h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In some sense I think that the idea of you make your own health is really a desire for mankind to stretch his control into things that he normally wouldn't have believed in his reach. If you take my meaning.

And yet I wonder at the validity of positive attitude as it relates to healing.....

My stepmother had breast cancer that quickly became lymphatic cancer. Third phase infiltrating stuff. She died within 2 yrs of diagnosis.

She had always had a vile attitude towards life. Always felt that the world actually owed her something. That she was carrying a burden too heavy for one person and should somehow be accomadated for it. My father worked out of town a lot and she vented her anger at him for not being there on me for being there and being a spitting image of him. There were very few times in that house that there was *any* love between a son and a mother(my own mother having died when I was 4), there was a lot of hate and resentment however. When she was diagnosed I, like my younger brothers and sisters expected to see some kind of change in her attitude towards life. What we saw was fear followed by anger. It was like Elizabeth Kubler Ross's stages of dying, except that the acceptance stage never took place. Anger and resentment had been easy/comforting bedfellows for her in the past and she kept them right up to the end. I have to wonder however if she would have lived a *little* longer if she had changed her life. I won't go so far as to say she caused the cancer, but I will say she didn't learn anything from it. She carried her hatred right to her grave. Who is to say that if she had learned from it, wouldn't it also be possible for her to have lived a longer life than the two years that remained? I for one don't have the answer, but having watched a person die over a 2 yr period, watching their anger eat at them every day, I can't really discount it.

The thing about that hate though, I never returned it. My sister never returned it. Her children never felt her anger(just me and my sister being not of her blood). All that hate was entirely one sided, it didn't have to be. But because she was afraid to be anything other than what she had been her whole life, she died angry and unhappy.

I suppose this subject like a lot of them doesn't have a specific answer to it, just more questions. Seems like all the good ones do.

I have a deep rooted, and sientific belief in the ability to afect ones own health, and the idea of both psychic healing and wish fulfillment. just don't think its got anything to do with magic, aliens or aanti-deluvian societies.

Perium, I see your point about yr step-mother - and when I think about my mother, I see that her attitude towards life, was unenthusiastic... but better than it had been for years when she died! Her disease lasted 15-20 years - the first 14 or so of them undiagnosed! Which is why I don't think her attitude really had a lot to do with it. I didn't get on well with her - even the last time I saw her, a month before her (unexpected, at least by me) death - she was making it plain how I disappointed her! So, though she's dead these 21 years, I have a hard time with my objectivity about her.. I am sorry for your loss of yr real mother, and for yr stepmother being such a difficult woman - our families of origin affect our world-view so much!
Autist, yes, I believe our attiutdes can *help* our healing, all without crystals and such!

I don't know that the crystal stuff serves any other function that giving you something to focus on. Seems to me that a change in your attitude, particularly if it was deep rooted, would take a considerable amount of change. That requires focus. Who is to say that it is a bad thing? Seems like mumbo jumbo to me, but if it works for them, hey, more power to them.

Yeah, it's not magic, earth power or cryistal energy - it's psychology!