Confidence – the mind/body connection

To close out this chapter on confidence, I love that the Shogun talks about the confidence you have with your own opinions regarding your health.  I read a statistic somewhere that people with positive attitudes who expect to be healthy for a long time live an average of seven years longer than average (if I can recall that properly).

He says, “There is a solidarity between mind and body which allows of the latter becoming an easy prey to affective conditions brought about by suffering…It would be idle to deny the connection between our physical ills and our mental suffering.”

(Earlier in the book, he talked about hypochondria.)

Now when he says suffering, let’s unpack that.  External conditions are there.  Stuff happens in the world – around us and to us.  We may experience physical or mental pain for a short time.  But suffering – that’s different.  Suffering is to dwell on the pain, to relive it, to make it part of our identity and think of it over and over – to become a victim.  That’s suffering.  It’s internal.  A choice.

“It is wiser sometimes to cure the mind before considering how to care for the body, for cure both at the same time.”

So there you go.  From 838 years ago – before modern medicine.

“Now it is that influence makes itself felt, triumphant, radiant; it stamps on the nerve centers an impression which reverberates through one’s whole being.  Considering that our troubles are due to pain, to anxiety, to hypochondria, we should cultivate confidence and cheerfulness.”

“If the sick are told with confidence they are getting better…then do…miracles have no other basis than this.”

Yoritomo says that some people who feel sick just need a purpose – then they’ll make themselves better to carry it out.  We know this.  When people retire and have no purpose, they leave us pretty quickly.  If they have a purpose, a someone or something, they live for it.  If that purpose goes away, they do too.

Let’s close this chapter on confidence.

“Let him who feels himself to be in the right and has confidence in himself rise up and proclaim this faith, so that the weak, the vacillating, and all those who suffer from doubt may flock around him to warm themselves at the genial blaze that issues from the fire of contentment of which his mind is full.”