we must address the deeper psychological and spiritual aspects of our lives.
SPECIAL EDITION: Mind/Body Solutions for Surgery: In this special edition of Mind & Body, Dr. Neimark shows us how simple preoperative mind/body interventions can speed our recovery from surgery, minimize post-operative blood loss, reduce anxiety and shorten our hospital stay. Don't miss this issue. Based on the latest advances in the area of behavioral anesthesia, this issue is a must if you or a loved one requires surgery in the near future. Norman Cousins once said: "the highest exercise of a physician's skill is to prescribe not just out of a little black bag, but out of his or her knowledge of the human healing system." Advances in mind/body research are now showing us the specific ways in which we can reach beyond our "little black bags" and help patients activate their own internal healing system. These advances allow us a measure of coping and self-care that can greatly improve our physical and psychological well being. In this special edition, we reveal new understandings in our knowledge of the human healing system.
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