As I sat facing the doctor from the other side of his desk, I could feel my muscles beginning to tense up and my heart starting to race while he told me he was sending me to the emergency room for an immediate MRI because of the results of my blood work that was drawn just an hour prior to sitting in front of him. I had never had an MRI before and I was getting nervous because this was all happening so quickly. I had come to Urgent Care because of a mild stomach discomfort I would get after I eating, and after a couple weeks of hearing me comment about it my roommate urged me to get it checked out.

After the MRI, I went back to the doctor’s office to wait for the results. The waiting room is the worst place to be in times like these. This is when the mind likes to travel to those dark and scary places.

I actually knew the results of my blood work before the doctor because they were posted in my online profile when the tests were completed. Since I had the time in the waiting room before I was called back to see the doctor I decided to look up the results and find out what was tested and if the results were normal.

Almost all of the results were in the normal range with the exception of one… the pancreas.

The numbers were more than 3x the normal high, and while I waited I searched on the internet what that meant and found that most sites said that I either had pancreatitis or pancreatic cancer, neither of which sounded good. When the doctor wanted to get an MRI immediately after seeing the results, my mind drifted towards the latter.

My name was finally called to see the doctor again and get the results of the scan, and lucky for me they did not find any mass in or around my pancreas. He diagnosed me with pancreatitis, wrote a prescription for an antacid, and told me to adjust my diet to help reduce the inflammation. We made a follow up appointment for the following week to see if the numbers were going down, and he sent me on my way.

I was perplexed with how I got pancreatitis though. It was so random. How could everything else in my body be fine, yet the pancreas was inflamed? What caused it? What did I do to make this happen?

I was walking past my bookshelf the next day and caught a glimpse of Louise Hay’s book You Can Heal Your Life that I had picked up from a book sale the previous year, and I remembered that in the back of the book she had listed numerous conditions and diseases with the probable thought patterns that caused them. I grabbed the book and flipped through the appendix looking for pancreatitis, and there it was.

Pancreatitis - Probable Cause: Rejection. Anger and frustration because life seems to have lost its sweetness.

I dropped the book and literally laughed out loud. How could it be so specific and so… correct? It hit the nail right on the head, and that blew my mind.

Two months earlier my heart was broken by the worst heart break I had ever felt in my life. I was deeply in love with whom I thought to be “the one,” and she broke up with me in an email one week before I was flying out to spend the summer with her. She did not want to talk about it, and gave me no opportunity to do so. I was completely, and utterly rejected.

Over the two months since the breakup I was able to get over it and move on with my life, but the pain of that rejection was lingering under the surface and eventually bubbled up in my pancreas.

I was shocked that the link between the pancreas and rejection fit perfectly to what was happening with me, and I started using the prescribed affirmation that Louise Hay suggested for this condition. I also did what the doctor suggested, finishing the prescription and watching what I ate for a while, and the numbers were decreasing when I went for my follow up a week later. However, I knew that by understanding the root cause of the problem and clearing up my thought patterns around it that I would be able to heal without the need for any more medical attention.

I wrote the affirmation 5x every morning for 28 days and have never had an issue with my pancreas since.

It was this experience in 2012 that got me to see the mind/body connection, and that our physical health is secondary to our mental health. With this new insight I started referencing Louise Hay’s book when working with clients, and I found that oftentimes the “probable causes” she listed would resonate with them and their pains and conditions. This reinforced the connection between the body and the mind, and taught me that meditation and/or journaling are the most important activities a person can do to maintain their physical health.

A healthy mind maintains a healthy body.

If there is a disturbance in one’s mind and nothing is done to clear it up, then pain or disease will appear in the body, and that’s when people start to listen. However, it could be avoided if one is paying attention to the thoughts in his mind and making necessary changes to improve them.

“The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts.” Marcus Aurelius