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Part 4: Meditation, Healing, Stress, Disease Support, and Mind-Body Power

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Part 4: Meditation, Healing & Mind Power

Where Ancient Healing Meets Modern Consciousness Research

Part 4 is the longest section so far so buckle up! You are about to learn the science behind the method. This section may take you awhile to get through.

It's packed with scientific stats and evidence that supports the idea that the mind can do wonderous things, far more than we realize! This part of the course steps into the powerful middle ground between spirituality and science.

Ancient people believed prayer could heal. They believed words could bless or curse. They believed emotions affected the body. They believed certain people could transmit healing energy. They believed the heart, breath, spirit, and body were connected. For a long time, modern culture dismissed many of these ideas as superstition.

Now, researchers are proving that the acts of the ancients play a real role in real reality. Instead of only saying “energy,” researchers may study:

Stress Hormones
Immune Function
Nervous System Regulation
Placebo Response
Brain Plasticity
Psychoneuroimmunology
Epigenetics
Heart-Rate Variability
and Gene Expression.

The spiritual language and scientific language are not always describing the exact same thing, but they are circling the same mystery: the inner life of our thoughts and emotions affects the body in profound ways.

Skepticism is OK. Cynicism is NOT OK.

When you walk through this course, remember, that skepticism is characterized by an open mind and a willingness to entertain new ideas without immediately accepting them. A skeptic demands evidence before shifting their belief and remains curious and engaged, capable of changing their mind when presented with new facts. It is considered a positive, rational approach to truth-seeking.

In contrast, Cynicism is a closed-minded attituderooted in disbelief and distrust. A cynic assumes motives are corrupt or ideas are flawed before seeing evidence and is unwilling to be convinced by facts. While skepticism challenges assumptions to find truth, cynicism focuses on the negative and leads to apathy or disengagement.In other words, we welcome your skepticism. However, we will ask those with closed minds to look elsewhere for their services. We are building a wonderful community of people that want to raise up each other, here. Be nice.

Quick reminder: this section is not a substitute for actual medical care. As we covered in the disclaimer and our terms of service, the governments of the world have decided, 'in their infinite wisdom', that we're not allowed to say certain things about medical terminology. So we won't. What we can do is teach meditation as a doorway into your body's inner environment, better health, and the art of manifestation. Keep your doctor.

https://cyom.io/terms

Things Your Doctor Believed Until Meditation Disagreed

False: "The adult brain is fixed." An 8-week mindfulness program produced measurable increases in gray-matter density, and Harvard's Lazar lab found meditation can promote cortical plasticity in adults, possibly slowing age-related thinning. Evidence: strong (randomized, MRI-verified).
Source: Harvard Gazette: "Eight weeks to a better brain" https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to-a-better-brain/
False: "Pain is a fixed physical signal you can only block with drugs." Brain-imaging shows meditation reduces pain through its own neural pathway, distinct from placebo. But the big meta-analysis was honest: across 30 trials it found only low-quality evidence of a small decrease in pain.
Sources: NCCIH overview | Meta-analysis (PubMed) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27658913/
False: "The autonomic nervous system is involuntary." Meditation gives measurable influence over the stress (fight-or-flight) response, heart rate, and related cardiovascular markers once assumed to be fully automatic.
Source: AHA Scientific Statement: Meditation & Cardiovascular Risk
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/jaha.117.002218
False: "Depression relapse is inevitable without staying on medication." In the PREVENT trial, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy matched maintenance antidepressants for preventing relapse over 24 months, which is why the UK's NICE recommends it.
Sources: Lancet PREVENT trial (Kuyken et al.) | NICE-inclusion meta-analysis The Lancet https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62222-4/fulltext https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acps.13242
False: "Blood pressure needs medication, full stop." The AHA concluded that Transcendental Meditation specifically has evidence for lowering BP.
Source: AHA Scientific Statement (cardiovascular)
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/jaha.117.002218
False: "Skin disease is purely dermatological." Psoriasis patients who meditated during UV therapy reached skin clearing significantly faster than those getting the light alone.
Source: Kabat-Zinn et al., 1998 (PubMed) PubMed
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9773769/
False: "Inflammation and immune activity are set by biology, not mood." Meditation has been linked to lower inflammatory markers and shifts in the expression of stress and inflammation related genes.
Source: Nature, Translational Psychiatry (2016)
https://www.nature.com/articles/tp2016164
False: "Cellular aging is out of your hands." Meditation is associated with higher telomer activity and healthier telomere dynamics (the protective caps on your DNA tied to aging).
Source: Case-control study, telomere dynamics (PMC)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10380951/
False: "Heart disease only ever progresses." Randomized trials showed coronary blockages could regress in a year with a plant-based diet, exercise, and stress management.
Source: Ornish, The Lancet
https://www.ornish.com/wp-content/uploads/can-lifestyle-changes-reverse-coronary-heart-disease.pdf
False: "BS is strictly a gut problem." Randomized mind-body yoga trials significantly reduced IBS symptom severity by targeting the gut-brain axis.
Source: Am. J. Gastroenterology RCT (2022, PMC)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9889201/
False: "You can't influence whether a virus takes hold in your body." A 2023 UC Sand Diego paper showed that an intensive 7 day meditation workshop was associated with the upregulation of 220 immune-related genes that were previously down-regulated in COVID-19 patients.
Sources: Zuniga-Hertz et al., Brain, Behavior, & Immunity – Health (2023, PMC) · Newer UC San Diego retreat study, Communications Biology (2025)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10432704/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260406192913.htm
On and on... literally hundreds more studies and investigations.

Your Body Is Listening

We believe that every thought is not just a thought. It has a feeling. Every feeling is not just raw emotion. Rather, it has a body state attached to it.

When you remember betrayal, your body will tighten. When you imagine a future disaster, your stomach may twist. When someone feels loved, the breath may soften. When someone feels safe, the muscles may release. This is one of the easiest places to begin understanding manifestation and healing.

In fact, When you feel loved or safe, your brain actually releases oxytocin, often nicknamed the "Love Hormone." One of its jobs is to help flip the nervous system out of fight-or-flight (sympathetic) and into "rest-and-digest" mode (parasympathetic).

Oxytocin is associated with calming the stress response, nudging heart rate and blood pressure down, dampening cortisol, and easing muscle tension. So the soft breath and the released shoulders aren't just metaphors. They're the visible signature of a chemical telling the body you're safe now, you can stand down.

Your body is always listening to the story your brain is telling it.

Meditation gives you a way to change the story, not through denial, but through repeated inner rehearsal. A person can practice calm until calm becomes familiar. You can practice gratitude until gratitude becomes easier to access. You can practice the feeling of healing, abundance, love, or confidence before the outer evidence is complete.

That is the foundation of mind-body manifestation!

Stress, Survival, and the Old Reality

Stress is not only a mental experience. It is a very real, whole body, experience. Think honestly about how you actually live most of the time.

Are you lying awake doing math on the bills you can't pay?
Are you bracing every time your ex's name lights up your phone?
Do you replay that conversation with your boss, rehearsing what you should've said?
Are you tensing in traffic when someone cuts you off?
Do you dread emails before you've even opened them?
Does scrolling through headlines that leave your chest tight?

If you look closely, you'll notice that for a lot of humans... and maybe even yourself, this is the baseline. The body can't tell the difference between a predator in the grass and an overdue invoice. To your nervous system, a threat is a threat. So the same survival response that was built for a thirty-second sprint away from danger gets switched on and keeps running at full speed, every day, for years.

A body stuck in survival mode isn't just feeling uncomfortable. That muscle ache might be a sign that you have a body that can't fully heal, rest, connect, or create, because all of that requires the opposite state for an extended period of time. If it takes year to get sick, it could take years to undo the damage. Watch this video...

To the part of your brain that sounds the alarm, a memory, a worry, or a worst-case scenario you've cooked up at 2 a.m. looks exactly like a real emergency unfolding right now.

Years ago, a warrior would chase you with a sword but in modern society, your rent is overdue and you don't have the money to pay it...
Whether a rival tribe raids your camp at night or your phone lights up at 11pm with an email marked urgent...
Maybe winter's coming and your food stores are running low. You get fired over email and don't know where to turn...
A snake coils up right next to your foot. You read "we need to talk" in a text from your partner

Whatever the case, you brain can not perceive an actual threat and an imagined one so it treats them both the same.

Think about the last time a scary movie made your heart pound, even though you were safe on your own couch. Or how just remembering an embarrassing moment can flush your face and tighten your stomach years after it happened.

Think about it...

