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Cheerfulness: The Healing Power of a Merry Heart
The subject of AI (Artificial Intelligence), piqued my interest the other day as I listened to 3 creators of the technology talk about how the world was on the cusp of miraculous medical changes thanks to AI. How wonderful for future generations and maybe, if they are fast enough, our generations. Star Trek: The Next Generation, here we come.
However, the human body works not just scientifically, but emotionally and spiritually. There are examples everywhere of miraculous cures for no scientific reason, but yet they still happened. One story which has always stayed with me was that of Dr. Norman Cousins. I read his book Anatomy of an Illness, for a Philosophy class while getting my Masters years, okay decades, ago. His story touched me and while I had always defaulted to being a happy person, his experience gave me even more impetus to find joy wherever I could. Here is a piece of a synopsis I found on the internet that explains his miracle simply and succinctly.
"Dr. Norman Cousins, for a number of years, was on the medical staff at the UCLA School of Medicine. About 25 years ago, Dr. Cousins was diagnosed with having a strange, rare kind of disease that destroys the connective tissue of the body. The doctors gave him the battery of expensive tests and said, “Sorry, there is really nothing we can do. It is degenerative and you are going to die.” Dr. Cousins said, “Well, I didn’t want to just give up.” So he set himself on a regimen of exercise, high doses of Vitamin C, and then he added an unusual thing. He rented a projector and rented Marx Brothers and Three Stooges movies and all the cartoons he could find. For hours each day, he would take his Vitamin C and watch the Marx Brothers and Three Stooges and would laugh his head off. What he discovered was that ten minutes of hearty laughter gave him a whole hour free from pain. So he would watch those movies over and over and over again. He discovered, as he did this, that he began to get better. The day came when he went back to the doctors and they said, “We don’t know what happened, because this was an incurable disease; but as far as we know, you are completely cured.”
Dr. Cousins lived about another 20 years after that and wrote his book called Anatomy of an Illness, in which he made the point that your mental attitude, the cheerfulness or lack thereof, has a great deal to do with whether you get sick, how bad you get sick, whether you get well, and how quickly you get well. What he discovered is nothing more than what Solomon told us 3000 years ago, which is that a merry heart causes good healing."
In this month that is all about the heart, whether physical, spiritual, or emotional, it is good to remember that finding joy in small things can heal us in many ways, some of them not so small.
Blessings, and here's to living with a Merry Heart!
Anne Fagan, FREA Executive Director.
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