We have all heard of the mind-body connection, but what is it, really, and how can an ordinary person develop a healthy awareness of its subtleties? 

Imagine you are a young woman in your twenties who has recently gone through a romantic break-up. You are someone who harbors deep fears about dying from cancer. In the weeks following the break-up, you are besieged by negative emotions: you miss your boyfriend, you feel unlovable, you blame yourself, you are afraid you will never find love. A mole on your skin starts to bother you. It gets bigger and begins to hurt.  You go to the doctor and your worst fear is confirmed.

Have you given yourself cancer? Have your negative emotions and deep-seated fear somehow activated the cells in the mole? Isn't this kind of thinking counter-productive, to say the least? Not only did your negative thinking (possibly) make you sick, now you hate yourself for hating yourself, a truly vicious cycle.

How can that cycle be broken? This is a question I think about often. How can one go from being her own worst enemy to her own best friend? There would seem to be a simple answer--love yourself--that is however less than simple to achieve. Too easily, such advice can flip into the realm of blame: you didn't love yourself enough, you brought bad upon yourself, you failed. 

Is the idea that we have any control over what happens to us mere wishful thinking? Is The Secret, for example, merely a New Age twist on the Puritan Ethic: a singular focus on the hard mental work necessary to achieve personal salvation?

There is a good deal of evidence to support the idea that our minds affect our physical beings, and vice versa, but I believe that connection is a part of a much larger, highly complex set of connections--with the environment, with other beings, with the universe. How does a lay person who is not a psychologist or a neuro-biologist or a shaman sort it all out?  

This is what I will be thinking out loud about in this journal over the next month. I'll also share links of interest. 

For today, have a look at a Psychology Today blog which argues that the mind-body dichotomy is a flawed construct: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/shift-mind/201001/beyond-the-mind-body-connection