Question

What about that conversation you have with yourself with that irate co-worker? You stand in the shower and get yourself worked up over all the angry words. Your blood boils! You are even pointing your finger and talking out loud...

Tap to reveal

Answer

You know, the conversation that never happened and probably will never happen? You did this to yourself. You spiked cortisol for no reason at all.

Nothing in your outer environment changed. There was no predator, no danger, no actual threat in the room. It was all thought. You made all that shit up out of thin air! And yet your body responded as if it were real. The shallow breath, the tight muscles, the racing heart, all of it! You made it all up and hurt yourself when there was no threat at all.

That's the catch most people never realize. You don't need anything bad to actually happen to live in survival mode your entire life. You can turn on the entire stress response with nothing but your own thoughts. Which means the same imagination that keeps you trapped in fight-or-flight is also the doorway out... because if a thought can cause emotions to make the body feel unsafe, a thought can also cause emotions teach it to feel safe again.

You simply need to retrain it.

Think about this statement, "When your body feels unsafe (even with an unopened email that may or may not have bad news), it prepares for survival. Your breath changes and your muscles tighten. Your heart rate will shift. Your thinking and vision narrows. You become more likely to repeat old patterns because survival mode is not designed for creativity. It is designed for protection."

Let's break that down...

"When the body feels unsafe, it prepares for survival." This starts in the amygdala, a small threat-detector deep in the brain. It spots danger (real or perceived) and fires an alarm to the hypothalamus before your conscious mind has even caught up. The hypothalamus then triggers the sympathetic nervous system and floods the body with stress chemicals such as adrenaline, within seconds, and cortisol shortly after. The whole point is to ready you to either fight the threat or run from it.

"The breath changes." Breathing speeds up and gets shallower. The body is grabbing extra oxygen and dumping carbon dioxide, prepping the muscles and blood for sudden exertion. This is why a panicked or frightened person breathes high in the chest and why over-breathing can cause lightheadedness or tingling. This is different than intentional breathwork - We will discuss that later...

"The muscles tighten." Adrenaline routes blood away from things you don't need in an emergency (digestion, skin) and toward the large muscles of the arms and legs. They tense up, primed to spring. Held long enough, that's the source of the clenched jaw, knotted shoulders, and tension headaches chronic-stress sufferers know well.

"The heart rate may shift." The heart speeds up and beats harder, and blood pressure rises, to push that oxygen-rich blood out to the muscles fast. Under certain threats the body does the opposite and the heart slows or skips beats to a level that could be considered dangerous.

"The mind narrows." Under threat, the prefrontal cortex, which is the calm, reasoning, planning part of the brain, gets switched off, while the amygdala takes the wheel. Attention locks onto the danger. You may get "tunnel vision", and complex big-picture reasoning drop away. It's why people can't think straight in a crisis, or go blank in a high-stakes moment.

You will hear people say, "Stop being weak!" or "Stop overreacting!" The important thing to remember is that NONE of this is weakness or overreaction at all. It's built into us. It's ancient, automatic, and protective. The exact same system that once saved someone from a predator now fires at that hostile email or confrontation with someone who cut you off in traffic. The problem is that we often allow our modern life to keep the fight or flight response switched on, running full steam ahead, 100% of the time when there's nothing to fight or flee from.

Meditation provides the doorway to switch the body back to "rest-and-digest" by signaling that everything is safe. This is why meditation matters so much for healing and manifestation. You cannot create a new life while the body is constantly rehearsing old perceived danger. You can't heal when you mind is constantly racing with your foot on the gas pedal and the brake at the same time, all the time.

When your body is no longer locked in stress, you have more access to imagination, intuition, inspired action, compassion, and belief.

Breathwork: A Fast Doorway Into State Change

Breathwork deserves special attention because your breath is immediate. You can think about changing your life for years, but one slow breath can begin changing your state right now.

Breath is physical, emotional, and spiritual at the same time. In yoga, breath connects with prana. In Chinese traditions, it connects with life-force cultivation. In prayer, breath can become surrender. In modern nervous system language, breath is one way to influence the body’s regulation.

A 2023 meta-analysis on breathwork found that breathwork interventions were associated with lower self-reported stress compared with controls, and also reported improvements in anxiety and depressive symptoms.

In manifestation work, breathwork is useful because it helps you become available to a new feeling. If a person is trying to manifest prosperity while breathing like they are being chased, the body is voting for danger. Slow breathing tells the body, “We are safe enough to create.” This doesn't discount fast breathing in breathwork like the Breath of Fire but that's another topic altogether.

So let's break it down...

Breathing is the only part of your autonomic nervous system you can consciously control. Your heart rate, digestion, blood pressure, and stress hormones all run automatically. You normally can't just decide to lower them at will... unless you are trained and well skilled.

Breath sits on the border between automatic and voluntary. That makes it a kind of remote control for a system you're normally locked out of. Breathwork heals not by directly fixing anything, but by switching the body out of survival mode and into the state where its own repair systems can finally do their work. Here's what's medically happening when that switch flips:

The vagus nerve and the "off switch."

Slow breathing... especially a long, extended exhale, stimulates the vagus nerve, the main highway of your parasympathetic ("rest-and-digest") nervous system. Inhaling gently revs you up; exhaling calms you down. So when you make your out-breath longer than your in-breath, you're directly dialing up the body's brake pedal. This is the single biggest mechanism, and it's why "breathe out slowly" actually works when someone's panicking. It's neurology.

As the parasympathetic system comes online, the body stops pumping out adrenaline and cortisol. Your heart rate slows, blood pressure eases, and muscles loosen. The whole fight-or-flight cascade we talked about earlier starts to power down.

When you breathe at around ten breaths a minute or less (much slower than normal), your heart rate naturally rises on the inhale and falls on the exhale in a smooth wave. This increases heart rate variability, which is a measure of how flexibly your nervous system can shift gears. Higher HRV is linked to better stress resilience, cardiovascular health, and emotional regulation. You're essentially training the system to be more adaptable.

Once the stress response quiets, the prefrontal cortex reactivates. This is your calm, reasoning, problem-solving part of the brain. Also, the amygdala settles down. The Amygdala is kinda like an alarm bell. This is the medical reason people feel clear-headed and "back to themselves" after breathing, instead of still feeling reactive and foggy.

Your body's maintenance work like immune activity, tissue repair, digestion, and hormone balancing, happens in the parasympathetic state, not usually in survival mode. If your body is stuck in chronic stress, it's too busy bracing for threat to do deep repair so breathwork creates the calm conditions under which all of that can resume. So it's less that breath heals you, and more that it gets your body out of your own way.

One important medical note:

Not all breathwork does the same thing: slow, gentle breathing is the calming, parasympathetic kind described above. However, some popular methods like the Kundalini Breathwork, Wim Hof method, Holotropic Breathing, or "breath of fire" deliberately use fast, heavy breathing followed by breath holds.

This type of breathwork actually does the opposite. Short-term, spiking adrenaline, shifting blood CO2, and sometimes causing tingling or lightheadedness. These have benefits too, but through a very different mechanism, and they're not appropriate for everyone (people who are pregnant, have heart conditions, epilepsy, or a history of fainting) should be cautious.

Let's Practice: A 5-Minute Calming Breathwork Session

First, go ahead and play the track below. There's nothing you need to do yet. Simply allow the music to find you. Let it move through you slowly for a minute. Feel or even imagine the way warmth spreads through your hands when you come in from the cold. You don't have to make anything happen. You don't have to get this right. Just let the sound begin to soften the edges of the day.

Let your mind rest on nothing in particular. If a thought drifts in, that's okay. You're not doing it wrong. Just gently settle that thought down, the way you'd set down something heavy you've been carrying without realizing it. For these few minutes, there's no job waiting. No bills to solve. No one needs anything from you right now. For the next 5 minutes, there is nowhere else you have to be, and no one inthe world you have to be available for. This is simply time for yourself.

Listen

Luminara

5:54

0:00 5:54

When you're ready, click the 'Begin' button below and let the breathing circle guide you. As it gently expands, breathe in slowly for a count of four. As it softly contracts, let your breath out for a count of eight. In for four… out for eight. The long, slow exhale is where the body lets go so let that out-breath be easy and unhurried, like a quiet sigh of relief.

You'll move through this breath ten times, but please don't worry about counting perfectly or keeping pace with the circle. It's only a guide, not a test. If a longer exhale feels like too much at first, shorten it. Your breath should feel like a comfort, never a strain. Let your body find its own gentle rhythm.

And whenever you feel ready, you can simply let your eyes close. Stay with that slow, extended exhale on your own... a soft breath in, longer breath out... and let it carry you gently all the way to the end of the track. There's nothing left to do now but breathe, and be cared for by your own quiet attention.

