Spontaneous Healing Quotes

“Happiness is a skill. It requires effort and time.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing

“I believe that it may be normal, healthy, and even productive to experience mild to moderate depression from time to time as part of the variable emotional spectrum, either as an appropriate response to situations or as a way of turning inward and mentally chewing over problems to find solutions.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing

“Among other things, neuroplasticity means that emotions such as happiness and compassion can be cultivated in much the same way that a person can learn through repetition to play golf and basketball or master a musical instrument, and that such practice changes the activity and physical aspects of specific brain areas.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing

“My personal opinion is that the neutral position on the mood spectrum—what I called emotional sea level—is not
happiness but rather contentment and the calm acceptance that is the goal of many kinds of spiritual practice.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing

“People who are contented and serene sleep well. They fall asleep easily, stay asleep, and wake refreshed. Conversely, people who are anxious, stressed, or depressed do not sleep well, and chronic insomnia is strongly associated with mood disorders. These are clear correlations, but what is cause and what is effect is not clear. Most experts agree that sleep and mood are closely related, that healthy sleep can enhance emotional well-being, while insufficient quantity or quality of sleep can adversely affect it.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing

“It is unrealistic to want to be happy all the time.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing

“In my view, prescribing antidepressant drugs is too often a quick and easy substitute for developing treatment plans that address the totality of health concerns and lifestyle factors that have an impact on wellness, including emotional wellness.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing

“I do not claim to have attained optimum emotional well-being. Actually, I think that may be a lifetime goal. For me it’s an ongoing process that requires awareness, knowledge, and practice. I do know what good emotional health feels like, and that motivates me to keep at the practice.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing

“I am uneasy about the suppressive nature of conventional medicine. If you look at the names of the most popular categories of drugs in use today, you will find that most of them begin with the prefix “anti.” We use antispasmodics and antihypertensives, antianxiety agents and antidepressants, antihistamines, antiarrhythmics, antitussives, antipyretics, and anti-inflammatories, as well as beta blockers and H2-receptor antagonists. This is truly antimedicine—medicine that is, in essence, counteractive and suppressive. What”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“I have always believed that the primary function of doctors should be to teach people how not to get sick in the first place. The word “doctor” comes from the Latin word for “teacher.” Teaching prevention should be primary; treatment of existing disease, secondary. I”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“Grieving itself is a variety of healing, an operation of the healing system.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“mente es una influencia importante en la curación, para mejorar o para empeorar.”
― Andrew Weil, La curación espontánea: Spontaneous Healing - Spanish-Language Edition

“la mente es una influencia importante en la curación, para mejorar o para empeorar.”
― Andrew Weil, La curación espontánea: Spontaneous Healing - Spanish-Language Edition

“Are fish eaters healthier because of the fish they eat or because of what they don’t eat?”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“American medicine has no specific treatments for tinnitus, no understanding of its cause, and little success in alleviating it. My German friend thinks tinnitus results from chronic muscle tension in the head and neck, often associated with poor posture and stress.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“I regard the placebo response as a pure example of healing elicited by the mind; far from being a nuisance, it is, potentially, the greatest therapeutic ally doctors can find in their efforts to mitigate disease. I believe further that the art of medicine is in the selection of treatments and their presentation to patients in ways that increase their effectiveness through the activation of placebo responses. The best way to do this as a physician is to use treatments that you yourself genuinely believe in, because your belief in what you do catalyzes the beliefs of your patients.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“Kava relaxes muscles, promotes calm, and is nonaddictive. It may work as a natural alternative to the benzodiazepine tranquilizers doctors prescribe as antianxiety agents. Valerian is a strong enough sedative to be used for insomnia, but small doses—say, ten drops of the tincture in a little warm water—can be used for daytime calming.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“Peppermint oil in enteric-coated capsules, available at health food stores, is an excellent treatment for irritable bowel syndrome, diverticulitis, and other intestinal ailments.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“Dietary modification would be the same as it is for allergy: a low-protein diet with minimal intake of foods of animal origin, especially milk and milk products; plenty of organically grown fruits, vegetables, and grains; elimination of polyunsaturated vegetable oils and artificially hydrogenated fats; inclusion of fish or other sources of omega-3 fatty acids, such as flax seeds.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“Mind/body interventions are key in autoimmune disease, because the ups and downs of these diseases often correlate with emotional ups and downs, and because we know that mental factors influence immune responses. Psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, and guided imagery therapy are all useful and worth exploring”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“A good herbal treatment for hay fever, especially for allergic sneezing and itching eyes, ears, and throats, is stinging nettles (Urtica dioica), especially a freeze-dried extract of the leaves of this plant. (See Appendix for a source.) One to two capsules every two to four hours as needed will control symptoms with none of the toxicity of antihistamines and steroids”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“TCM is worth trying for a wide range of allergic, autoimmune, infectious, and chronic degenerative conditions, including asthma, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, chronic bronchitis, chronic sinusitis, osteoarthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, HIV infection and other states of immune deficiency, sexual deficiency, and general debility.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“Training in biofeedback, a relaxation technique employing electronic equipment to amplify body responses until they become perceptible, is offered by certified therapists, many of them clinical psychologists. In the most common version, patients learn to raise the temperature of their hands and by so doing relax the whole sympathetic nervous system, which controls many involuntary functions. Biofeedback training is enjoyable, and almost everyone succeeds at it.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“Another Ayurvedic preparation, called triphala, is the best bowel regulator I have come across, much better than Western herbal remedies for constipation. It is a mixture of three fruits and can be found in capsule form in health food stores.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“Consider the common impediments to rest. Many people are unable to sleep because they are overstimulated, often by drugs they have ingested earlier in the day. Others cannot sleep because of noise or aches and pains. Others cannot turn off their minds. There are simple remedies for all of these problems.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“It is a fact of life in the America of the nineties that health food store clerks have replaced pharmacists as dispensers of practical advice to many sick people, especially those with difficult problems or ailments that do not respond well to conventional treatment. The change is another indicator of widespread disaffection with standard medicine.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“I think breast cancer results from a complex interaction of genetic and environmental factors, in which lifestyle choices, such as diet, use of alcohol, and exposure to estrogenic toxins, may have much more influence than emotions. I do believe that grief and depression may suppress immunity, giving malignant cells the chance to grow into perceptible tumors; but I reject the idea that people give themselves cancer by failing to express anger and other emotions.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“The greatest medical advance of the twentieth century has been the reduction of infectious disease by means of improved public sanitation, immunization, and antibiotics.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“Belief in the healing power of some person, place, or thing can also be a key to success. This is the realm of placebo responses and miracle shrines. We do not seem to be able to will healing responses to occur, because our will does not connect directly to the autonomic nervous system and other controlling mechanisms of the healing system. Yet we can circumvent that obstacle by projecting belief in healing onto something external and interacting with it. I have already noted that if physicians understood this process and were better trained to work with projected belief, they would better fulfill their roles as shaman/priests and be much more effective at helping sick people get well.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself

“Because I take extensive social histories and work from a model of health and healing predicated on mind/body interaction, I am keenly aware of correlations between mental/emotional events and healing responses. These correlations are important, because they suggest ways that people can keep their healing systems in good working order and can use their minds to promote healing rather than obstruct it.”
― Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing: How to Discover and Enhance Your Body's Natural Ability to Maintain and Heal Itself