Measuring the effects of what we did is a different story. We have decades worth of science left to do in order to get to the bottom of what it means to go into deep states of relaxation and to change one's relationship to one's own body in terms of the actual felt experiences of it.
How would you define mind/body medicine to me?
Over the past several hundred years we've tended to look at disease as being more or less a function of the physical body, and to look at thoughts, feelings, emotions, and social interactions as being in the domain of the mind. For the most part, we've thought that the disease process is independent of mind. If for example, you get a bacterial infection, how you feel about that infection is not going to make a difference—but penicillin will make a big difference. In this model you diagnose what's the matter with the body, treat it, and then get on with your life.
But as we begin looking at chronic illnesses like cancer and heart disease, which aren't infectious, we see more and more evidence that how we live our lives and, in fact, how we think and feel over a lifetime, can influence the kinds of illnesses that we have. So the mind/body connection really has to do with understanding that the mind and the body are only artificially separate, that they've always been together, and that they have an interactive influence on each other. This idea is not new—it's as old as medicine. It's as old as humanity. I think what's new is the introducing of it into modern Western medicine.
Why the reunion of mind and body now?
To a large extent, it's because some very interesting developments have been happening in science that have forced us to look again at this division. Also, we've reached certain limits in terms of what medicine can do. Americans tend to expect medicine to cure everything—but medicine is capable of doing far less. We also expect to understand everything—but we don't even know what a thought is, although we know we have them.
But do you mean that the insurance companies will reimburse you for teaching people to hang out with themselves that way?
Well, if it's therapeutic, why not? It's a hell of a lot cheaper than opening up their chests. If one person is saved from one major operation by learning how to self-regulate using these mind/body techniques, we've paid for most of the other patients in the clinic for an entire year. Medicine is reaching the point of increasing expenses with diminishing returns. Part of the problem is that a very profound element is missing in medicine: the active participation of the patient. That's where optimizing the mind/body connection really becomes critical. And cheap.
If it's possible to teach people how to self-regulate so that, for instance, they don't go into panic so much, and their blood pressure doesn't escalate so often under stress, and they can handle their pain in such a way that they don't constantly have to go to the emergency rooms, or be medicated because of it, can you imagine how much money that would save the system? So it's totally in the interest of the health care providers and insurance companies to support this kind of thing.
Actually, I think it's a misnomer to call what we have a "health-care system." It's really a "disease care system." Many of the clinics that are developing along these lines are challenging patients to see what they can do for themselves as a complement to their medical treatments. I've seen people in their nineties who are healthy as hell, and other people in their thirties who are an absolute mess. If you had some kind of inner control over that, you could save the system an awful lot of money and save yourself an awful lot of grief.
You mean medicine that enables me to take charge of my own behavior and conduct myself more healthy?
Right, and I think one of the reasons clinics like this one have such high levels of patient satisfaction is that we make this stuff fun. Meditation becomes so compelling that you don't want to stop. It's part of working on oneself to develop one's inner capacity to be whole.
There's something about the discipline associated with these mind/body techniques that empowers individuals and, at the same time, deepens and broadens their perspective on the value of having a body and of taking care of it and nourishing it in a certain way. I think that any doctor would give his or her right arm, so to speak, to have patients who have this perspective because it would help the doctor to care for patients as best he or she could.
Does meditation eventually become just another Band-Aid, something I do when I start to feel bad?
A lot of people think that's what meditation is all about. "I'll learn a little meditation technique, and then when things get too stressful, I'll use my little technique and relax." They think meditation is something to be used when you need it.
Actually, meditation is best described as a way of being. It's like wearing a parachute. You don't want to start wearing the parachute when you're about to jump out of the plane. You want to have been wearing the parachute morning, noon, and night, day in and day-out, so that when you need it, it will actually hold you. You have to carve out some time every day that's your time for just being. And then when stressful situations come up, and you feel like doing more, you have a framework in which to do it and a reservoir of inner calmness and stability and insight.
Excerpted from Bill Moyer's Healing and the Mind (Doubleday;1993). Copyright 1993 by Bill Moyers.
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