Breathing Exercise

Take a moment to settle in.

Breathe naturally

A Moment to Reflect

Before you move on, take a moment to check in with yourself. There are no right or wrong answers here.

How do you feel right now, after that time with your breath? Do you feel more relaxed, more settled, a little softer than when you began? Or do you still feel some stress, some tension, some restlessness? Either answer is completely okay. Sometimes the body relaxes right away, and sometimes it needs more time and practice to learn that it's safe to let go. Both are part of the process, and neither means you did anything wrong.

Take a moment to write down whatever you noticed, in your own words. There's no need to make it sound a certain way. Be honest and kind with yourself.

Reflection

How do you feel after this breathing exercise?

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The Placebo Effect: Meaning as Medicine

The placebo effect is one of the most important bridges between 'Woo Woo Magic' and science. It's a very real and documented phenomenon and suggests we can heal our bodies with our mind.

What the placebo effect actually is:

A placebo is a fake treatment. Maybe a sugar pill with no medicine added, a saline injection, or a sham procedure that contains nothing active. The 'Placebo Effect' is when a person actually gets better after receiving that fake treatment, simply because they believed they were being healed.

It produces real, measurable changes in the body. When someone takes a placebo painkiller and their pain drops, brain scans show their body actually releasing its own natural opioids. It's so real that if you give them a drug that blocks opioids, the placebo pain relief disappears. Belief, in other words, has a chemistry. That's the whole CYOM thesis, validated in hundreds of thousands of medical labs.

Real-World Placebo Examples:

Sham surgery: In a famous study, patients with knee arthritis were split into two groups. One group got real arthroscopic surgery and the other group received a fake surgery. The fake surgery included real incisions made, but nothing was repaired. Both groups improved at almost the same rate. The BELIEF they'd been fixed did much of the work.
Source: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa013259
Placebos work even when you know they are fake: Researchers gave IBS patients pills they were openly told were placebos and they still improved more than people given nothing. Expectation and ritual did something on their own.
Source: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0015591
The details matter: An injection causes a stronger placebo effect than a tablet, two tablets work better than one, capsules beat tablets, and even pill color changes the result. | Volunteers received identical placebo painkillers, but those told the pill cost $2.50 got more relief than those that were told it cost 10 cents. | Researchers in Neurology gave Parkinson's patients two saline shots described as a $100 vs a $1,500 drug. The the "expensive" placebo improved motor function more than the "cheap" one.
Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080304173339.htm
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/01/28/an-expensive-placebo-is-more-effective-than-a-cheap-one-study-shows/
Source: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/306437

How Placebos are Used in Trials:

The gold standard of medical research is the placebo-controlled, double-blind randomized trial. Participants are split randomly: one group gets the real drug, the other gets an identical-looking placebo and neither the patients nor the doctors know who got which until the end (that's the "double-blind" part). Why? Because some people will improve on the sugar pill alone. So a drug only counts as "effective" if it beats the placebo by enough to rule out belief and chance. The placebo is the measuring stick for the entire experiment.

There's no exact count of every placebo trial in history but we do know that the number is over 500,000 registered studies, about 65% of them randomized. So placebos are used in hundreds of thousands of trials. These are hundreds of thousands of data points suggesting that your mind has the potential to heal your body.

Skeptic Note:

A placebo works powerfully on subjective, brain-mediated symptoms, such as pain, anxiety, nausea, fatigue, depression, IBS. It's not the actual placebo that cures the disease. It doesn't shrink tumors, clear infections, or mend broken bones.

It's the 'Belief' in the placebo that changes how you feel and how your nervous system responds. When your emotional state changes, then the cells of your body follow. It's the belief that changes you, not the actual placebo pill, injection, or sham surgery.

We can't rule out natural recovery either. Our bodies often go through illness and recover on their own, through the natural processes of the immune system. And a part of what looks like "placebo magic" in trials is actually people simply getting better on their own over time, not the sugar pill doing something.

For instance, your cells are constantly accumulating DNA damage and mutations. This is a normal byproduct of cells dividing and living. Most of that damage gets repaired, and cells that are too damaged usually self-destruct through a built-in process called apoptosis (programmed cell death). On top of that, your immune system does run a 'Safety Patrol' called immunosurveillance.

This is where T cells and natural killer cells spot abnormal-looking cells and destroy them. In many cases this happens without you ever knowing. Your the immune system can stop a would-be cancer before it ever grows. There's even a specific study showing that each of us has spontaneous mutations in our immune B cells, and the immune system removes those errant cells before they can form lymphomas.
Source: https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/meditation-and-mindfulness-effectiveness-and-safety
Source: https://mbct.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/kuyken-jccp-2008.pdf

There's also a real, well-documented phenomenon where people walk around with tiny, "indolent" cancers that never cause problems. Autopsy studies regularly find small prostate and thyroid tumors in people who died of completely unrelated causes and never knew they had them. So "small cancerous changes that never progress" is a real thing.

For a long time, people misunderstood placebo as “fake.” But placebo research shows something more interesting. Meaning, expectation, ritual, trust, and the healing environment can influence symptoms and lived experience.

Open-label placebo research is especially fascinating because it studies placebos given honestly. In other words, people know they are receiving a placebo, and yet some still improve. A 2010 randomized controlled trial found that open-label placebo was superior to no-treatment control for irritable bowel syndrome symptoms.

A later BIDMC report described research suggesting that patients may receive benefit from placebo treatment without deception.
Source: https://bidmc.org/news-stories/all-news-stories/news/2021/03/honest-placebo-works-as-well-as-double-blind-placebo-in-irritable-bowel-syndrome

So, in essence, The Placebo Effect is not “just pretending.” It shows that the body responds to meaning. The ritual matters. The expectation matters. The relationship matters. The story matters.

Nocebo: When Fear Becomes a Spell

Have you ever heard someone say, "You're going to worry yourself sick"? It turns out that old saying carries more truth than people realize. Worry doesn't just live in your mind. It moves into your body as negative energy. Constant worry keeps the stress response switched on, and that steady drip of stress chemistry raises blood pressure, disrupts sleep, strains the heart, strains muscles, wears down the immune system, and stirs up mucus and inflammation.

Worry leads to tension, tension leads to strain, strain wears the body down and over time, that wear can open the door to genuine dis-ease. The word itself says it: a body at un-ease with itself.

If the placebo effect shows how positive expectation can help the body heal, the nocebo effect shows the same power running in reverse. A nocebo response is when negative expectation makes symptoms or distress worse, due to what the person believes is coming... even if it's just 'perceived' danger when there is actual no danger at all.

Think about how a curse is supposed to work. If someone "casts a spell" on you, it isn't the spell itself that harms you. There's no magic in the words or the gestures. What harms you is your belief in it. The fear does the work. That's exactly what nocebo is: not sorcery, but fear that becomes embodied expectation. The mind hands the body a story, and the body starts living inside it.

Just like energy healing such as Reiki helps the sick person heal, it's not the actual Reiki that can do it if the patient doesn't believe in the healing energies. The same concept goes for spells and curses. If the cursed person doesn't believe it, the negative energies will never harm them.

An example in real life:

Here at CYOM, we believe that if a person is suggestible, a medical diagnosis is like casting a spell on them. They may have a minor pain in their body. Maybe they hear a family member tell about how someone their friend knows died from something similar. They scroll through worst-case stories online at midnight, looking at all the nasty pictures of death... programming their mind into fear. They start to believe their body is broken beyond repair. They see a doctor who gives a diagnosis and whammo! They now believe 100% of everything that doctor says. And slowly, the body begins to organize itself around that meaning... bracing, tightening, expecting the worst, and preparing to die. I did! That's exactly what I did...

The famous case of Sam Shoeman.

This is the single most-cited example of the nocebo effect in history.

In 1973, Sam was diagnosed with metastatic liver cancer and told he had only a few months to live. He died right around the predicted timeframe. But when doctors performed the autopsy, they found that his tumor was tiny and had not spread. There was nowhere near enough disease to have actually killed him. His physician, Dr. Clifton Meador, put it bluntly: "He didn't die from cancer. He died from the belief that he was dying of cancer." Meador's reflection was that when everyone around you treats you as if you're dying, you buy into it, and your whole being becomes about dying.

Hard science to pair with the Shoeman story

Irene Tracey (Oxford): Expectation can erase a real painkiller

In 2011, Irene and her colleagues gave healthy volunteers a steady dose of remifentanil (A potent opioid painkiller) while applying controlled heat pain... and changed only one thing: What people expected.

