true-healing-stories — The Connection: Mind your Body

The Connection features six true stories of people who have added mind body medicine to their approach to healing a chronic illness.

Whether it’s recovering after a heart attack, coming back from incurable cancer, healing severe back pain, becoming pregnant after an infertile diagnosis, or recovering from multiple sclerosis, the stories are real and remarkable in their simplicity.

Each person takes a different approach to his or her recovery. Their stories show the power of stress reduction, relaxation, group support, meditation, faith, belief and finding emotional balance through things like professional therapy.

While each of the people featured in the film is committed to their mind body practice, they also believe their approach should be used in conjunction with best modern medical practice.

Dr Craig Duncan

“If you do not have your mind in some sort of balance, it doesn’t matter how healthy your body is.”

Craig Duncan didn’t believe his doctor when he was told he’d had a heart attack and was lucky to be alive. The 43-year-old is a leading sports scientist, who works with elite Australian athletes. He was in peak physical fitness. He ran regularly. He was vegetarian and did not have high blood pressure or high cholesterol. But Craig had suffered a Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection.

“When I looked up the literature – there had only been a hundred and fifty cases reported and the majority of these were an autopsy.”

At the time of his heart attack Craig was under enormous pressure in his work and personal life. I was under enormous stress and I had been for a long, long time. A lot of it was self-imposed and just rushing around at a million miles an hour.

“I was frustrated and unhappy and that was difficult. I was struggling to sleep, or sleep well, and even though I might be healthy on the outside… it all became too much.”

Craig is very thankful for modern medicine and has had surgery. He also takes medication. But his near death experience has completely changed his life. He has taken on a far less stressful academic job and now consults to football clubs rather than bearing the brunt of the football season pressure. He’s also added meditation and prayer his daily healthy lifestyle practices.

Dr. Craig Duncan is internationally recognized in the area of sport science and human performance. He works with Australia’s elite athletes including working as head of performance with the NSW NRL State of Origin squad, the Western Sydney Wanderers FC. He currently lecturers at the Australian Catholic University in the field of sport science.

Prof. George Jelinek

“I think I got sick in hindsight because everything in my life was really out of whack. It was really out of balance and I was grossly over-committed to my work. And that was just the beginning of it. I mean, that was the thing that drove all the other things that ended up out of balance.”

Professor George Jelinek was the head of an Emergency Department in a major Australian hospital when one day, while doing his rounds he felt a strange sensation in his feet. In a matter of days he was numb from the waist down. When a scan revealed lesions on his brain he learned he had Multiple Sclerosis (MS), the same disease that made his mother take her own life in 1981. At the time of his diagnosis George was at the height of his career, working countless hours as the first appointed Professor of Emergency Medicine in Australasia.

“You see all these other people who are sick and you never expect that it can happen to you”

MS is an autoimmune disease that can be extremely debilitating and thought to be genetically inheritable. When she took her own life, George’s mother had been wheelchair bound and unable to feed or wash herself. George was 23 at the time and had just finished his medical degree. He was about to travel the world, and it was at his going away party that he’d learned of her death.

“To be diagnosed with MS was just an enormous, an enormous blow. I mean, it’s impossible to really to adequately convey how life changing that is to someone who hasn’t had the diagnosis”

Months later, fatigued and unable to stand for long periods, George found himself on medication that did little to resolve his symptoms. He decided to put his skills as a doctor and researcher to work by searching the medical literature for answers. Before long he had thousands of peer reviewed academic research papers from which he could formulate his own treatment program.

Buried in the literature were recommendations for a number of lifestyle adjustments that included a plant based diet, exercise, vitamin D and daily meditation. George also sees a counselor in order to process his emotions, and writes in a diary regularly. He believes the diet and exercise component to his new way of life to be the easy part, but by following this regime he has managed to fully overcome MS.

He’s written two books about his journey; Taking Control of Multiple Sclerosis, Overcoming Multiple Sclerosis, and Recovering from Multiple Sclerosis and has a dedicated website that details the scientific evidence behind his approach. He also established retreats for people with MS at the Gawler Foundation.

