Our bodies can be used to teach us many lessons. And most of those lessons come when you are not listening to what it is telling you. You aren’t paying attention when your knee hurts, you have constant headaches, are always tired, or feel sad. Pause and listen to what your mind may be telling you. Then you can try these ten ways to use your mind to heal your body.
Your mind is powerful. It is connected to your higher spirit. So, when I use the word mind, I’m not talking about the part that listens to your ego.
Your ego wants to tell you that you are different from everyone else, and you need to fear when someone else sees that as bad. So you think about all the ways you are different and judge yourself and others based on a made-up standard. Your mind knows that there is no standard. There is only you, and you are perfect, just like everyone else. You are pure love created by God.
There are many reasons why people get ill, and I won’t pretend to think I know what they all are or that we can avoid them. But, I do believe there is a lot you can do to help heal what causes your body pain and stress.
10 Ways to Use Your Mind to Heal Your Body
Find ways to feel happy.
When you are feeling happy, your mind releases all other feelings. The more you do things that make you smile, the less you focus on what might be making you ill. Here are a few suggestions.
- buy fresh flowers
- smile at someone else
- plan a vacation
- watch a comedy
- take a nap
- find 95 more ideas in this post.
Take breaks and breathe deeply.
When you pause, you can notice if your mind is trying to tell you something. Take a break and breathe whenever you feel stressed or any feeling that takes you out of alignment. Listen and, if necessary, change course. What are you doing that is causing that feeling? What can you do differently?
Create or find affirmations you can repeat often.
Affirmations can help bring your thinking and actions back in alignment with your physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Write them down, hang them all over your house, keep one in your pocket, etc.
I worked with a friend who has chronic pain for a couple of months using affirmations. Her pain didn’t go away, but her mind changed about how she dealt with it. It doesn’t control her anymore, and she can still find ways to enjoy life.
Use the search bar above and type in affirmations. I have many affirmations you can use. Here are a couple related to health.
- I love my body and all it does for me.
- I let go of shame and guilt to live a life of joy.
- My self-worth comes from pure love.
- When I feel joy, my body responds.
- I breathe in peace and breathe out shame.
- I breathe in love and breathe out fear.
- I breathe in forgiveness and breathe out guilt.
Do things that bring you joy.
What are you passionate about? The more you are focused on doing things that are playful, and fun, and bring you joy, the more you will be in alignment with your higher spirit, and the less time your ego will have to create any disconnect. Even if you don’t love your job or some of the things you need to do every day, find a way to give them purpose and feel good about doing them.
Listen to what your body is telling you.
Listening can be one of the easiest ways to use your mind to heal your body if you let it. When our mind uses our body to teach us something, we often decide it’s a sign of weakness on our part and either push through or ignore it. But what if you listened, paid attention, and course-corrected?
For example:
- If you are a runner and your knee starts to bother you, do you keep running, or stop and maybe try a different exercise that does not hurt your knee?
- If you get a stomach ache every time you eat eggs, do you stop eating eggs or justify the timing or how they were made and keep eating them?
- When you get headaches every night after a long day of stressful work, do you push through it and take lots of medications and go to the doctor? Or, do you find a less stressful job and notice the headaches go away?
Be mindful of how you eat and how you move.
Pay attention to what you put in your body and the energy you put out. What feels good? If you feel guilty or shame about what you are eating, it will produce ill-intended results on your body. The same goes for exercise, if you think you have to do certain kinds or certain amounts of activity to be healthy, then you are setting yourself up for failure. Just move your body in the ways that make you feel good and eat the foods that make your mind and body happy. Your body will respond.
Pay attention to your thoughts.
Listen to the thoughts that keep repeating in your head. The thoughts that use comparison or judgment are coming from your ego. The part of your mind that wants you to feel separate from your higher spirit. When your thoughts are on repeat that you are unhealthy or not as good as someone else, your body will respond to that too and make it true. Start your morning with positive thoughts or mantras that set you up for a great day. Notice when your thoughts go negative and pause to let them go.
Visualization
Visualize your body in a healed and perfect state of well-being. See yourself doing all of the things that bring you joy. You can visualize specific ailments being healed or focus on overall health. It only takes between 3-5 minutes a day of visualization for this to have an effect. And when you are doing your visualization, be sure to FEEL the way you want to when your manifestation appears.
Forgive yourself and others.
Forgive yourself and others for judging and believing that anyone is flawed. Holding grudges or feeling guilt creates stress in your body, creating illness. Let forgiveness bring you peace and calm and a body that works smoothly.
Believe it is all possible.
Of course, none of these ways of using your mind to heal your body will work if you don’t believe it will. That is common sense, right? Since you are reading this, you probably know that some of this is true, so the next step is to try a few of them. You can read a lot of case studies or books, but the real proof that your mind is powerful is when it works for you. It is through your own experiences.
Finally, consider the placebo effect.
“The placebo effect is a phenomenon often seen in clinical trials and other tests of new medicines. Clinical trials usually involve three groups of patients: one given the new medicine, a second given something that looks like the new medicine but has no effect (a placebo), and the third given no medicine at all.
Doctors often notice that the patients given non-effective medicine show signs of improvement. This has been documented over and over again. There is no clinical reason for this improvement (the medicine that they are being given cannot cause these effects, because it contains no active ingredients). The only conclusion is that these patients improve because they believe they are being given something that will make them better.
This is the placebo effect and shows the power of the mind.” (Taken from Skillsyouneed.com)
“Your body’s ability to heal is greater than anyone has permitted you to believe.”