When people expected the drug to work, its pain relief roughly doubled.
When people were told (falsely) the drug had been stopped and to expect more pain, the painkiller's benefit was almost entirely nullified, even though the remifentanil kept infusing, unchanged, the whole time.
fMRI brain scans confirmed these weren't made-up reports: expectation produced real, measurable changes in brain activity.

In other words, negative expectation didn't just "feel" worse. It canceled out a powerful painkiller. That's the nocebo effect, proven in a controlled experiment.
Source: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.3001244

Fabrizio Benedetti (Turin): The actual chemistry of nocebo

Fabrizio's lab went a step further and traced how fear turns into physical pain. In a clever experiment, they gave patients a harmless saline solution but told them it would increase their pain. Guess what? It, in fact, did increase their pain, inducing a nocebo response. Then they showed they could block that pain increase with a drug (proglumide) that blocks a brain chemical called cholecystokinin (CCK).

This pinned down a mechanism: nocebo manipulation creates anticipatory anxiety, which triggers CCK, which amplifies pain transmission. Block the chemical, and the nocebo pain disappears.. A follow-up study showed nocebo also switches on the body's HPA stress axis which literally activates the stress-hormone system.Source: https://www.jneurosci.org/content/26/46/12014.

The goal is not to deny that medicine can work. Facts are facts, and good medicine can save lives. The goal is to stop feeding fear as if harsh medicines or procedures are the 'ONLY' possible future. You can take the diagnosis seriously without handing it the pen to someone else to write your entire story. There can be, and quite often is, a different possible outcome.

Psychoneuroimmunology: The Mind-Body Conversation

Psychoneuroimmunology is a scientific field that studies relationships among the nervous system, the endocrine system, behavior, and the immune system. Robert Ader and Nicholas Cohen were major figures in establishing this field, and their work helped show that immune responses could be connected with conditioning and stress.

This is one of the most important scientific bridges in the course. It gives modern language to an ancient belief that the mind, emotions, and body are not separate kingdoms. What you repeatedly feel and focus on becomes part of the body’s environment. The body is not only responding to food, sleep, toxins, and exercise. It is also responding to emotional life, stress, fear, hope, connection, and meaning.

The Sweet Water That Shouldn't Have Been Deadly

In the early 1970s, a psychologist named Robert Ader was running an ordinary learning experiment at the University of Rochester. He wanted to understand how animals learned to avoid things. This is the same basic idea as Pavlov's famous dogs that learned to drool at the sound of a bell.

His method had two parts, given together:

He let rats drink sweet-tasting water (flavored with saccharin, an artificial sweetener. It was sweet, but had no sugar and nothing harmful in it).
At the same time, he gave them an injection of a drug called Cytoxan, which made them feel nauseous.

He repeated this pairing several times. The rats quickly learned that a sweet taste equals sickness. Before long, they refused to drink the sweet water at all. So far, this was a textbook example of learned avoidance, which was exactly the result Ader expected.

Then he asked a simple follow-up question, "How long would that avoidance last?" To find out, he needed the rats to keep tasting the sweet water, so he gently fed it to them with an eyedropper. This time there was no drug injection. He just gave them the harmless sweet water by itself.

The rats began to die.

This made no sense. The water was harmless. And while the drug they'd received during training was real, the amount had been small and nowhere near enough to kill a rat. Nothing the animals had been given should have been deadly. Yet they were dying.

Ader kept digging, and eventually reached a conclusion that went against everything medicine believed at the time. The drug he'd used had weakened the immune system because the rats had learned to connect the sweet taste with feeling sick. Their bodies had also learned to connect that taste with immune shutdown.

So now, the sweet water alone was triggering the same effect the drug once had. The taste had become a kind of switch and when it flipped, the rats' immune defenses dropped so low that ordinary infections, the kind healthy rats shrug off, were enough to kill them.

Nothing physical had been done to these animals during the test. They were given plain sweet water. The damage came entirely from what their bodies had learned to expect.

This was a radical claim at the time. In that era, scientists were confident the immune system was a sealed, self-governing system with no line of communication to the brain. Ader's idea that the mind alone could alter the immune function, was met with skepticism and even public ridicule.

So he did what good scientists do... He proved it. He partnered with an immunologist named Nicholas Cohen, and together they ran a tighter version of the experiment. They vaccinated rats, exposed the conditioned group to the sweet taste, and then measured the actual antibody levels in the animals' blood. The results held up, again and again. The conditioned rats, given nothing but the sweet water, produced fewer antibodies. Their immune systems really had been turned down by nothing more than a flavor.

In 1975, Ader and Cohen published their findings, and Ader named the new field by joining the three things everyone had insisted were separate: Psycho (The Mind), Neuro (The Nervous System), and Immuno (The Immune System) or psychoneuroimmunology.

Decades later, researchers began using Ader's discovery in reverse, to help people. If the body can learn to suppress its immune system in response to a taste, then patients who need that effect (like organ-transplant recipients, whose immune systems must be calmed down so they don't reject the new organ) might one day get the same benefit using a harmless flavor as a cue, and less of the toxic medication. The accident that killed those rats is now being studied as a way to help people heal more gently.
Source: https://newrepublic.com/article/129495/can-train-body-thinking-its-medicine

Spontaneous Remission

Spontaneous remission means a disease improves or disappears in a way that is not expected from the treatment given, or in some cases without targeted treatment.

A 61-year-old man had lung cancer. It was an aggressive large cell and polymorphic lung cancer, which basically means the tumor cells looked wild and disorganized under the microscope. This is a sign the cancer tends to grow and spread fast. To treat it, surgeons removed an entire lung (a pneumonectomy).

That should have been the hard part. But just five months after the operation, the cancer came back. He developed widespread metastatic disease, meaning the cancer had seeded itself in multiple places around the body. There was a large tumor mass growing in his abdominal wall, which doctors biopsied and confirmed under the microscope was cancer. On top of that, scans showed the cancer had also spread to his liver and his other lung. At this point his outlook was grim. This is the kind of picture where you'd expect things to keep getting worse.

Then something strange happened.

Eight months later, the man went in for what should have been a totally unrelated, minor surgery: he'd developed a hernia right at the spot where they'd taken the earlier biopsy. But when the surgeon opened him up to fix the hernia, the abdominal wall tumors that that had been confirmed as cancer... They were simply gone! Completely gone, with no treatment that could explain it.

About five more months after that, follow-up scans showed the liver and lung metastases had also vanished. No radiologic evidence of them at all. The man's body had, on its own, cleared out cancer that had already spread to multiple organs.

This is what doctors call spontaneous remission. The remission in this case wasn't a brief flicker either; it held for more than five years.

Because a story like this is so hard to believe, the authors did their due diligence. Several independent pathologists re-examined the tissue from both the original lung tumor and the abdominal metastases to make sure the diagnosis was real and nobody had simply made a mistake. It checked out.
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0923753419639931

The human body is not a simple machine. The immune system, nervous system, emotional life, genetics, environment, infection history, hormones, meaning, and unknown factors may interact in ways we do not fully understand. This is why spontaneous remission stories are so compelling. They remind us that biology still contains wonder. More evidence follows...

The Radical Remission Project

The Radical Remission Project, founded by Kelly Turner, studies people who experienced unexpected cancer remission. Turner’s research includes interviews with survivors and non-conventional healers to understand patterns in radical remission stories. A published grounded theory study collected hypotheses from 20 radical remission survivors and 50 non-conventional healers across 11 countries.
Source: https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=ijts-transpersonalstudies

The Radical Remission Project teaches healing factors such as changing diet, taking control of health, following intuition, using herbs and supplements, releasing suppressed emotions, increasing positive emotions, embracing social support, deepening spiritual connection, and having strong reasons for living.

For this meditation course, the key lesson is that healing stories often involve a full identity shift. People don't just change a habit. They have to change their relationship to food, fear, purpose, love, intuition, spirit, and life itself. They have to become a new person with a new identity that doesn't identify with the previous version of themselves.

Near Death Experiencer: Anita Moorjani

Anita Moorjani’s story is one of the most famous modern healing stories. She had end-stage lymphoma, entered a coma, had a near-death experience, and then experienced a rapid recovery after returning with a deep realization about love, fear, and being herself. She regained consciousness, her cancer began to heal rapidly and she became free of countless tumors and cancer indicators within weeks.

She frames her recovery as a shift from fear into love. Her message is to “be who you really are, stop living from fear, and remember your true nature.”

4 Quantum Field Researchers

Dr. Joe Dispenza:

Dr. Joe Dispenza is one of the most influential modern teachers connecting meditation, neuroscience, emotion, energy, and manifestation. His central teaching is that many people live from the emotional memory of the past, and that meditation can help them condition the body into a new future.

