Hip Hip Hooray!

I have a hip permit. After successfully running the medical gauntlet – EKG, labs, upper GI, chest X-ray, consultations – I’ve been cleared for total-left-hip-replacement surgery a week from today. It’s really amusing to me, as a Realtor, that the clearance is called a “permit.” I feel like I’m going to be under construction, and, in a sense, I am. I have the orthopedic surgeon’s laminated business card showing my new hip in all its plastic and titanium glory. This healing journey is definitely a spiritual adventure. It involves much more than mere mechanical installation of a new hip. For that reason, I would like to dedicate this post to Louise Hay for her contributions to health and wholeness in writing and publishing her book You Can Heal Your Life.

Louise Hay healed herself of ovarian cancer after a diagnosis of terminal illness. As a metaphysical counselor, she applied what she learned from her own personal experience to assist others in discovering and using the full potential of their own creative powers to clear away blocks keeping them from robust health and having what they want in life.        

You Can Heal Your Life is the most dog-earred, taped-together book on my bookshelf.  I’ve had it for more than twenty years (published in 1984). In the back of the book, there is an alphabetical table of the “mental equivalents” of dis-ease listing (1) Physical Ailments; (2) their Probable Cause (mental and emotional); and (3) a New Thought Pattern to assist with healing. Louise Hay compiled the list from her own work as a licensed “practitioner,” or affirmative prayer counselor, and the work of others, especially Ernest Holmes. It’s not uncommon to greet these ideas with healthy skepticism. The proof is in the pudding. Look up one of your ailments. See if the “probable cause” fits. Apply the “new thought pattern” with feeling. Verify your own results. Empirical proof. Direct knowledge. It’s a “woo-woo” free zone.

Sample examples from the book include the following:

Problem:  Allergies. Probable Cause:  Who are you allergic to? Denying your own power (belief that something outside you has power over you). New Thought Pattern:  The world is safe and friendly. I am safe. I am at peace with life.

Problem:  Diabetes. Probable Cause:  Longing for what might have been. A great need to control. Deep sorrow. No sweetness left. New Thought Pattern: This moment is filled with joy. I now choose to experience the sweetness of today.

Problem: Hip/Hip Problems. Probable Cause: Carries the body in perfect balance. Major thrust in moving forward. Fear of going forward in major decisions. Nothing to move forward to. New Thought Pattern: Hip Hip Hooray – there is joy in every day. I am in perfect balance. I move forward in life with ease and with joy at every age. That certainly fits my experience of moving from California, where I lived for 65 years, to New Mexico, where I knew no one, had no job, no place to live and had never lived so far away from my son Grant, an only child.

For me, physical health problems are outer evidence of the invisible, inner mental, spiritual and emotional causes of dis-ease. I have found it can take some digging to get down to the root causes. Like weeds, the roots need to be removed, or the problem remains. Recently I’ve spent entire days in my garden doing the things my post-surgical self will not be doing for a while – setting pavers, lifting bags of bark, soil, decorative stones, digging holes, pulling weeds while sitting on the ground (yes, next to my walker!) I’m struck by the tenacity of elm tree seedling volunteers (AKA: “weeds”). As soon as the dime-sized, parchment-like seeds (which the wind ever-so-helpfully scatters by literally millions - large, black trash bags full) take hold, a long, deep, hard-to-remove tap root goes down. Such a metaphor for our deepest thoughts about our health. Establishing a new thought pattern is a spiritual practice. The roots of my hip problem, on the left, or feminine, side of my body, grow down to my relationship with my mother, childhood trauma and creative self-expression. Complete healing means addressing these roots in addition to having a new hip installed. Just a new thought is not enough – the reason affirmations often don’t work. The new thought has to be enlivened with felt, believing emotions in order to take form. This is the power of the mind and heart to heal. This is how Louise Hay healed herself of ovarian cancer.

Grant dramatically demonstrated the power of the heartmind to affect the body while in the ICU at UCLA being treated for stage-four melanoma. His dad, who previously had bypass surgery, was hospitalized with a large blood clot in his heart. We stopped to visit him on our way to check Grant into the hospital for a week of treatment. Worried about his dad, Grant was torn. He didn’t want to be hospitalized. He told us, “I just can’t lose one of you right now.” As soon as he was admitted and in his assigned bed, he started having the cascade of 20-30 side effects Interleukin-2 treatment produces: chills, fever, vomiting, diarrhea, “rigors” (shaking), high blood pressure, accelerated heart rate. There’s just one thing. The dose of Interleukin-2 had not yet been given. Grant had the side effects of the drug without the drug. During her rounds the following morning, Dr. Lee talked with Grant:

Dr. Lee:  You had all the side effects without the dose. How did you do that?

Grant:  I created it.

Dr. Lee:  Wow. That’s powerful.

They sent Grant home. He didn’t have to be there. He returned for treatment a week later once his dad was out of the hospital. This is the power of the mind and the emotions to affect the body. Hip Hip Hooray, Louise Hay.