Gracious viewers, welcome to Healthy Living on Supreme Master Television. This week we present the first in a two-part interview with Dr. Joan Borysenko, a renowned pioneer in the field of integrative medicine or medicine that treats the whole person, with a focus on the interaction between the mind, body, and spirit.

Dr. Borysenko, a vegan who received her doctorate in medical sciences from Harvard Medical School in the US is a licensed psychologist, director of the Claritas Institute for Interspiritual Inquiry Mentor Training Program, in-demand lecturer and bestselling author. Her latest book is called “Fried: Why You Burn Out and How to Revive,” which is about emotional and physical exhaustion and how to overcome these challenges.

In 1987, Dr. Borysenko published “Minding the Body, Mending the Mind,” which sold over 400,000 copies and was on the New York Times best-seller list. The book delves into how emotions and stress influence our physical well-being.

We really need to understand the connection between emotions and disease because when you have an emotional response, there are different areas of the limbic system of your brain that are involved.

You have, for example, the amygdala, which stores images. So, for example, you have somebody who has post-traumatic stress (disorder) who has been in a war, and they may have nightmares or repetitive dreams, and that kind of chronic stress will release chronically a number of hormones.

Amongst them is cortisol, which decreases the function of the immune system and actually kills cells in a neighboring part of the limbic system called the hippocampus. And this incredible activation of the nervous system that creates fear will continue.

And what we know now, this is the work of Dr. Candace Pert who has done so much work on what she calls “informational molecules.” She is the co-discoverer of receptor sites in the brain for opioids. If an opioid creates an emotional response, it’s because the cells of the body are responding to that molecule which is released by the brain, goes through the blood and then you know just like that in a millisecond it’s bound to every cell in the body. So all emotions release slightly different neuropeptides, informational molecules.

Those bind to the surface of the cell and they are in fact signaling the nucleus of the cell, they are signaling the genes to create different proteins, and therefore there’s not only an immediate effect but in the case of chronic emotions, a chronic effect on your genetic code that comes from emotions. And people haven’t realized that.

They’d say, “What difference does it make? Emotions come and emotions go.” But over time they have a great deal to do with the longevity of the body. Positive emotions like love have a positive effect on the body. Chronically fearful emotions, as we’ve already explained, have quite a negative impact on not only your body, but your well-being.

How can we learn from our negative emotional responses and achieve peace within, thereby improving our health and longevity? Dr. Borysenko now provides her perspective.

You can take what might have originally been a calm nervous system, and through subsequent experience it begins to respond, for example, with anger towards something. And then anger comes up and all of their relationships are colored by this. So what needs to happen if a person has chronic emotional problems, unhappiness of this sort or lots of anger or fear is that two things need to be worked on:

One of them is the possible childhood roots of that, the beliefs that they hold, the experiences that they have had, which entails a great deal of healing to do that, to go back and learn to recognize, “Yes, this was my past, this is how I respond. I recognize that those patterns of response are not reality. They are conditioned by my mind.”

And you can learn: “Let me step back for a moment and witness them. There it is, there is the anger again. I feel it in my body. I am not judging it as good or bad, but I can just do a couple of things here.”

Number one: take a look and say, “Is the anger at this moment a kind of guidance that I am in a situation that’s dangerous, that somebody has overstepped their boundaries,” because anger is protective, we have to have it. All emotions are really important. So in other words, you are trying to see: “Is this my old conditioning or is this real?”

And then what you can learn to do if you realize it: “Wait a minute, I don’t need any information from this anger; it’s just an old mind habit.” You can learn to alter your breathing. If you are a meditator, you already know this. You begin to breathe in a deep and slow way. It calms down your nervous system and then without trying to chase away the emotion you can just witness it for even a a little while: 10 seconds, 20 seconds and often it will simply dissipate or transform.