A 2025 Communications Biology paper studied his seven-day meditation retreat intervention combining meditation, reconceptualization, and open-label placebo healing rituals in 20 healthy adults selected from 561 retreat participants. The study investigated neural and molecular effects of the retreat and described broad changes in brain function and blood biology.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-025-09088-3

UC San Diego reported that the meditation retreat engaged physiological pathways related to neuroplasticity, metabolism, immunity, and pain relief.
Source: https://today.ucsd.edu/story/meditation-retreat-rapidly-reprograms-body-and-mind

Another study connected to meditation research explored whether bloodborne factors from meditators could affect cellular models related to COVID-19. The 2023 paper showed meditation-induced bloodborne factors as a possible treatment and identified SERPINA5 as a protein of interest in the study model.
Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10432704/

Bruce Lipton:

Bruce Lipton, the father of epigenetics is best known for 'The Biology of Belief', where he teaches that cells respond to their environment and that belief affects biology. His message became influential because it gave people a biological language for the power of perception.

Epigenetics is the mainstream scientific field that studies how gene activity can be regulated without changing the DNA sequence. The CDC explains that epigenetics refers to how behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way genes work, turning genes on or off without changing DNA sequence.
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/genomics-and-health/epigenetics/index.html

This is where Lipton’s teaching becomes a powerful manifestation bridge. If environment affects gene expression, then the inner environment deserves attention too. Stress, love, fear, nutrition, sleep, movement, social connection, and belief all become part of the field the body lives in. A gene is the part of your DNA that works like an instruction sheet for things like building proteins.

So saying 'it's in my genes' as if your biology is fixed at birth isn't the whole truth anymore. You're not stuck with the genes you were born with running on autopilot. Your behaviors, emotions, and, environment can turn their activity up or down.

Lynne McTaggart:

Lynne McTaggart is known for The Field, The Intention Experiment, and Power of Eight groups. Her work centers on the idea that focused intention, especially in groups, can affect living systems and human outcomes.

McTaggart’s own reporting on her germination experiments describes seed studies with Gary Schwartz’s University of Arizona lab, where intention targets were selected and seed growth was later measured. Her evidence page says that after six experiments, seeds receiving intention grew taller on average than controls.
Source: https://lynnemctaggart.com/evidence
Source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/107555304322849039

Her Big Idea: Intention may become stronger when people focus together.

This connects with prayer circles, church healing services, Buddhist compassion practice, Sufi dhikr gatherings, chanting circles, and modern group meditations and retreats. The pattern is ancient but Lynne gives it modern intention language.

The late William Bengston:

William Bengston was known for experimental work involving healing intention and cancer models in mice. His early work with David Krinsley reported striking results in transplanted breast cancer in mice, including claims of remission and normal lifespan in treated mice, while controls died within expected timeframes.
Source: fourmilab.ch/documents/gtpp/Documents/jse_14_3_bengston.pdf

His related studies have explored whether recorded magnetic signals associated with the Bengston Healing Method, could affect cancer models. A 2023 paper tested recordings on three cancer models and reported significant tumor suppression in the breast cancer model, no significant tumor growth difference in the melanoma model except platelet count, and no evident tumor growth in the bladder cancer model.
Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10265331/

A 2018 paper reported transcriptional changes in cancer cells exposed to the Bengston Healing Method through energy-charged cotton and electromagnetic recordings.
Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30022894/

Your Healing Identity

You don't manifest a new reality and then become someone new. You actually need to become a brand new person first, and your new reality follows.

Most people try to manifest a new life while quietly holding the old self in place.

They want abundance but identify as unlucky.
They want to fall in love but identify as ugly.
They want health but identify only as broken.
They want a life purpose but identify as too old.

That Thinking is a trap.

The wanting and the identity are pulling in opposite directions. As stated earlier, it's like having your foot on the gas pedal and brake at the same time. The want reaches forward while the identity reaches back, and the identity almost always wins, because identity is the deeper instruction. It's the thing running underneath the affirmations, deciding what's actually possible for "someone like me."

Here is a comical video of 2 forces pulling in opposite directions.

So the work isn't to want harder. It's to stop doing 2 things at the same time. It's to stop being the person telling the old story and become a brand new person that tells a brand new story.

Why the old identity blocks the new reality

Think about how identity actually operates. You see the world through a filter. The person who identifies as unlucky doesn't just feel unlucky; they unconsciously screen the day for evidence of bad luck, talk about how, "If I didn't have bad luck, I wouldn't have any luck at all." They dismiss the good as a fluke, and brace for the next disappointment, day after day, for decades. Their identity of bad luck writes the script before the day even begins. This is why two people can walk through the same week and come out with two completely different stories. The week didn't differ. The identity of the week, through the lenses of two different people did.

So when you try to manifest a new reality or a new version of your world from the filter of the old identity, you're asking to suddenly find healing when you are not allowing yourself to heal. The new reality may even show up time and time again as an opportunity to heal but you can't see it. The old identity won't recognize it. It won't reach for it. Maybe you won't feel worthy of it. You will let it pass and call that "realistic."

For instance, maybe you want to lose weight, and a free gym coupon shows up in your mailbox. A friend invites you to a class. Your body wakes up one morning actually wanting to move. But the old identity, the one that knows itself as the person who's "just not athletic", looks at that coupon and says I'd embarrass myself, I'm too far gone to start now. Maybe tomorrow. And into the drawer it goes.

The healing knocked but the old self didn't answer the door.

That's the pattern. The opportunity to heal almost never arrives labeled "your miracle." It arrives disguised as something small, ordinary, and easy to dismiss and the old identity is expert at dismissing it.

Maybe you're sick and bedridden, and you've been telling yourself and everyone else that you're too weak to move. Maybe you are making excuses about why you feel the way you do. That was my own story. I was very sick a few years ago and I started to identify with my ailments. That became the truth of who I was. It defined me until I decided to change.

Maybe the light comes through the window just right, the pain eases for a moment, and something quiet in you says get up. Walk to the door. Just the door. The opportunity to heal is right there... a single step.

But the old identity, the one that has wrapped itself so tightly around being sick says, "Don't be foolish! You're sick and there's nothing you can do about it. You'll fall and hurt yourself even more. You'll make it worse. Your body can't do that anymore." And so you stay in bed. Feeling drained and alone, you pull the blanket back up, feel a warm tear flow down your cheek and sigh. You call it being realistic.

Pure Grit

But here's what the old self can't see from under that blanket... Actually getting out of bed and walking was never going to heal your legs. It is the act of being determined enough to try to walk. THAT is the healing. The willingness to move as though you are already someone who can, even if you have to pretend... THAT is the new identity trying to reach for its own life. The body is offering you a doorway and asking only that you act, just for a moment, like the version of you who has already recovered. And every time you decline it, you renew your vows to the old self.

However, what if you took a step, no matter how small? If you take a small step in your mind, your body will obey and also take a small step. What if you could manage to throw the covers off, muster a smile (even if you have to fake it), give thanks for your healthy body and walk to the door.

What could it hurt? Nothing.

What could it help? It could be the very start of your healing!

In fact, walking 'TO' the door might actually spark the bringing of you walking 'THROUGH' the door of possibilities.

Faith

Healing often asks for the smallest act of faith first. Faith wants you to move before you feel ready. Faith asks you to get up before the proof arrives. Faith will encourage you to behave like a champion while you are still in pain, eat one bite even though you are sick to your stomach, and smile even while tears stream down your face.

The body doesn't wait for the identity to be confirmed by circumstances. It waits for your identity to be chosen. The step comes first. The strength comes after. And the one who finally swings their feet onto the floor and walks to the door, legs shaking, unsure, but doing it anyway, is no longer the bedridden self at all. In that moment, you become someone new in the act of standing up.

Meditation is the tool

Meditation helps change your identity because it lets you rehearse being someone new before life confirms it. That's the whole mechanism, and it's more grounded than it sounds. The nervous system can't distinguish between a vivid imagination and reality so when you sit, breathe, and imagine and feel the emotions you would have if you were healed... If you can simply play with the universe and become a new version of yourself for just a few minutes while meditating... Each time you do this, your body starts treating that 'imagined' identity as the baseline. Every time you install a new picture of the person who you want to be, as if it's true, your body follows that plan, little by little.

Ryan's Story: From the Brink of Death...

The Drive to Succeed

Hi there! I am Ryan, the creator of this app. I hope you have been taking notes and learning along the way. I hope you are researching every statement to come to your own conclusions. The following story is about overcoming an obstacle and my goal is is to give you hope and faith to overcome anything!

