This month’s blog is more of a review on a fascinating book I’ve just finished reading called Cured, The Life-Changing Science of Spontaneous Healing by Jeffrey Rediger MD. It’s one of those books that compels you to start underlining sentences or marking in the margin and then find you’re having to underline the whole page, and the next!
Dr Rediger has spent over 15 years studying spontaneous healing, developing the use of science to research complete recoveries from incurable diseases. As a student at medical school, he was taught that cases of spontaneous healing were flukes and as rare as 1 in 100,000. It was extremely unusual for any serious investigation to be done into how or why these individuals had suddenly healed and, as a result these cases are not considered by doctors when treating other patients.
Dr Rediger has learned that, whilst cases of spontaneous healing are not common, they are less rare than most of us realise. His search for answers whilst interviewing and studying individuals saw expected dramatic changes in diet and lifestyle, efforts to lower stress levels and improve stress responses. He discusses in depth the parasympathetic nervous system, how it is fuelled by love and connection and how the physical body needs to be in the parasympathetic as much as possible to heal.
However, these changes alone, whilst important steps to take for anyone diagnosed with a disease, were by no means a guarantee that the individual would spontaneously heal.
In a TEDx talk that Dr Rediger delivered in 2015, the heart of his message was that the brilliance of Western medicine is that when you have a medical problem, a psychological problem or a spiritual problem, you go and see the appropriate medical/spiritual practitioner. He said, “In Eastern medicine, there is no distinction between the body and the mind. Both physical and mental illnesses are treated by rebalancing the body’s energetic system.”
And it was this understanding that ultimately led him to realise that all the individuals he was studying had chosen, knowingly or not, to heal their identity; their beliefs, stories, conditioning and childhood experiences, the way they perceived themselves and the world and their place in it. Dr Rediger describes it as our Black Box, scientifically known as our Default Mode Network.
This is just a tiny glimpse into the book. One of the reasons I found the chapter on Healing Your Identity so interesting is because of the discussions we’ve had recently within our Soul Healing Studio Circles about where people are stuck or confused about their purpose and their role on the planet at this time. If we’re willing to open our Black Box and clean out or redefine ourselves in true alignment to who we really are, we may have greater fulfilment in this lifetime and perhaps also prevent health concerns in the future.
I highly recommend reading about the remarkable stories in this book and the science behind them to understand the whole picture.
