Robert Pyles, M.D., while president elect of the American Psychoanalytic Association, sent psychologist Elizabeth Mayer a personal account that he’d never previously revealed to anyone:
Some years ago I was diagnosed with a viral meningoencephalitis. Over the course of my being worked up, they discovered a large mass in my chest along with the infiltrate throughout my lungs. It turned out to be disseminated sarcoidosis. I lost forty-five pounds and the disease seemed to be taking its expectable course—invasion of other organs and a high probability of death not too far off. I began meditating, then running, mostly to calm myself down. I had young kids, an active career—I wasn’t handling the prospect of an early death well at all.
Without knowing what I was doing, I felt the impulse to focus on my actual cells—my literal physical cells—as I ran. Then I began focusing on the lesions. And something very strange began happening. It will sound hallucinatory and crazy—I thought it was totally crazy at the time—but all I can say is, it was also very real and powerful. What started happening was I literally became those cells and those lesions while I ran. And once that happened, the lesions started getting smaller. I became the lesions resolving. I watched them resolving and I was them resolving.
And sure enough, the mass started decreasing and after three years the infiltrate was gone. Gone. Eventually, the mass totally disappeared. In fact, I was written up in a medical journal—a spontaneous resolution of a disseminated sarcoidosis that was entirely unexpected and unexplained.
The evidence for what happened is medically irrefutable. I myself am sure that running got me into a state of mind that enabled me to affect those cells and those lesions by—strange as it sounds—becoming them. That experience didn’t just change my life because I was cured—it also opened a world of possibilities about connections between things we’re normally unaware of, connections rooted in access to certain states of mind.
Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (Bantam Books, 2007), 10-15.
No comments:
Post a Comment