Having overcome a supposedly incurable disease, George considers himself living proof that the ability to adapt to change is imperative to good health.

“From what I’ve seen in my own personal experience now, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to start a conversation about recovery from MS. Why not? It’s just another chronic illness like many of the others we see in the West. Why couldn’t you recover from that?”

Scott Stephens

“The truth of the matter is, I never grasped the idea that something in my life needed to be changed. Not until it was too late, right at the end. I never addressed the problems. I never looked to myself. You know, I just looked to the medical system and whacked a drip in my arm and sat there and said, ‘She’ll be right mate’. Like that’s the mentality that I had. But I wasn’t right because it kept coming back.”

“I was a terminal patient. I had Stage IV Melanoma. And here I am, cancer free 6 ½ years later.”

Scott Stephens is not the typical kind of person you would expect to find meditating under a tree for two hours a day. The Aussie carpenter loved nothing more than going to the pub, having barbecues with friends and surfing. But at 24 years old, he was diagnosed with Metastatic Melanoma, an aggressive skin cancer.

“My doctor said, ‘It doesn’t get any more serious’… I had Stage IV Melanoma and people with stage IV melanoma didn’t get better.”

Scott had various surgeries and drugs over a number of years, but shortly after he was married and was ready to start his new life, doctors told him the cancer had spread to his bowel and chest and they had run out of options.

Scott hit rock bottom, but a friend told him about The Gawler Foundation, an organization providing cancer retreats and programs with an integrated approach to healing. After doing the retreat Scott filled his fridge with organic vegetables, began to meditate two hours a day, took up Qi Gong each morning, and concentrated on feeling more positive. Subsequent scans revealed Scott’s tumors had gone. His doctor was astounded.

“I think the easiest way to sum it up for someone is: Would I have got well without all these approaches like meditation and essentially, looking after yourself? No. Would I have got well with just that and no chemical intervention? Maybe. But if you wanted to break it down, the drugs weren’t going to cure me. Not by themselves.”

Ian Gawler, who is also featured in the The Connection is the founder of the Gawler Foundation where Scott did his retreat. You can read about his story here.

Ian Gawler

“There’s absolutely a potential within the human body to recover from a major illness. It only has to be done once to show it’s possible.”

an Gawler was only 26 years old when he was told his cancer was incurable and he had weeks to live. He’d been first diagnosed with bone cancer in his right leg in 1974 and doctors decided amputation from the hip down was the best treatment for the young athlete. But despite the major surgery, the cancer spread to his chest and his pelvis.

As a young veterinarian, Ian had seen animals healing against the odds and decided he would try everything he could to help his body recover. With the guidance of Australian psychiatrist Ainslie Meares, Ian began mediating and embarked on an intensive program of self-reflection as well as following a strict plant based diet.

Ian also sought help from the best medical practice of the day and had palliative radiotherapy and underwent three cycles of experimental chemotherapy. He also traveled to India where had an audience with healer Sai Baba.

“I met some remarkable people who were pioneers in that field and, with a whole lot of help from them, a little bit of medical help, and a lot of work on my part, I managed to get well.”

Two years after he was told his cancer was terminal, Ian was declared healed. People all over the world heard about his story and wondered what he’d done and whether it could help them. He wrote a best selling book, called You Can Conquer Cancer and began running support groups and retreats. This has now become The Gawler Foundation, which runs health and well being programs for thousands of people.

He is the recipient of the Order of Australia Medal (OAM), which in the Australian honours system is awarded for outstanding achievement and service.

Ian does not claim to have a cure for cancer, but believes people can create their healthiest lives whatever their circumstances.

Scott Stephens, who is also featured in the film as a cancer survivor draws upon the techniques he learned at a Gawler Foundation retreat.

There have been many thousands of people who’ve tried these things over thirty years now and really my stories got less and less significant because the real body of the work is the testament of all the people who’ve done these things over many years.

