Mindbody

In his book, When the Body Says No, Gabor Mate writes, "...mind and body are not separable."

He makes a case that "when we have been prevented from learning to say no, our bodies may end up saying it for us."

He tells the story of a woman, Mary, who described herself as 'so scared all the time, but as a seven-year-old I had to protect my sisters. And no one protected me.' As a consequence, "she never revealed these traumas before, not even to her husband of twenty years. She had learned not to express her feelings about anything to anyone, including herself. To be self-expressive, vulnerable and questioning in her childhood would have put her at risk. Her security lay in considering other people's feelings, never her own. She was trapped in the role forced on her as a child, unaware that she herself had the right to be taken care of, to be listened to, to be thought worthy of attention."

So this is how we learn to keep it to ourselves, pretend to know, never question. No wonder it feels so wrong.

If you have a voice, then use it. It was your birthright. You have a right to do this now.

Through stories and a review of medical literature, he writes about "the effects of stress on health, particularly of the hidden stresses we all generate from our early programming, a pattern so deep and so subtle that it feels like a part of our real selves."

The biological call and response system between child and parent called attachment, teaches us so much about self in relation to others and the world. We learn this without words, before verbal language develops. Beliefs we take for granted and without question. Unless...we stop to reflect...but when? how? There are so many distractions, marketed very well.

"The new discipline of psychoneuroimmunology has now matured to the point where there is compelling evidence, advanced by scientists from many fields, that an intimate relationship exists between the brain and immune system...An individual's emotional makeup, and the response to continued stress, may indeed be causative in the many diseases that medicine treats but whose origin is not yet known..." Immediately, that resonates. Science is systematic, incremental and slow. Inuition and grandmothers seem to get there faster. When both agree, we've really got something.

"Emotions are deeply implicated in the causation of illness or in the restoration of health."

"Physiologically, emotions are themselves electrical, chemical and hormonal discharges of the human nervous system. Emotions influence - and are influenced by - the functioning of our major organs, the integrity of our immune defences and the workings of the many circulating biological substances that help govern the body's physical states. When emotions are repressed, as Mary had to do in her childhood search for security, this inhibition disarms the body's defences against illness. Repression - dissociating emotions from awareness and relegating them to the unconscious realm - disorganizes and confuses our physiological defences so that in some people these defences go awry, becoming the destroyers of health reather than its protectors."

"In important areas of their lives, almost none of my patients with serious disease had ever learned to say no."

"...To have the ability to respond with awareness to the circumstances of our lives rather than just reacting. We want to be the authoritative person in our own lives: in charge, able to make the authentic decisions that affect us. There is no true responsibility without awareness."

Knowing this, how can we develop a wellness-oriented lifestyle, family culture, school culture and society (instead of a primarily stress-driven one). How do we bring about personal and structural transformation?