Positive Thinking May Put Cancer Patients at Risk
We keep hearing about the importance of the power of positive thinking. Books and magazines, new-age experts and mental health professional all praise the benefits of positive thinking as if it’s the magic cure we all hoped for. Even motivational gurus tell us that being positive is essential to our success and happiness and still, danger lurks in the mind that focuses only on the positive in the form of denial.
The Danger in Positive-Thinking
A positive attitude can add healthy happy years to our lives and is considered to be the key to happiness. This happiness help cancer patients boost their immune system and therefore support healing. However, there is a great difference between manufacturing positive thoughts by denying all else and seeing things as they are. By denying reality we delay our healing. Taking a realistic approach and still choosing to focus on that which is well and valuable, that which promote a feel-good state of mind will strengthen your resolve to heal and support your journey toward health.
In my perspective, the positive-thinking-theory took a wrong turn when promoted itself as a substitute to the realistic approach. That wrong turn stripped its healing value and began broadcasting the message of false hope.
Riding the Emotional Roller-Coaster of Illness
When illness strike and we are riding the emotional roller-coaster it’s very tempting to deny the shock, the fear and the uncertainty we fill. It seems that as long as we don’t look at that which is wrong we won’t have to face it and therefore it will not affect us.
That plan however, is set for failure right from the beginning. It will fail because it takes effort to deny our true feelings and experience. Based on the concept that “what we resist persist” we only suspend the eruption of our emotional volcano.
This eruption of emotions, if not exhausted beforehand, will take place within us and only serve to suppress our immune system even more which means allowing illness to progress.
Since the path of healing is aligned with the path of truth, evaluate your thoughts on a regular basis. Make sure to see things as they are, and allow yourself to express the rising emotions regardless of their quality i.e. negative or positive.
As you see the big picture, the bad and the good, choose to focus on that which uplift you and makes you feel hopeful.
Share with us your view of positive thinking?