I've lived a full life...Adventure, fun, travel, the whole ride. My kids have always had a roof over their heads and food on the table. They have more love than they knew what to do with. My wonderful wife, Chris Ann, is a genuine gift from God. I love life and have a good one but there was a time when it wasn't so good...

Career wise, I was deep in the trading and investment world, working alongside investment banks, podcasters, and some of the wealthiest individuals in the U.S.A. I was so heavily vested that a president of an exchange sat at my kitchen table to hasg out ideas. I was on top of the world. My business was sailing and life was great!

In the midst of the success, we moved to where the fun could continue... Orange County, California of course! There was sun, fun, and OC dreaming around the clock. My family life, career, and health were all firing on every cylinder. We would literally be hiking in the mountains in the morning and laying on the beach at night. To say the least, life was full.

Fear Arrives

In finance, there's an old saying, "You're only as good as your last trade." At the time, I built probability-based trading software for a living. Traders would place calculated trades based on the outcome of this software, and somewhere in the back of my mind I always knew the day might come when my strategies stopped working.

"Nothing lasts forever, and the markets never stop shifting." I thought. Then one day the thought landed hard, "Oh shit, What if I fail tomorrow? What if I just can't do it anymore?" That single "what if" opened a spiral I couldn't climb out of for years. Nasty, negative thoughts started creeping in, even though there was nothing wrong with the software. Those thought latched on and took over. On the outside I looked fine. I looked happy. However, on the inside, I was a complete shit-show and an absolute mess.

Anger Creeps In

Day after day, I was upset and emotionally drained. The pressure climbed to a level so intense that I slowly turned into an angry person. I'd wake up mad and stay mad until I fell asleep. If I wasn't mad because of what someone was doing 'to me', I would scan the news until I found a reason to be mad at them - whoever 'them' was. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and be furious that I couldn't fall back asleep. When I awoke, I'd be enraged that the cereal box was empty. I would get pissed off that I couldn't find my socks. I even lost my mind because a family member was singing 'too loud' in the shower.

If I took a loss on a trade, which is something that is just a part of trading and unavoidable, I would be depressed for hours. Even when I took a massive profit, I would get upset because the market kept climbing without me. I'd yell at the screen and blame the news for the missed opportunity.

The poison was seeping into my marriage. My wife has a heart of pure gold... loving, kind, and the person I look up to the most. She's my queen (Actually she is my Queenie Queenie Banana Beanie). We normally have a fairytale marriage but there I was, snapping at her over things she had no control over. If my clothes were not hung in the proper spot, I would mention it. If the food she had so graciously prepared was not hot enough or too hot, I would say something.

I was acting ridiculous. I was experiencing a manifestation of a fear response running at full speed for an extended period of time.

Sickness Shows Its Face

It started as an uneasy feeling on the left side of my abdominal wall. I thought I had pulled a muscle. A slight nagging pain wouldn't go away and was very irritating. I thought, "Now I have to deal with this too!" Within a week I was at the doctor's office, where I received the classic line, "If it gets worse, come back and see me."

Over the next few months, it did in fact get worse... Much Much worse! Day after day, the pain increased little by little. Over a 3 month period, I eventually developed gut-wrenching pain accompanied with nausea that never let up. It was constant and 24 hours a day. This sickly feeling was the nastiest thing I had ever experienced. It was like I could actually feel the slime in my body festering. I added worry to my anger and started identifying as a world class asshole.

Mouth Breather

My wife loves making the house smell good with boiled apples, oranges, cranberries, and cinnamon. Oh it's the loveliest scent you could ever smell. However, I started breathing through my mouth, because any scent would turn my stomach. Even the smell of breakfast being cooked would trigger my gag reflex. I stopped going to restaurants and eventually stopped eating. When I stay I stopped, I went an entire week without eating.

Fasting often heals but this wasn't fasting. This was fear sucking the nutrients out of my body.

I started going to doctors and specialists. They ran every test they could and still couldn't pin down a diagnosis... Endoscopies, Colonoscopies, CAT Scans, Ultrasounds, Blood work, Biopsies, Stool Samples, Medications. They floated Ulcerative Colitis, Lyme Disease, Crohn's, but nothing fit their cookie cutter chart. My symptoms were so bizarre. I developed full body rashes, daily diarrhea, constant vomiting, and even bleeding from my private parts.

The doctors kept handing me off from one specialist to the next. Pills, pills, and more pills, which only made me sicker.

I was dropping weight too fast and lost over 80 pounds, more than a third of my body weight. For the next year, I didn't eat solid food. Instead, I survived on a 100% liquid diet. Life was a hellish experience.

Giving my Business Away

I walked away from my business entirely, shutting the whole operation down and handed it to one of my partners. There was simply no way to keep going. I was dying, and honestly, I didn't even care anymore.

At this point, my partners didn't like me anyway. I took a good thing... a great thing and smashed it to pieces. They were all invested and it felt like I simply destroyed it all as soon as they started.

Bedridden

One morning, about 6 months in, I was the sickest I had been up until this point. After pushing my puke bucket away, due to the smell, I tried to get up to go empty it. My body was so tired that I couldn't even stand up. I called to my wife, Chris, "Babe, I am so sorry but can you empty this for me?" It was embarrassing and I felt destroyed...and still mad at everything, including God who 'did this to me.'

I didn't get out of bed that day. There were days that I was so dehydrated that I didn't even urinate. That one day started an entire year where I didn't get out of bed too much. Sometimes I managed to drag myself into the shower and sit under the water and other times sometimes to sit on the porch and get some sun but that was about it. When I went to the doctor, someone had to drive me because I couldn't drive.

If my son wanted to play, I would play with him while laying in bed for a few minutes until I had to rest again. My wife started eating dinner in bed with me while we watched TV just so she could spend time as a family together. On a happy note, we did have a lot of family cuddle time and watched so many movies and TV shows together!

Broke as F**k!

The medical appointments and 'treatments' burned through our savings faster than if we'd just lit the money on fire. This piled a brand-new fear on top of everything else. Now I had no job, very little money left, and I was dying. The medical bills eventually wiped out 100% of our savings and we lived on the money from my wife's job.

Remembering Stories of Healing

We were going to a church directly across the street when I could manage to make my way out of bed. The pastor taught about loving others and living a good life with good intentions but I had a conflict. I didn't feel like God could heal like the pastor said he could. I was resentful.

I was furious at God and I thought all of this religious stuff was nonsense. The pastor came to see me one day and pray with me but all I could think was, "Healing? Hmph. Nobody heals. It's all a bunch of crackpot quackery."

However, I kept thinking about the stories of asking and receiving.

Matthew 21:22 "And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive."

Mark 9:23 "If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth."

Matthew 7:7 "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you."

My Simple Healing Prayer

I kept thinking about how God could heal. That never left my mind and months later, I sat in my favorite 'Thinking Chair' and cried out with everything in my soul! "God, if you are real, prove it because I don't believe it. If you are real, heal me and I will tell everyone about you!"

I was still angry and desperate, grasping at every straw. Prayer was the only tool I had left. I remembered an old saying from one of the sermons, "Fake it till you make it." It sounded stupid, to say the least but I was at rock bottom. I had absolutely nothing left to lose except my life and I was losing that anyway. Why not try something crazy?

The Night that Changed EVERYTHING!

I didn't actually know how to fake it till you make it so I started looking up videos on YouTube about alternative health and thinking positive, hoping that I would find something that helped.

One night, I wanted to listen to some soothing music to try to fall asleep and I stumbled onto a random video. As it played, the music was soothing but it wasn't just music. It was a guided meditation but was nothing like any meditation I'd pictured in the past. It was so odd that I almost turned it off.

This random guy was going on about being "In Spaaaace..." and his voice sounded weird. I didn't particularly like it but I was intrigued so I let it play and decided to follow along in this charade of the weird. What could it hurt? No one was watching. This was a video by Dr. Joe Dispenza who later became a mentor of mine.

That meditation sparked something in me. I was curious. During the meditation, I was able to drift off to sleep in a relaxed way. I became more relaxed than normal so, the next day, I searched the internet for more of his videos and found a meditation called "The Breath."

This was an active meditation where he asked me to squeeze my muscles in a certain manner and 'project energy up my spine into the top of my head.' Five minutes in and for the first time in over a year, the nausea and pain vanished for about 45 minutes! I was like, "What the F?!"

I hadn't felt remotely human in a long time. The nausea came back a little later and I was bummed but I knew that a spark had been lit. No doctors or medicines had been able to relieve my symptoms up until that point.

I tried the meditation again and OMG! I felt hungry.... like literal hunger.

