Florene's Heart

My grandmother died of a broken heart. I heard the story over and over from the time I was eight or nine years old. Her name was Florene and she was the original “free spirit" and bucking the trend, cutting her hair short in 1921 when other girls wore their long hair piled in elaborate designs on top of their heads. My adoptive grandmother was Florene’s older sister, and they were as different as night and day.

As free spirited as Florene was, my adoptive grandmother was as equally up tight and repressed. But she loved her little sister dearly, and would often get tears in her eyes as she retold Florene's story: She fell in love with a handsome young man named Bobby Lee. They were both from good families – leaders in small communities where decorum was the social dictum. Florene became pregnant at 18 and the two planned a hasty wedding.

Unfortunately Bobby’s parents found out about the pregnancy and forced Bobby to return to his home 70 miles (and a full day’s journey) away from Florene, and forbade him to ever see her again. Florene was left alone, pregnant, dishonored, and heartbroken.

She took to her bed, wasted away, and despite urging from her family to hold the baby, never saw my mother’s face. At her bedside the doctor made the pronouncement that Florene had died of a broken heart.

I loved the pathos of the story as a child. But, like everyone else, I would eventually dismiss the doctor’s diagnosis as primitive, and assume there was a physiological reason for her death that the doctor did not have the sophistication to recognize. I’ve changed my mind.

With the advent of modern medicine, doctors began to examine the human body in “parts." During autopsies, they discovered cases of abnormally large livers and brains with tumors on them, leading to the belief that each organ is separate from the others in its ability to function. Doctors eventually concluded that the human mind and body were two separate entities.

Finally the trend in medicine is returning to the belief that the mind, the body and all its organs function as a whole and are dependent on each other for good health. This changes our entire approach to medicine, psychology and our individual responsibility for our own health. It also gives us the opportunity to learn to heal ourselves and to help heal those we love.

Stress may be the number one enemy to our health and healing. We dismiss stress as simply a natural and necessary result of our busy lifestyles. Yet study after study has proven that stress weakens our immune system and compromises our ability to fight off infection. One study with control groups actually showed that wounds in people without a great deal of stress healed nine days faster than those in people with extreme stress. I have seen estimates that 80% of disease is caused by stress.

When we are under stress our brains release chemicals that affect the adrenal glands, causing fatigue, illness, and depression. It may be natural, but it certainly isn’t necessary. There is something we can do about it.

There are as many techniques designed to help us reduce stress and heal our bodies as there are people studying the topic. Meditation, prayer, self-hypnosis, guided imagery, visualization…they all have extensive track records of helping people heal faster, deal with depression better, feel less pain during medical procedures and even reduce the size of tumors in their bodies. 

I have tried them all. Through self-hypnosis my broken hand healed in half the time the doctor expected. With visualization my son was able to finally connect the bat with the ball in grade school. Guided imagery helped me overcome issues from my past that had caused depression. And prayer has helped innumerable times when friends were ill.

If these techniques are so effective in curing all the woes of the world, why aren’t we using them every day?  We forget. It’s that simple. When faced with crisis we revert to our less evolved behaviors – fight or flight, panic, stay with what seems safe. We have lost the ability to step back from the situation, go inside ourselves and listen to our heart tell us which healing technique is right for us.

And most doctors are not equipped to guide us. Few have had training in holistic healing.

Buddhist monks spend their lives training their minds to work FOR them. They can raise or lower their body temperatures dramatically and have surgical procedures without anesthesia. It is doubtful that any of us normal folk will spend the time necessary to truly be able to control the functions of our bodies like the monks do, but they offer proof that it can be done.

We will never know whether modern medicine would have saved Florene. But just as I now believe that she may very well have died of a broken heart, I believe that we all have the ability within us to heal our bodies as well as our hearts. Download Health-Florene.mp3

Comments

[Suzanne]

For those who'd like a little assistance in seeing another perspective on very specific conditions and dis-eases, I recommend Louise Hay's "Heal Your Body" the contents of which is also found in her book "Heal Your Life".
I recently had evidence of problems that were taking weeks to even get opinions from the allopathic medical world and was able to realize the mind/body connection before the physical source was even identified by doctors. It turned out that physical location shown in an MRI was the same already identified in Louise's book, and I was already working successfully at a return to health before even having my first appointment (another 10 days from now) with the specialist. Had I followed allopathic prescriptions, I would be on 4 medications and probably addicted (or dead since just trying 2 of them set off congestive heart failure) before any help was found in the "body shop" approach of the medical world.

[Holly Sparkman]

Sometimes people are better at finding their own dis-eases that allopathic physicians are.