Psychosomatic Illness Quotes

Most illness begins with a negative mind.

Nothing is so costly as the pursuit of a cure for imaginary ills.

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.

With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.

The greatest cause of ulcers is mountain-climbing over molehills.

The incurable ills are the imaginary ills.

All the powers of imagination combine in hypochondria.

We live in a culture that is much happier talking about organic brain disease than about psychic illness because the former suggests that something that is physically wrong in a brain is wholly unrelated to that person's upbringing or experiences in the world, but that is not necessarily true.

I'd say that I've been reclusive the last 34 years. That was my big thing as a kid, staying home from school. I've trained myself to be psychosomatically sick a lot. Anytime I go out, it is just something to deal with, even walking to the grocery store. If I'm supposed to go from one place to another place that isn't that comfortable, I usually don't go.

Every mental state is also physical.

Many ordinary illnesses are nothing but the expression of a serious dissatisfaction with life.

If you have the thought in your mind that you are sick, you surely will be.

To believe you're being psychically attacked gives you an understanding of your illness that no Western doctor can provide; this can be reassuring when you've exhausted the Western doctor tool kit, and the doctors are sending you to acupuncturists for pain relief.

In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet.

There's some herb that's good for everybody, except for them that thinks they're sick when they ain't.

Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.

Over the years, there's been some cases where people did come up who said they were healed, but really they were not healed. I do believe it's possible for individuals to mentally convince themselves they are, but that does not deny the real healings. That doesn't dismiss the fact that a lot of people are really cured.

A mountain of evidence shows that our bodies are pushing, shaping, even leading our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. That the body affects the mind is, it's fair to say, incontestable. And it's doing so in ways that either facilitate or impede our ability to bring our authentic best selves to our biggest challenges.

If I'm not doing the work I want, I usually suffer a psychological allergic reaction and get ill.

Sickness is the result not only of our acts, but out thoughts also.

Illnesses are often times a reflection of an emotional place that needs healing or attention.

Heavy thoughts bring on physical maladies; when the soul is oppressed so is the body.

I once thought I had mono for an entire year. It turned out I was just really bored.

I should like to raise the question whether the inevitable stunting of the sense of smell as a result of man's turning away from the earth, and the organic repression of the smell-pleasure produced by it, does not largely share in his predisposition to nervous diseases.

Illness cannot exist in a body that has harmonious thoughts.