I had not been hungry in over a year so I made my way to the kitchen, opened the fridge and grabbed a slice of pizza, stuck it in my mouth and began eating. My wife's mouth hit the floor. She was like, "Whaaaat???"

The Fun Puke!

Of course I vomited up all the food later because eating pizza and everything else after a year of not eating anything solid was really stupid! But it was ok because something had shifted in me. I couldn't pinpoint it but I knew that something was different. As I was puking, I was actually happy because I knew something was different in me. The nausea returned but I was on a mission now.

Finding Woo Woo Magic

Even though I was still sick, I knew I was on to something! I started reading and watching and listening to everything and anything about meditation, alternative healing, and all the Woo Woo Magic the internet had to offer!

Much of the content didn't resonate with me because I am a skeptic by heart. I had to find my tribe and I had one rule... If the woo wasn't backed by science, I didn't want it. I wasn't shopping for a religion. I was looking for something repeatable.

I began trying methods from many teachers, such as breathwork, emotional work, and body movement. Sometimes I did this for hours, day after day. Healing became my job.

After many sessions, my symptoms subsided for a while. Food started to become more appealing. Slowly, I started eating small amounts of solid food again and sometimes, every bite tasted like the best meal of my life. It had been a very long time since I'd been able to eat and enjoy it.

It wasn't all great. It was like a roller coaster ride. Some days I would be up and others I would be down. I was trying all the alternative methods that I could find. Juicing celery. Acupuncture. Chiropractic care. Chinese herbal medicine. Kundalini activation. Crystal healing. Earthing. EFT tapping. Meditation.

I knew something was happening... I could feel it in my body. I started replacing Fear with Hope; Anger with wonder; Desperation with Excitement. I started watching my thoughts. Every time I started being negative, I would swipe the ninja sword of my mind right through that negativity and replace it with a memory of something happy.

My Mentors

I was learning from everyone... Wim Hof for breathwork. Niraj Naik for weaving spirituality into breathwork. Lynne McTaggart for the power of intention. Bruce Lipton for epigenetics. William Bengston for healing energy. Robert Monroe for remotely expanding the mind. Russell Targ for perceiving beyond the body. Caroline Cory for telekinesis. Jim Carrey for the law of attraction. Brian Scott for thinking outside of normal. A steady diet of GAIA, Mindvalley, the YouAreCreators channel, the Love Covered Life podcast, Shaman Oaks, Charlie Goldsmith, Dolores Cannon, Joel Osteen, and the KAP girls at the Conscious life Expo in L.A. I was filling my mind with all of it!

Even though I was still sick, I was able to manage the symptoms pretty good. Little by little, I was healing. I stopped bleeding from my pores. My stool became someone what normal again and I figured, it took me years to get all the way down to this point so it might take years to crawl my way back out.

I was spending up to 6 hours per day in meditation and another 6 hours studying the Law of Attraction. Slowly, I started gaining weight and regaining my life back, one pound at a time.

Then something crazy started to happen. As I replaced all of the negative emotions with positive emotions, I began to try my hand at manifesting things other than health. I thought, "If this work does wonders for health, then will the law of attraction work for things I want also?

The Magical Felt Tip Pen

As I was doing the work to make my body whole again, I turned it up a notch and wanted to play with the universe. I imagined a felt tip pen. I saw it in my mind and convinced my mind to believe, just for a few minutes that I actually had the pen.

The reason I chose this type of pen is because I didn't have one and I thought that it was small enough to manifest. It wasn't like I was trying to manifest a hundred thousand dollars - That came later wink wink... I imagined having the pen, loving it, writing with it. I even imagined how it felt to write with it and the sound it made. I imagined the smell of it... As soon as I was convinced that when I opened my eyes, the pen would be sitting on my desk, I let it go and forgot about it. I figured, if this manifesting stuff worked, then it would come at some point.

3 days later, my wife gave me a package that came in the mail and said, "I bought you something."

I shit you not! Guess what was inside? A felt tip pen!

I never asked her for it. I didn't search the internet. There was no way she could have known about this experiment.

I asked, " When did you order this??" She was placing the order at the exact moment that I was playfully imagining having it. Boy oh boy! I was on fire! The realization that I could actually have what I wanted, by simply using my mind was starting to take hold. I was so excited that I wanted to try something else!

Manifesting a Dream Job

I learned that creating a vision board would help manifest the things I wanted. One thing I wanted was a good-paying job that I enjoyed. Up until now, because I was sick all the time, the only job I could get was working at a pizza joint just to bring in some cash. I didn't like it and it didn't pay well.

Since my background was in algorithms and finance, I wanted to work for a trading company of some sort, creating some type of cool product. I didn't want to be a banker. I didn't want to be an investment advisor and I certainly didn't want to be a stock broker! I wanted to create something, similarly like I created the software in the previous years.

I started applying to companies, acting as if I was already hired. I began brushing up on my skills, watching training videos. I started to act as if I already had the job. A few people thought I was nuts but I didn't care. I was at the point where I had already made the universe work in my favor twice already... Once with my health and once with the felt tip.

Quick Note: I was still sick but progressively getting better little by little.

Low and behold, the company that I so badly wanted to work for called me up. I remember the head of their trading platform services asking me a few questions about options trading and apparently he like my answer because I was hired within a few days!

Oh it was a dream! The facilities were awesome! We had catered food every day. They threw parties and gave a way merch! It was exciting!

My job was to write documentation for a new trading platform. Whaaat?! I was so amazed with this job and I was very good at it! My life was rebounding. My health kept improving little by little. I still had to keep a puke bucket beside my desk at work but at least I want in bed anymore! Everything started to look up. It was a wonderful period.

Vacations Returned

Since my health was starting to improve, we took a vacation. We went to Monument Valley. It was amazing. I fell in love with the SUV we rented so while we were driving on the road for hours, I would imagine it was mine... and then I just surrendered it to the universe. That vacation was the most memorable one because it was at the first vacation we had been on after I was beginning to heal.

We went on a lot of vacations that year. We went to Park City to go skiing but I had to take it slow. I was still sick and had to take time to rest quite often. We went hiking. We went to the beach oodles of times. We even started going out to eat. I felt like I could live again. My smile was back and then...

Losing the Dream Job

That lasted about a year and a half and then, out of nowhere, Whammo! I was laid off. The rug had been pulled out from under me. I was in utter shock. Devastated, I cried for a solid week. What happened? Did I become complacent? This was the best job I had ever had and I couldn't understand why the universe took it away. What was I doing wrong?

I couldn't see it at the time. This job was fun but it wasn't my destiny. It was only a stepping stone. I look back on it now and think that the universe probably gave me something fun to compensate for the hell I went through.

The Check in the Mail

Being jobless again gave me quite a few months to spend focusing on my health and figuring out what I did wrong. It sucked that I lost my dream job but in retrospect, that was all it was... A job. I was focusing too small.

For months, I spent time in quiet meditation, centering myself again. I was coming off a big high and now I was being humbled. This was a chance to really focus on what came next. "Well", I thought, "The universe has brought me 3 things like magic so why not do it again?"

I created another vision board that had things like 100% full health, lots of money in the bank, etc... One thing I put on the vision board was my dream home with Spanish tiles on a cobblestone street. Another item on the board was a luxury SUV like the one I fell in love with in Monument Valley. Even though we didn't have any money, I imagined that we did. I kept meditating, I kept being delusional and pretending that I was way better off than what it looked like on the outside.

Out of nowhere...

An opportunity came that allowed us to have the exact SUV that we were driving on the Monument Valley vacation... without the sunroof. I took it! We were still somewhat broke but at least we had better transportation now!

California was getting too expensive I thought and I wanted to move to a more affordable area. Moving back to Tennessee seemed like a good option at the time because we had family there, no state income tax, and the houses were affordable. The only problem was that we didn't have the money to move.

So I started focussing on being the most abundant person I had ever been!

I walked around our neighborhood with my headphones on meditating for hours, giving thanks for my amazing life, smiling at everyone I passed.

And out of nowhere...

A big fat check came like magic, from a decision my wife made years earlier. This was enough money to help us with a fresh start and replenish the savings we had lost when I got sick. It was life changing money. So we packed our bags and off we went... being grateful along the way!

The Out of Body Experience

Years went by. My health improved but seemed to plateau. We bought a house with our seed money. By the summer of 2023, I was about 70% healed but I couldn't seem to get over the hump. I still had flare-ups and when they hit, they knocked me back for a few days. I marked them off as body maintenance.

The continual healing took years of hard work, and the whole time, I held onto the belief that I would eventually heal 100% and not have to constantly work on my health.

