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Keep in touch......with your bodyFeeling good is more than just the absence of body pain. Thoughts and emotions have as much to do with how you feel as anything you can do physically. 
Stress,
anxiety, fear and other negative emotions have tremendous effects on the body. If you could replace anxiety with calmness whenever you choose, you would experience good feeling immediately. Although this is a mind experience, the actual replacing of the anxiety becomes a spiritual exercise.
Every health professional and many laymen are familiar with the placebo effect. The placebo, or inert pill, works because the patient believes it will work. The mind accepts the idea that help is on the way and acts as though he is already healed. This is the mind consciously giving instructions to correct the ailment. Healing through visualization works in much the same way. The mind not only visualizes a perfect condition but imagines what it feels like. This too crosses over into the spiritual.
Ever Present SpiritThis is not about any particular religion. Spiritual awareness exists in every religion and culture in the world. Meditation and prayer are matters of the spirit. Both have proven very effective in healing and health maintenance. Let's start with meditation. What is meditation and how do I do it? There are literally hundreds of sources for learning meditation. Here we are merely going to point out the basic premise and the value. The focus is not only to clear the mind but to temporarily deactivate it. The average modern human thinks somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 thoughts per day. Ninety percent of them are the same ones he thought yesterday. A large majority of them are worries or 'what if?' scenarios. And a lot of those have to do with health. Over ninety five percent of the worries never happen but all parts of the body are trying to react to the turmoil. In meditation you stop the incessant chatter and totally clear the mind. By getting rid of useless and negative thoughts, the mind body communication can start over on a brand new, clear path. Meditation is not difficult, anyone can do it and it works.
Prayer is like conscious, verbal meditation. Different religions suggest a variety formats but most take the form of a petition to a Supreme Being to intercede on behalf of the petitioner. Some are simply affirmations. The non-religious have been known to cry out to an unseen Power for help. All work to varying degrees. The fact that the individual is consciously creating in his mind, as he prays, for change in a certain condition has healing power in itself. Whether that is a mental-physical reaction or a spiritual act or both probably doesn't matter. Modern medical studies have shown that prayer can have a positive, even life saving effect on the human condition. Meditation, prayer and other non medical practices are all in some way part of the body-mind connection. The physical being, the mind, and the spirit cannot be separated from each other. In health and wellness issues they must be regarded and treated as a collective entity. What is the body-mind connection?
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