Love, Medicine & Massage By Bernie Siegel, M.D.

To Life

In your practice you focus on the person you are touching. That is what the great prophets of all times have done. They did not focus on statistics relating to the average income, number of crimes committed, unemployment, or divorce rates. They cared for the person in pain who stood before them. The person to help is always the one in front of you. The time to help is now and the thing to do is what that person needs. We make a difference by helping individuals. The ripple effect is a powerful one. My friend Jerry Jampolsky once told Mother Teresa that he wanted to go with her on a trip around California to observe and learn from her. She asked, "How much will your airline tickets cost?" "They will cost $250." "Then go home and spend the money in your community doing some good there."

I jog and bicycle regularly. I pick up all the discarded cans and bottles lying on the side of the road for recycling. With the money I buy lottery tickets in the hope of winning. When I win I’ll say, "Oh God, why me?" to all the interviewers and donate the money to the local animal shelter and the area’s needy children. I have not won the lottery yet so they have not reaped any reward. I recently started paying for my own lottery tickets and giving the animal shelter the funds I receive from recycling. They are better off now then they were with my former policy.

When you are touching someone you make a difference. Differences are always made one at a time. Any survival group you talk to will share that with you. You will find as I have that you can learn these lessons from an AA group, the U.S. Marines, cancer and AIDS patients, and others suffering from afflictions.

The message is twofold. One, what we can provide with our compassion to those with afflictions and two, how to rejoice in your afflictions. Both heal the world. Always remember to pay close attention to the people who rejoice in life and learn from them. Don’t ever think they are lucky, have no problems, and just won the lottery and so are happy.

Those who win the lottery are, 95 percent of the time, sorry they won 5 years later because they didn’t know what to do with the money. Also, winners are often in debt because they gamble uncontrollably and ruin their lives, whether they eventually win or not, because of their debts and bankruptcies.

You are far better off if you learn from your affliction, whether it is an illness or winning the lottery. It will increase your level of wisdom dramatically in a short time span. If you are wise, however, you will learn from past prophets and sages and save yourself the pain.

Lately, I have had an interesting thought about our bodies, what directions they are given, and who the director is. Think about a bacteria learning to become resistant to antibiotics or someone overcoming AIDS or cancer. Descendants of the bacteria are more resistant, too, as are descendants of survivors of the Great Plague. DNA fascinates me. It knows when to reproduce itself with no alterations and it knows when to change. How does it know what to do when threatened?

I am sure we will learn some day that what the quantum physicists say about matter is true of the body. After all aren’t we and don’t we matter? They tell us that desire and intention alter matter. I believe the desire to live, the joy of living and loving, and a sense of meaning in one’s life all are communicated to your DNA and it responds to your direction. Senior citizens grow healthier and younger physiologically when exposed to an environment and conditions like one they lived in decades before. So give live messages to your body and let it know that you desire life and living. Your body stores your experiences. Transplant recipients’ stories of their knowledge of the life of their donors confirms this. Our determination to live is related to our survival.

So touch the bodies and lives of the people before you. Help them to feel that they and their lives are worth living. Remember, the sickest people around are high school students. Visit your local high school and hold a massage day for the students. Set up a chair in the cafeteria and touch them. If they see that you care, some of them will stop wishing to die and wish to live. You can make a difference, so get out there and just do it.

This is about rejoicing in life and its afflictions. It is not about avoiding death. I know people who went home to die and put their lives in order in preparation for death and then spent their remaining time loving. One died at age 92, fifteen years after the diagnosis of an incurable cancer, and the other wrote to say, "I didn’t die and now I’m so busy I’m killing myself. Help, where do I go from here?"

To life.

Bernie S. Siegel, M.D., a New Haven surgeon,
is author of Prescriptions for Living; Love, Medicine and Miracles; and other books.