~a column by Colleen O’Brien
A chance encounter as I stand in my driveway watching clouds – cumulus, big and fluffy, moving almost imperceptibly behind the tree-scape – a woman I don’t know stops to look at what I’m looking at, and we start talking.
After half an hour, we go into the house to get a glass of water and continue talking. She can’t “stay very long.” Three hours later, she leaves, and we have plans to meet again.
She’s written a book on practicing mindfulness meditation to heal oneself; I’m wearing a brace to help stabilize two broken vertebrae. I have a lot of questions, and she has a lot to tell me.
Her name is Peggy Huddleston, and she is a psychotherapist who wrote a book, Prepare for Surgery, Heal Faster; A Guide of Mind-Body Techniques, on how to help yourself if you’re broken or have a disease and are depressed about it.
She’s not the first one in the modern era to study this kind of therapy. Among others, Dr. Andrew Weil wrote Spontaneous Healing in 1995, and currently, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital are studying mindfulness in relation to healing from trauma.
Mindfulness is be-here-now therapy. Rather than wandering around in my busy gerbil brain castigating myself for falling off the couch and breaking my neck, I can concentrate on being kind and loving to that self. I can practice training my brain – being mindful (that means being in the moment), purposeful and positive – rather than reverting to the overused self-talk of “I’m scared I won’t heal,” “I’ll never get well,” “If I weren’t so stupid, I wouldn’t have walked on a couch.”
Huddleston’s idea is that talking positively to my broken bones will make a difference – both in healing time and durability of the healing. Her scientific research is simple and hopeful. It is not hocus pocus, wishful thinking or religious fervor. It is documented fact through scientific study. In this country alone, from a lone study in the early 1990s to more than 200 currently, we are progressing into the past: the idea of mind body healing is not new at all, for the ancient Greeks, under the auspicious practice of the god of medicine Asclepius and his daughter Hygieia, the mind-body healing process and recuperation from illness was common practice in 7th century BC.
What went around long ago and far away comes around in the present day. After writing to my longtime Jefferson friend Becky Coyne White about my new information on healing, she wrote to me: “Mindful meditation feels essential to me, and I love my app from the Mindful Education Program at UCLA; keeps me balanced, and I know their work is based on good science and research. Wish and ask for your good health, spirits and perseverance, Col.”
Serendipitous encounter watching clouds leads to positive fatefulness in recovery of health; I’m the latest acolyte of mindfulness.
