Do we have the capacity to heal ourselves?

A few days ago, I received a message from long-time correspondent, Ralph Haulk, in which he related some personal healing experiences that are rather astonishing. Mind over matter? Here it is below; you can decide for yourself.-t.h.g.

I’ve recently been focusing on body trauma and how it affects our thoughts and reactions.

 Several years ago, I banged my head, and the force nearly knocked me unconscious. As a result, a growth began to develop, not a mole, but similar. Not discolored,  but it kept getting larger until I could not comb my hair without hitting the growth. My barber would accidentally hit it while trimming my hair. I dealt with this for a bout 3 years, and then I began to focus my mind on it, touching and rubbing it with my fingers and saying “You have to go. I don’t need you”.  Whenever I thought about it, I would repeat that procedure. After a couple of weeks, I noticed it began to feel soft, and somewhat pliant, unlike the hard growth that had developed as a form of protection. After a month, it began to feel almost like a large blister filled with fluid. One day, I reached up to rub it, and there was nothing there. It has not returned after two years.

As a result of injury in the marines, I had knee surgery on my left knee, and as I got older, it began to get weaker, stiff, and I couldn’t support my weight. Just after I got out of the marines, I was working on a roof when the roof collapsed and fell through, injuring my right knee.

As a result, by the time I turned 60, both knees had begun to grow bone spurs that caused pain, and my right knee had a spur that grew through the knee(as shown on an x-ray), and it looked nearly big as my thumb. It was pulling my knee inward, throwing strain on my hips and getting my back out of alignment, so I had to be careful how I walked, or bent over, or even sudden movements in my sleep.

I couldn’t sleep well, because the strain on my hip would build up if I turned at certain angles. I went to the VA, and they said nicely “Get in line. We got more severe problems to worry about”.

So, because I had  nothing  better to do, I started doing what I did for the growth on my skull. I began rubbing my knees and imagining the bone spurs dissolving into my bloodstream, with the calcium going to more useful places. I imagined my hip coming back into alignment as my right leg straightened out.

Until that time, the misalignment of my hip and knees was so bad I had to walk in a modified sideways crab-step, pulling myself forward with my right leg, and bracing with my left , making “Chester” on the old “Gunsmoke” show look graceful by comparison.

 After a month of what I started calling guided meditation, I noticed my knee didn’t hurt as much. I finally got a good night’s sleep, fully relaxed. I looked at my right knee, and it didn’t seem so crooked and warped, and I could walk more nearly normal.

 At present, I can walk normal, squat to pick things up, which I couldn’t do before, and I can actually feel the ligaments, bones, and muscles in my right knee operating from a different angle, getting stronger as I exercise them.

I have begin to study and think about the way our minds work, and how we focus and adjust to trauma, rather than guiding our minds toward healing. Many ideas are resulting from this that may be useful in personal therapy. I’m looking for courses in that area that perhaps may qualify me to help others in this discovery. Any ideas?

Ralph

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