Ann Salerno

“The doctors that I had been to had not really attended to how this infertility treatment and journey had been affecting me emotionally. I didn’t realize it was happening but I started feeling more and more depressed.”

“All my testing was normal. All the signals were happening at the right time and still, nothing happened.”

Ann Salerno was 33 years old, had been newly married and was ready to start a family, but after trying for six months to conceive she started to despair. She went to a fertility specialist who told her everything was normal and there was no reason she couldn’t conceive a baby. As a specialist doctor who cares for children with kidney disease she was working with children every day, and with every month that passed and she wasn’t pregnant, her pain grew.

“You know, part of the difficulty of infertility, I believe very strongly, is the isolation because there’s a shame associated with it for some reason in our society, that most women keep it extremely private. Many of them don’t tell anybody except their spouse. And I think that isolation, which is also very unnatural for women I believe, is part of what feeds the depression.”

About a year into her journey Ann realized her mind was playing a role in her infertility when her pet chickens stopped laying eggs after a coyote killed one of them. Before that, they had laid an egg every day. Gradually, each chicken took a different amount of time to start laying eggs again.

“It was really just a wake-up call that this simple animal model of a chicken and how them feeling that there was danger and feeling stressed or saddened by the loss of their friend had affected their fertility and their ability to ovulate.”

Ann sought out Dr. Alice Domar’s mind body program for women with infertility. It involved learning mind body techniques such as eliciting the relaxation response, meditation, and yoga, as well as understanding how we to restructure thoughts to be more positive thoughts. Part of the program also involved meeting in a weekly group with other infertile women.

“Just looking around the room and saying ‘I’m not alone, I’m not a freak, I’m just, you know, another woman that has a struggle like the rest of them’, and that was just extremely powerful in terms of just turning my mood around and helping me to feel more optimistic about my life regardless of whether I got pregnant or not.”

After trying various fertility drugs, Ann decided she felt comfortable only doing one round of IVF, and fertilizing only one egg. But she continued doing her mind body work. She ended up conceiving.

“I just felt a contentment that I had never felt before in my life, you know. I had accomplished a lot of great things that I’m very proud of and I worked really hard for, but this was something different. It was a feeling like, if I never accomplished anything or never did anything special for the rest of my life, that it was ok because he just sort of completed my journey.”

Two and a half years later, Ann fell pregnant again naturally. She believes that she has let go of a lot of inner stress and that helped her body prepare for another pregnancy.

Jason Wachob

“I think the most powerful thing is just realizing that everything is connected and once you realize that, things become a lot clearer.”

“I just couldn’t function. It was awful. I went to see two different specialists and both of them told me I needed back surgery.”

Jason Wachob’s back pain was so bad he could barely walk. At the time the entrepreneur was running a new company, constantly flying around the country and cramming his 6-foot body into tight plane seats. He was traveling so much that he would often wake up not knowing what time zone he was in. The stress and the constant compression of his body in unnatural positions resulted in crippling back pain. Jason had two extruded disks and saw two specialist doctors who told him he needed surgery.

“So much of the stress is the stress of the illness and being stressed about having the illness, not the stress that’s causing the illness.”

Jason is a former Wall Street trader who wasn’t inclined towards healing traditions of the East. But with the encouragement of his girlfriend (now wife), in a last ditch effort to heal before going under the knife, Jason turned to Yoga.

He started simply. Every day, twice a day for fifteen minutes, he would do the same five poses. After just one week he started to feel better. After a month he was walking for two blocks without pain. It started to work. Encouraged by the results, he kept it up, even before flights in airport boarding lounges.

Jason soon became ready to step up his practice and started a flow style yoga practice that focuses on a moving body and paying attention to breath. Today he is completely pain free.

“We’re used to pushing and going faster but paying attention and slowing down is literally what we need mentally and physically.”

His journey was so profound, that Jason turned his entrepreneurial skills to a new endeavor – MindBodyGreen a wellness and lifestyle website which aims to make healthy living achievable for everyone.