Mood Medicine: RX: “Relax! Come to your senses!”

By Marya Mann, PhD.

Taste more strawberries and chocolate.
Smell homemade bread.
Gaze at a magenta flower.
Listen to Mozart.
Touch someone you love.
Signed: Mood Medicine Doctor of the Future

The best way to resolve any health care crisis is to stay well. Just don’t get sick anymore. Easier said than done, I know, but here’s the good news: healthy pleasures actually stimulate the biochemistry of enjoyment and set up a delicious cycle in which sensory delights lead to more health, more happiness, and even more delight.

So throw away your medical bills! Pick up a healthy pleasure instead.

When we listen to our favorite music, savor a tasty meal, enjoy the seaside, or marvel at the beauty of dance, we feed the pleasure-craving parts of ourselves, and that nourishes “feel-good” neurochemicals, immune system boosters, and other natural responses that make us robust and strong.

Robust people expect good things to happen. They enjoy their bodies, giving attention to what they’re actually feeling and thinking, as well as what’s going on around them. They know how to balance inner and outer experiences, feel centered, and generate more mana, or spiritual power, through the conscious movement of energy.

They’re flexible. They can often change what they’re feeling with a switch of their focus, check out new beliefs, restore a healthy heart rate, and stimulate enough “feel-good” neurotransmitters to foster ongoing positive relationships in all areas of their lives.

Sure, exercising, not smoking or drinking in excess, and avoiding sunburn all contribute to a long, healthy life, but mindful sensitivity to and appreciation of pleasure counters the materialism, workaholism, and brain imbalances which have racked our society with disease.

So go ahead. Feel good now! It’s good for you!

Why Kill Yourself to Save Your Life?

The wide use of “feel-good” pharmaceutical medicines—Prozac™, Zoloft™, and others, as well as the use of methamphetamines, alcohol, heroin, and crack—tells us that many people simply aren’t happy.

Well, who could be happy when we’re told that our health depends on not drinking the water, not breathing the air, giving up steak, and repetitive lifting of 20-lb. weights, while avoiding sugar, wheat, and chocolate?

All in the name of dodging the medical terrorists – cancer and heart disease. You can’t terrorize people into feeling good.

Take chocolate, for instance. A few years ago, research showed that a certain kind of chemical in chocolate had been shown to be associated with a certain kind of cancer. The headline read, “Chocolate Increases Cancer Tenfold.”

Behind the headline, a different story went unreported. Chocolate eaters ate fewer carrots, which may have protected them from cancer, so it may have been the lack of carrots, not too much chocolate, that accounted for the association!

But nobody knew this because the news cycle is only 4.2 minutes long, and a few unfortunate chocolate-lovers added worry and guilt to an otherwise delicious encounter with a sensory pleasure. Worry is far more dangerous than simply eating a little chocolate and enjoying it!

Unhealthy shame can kill. Enjoyment is the key to health!

Crime and Pleasure

Miserable people are dangerous for the simple reason they don’t care whether the earth or other people survive or not. They are so miserable that deep down they may think it would be better if everything were finished.

Only happy people would like for this planet to survive forever.

Criminals are not necessarily evil. They are sick and need sympathy. Opening up the prisons and having a love-in is not the answer. Rather, we can help reduce crime in our culture and encourage more joy by teaching our children to have healthy inner lives that include healthy pleasures.

Love, tears, and laughter are three energizers that can bring people back to their senses. If people feel loved, they can be happy, and they will gush neurotransmitters. They will behave within reason, their bodies will be strong, and they will have many mana moments when they can choose to create, not destroy.

Doctors and teachers can help educate people to learn how to enjoy consciousness, have more awareness of the beauty right in front of them, and experience more life-affirming values.

Small changes add up to big changes. So begin today. Take a walk and enjoy the fragrant tuberose. Stretch your body. Open your mind. Touch someone kindly. Get up and dance. Remember: Hard work helps to shape who we are and give us vital meaning for the journey of life, but an imbalance of work and pleasure, study and celebration, or productive effort and inner awareness leads to stress. Balance is the key.

A meaningful, pleasure-filled life gives you endless doorways to wisdom and wholesome living. It improves not only your health, but the health of our world.

Take two arias and call me in the morning. ❖