The world is such and such or so and so only because we tell ourselves that that is the way it is.—Carlos Castaneda

The childhood rhyme that says, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me” is far from true. Words can literally kill. In the introduction to Norman Cousins’s The Healing Heart, Dr. Bernard Lown, professor of cardiology at Harvard, tells a story that illustrates the power of words. A woman he was treating displayed severe panic type reactions upon hearing the physician say that she had TS (tricuspid stenosis, a condition of obstructed blood flow in the heart). The woman interpreted this as “terminal situation” and reacted accordingly. She developed massive lung congestion and died from heart failure the same day.

Of course this is an extreme case. Nevertheless, it is true that your words create your world. As you look around your surroundings, you are talking to yourself about everything you see. Your language structures your reality. Furniture and pictures are not good or bad in and of themselves. They become beautiful or ugly, valuable or worthless, based on your descriptions of them. The clothes you’re wearing are fashionable or dowdy, depending on your judgment of them. So too with your health. If you tell yourself that starving a fever will help relieve it, it probably will. If you say that arthritis and senility are inevitable, they probably will be. People tend to find what they have told themselves to expect.

Where Our Illness Programming Originates
Self-Programming That Heals
Exercises in Reprogramming

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