The Mind-Body Connection: Is Your Brain Making You Sick? | Eckhart Tolle Explains

And you went to a doctor for physical treatment and not a single question about how do you feel? What is your mental state, your emotional state, how do you feel? No question. No, just look at the symptoms. And those traditional doctors would say, oh no, there's no connection. First question here is, does the mind create a physical problem to distract us from emotional pain? It is often the case that emotional pain that is not recognized when there is not enough awareness. The emotional pain exists beneath your level of awareness and it can come out as certain kinds of reactivity in daily life. So you are taken over by reactions to certain things that trigger that type of emotional pain that is in you, that you are completely unaware of. And emotional pain that is in total unawareness can very easily become a physical symptom. It transferred into the physical realm. Any kind of prolonged negative mental states which produce corresponding negative emotions affect the functioning of the physical organism. And even research has been done on this and been confirmed that negative states, mental, emotional states, affect, in the long term, affect the physical organism. You can verify it for yourself. If you are in a state of anxiety, thinking, thought of thoughts that create anxiety, fearful thoughts, usually not about the present moment, in present moment is fine, but about some imagined future moment, then that affects the body. Your breathing becomes shallow, your heartbeat increases, your entire energy field contracts. All kinds of physical symptoms appear. So there's no doubt that what goes on in the mind affects the body. And again, for a long time, doctors completely ignored that. They actually denied it. And you went to a doctor for physical treatment and not a single question about what? About how do you feel? What is your mental state, your emotional state, how do you feel? No question. No, just look at the symptoms. And those traditional doctors would say, oh no, there's no connection. Of course there is. You can teach your child that there is a connection between their mind and the body and immediately think of, imagine you are biting into a lemon, close your eyes and imagine you are biting into a lemon and taste it. And immediately you feel saliva accumulating in your mouth. And there is no lemon. There was just the thought of a lemon. So the thought creates a physical response in the body. It's just a tiny example. And then we have another thing that is totally, almost completely ignored by conventional mainstream medicine. The so called placebo effect. And all the drug companies, when they test their drugs, a certain number of test subjects, when the drugs are given to humans are just sugar pills or whatever they are, placebos, they contain nothing. But the test subject is not told. The test subject is told that this is a new, powerful drug. And always there is a significant percentage of people who become cured or if not cured, whose symptoms improve significantly after taking these placebo pills. In all clinical trials they have these results, not all of them, and sometimes the placebo is very close, helps as many people as the actual new powerful drug. But this is dismissed, oh, this is a placebo. So let's not look at that, because we are only interested in what this drug does. So all these placebo results are discarded and nobody seems to really ask, wow, there's the most powerful healing agent here. People heal themselves if they believe that they are being healed, but they have to believe it completely. So you can see how powerful the mind, how powerfully the mind can impact the body. And if we could explore a little bit more what placebo means and whether this could become in some way replace conventional, replace the taking of drugs and how to do that, of course that moves into the realm of spiritual healing, but there are vast possibilities there for healing. There are other factors that can bring about disease. Not all diseases are caused by mental negativity or dysfunctional thinking. Anger, sadness and so on. All kinds of negative emotions, envy, regret, guilt, they all impact the body. There are other factors. We live in a world that is full of poisonous substances created by the clever human mind. So we ingest poisonous substances all the time. And there are all kinds of, we are bombarded by all kinds of man made radiations. There may be certain genetic factors also, but the fact remains that there is a very strong correlation between how well the physical vehicle functions and how harmonious or disharmonious the mind operates. So it's everybody's responsibility, of course, to become aware of the negativity that they harbour inside. And of course, as part of this teaching is to recognize your identification with thinking which creates those structures. And you step out of that and many people will experience an improvement in their health. Surrender and presence often is also associated with a complete healing of physical symptoms. Surrender here means a space of acceptance of what is not acceptance of a disease. There's a huge difference between accepting a disease which is not a good thing, but accepting what is in the present moment. What's the difference? The disease is a conceptual form, a concept in the mind, whatever it may be. Let's say it's a serious disease, multiple sclerosis. Do I have to accept that I've been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and I need to accept that I have this disease called multiple sclerosis? No, that's a concept. When we talk of acceptance. All that is required is accepting whatever arises at this moment. So if something arises at this moment that you can feel that it's some form of disability or pain or weakness, that's what you surrender to. Not an idea of illness, just what arises at this moment. And when you bring that surrender to it, then often healing happens because the energy of presence burns up. One could say a large amount of karma of old stuff inside you with the physical manifestations of it or mental or emotional manifestations. In the presence of presence the past gets burned up. So often surrender makes healing much easier. It makes it easier for the body to heal itself because healing no doctor heals you. When healing happens it's always the intelligence that inhabits the body produces the healing and that can function more powerfully when you see surrender to life. And surrender to life is in the now. So never to the idea of illness but just what is now.