It’s just like you’ve cut through illusion and brought yourself really to reality in that moment. So those are a couple of ways to deal with emotions. But I always like to remind people that some emotions that are really difficult, for example, grief, we have to simply express and live with because a lot of stress-related problems I think are due to the fact that we are not allowed to grieve.

In many of the world’s sacred scriptures, the virtue of forgiveness is highly praised. For example, in the Holy Bible’s Book of Matthew it’s stated, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you that you may be sons of your Father in Heaven.” As Dr. Borysenko explains, forgiving others has a great impact on our health and well-being.

Then another fairly recent study at Emory University, (USA) which has a Tibetan Studies Department, has looked at the effect of compassion meditation, where you’re really generating thoughts of loving kindness toward yourself, to other people and forgiveness, toward those people who you may have held grudges against.

What happens is even not just for long-term meditators but for novice meditators, there is a decrease in the inflammatory system of the body. So in other words, that’s a direct effect on the immune system. And inflammation is the final common pathway in most diseases, everything from heart disease, because it’s inflammation, for example, of the endothelium or inner layer of the blood vessels that allows plaque to build up. So if you get rid of some of the inflammatory response, you’re going to have less cardiac disease.

A molecule released by a cell of the immune system, one of them, interleukins-6, has been studied. You get stressed out, levels of interleukin-6 get higher, your inflammation increases and you’re more likely not only to get heart disease but osteoporosis, the frailty of aging, practically every chronic disease that we know is impacted in that way by stress and relieved then by meditation. You can actually learn how to forgive.

This is important because what people do when they are holding a grudge is usually they are re-running in their mind their grudge story or their regret story. “I am a terrible person, how could I have done this, how could I have hurt somebody?” And every time you re-run the same story, you get the same hormonal response so your stress becomes chronic through doing that.

The feeling of gratitude also has a powerful bio-molecular effect on the body.

With gratitude, if you measure different aspects, different levels of stress-related hormones they’re going to go down. If you look at the immune system, it’s going to be functioning at a better level. There is going to be less of that cytokine-6, for example, that really inhibits good immune function.

And gratitude also has another effect, and that is that people who are grateful are much more effective in this world. They actually have better motivation, they get things done and, of course, they are nicer. Look at people.

Not only can an illness be healed through a change in attitude, but the condition itself may act as a spark to awaken us to a greater sense of self.

In some cases it is possible to cure diseases by changing our attitudes. For example, all of the diseases that are primarily related to stress we can eliminate. But then if there’s another component, there’s a virus, there’s a genetic component we may be able to make it much better, but in some cases we can’t eliminate it. Not everything can be cured.

But every condition of life including every illness can in fact be a journey of healing where you come into a sense of harmony, where that conditioned or false self is actually, in a way, broken through by your difficulties. When all that false persona falls away because suddenly you realize, “I am actually not in control of the universe; look what’s happened,” at that time it’s easier to access that part of yourself that people have different names for.

Some people think of it, “Oh, it’s my core self” or “my true nature” or “my divine self” that’s in connection with something larger, and that’s a major thing because once you get to that point you have a lot more peace of mind. You have much more of that sense of compassion that comes from your heart. There’s more harmony that you have and you generally feel a whole lot less stress.

Dr. Joan Borysenko, we thank you for your time and insights into the role of emotions in the realms of wellness and healing. Your work in this field is surely helping many find more harmony and contentedness in their lives.

For more details on Dr. Joan Borysenko, please visit www.JoanBorysenko.com
“Fried: Why You Burn Out and How to Revive,” and other books by Dr. Borysenko are available at the same website

Amiable viewers, please join us again next Monday on Healthy Living for the conclusion of our intriguing interview with Dr. Borysenko, where we’ll learn more about the benefits of love, meditation and a plant-based diet. Thank you for your presence today on our program. Coming up next is Science and Spirituality, after Noteworthy News. May we immerse in Heaven’s love, protection and light as we learn to sow seeds of gratitude, happiness and peace.