Quotes: Role of psychology in healing the body

Rollo May:

"When I was ill with tuberculosis two and a half decades ago, I found that my inherited "will power" was strangely ineffective. In those days, the only cure was bed rest and carefully graduated exercise. We could not will ourselves to get well, and the "strong-willed," dominating type of person sick with TB generally got worse. But I found that listening to my body was of critical importance in my cure. ... This may seem like a poetic and "mystical" viewpoint for someone seriously ill to be indulged in, but actually it was a hard-rock, empirical issue of whether I would live or die. ... There is, therefore, a willing which is not merely against bodily desires but with the body, a willing from within; it is a willing of participation rather than opposition.
"

J. Allan Hobson:

"The best doctor, then, is the self, the only agent who can engineer sound health practices. This view, and its application to our mental and physical health, is something I call 'scientific humanism.'"

Edward Tenner:

"But as yet there is still no reliable technique to establish the existence of suffering. Insurance company lawyers may call automobile whiplash injury a license to steal because no objective imaging procedure or test can diagnose it, but a strained muscle or sprained ligament in the neck is an extremely painful condition that can arise from even a minor collision. As often happens, such injuries may easily be faked. And perhaps there is a borderline region in which honest people, knowing that even minor symptoms are grounds for compensation, subconsciously focus on their pain, amplifying it. Yet the most recent research on whiplash injury suggests that there is no relationship between "neuroticism" and time needed for recovery."

Sources

Rollo May, Love and Will, New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1969. p 239-240.

J. Allan Hobson. The Chemistry of Conscious States: How the Brain Changes its Mind. (Originally 1994). p 225.

Edward Tenner. Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. p. 213.

No limit to the light that we share

The world begins in darkness.

Andrew Taylor:

"I had forgotten how dark it can be in the country. It’s never dark in London. I’ve always been a city-dweller. There were neither stars nor a moon. The torch beam shone directly in front of me, illuminating the surface of the road. It gave off such an inadequate and partial light that it had the paradoxical effect of emphasizing the darkness rather than dispelling it."

When we share the world, it lights up.

Rollo May:

"On this dimension, will enters the picture not as a denial of wish but as an incorporation of wish on a higher level of consciousness. The experiencing of the blue of the sky behind forsythia blossoms on the simple level of awareness and wish may bring delight and the desire to continue or renew the experience; but the realization that I am the person who lives in a world in which flowers are yellow and the sky so brilliant, and that I can even increase my pleasure by sharing this experience with a friend, has profound implications for life, love, death, and the other ultimate problems of human existence."

When it lights up, there is no limit.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

"It is another of the miraculous things about mankind that there is no pain nor passion that does not radiate to the ends of the earth. Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world."

Sources

Andrew Taylor. The Leper House. Kindle Single, 2014.

Rollo May. Love and Will. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1969. p. 267.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Wind, Sand and Stars. (1939) Translated into English by Lewis Galantiere. London: The Folio Society, 1990. p. 159.