Love &
Survival
By Dean Ornish, MD
Our survival depends on the healing power of love, intimacy, and
relationship. Although there is more scientific evidence now than ever
demonstrating how simple changes in diet and lifestyle may cause
substantial improvements in health and well-being, one of the most
powerful interventions - and often the most meaningful for me and for
the people with whom I work, both colleagues and patients - is the
healing power of love and intimacy and the emotional and spiritual
transformation that often result from these. These include:
- Rediscovering inner sources of
peace, joy, and well-being
- Learning how to communicate in
ways that enhance intimacy with loved ones
- Creating a healthy community
of friends and family
- Developing more compassion and
empathy for both yourself and others
- Experiencing directly the
transcendent interconnectedness of life
Love and intimacy are at the root of what makes us sick and what makes
us well, what causes sadness and what brings happiness, what makes us
suffer and what leads to healing. If a new drug had the same impact,
virtually every doctor in the country would be recommending it for
their patients. It would be malpractice not to prescribe it-yet, with
few exceptions, we doctors do not learn much about the healing power of
love, intimacy, and transformation in our medical training. Medicine
today tends to focus primarily on the physical and mechanistic: drugs
and surgery, genes and germs, microbes and molecules. However, I am not
aware of any other factor in medicine - not diet, not smoking, not
exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery - that has a
greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness, and
premature death from all causes. Loneliness and isolation affect our
health in several ways:
They increase the likelihood that we may engage in behaviors like
smoking and overeating that adversely affect our health and decrease
the likelihood that we will make lifestyle choices that are
life-enhancing rather than self-destructive
They increase the likelihood of disease and premature death from all
causes by 200-500% or more, independent of behaviors, through different
mechanisms, many of which are not fully understood
They keep us from fully experiencing the joy of everyday life
In short, anything that promotes a sense of isolation often leads to
illness and suffering. Anything that promotes a sense of love and
intimacy, connection and community is healing. Healing is a process of
becoming whole. Even the words "heal" and "whole" and "holy" come from
the same root.
There is a deep spiritual hunger in this country. The real epidemic in
our culture is not only physical heart disease, but also what I call
emotional and spiritual heart disease-that is, the profound sense of
loneliness, isolation, alienation, and depression that are so prevalent
in our culture with the breakdown of the social structures that used to
provide us with a sense of connection and community. It is, to me, a
root of the illness, cynicism, and violence in our society.
We are creatures of community. Those individuals, societies, and
cultures who learned to take care of each other, to love each other,
and to nurture relationships with each other during the past several
hundred thousand years were more likely to survive than those who did
not. Those people who did not learn to take care of each other often
did not make it. In our culture, the idea of spending time taking care
of each other and creating communities has become increasingly rare.
Ignoring these ideas imperils our survival.
Awareness is the first step in healing, both individually and socially.
Part of the value of science is to increase the level of awareness of
how much these choices matter that we make each day. Not just a little,
but a lot, and not just to the quality of life but also the quantity of
life - to our survival. When we understand how important these issues
are, then we can do something about it. These include:
- spending more time with our
friends and family
- communication skills
- group support
- confession, forgiveness, and
redemption
- compassion, altruism, and
service
- psychotherapy
- touching
- commitment
- meditation
When we increase the love and
intimacy in our lives, we also increase the health, joy, and meaning in
our lives.
Source Web MD/MSN
Diva Bonnie
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