Ashok Gupta explores how fear and resistance complicate chronic illness recovery. He discusses acceptance and surrender as tools for retraining your brain's response to illness, and how letting go of the fight against your condition can reduce anxiety.
The second one is that fear, that anxiety, that resistance to what we're experiencing and notice in your body right now. If you have symptoms, are you holding your body against the symptoms and what you're experiencing? Are you saying I can only be happy when this illness is gone? That keeps us stuck in the future, always anticipating I'll be happy, I'll be free when this illness is gone. But no, let's reverse the causality. When I am happy and at peace in this moment, then I will move faster along the journey towards healing. And what is that anxiety doing to us? It is keeping that physical resistance where there is a tension or a holding of the body. And then there is that emotional resistance where we experience fear, anxiety and grief. There's that mental resistance where the thoughts are very busy. That monkey mind. Let me introduce you to Mike the monkey. He always loves making an appearance in our Facebook lives. He loves the audience. This is our monkey mind that says, oh no, I'm feeling unwell. What does this mean? How will I feel in the future? I'm going to feel like this forever. So we eternalize the problems we catastrophize. Can we notice this in our monkey mind? Take a step back. Witness what your mind is doing. In fact, the most important question in self development is, wait for it. What is my mind doing now? What is Mike the monkey doing now? Without judgment, without trying to change it. What is my mind doing now? When you experience chronic illness, you'll notice that it catastrophises, eternalizes, compares yourself to others. Oh look, they got better from the illness. Why can't I do it? Oh look, they're doing so amazing in life and I'm stuck with this condition. So let's really be the witness to the mental noise about our condition. And the journey to acceptance is through the brain retraining. So as you know, as part of the Gupta program, we teach you how to retrain the brain. Remember, these are not. This aspect I'm talking about is obviously conscious. But brain retraining is not cbt. It is not saying it's in the mind. It is a deep retraining of our nervous system to stop this over reaction of the immune system and nervous system. It's a very different thing. But brain retraining also helps us deal with this type of emotion which might be compromising our immune system.
