Mind Over Body

by Nancy Pickard

I experienced my first mind-over-matter healing when I was twenty-three. Previously, I had read one book and a couple of articles about “the power of mind,” and found them fascinating and persuasive, but they were stories about spiritual visions on mountaintops, epiphanies of long-distance runners, life-changing messages from hallucinogens, miracle healings of cancer patients. I wouldn’t have wanted that last kind of experience, and as for the exciting ones, I could only dream of such things happening to me. I was a sedentary young woman with a desk job. My only “hobby” was devouring mystery novels. I was an armchair adventurer, only. I was still decades away from becoming a student of A Course in Miracles and had little knowledge of any spiritual paths. I might have called myself agnostic, not having quite enough courage to say, “atheist.” I was a lapsed Presbyterian, but there hadn’t been much to lapse from, so it was easy for me to leave religion.

My introduction to the precedence and power of my mind over my body was about to begin not with a book or with a blast of enlightenment, but with a direct, astonishing, and irrefutable experience in my own body.

I dragged in from work that day.

I felt awful—achy, feverish, shivering, and already planning to call in sick the next morning. I remember standing in the living room of my apartment in Kansas City, MO, feeling like I was getting the flu and knowing that worse was on its way. I was facing west, the direction in which my parents lived, way across town, over the state line, in Kansas.  It was a good forty-five-minute drive through rush hour traffic to reach their home—a fact that would turn out to be pertinent to what happened next.

As I stood there, feeling as lousy as if I’d swallowed swamp water, I suddenly realized I was looking forward to being sick!

Shocked, I remember saying out loud, “What the hell?”

I wanted to have the flu?!

Then the second epiphany hit me: I was looking forward to my mother taking care of me.

Oh, my God. It was true. I was.

My mom was not the world’s most nurturing soul, except when I was ill. Then I’d get the full home-prescription of saltine crackers, 7-Up, chipped ice, chicken noodle soup, and loving attention. I don’t mean this in a psychotic Munchausen Proxy kind of way in which a parent makes their child sick to look like a healing angel. It was just that my mother had experienced a lot of sickness and pain in her life—Diphtheria and whooping cough as a child, migraines, and a “bad back” as a grown-up—and it gave her sympathy for me when I was sick.

But that wasn’t my only reason for “thinking myself sick,” I had to admit. I was stressed out—wrecked by work, by my love life, by friends, by money problems. I was exhausted and overwhelmed by the sheer hard work and responsibility of being a grown-up supporting herself for the first time. I needed a day off, two days off, and what more legitimate excuse than the flu?

A laugh burst out of me when I realized what was going on.

I’d caught myself in the act of making myself sick!

But then came epiphany number 3. First, I’d caught myself wanting to be sick, then I’d caught myself thinking I’d get something out of it, and now I saw the fatal flaws in my unconscious manipulations: like it or not, I was an adult now, and I didn’t live at home. My folks were way across town. There was no way I was going to drive all the way out there, feeling as I did. And it would be embarrassing, showing up like a little kid wanting mommy to stick a thermometer in my mouth and tuck me into bed.

Was I a grown woman, or was I a toddler?

And if I wasn’t going to get that familiar reward…

Suddenly, being sick didn’t look so appealing.

I considered how I felt. Like I was about to throw up. Ugh.

“I don’t want to be sick!” I thought, vehemently.

Instantly, my symptoms vanished.

All of them, all at once, poof!

Fever gone. Aches gone. Nausea gone. Shivering gone. Weakness and fatigue, gone, totally gone in that moment when I changed my mind from I wanna be sick to I don’t wanna be sick!

Snap. Just like that.

I was astonished, excited, and—I’ll admit it—a little disappointed that I wasn’t going to get that rare pampering and a day off work.

But not disappointed enough to choose illness.

I would find other ways to de-stress.

And twenty-two years later, I would open A Course in Miracles, and the gift of my early lessons in healing would finally coalesce into a meaningful whole.

I was suddenly starving.

I kicked off my high heels and walked into my kitchen to fix an early supper. It would not include chicken noodle soup, saltine crackers, or 7UP.

Who is the physician? Only the mind of the patient himself. The outcome is what he decides that it is. Special agents seem to be ministering to him, yet they but give form to his own choice…The patient could merely rise up without their aid and say, “I have no use for this.” There is no form of sickness that would not be cured at once. [CE M-5.II.2:4-13]

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