Healing your body and ridding it of a disease, or any life-threatening condition needs to include a healthy mindset. It is critical in a strategy to get well.

If you are battling cancer or are working with a family member or friend to help them fight then you should:

1. See your doctor or primary care practitioner and access the best expertise to fight your disease with knowledge, science and the latest medicine.
2. You should change your diet and eat well, consuming only healing, natural foods that support your health and well being.
3. And then you should get to work on your mindset.

Failure to do #3 is a missed opportunity to use massive and highly effective tool that can be used to fight your disease and heal your body, and cause real measurable healing.

You see, behind everything you do, and everything you are is your beliefs. Your mindset is critical in the healing process. And optimizing it to heal and get well again requires some very specific steps.

So here is how to change your mindset to cure yourself.

How to change your mindset to cure yourself

The New York Times bestselling book Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds, lists nine key factors cancer fighters should take to cure themselves, aside from the traditional methods of Western medicine or after its failed them.

Dr. Kelly Turner, who wrote the book, studied the cases of 1,500 cancer survivors in 10 countries. She discovered that they:

1. Radically changed their diet.
2. Took control of their health.
3. Followed their intuition above all else.
4. Used herbs and supplements under a doctor’s supervision.
5. Worked on releasing negative emotions.
6. Worked on being positive.
7. Embraced social support.
8. Deepened their spiritual connection.
9. Found a strong reason for staying alive.

Only two items on the above list – changing your diet and taking natural supplements – are physical. The rest of the items have to do with emotional support and shifting your mindset.

Why mindset is critical to healing

Thought and action are intimately connected. This is a scientific principle. Have a thought like “I’m hungry” and you will go eat something.

So when you’re sick and your thoughts are positive, and you’re genuinely excited about your future, you will take more positive actions to heal your body. More positive actions will predictably lead to positive health results.

The challenge around changing your mindset is how to do it. It’s less obvious than following a guideline like “embrace social support” or “eat natural unprocessed foods”. Shifting your mindset can be a bit more complex. Here are the most effective ways to release negative emotions and encourage positives feelings.

How to release negative emotions

Have you ever experienced a knot – a painful build-up of lactic acid – in a muscle after physical fitness? Press on that knot, apply heat or cold to it and the tension releases. You feel better. That’s similar to the way negative emotions are stored in the body.

Negative emotions, such as resentment, sadness, anger, jealousy, get held in your nervous system like a knot in the body. This often happens when you don’t process the emotion properly at the time the event occurs. So the emotion gets suppressed and held versus released.

Imagine you’re playing a sport with a team of your peers. You jump, land and injure your ankle. You want to cry it’s so painful but you’re also embarrassed. So you hold back your tears. You laugh instead. This is how emotion is sidestepped and stored versus being naturally felt, processed and moved out of the body.

The first step in releasing any negative emotion is to notice it. The easiest way to figure out what emotions and situations are putting stress on your body is to ask yourself these questions:

• What haven’t I been able to get over from my past?
• What is my emotional home and why do I keep going back to it? (Once again it’s likely linked to a painful event in the past)
• Who haven’t I been able to forgive?

There are many ways to release negative emotions. At the root of all these methods is connecting your body to your mind, bringing yourself to those negative emotions and past events and feel what you felt. The way to emotional freedom is through emotion not around it.

Here are the most effective ways to release negative emotions:

Visualization

Your brain doesn’t know the difference between imagining doing something and actually doing it. The simplest way to release negative emotions is to close your eyes and bring yourself back to past events you haven’t been able to get over. Experience those events as vividly as possible. Feel what you felt.

Then, consider all sides of the event, and from the perspective of other people. Bring loving emotions into the event. Distort the picture in your mind by making it black and white or bringing white light into it.

Do whatever you need to do to see the event in a positive light and with empathy. Visualize all the good things that have come out of that past event even if it was painful.

You may need to do this multiple times. Try to alter the picture in different ways until you find what works for you.

Meditation

Many types of meditation are helpful at healing and relaxing the nervous system. Meditation is specifically powerful for practicing forgiveness.

When meditators being monitored by brainwave machines focused on people they needed to forgive their alpha waves were at their peak.

To release negative feelings towards others and situations, focus on an image of the person or situation and work on bringing in empathy and forgiveness.

It might help you to see the person you’re trying to forgive as a baby. See them growing up and being harmed by the world or other people. See that they may have done something to hurt you but that it was not intentional. It was a result of their conditioning.