Staying healthy on my own was still a struggle but I was used to it by now. My wife and kids were my biggest cheerleaders the entire way, always there with encouragement, wisdom, and a loving ear. Life was so much better than years ago but there was still a hurdle I wanted to cross. I wanted to be whole. I wanted every piece of health back. I wanted to stop trying everyday.

Then, in April of 2023, I heard about a week-long healing retreat happening in Denver in July. After a long talk with my wife, we decided I was going to the event. We were stepping out in faith. I remember her saying, "You spend $5k on one ER visit so why not give it a try?"

So we turned it into a family vacation in Colorado. Of course, the day before it started, I had a flare-up and got sick in Estes Park. We spent that morning in the hotel room and missed most of what we'd planned. After snapping a couple of pictures, we drove on to the hotel, praying this event might finally move the health needle in our favor.

The night before the event, my wife took me to a nice restaurant but we boxed up all the food and went back to the room because I couldn't get a bite down. Even though my health was returning, when these flareups happened, I still struggled.

I was sick for the first three days of the event and couldn't eat much of anything. Every breakfast and lunch, I'd wander off somewhere by myself or pick at a few bites while chatting with other attendees. When they asked, "Can't you eat?" I'd tell them my story... How I was sick and part of the gastro study. Yes... The event doctors checked my poop.

We were meditating 8 hours per day and by Day 3, I started to panic that we'd just flushed all that money down the drain. I felt no better. Pure stubbornness was the only thing keeping me in that chair. I struggled to push the panic away. I was able to calm myself just enough to let the magic in.

We were doing the breath when it happened!

For the very first time in my life, I experienced a transcendental moment. I felt myself leave the body for about 30 seconds. I was in a place that wasn't dark and wasn't light. It just was. I had been there for a million years. I didn't feel excitement or awe but I did feel love like an ageless and unconditional love. I was content and home.

But then I thought, "How did I get here?" and that scared the absolute bejeezus out of me! Immediately I was sucked through a tunnel at light speed, back to Earth and ripped off my eye mask as fast as I could! I found myself laying in the little old lady's lap beside me. She just patted my back and said with a gentle laugh, "Welcome back!"

Something felt different. It was very subtle, but real. I realized that I didn't have any pain and started moving my body, hunting for the pain. It was gone! The nagging nausea was also gone but was it just a wondering moment of clarity?

After the meditation was over, I walked into the lunch hall to talk with the other attendees and for the first time at the event, I happily ate an entire plate of food. My tablemates were stunned. I'll never forget my friend saying, "You're eating, Ryan!"

Many things in my life changed that week. I watched so many people heal. I even saw people get up and walk out of their wheelchairs. I knew there is something to this meditation work, and I made up my mind right there to spend my life studying it. I wanted my wife to experience the awakening I had. The most amazing part is that as I write this in July, 2026, I haven't had a single flare-up since July 2023!

I was 100% fully healed in a 30 second out of body experience!

When I got home, my wife was amazed. Over the next few months, she saw that my transformation was so dramatic, she wanted to experience the event for herself. I wanted that for her, too. I wanted her to feel the love of the Creator the way I had, and still do, so we signed up to go to one together.

We bought the plane tickets to the event in Cancun and started planning, even though we didn't have the to pay for the event. It was $10,000 for the both of us. By this point, we had seem miracle after miracle so we started manifesting it anyway! I was at the point where I would simply ask, meditate on it, believe that it was mine, and walk as if it were already done. I didn't question any longer.

The 2nd Check in the Mail

So we didn't have the money because we just shelled out $5,000 for the event a few months ago. The rest of our money was tied up in the house, 401K, and all that jazz. We were not going to take out a loan because that wouldn't be trusting the universe.

The event tickets were about to go on sale and they usually sold out in minutes. We still didn't have the money. So Chris bought a dress and we talked about our plans during the event, as if we already had the money, instead! We both acted as if it had been paid for...because in the quantum field, it already had been.

And out of nowhere...

Another check came in the mail for $10,000 from a year end bonus that no one was expecting. It came just in time and was the exact cost of the event. I know! This story might sound absurd and outlandish but more often than not, woo woo happens in a way that you would never even realize.

On that magical beach in Cancun, Chris finally felt the love of the universe pour down on her. The prayer I'd quietly held, that she'd have her own transformative experience, was finally answered.

The Magical Land of Spain

Chris and I spent the next year and a half honing our skills, making friends in the meditation community and learning how to bring about our own reality, the way we want, on our own terms.

Fast forward to September 2025. We had always dreamed of living overseas one day. Chris wanted to see Europe so we said, "What the heck, let's do it!" Without a care in the world, we set the intention and started acting as if it had already happened.

It's now June 2026 and I am writing this from our home here in Spain. The home has Spanish tiled roof and sits on a cobblestone street, just like I had envisioned all those years before. We even have a view of the famous Alhambra Castle from our rooftop terrace. Here is a video of one of the street performers close to our house. Sorry about the video quality but listen and try to imagine the magic...

Why did I tell you all this? To give you hope that everything is possible. It may not be easy but it is highly probably if you put forth effort.

Reflection

Think of a time when you focused on something and it came to you like magic. What was it and how long did it take to manifest in your life?

0/300

The Attracting Mind

Want to know the crazy thing? Initially, I got sick due to the worry about letting clients down because i feared my software would stop working. In the end, there was nothing wrong. The software still works today just like it did in the beginning. I fabricated a fear about something that wouldn't even happen and it was so bad that it almost killed me, for nothing. I made it all up! I believed something bad would happen and my body made it happen.

During this lesson, you've seen that there's a growing body of scientific research that shows anything is possible. I believe that the way we meditate, the belief or lack thereof, the amount of stress we have, our level of compassion, the lifestyle we lead, how we treat others, and the food we eat are the future of preventative medicine... and they most assuredly are the future of your life.

It took me years to worry myself sick, and years to climb back out, yet in the end, the turning point came in a single instant. There's so much research still to be done, and I'm so excited to be here witnessing the flow of this brand-new scientific journey that picked up stream just a few years ago.

With certainty, you will become what you focus on. Good or bad. That's the truth and it happens to all of us all the time. CYOM was created to help share everything I have learned along the way and hopefully inspire you to take the next step... to believe with so much delusion and wonder that everyone around you will see a shift in you!

I want to see you heal. I want to see you succeed. I want you to spread your love and positive vibes all across the Earth.

Community Poll

Do you believe that you can have what you believe in by asking and believing?

Yes

Lesson Quiz

Ready to test your knowledge? 3 questions • 70% to pass

Notice

Part 4: Meditation, Healing, Stress, Disease Support, and Mind-Body Power

Part 4: Meditation, Healing & Mind Power

Where Ancient Healing Meets Modern Consciousness Research

Skepticism is OK. Cynicism is NOT OK.

Things Your Doctor Believed Until Meditation Disagreed

Your Body Is Listening

Stress, Survival, and the Old Reality

You simply need to retrain it.

Breathwork: A Fast Doorway Into State Change

The vagus nerve and the "off switch."

One important medical note:

Let's Practice: A 5-Minute Calming Breathwork Session

A Moment to Reflect

The Placebo Effect: Meaning as Medicine

What the placebo effect actually is:

Real-World Placebo Examples:

How Placebos are Used in Trials:

Skeptic Note:

Nocebo: When Fear Becomes a Spell

An example in real life:

The famous case of Sam Shoeman.

Hard science to pair with the Shoeman story

Psychoneuroimmunology: The Mind-Body Conversation

The Sweet Water That Shouldn't Have Been Deadly

Spontaneous Remission

The Radical Remission Project

Near Death Experiencer: Anita Moorjani

4 Quantum Field Researchers

Dr. Joe Dispenza:

Bruce Lipton:

Lynne McTaggart:

The late William Bengston:

Your Healing Identity

Why the old identity blocks the new reality

The healing knocked but the old self didn't answer the door.

Pure Grit

Faith

Meditation is the tool

Ryan's Story: From the Brink of Death...

The Drive to Succeed

Fear Arrives

Anger Creeps In

Sickness Shows Its Face

Mouth Breather

Giving my Business Away

Bedridden

Broke as F**k!

Remembering Stories of Healing

My Simple Healing Prayer

The Night that Changed EVERYTHING!

The Fun Puke!

Finding Woo Woo Magic

My Mentors

The Magical Felt Tip Pen

Manifesting a Dream Job

Vacations Returned

Losing the Dream Job

The Check in the Mail

The Out of Body Experience

The 2nd Check in the Mail

The Magical Land of Spain

The Attracting Mind

Lesson Quiz

🎵 Your Personal Mix

Great work!

Please slow down