Carve out a daily meditation time, 20 minutes a least to work on breathing and quieting your mind and working through your negative emotions.

EFT

Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) is a mind and body therapy that corrects energy flow to the body, which gets disrupted by negative thoughts and emotions.

Using EFT, negative emotions can be processed and released when you do a simple two-step process of 1) mentally tuning into a negative event or feeling and 2) tapping specific meridian points on the body with your fingertips to correct the energy flow.

While it may seem odd, the process is highly scientific. Chinese medicine discovered the meridian system 5,000 years ago. The meridian system is your body’s invisible energy flow.

When you connect to a negative thought and disrupt your body’s energy flow, you can easily correct it by physically touching meridian points on your body to loosen the energy. Think of it like releasing lactic acid and knots when you get a massage.

Story Writing

A simple way to release negative emotions that are connected to past events is to write a story about them. Write out the situation as if you were there. Use emotional language. Get all your negativity out on paper.

Then, read the story out loud. Read it to yourself in a mirror or to someone you trust. Read the story over and over. Eventually, you’ll find that the story becomes just that. A story. It loses its emotional sting. You easily get over the situation and can move forward.

Brainspot Therapy

This is very effective for correcting athletic blocks. For this type of therapy, you’ll need to seek out a brain spot practitioner. They will sit across from you and ask you to talk about a negative event or person. While you do this, they will look at your eyes. They will be able to see your eyes fixate on a specific area. They will have you hold your stare in that area while you continue to talk.

Where your eyes go is directly connected to the area in your brain where the memory tied to that emotion is. When you talk through the situation, you process and release the emotional knot around the stored memory.

How to thinking positively and feel positive emotions

If you want to work on changing your mindset to heal your body, it’s not just about releasing negative emotions, it’s also about growing more positive thought connections. Here are the most effective ways to do that.

Control your focus

What you focus on causes what you feel at any given moment. If you close your eyes and focus on a favorite pastime, food or person, you’ll feel good. If you focus on something you hate, you’ll feel bad.

In both scenarios, you’re either stimulating happy chemical pathways or negative emotional pathways in your brain. So to build a more positive mindset, focus on positive things more.

As soon as you notice you feel bad or you can see you’re focusing on negative things, take control. Close your eyes and focus on as many good things as you can. Get into it. Do this whenever you need to.

You’ll start to train your brain to go to positive thoughts more naturally and easily.

Engage in frivolous fun

When is the last time you had fun for the sake of having fun? Go have fun. Frivolous fun is fun without a purpose. Pastimes and hobbies such as: Gardening, painting, playing sports, laying on a beach, pottery, writing, going on a roller coaster, playing video games, are critical and especially when you are sick.

When you have more fun your brain increases the flow of happy chemicals. Fun will become a routine and feeling good will become your emotional home.

Physically activate your happy chemicals

Frequently engage in physical activities that get your happy brain chemicals flowing. Here are some simple ways to do that:

1. Gentle aerobic activity such as biking, swimming, dancing, jogging
2. Yoga
3. Touch another human. Give some hugs to someone you love or cuddle to release oxytocin in your brain
4. Hot or cold therapy. Do cryotherapy or go to a sauna. Even just sitting in the sun can be great for altering your mood.

Shift your language

What you say out loud and internally is critical. You can think more positively by choosing new words. For instance, if you say “I’m pissed off”, the emotions tied to the words will cause your anger to increase. Simply expressing yourself with a new choice of words can dampen the emotions around it. Instead, you could try: “I’m not pleased about this”.

Start to monitor your language and make slight changes. This will help you by thinking more positively.

Mindset as a key healing strategy

These methods above have one factor in common: They address the root of the illness equation. When you focus on changing your mindset as part of the healing process, you’ll be amazed at the mental and physical results you’ll produce.

With a healing mindset, you will have some direct outcomes. The following are adapted from an article at SCDlifestyle.com.

You will:

• have more willpower to follow a prescribed diet
• experience less anxiety about the process of healing
• experience more confidence in the healing plan you develop with your medical and health advisors
• have fewer cravings for food or things you do that hurt or stall your healing
• enjoy greater feelings of well-being, even if you are still unwell and not yet healed.
• also experience faster recovery from flares and setbacks

Get serious about your emotional health, and take control of the way you think. Work through your negative emotions and above all else have fun and feel good as much as possible. Now is the time to be with the people you love and do the things you love while you treat your mind and body with kindness. And from that, you will get well.

Kay Walker is the co-owner of AboutSoursop.com, SoursopStore.com and the creator of IamKayWalker.com