Dr. Alexandra Gayek once said, “No miracle, no matter how incredible it may seem, is outside the true laws of the universe. It’s only our belief, lack of awareness, and limited understanding that limits our experience of what’s really possible.”
Dr. Gayek is known in more than 132 countries for her global healing project, The Science of Being Well Network. Her mission is to create a worldwide ripple effect of healing and empowerment by reaching people who are ready for a radically different approach from even what we think of as alternative medicine. If you’re familiar with “The Secret,” you’ll be intrigued with The Science of Being Well.
After years as a primary care physician, Dr. Gayek abandoned her practice in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease because she came to believe that the standard approach of medical exams, lab tests, diagnoses, restrictive diets, and the emphasis on drugs and supplements can actually interfere with the healing process.
Her passion is to understand and teach how healing really works and to help normal people access miraculous healing of everything from allergies to AIDS, from cold sores to cancer, from digestive problems to diabetes, and from hemorrhoids to heart disease. Based on her own experience, she believes that everything and anything can be healed, and any person can learn how to heal him or herself.
To spread her message, Dr. Gayek gives away free copies of her eBook version of The Science of Being Well, which was originally written by Wallace D. Wattles, author of the famous 1910 classic, The Science of Getting Rich. She has also created free software delivering her weekly series of 52 very alternative health tips, her free monthly Be Well! eZine, her audio book version of The Science of Being Well, and the Infinite Coach™ audio program of her most popular lessons to patients, all available from her website, www.ScienceofBeingWell.net.
Dr. Gayek will soon be releasing the revision of her popular teleseminar, “How to Lose Weight without Trying,” two brand-new audio programs, a new eBook and an online course, The Science of Being Well For Practical Geniuses™.
Rebecca Fine is the founder of The Science of Getting Rich Network. She interviewed Dr. Gayek in this transcript. Over the past eight years, Rebecca has given away more than 1 million free eBook copies of the amazing 1910 book The Science of Getting Rich, the book that inspired the hit movie “The Secret.” With several hundred thousand members in 194 countries around the world, The Science of Getting Rich Network is truly a global prosperity phenomenon that is helping individuals transform their lives daily.
To get a free copy of The Science of Being Rich, go to Rebecca’s website at www.ScienceOfGettingRich.net.
REBECCA FINE: Alexandra, are you there?
ALEXANDRA GAYEK: I am.
REBECCA FINE: Are you ready to rock with this thing?
ALEXANDRA GAYEK: Let’s hope so!
REBECCA FINE: I guess so. I just want to tell you that this is such a joy for me to get to interview Alexandra, and I call her that for a reason instead of Dr. Gayek, which she certainly deserves, because not only is she an amazing doctor, she was my personal doctor, but she’s an amazing person and she’s my best friend.
I’ve gotten to watch what’s happened as she discovered this book that she gives away and made it her own really because she’s not only brought it up to date, she’s really given it just a whole new approach. Since Janet mentioned that hit movie “The Secret,” I’m willing to bet that there’s not anybody on this call who hasn’t seen it or at least seen part of it or seen people talking about it on television.
Now, you may not have known up until now that there was second book, not just The Science of Getting Rich, but The Science of Being Well, that Mr. Wattles wrote that very next year. A lot of people, if you’re in perfect health or really good health, you’re thinking, “Well, why do I need to know about The Science of Being Well?”
But what Alexandra and I’ve discovered is that those two books work together great, and total prosperity, total well-being, it’s all covered in those principles. Alexandra, since our theme for this call and this series of calls is passion, and I know that you’re passionate about a word that begins with ‘m,’ I’m going to ask you just to talk a little bit about that passion and how that inspires your whole approach as a doctor and teacher and the person who is spreading this amazing work around the world.
ALEXANDRA GAYEK: If people were tuned in a few minutes ago when Janet was reading the quote for the day, the word is ‘miracles.’ I’m fascinated by the idea of miracles. What I mean by that is what is the connection between daily life, the observable, physical world, and the mysteries of the universe? And no where is that connection more immediate and more impactful than the miracles of healing because people experience it right in their bodies.
When I think about that and what it has to do with this whole approach of healing, if you think about your own body and let’s say you cut your finger, how does it heal itself? Let’s say you get your hair cut? How does it grow back? Maybe once upon a time you had a wart that disappeared. Where did it go? Medicine has been able to describe a lot of the sequences of what actually happens: what do the little cells do and what chemical gets released from where and where does it go in the body.
But there is no explanation for the force that’s behind the things that happen. The ‘why’ has always been kind of what’s the missing link there, and those, of course, lead us into questions that are usually relegated to the spiritual realm: What is life? Who am I? Where was I before I was born? What happens after I die? Why do some people get sick and not other people?
Those are questions that, of course, the medical community would love to know the answers to, but the way that we take a look at medicine doesn’t really bring us to those kinds of answers. We’re trying hard to figure it out, but that’s the part that I’m really interested in.
REBECCA FINE: I’ve heard you say that this whole idea of health is basically for nerds. What do you mean by that?
ALEXANDRA GAYEK: If you think about it, really, at some point in your life, and this might be true for everybody on the call, you were probably aware that the popular kids were the ones who took risks, who didn’t follow the rules, who took the lead, who lived on the edge. They were not the ones who were careful, conservative, sensible, cautious, and did what their parents told them to do and what authority figures thought they should do. The people who were popular, the kids who were popular, were the ones who rebelled.
Most likely, at some point in our lives, all of us wanted to be popular, particularly when we were kids. We also wanted to establish our independence from our parents at the same time, which meant not following their rules. If you think about what kids are like, particularly teenagers, independence means staying up all night, eating junk food, indulging in mind-altering substances, engaging in sex and other risky behaviors or activities that one’s parents, religion, authority figures might not approve of.
The pressure for that kind of thing, I’m thinking at least in my experience, was probably even stronger for boys than for girls. You think, “Why do men not want to go to the doctor?” It’s because, I think, in large part we grew up with all of this pressure that if you were going to be cool, you wouldn’t follow the rules. The rules, things like eating healthy, being safe, and taking care of yourself, are the kinds of things that your mom or your grandma would have told you to do, and the very things that you would have rebelled against doing.
So if you think about what degree is it true for you when you’re on vacation, when you’re out with your friends, or when you’re living it up or partying or relaxing, how often do we think that the kinds of behaviors that fit with that are the very things that your doctor would tell you not to do? People think, “Okay, I’m just going to kick back and eat whatever I want now because I’m on vacation or because nobody’s watching,” or whatever.
I think a lot of us, without even questioning it, are still acting as if we need to rebel against something, and we haven’t really questioned what it is that we’re rebelling against. When I think about this, I think, “People at this point in their lives are either still trying to please their parents, even if their parents are no longer alive, or they may have a spouse who is nagging them to do the right thing, to eat well or do whatever, stop smoking.
Now they’re rebelling against a spouse. There might be a boss or some other form of authority figure. It might be the government telling you that you have to do the right thing. It could be your church. There is always some force around our lives trying to influence us in some direction, and in some cases it’s that even our own internal ‘big, wise person’ is telling us, “You should be careful and take care of yourself.”
When I really think about that, I would ask a person, “Given the choice, would you rather be healthy or sick?” For most people, being sick interferes with your having a good time in your life and doing what you want so, of course, you would rather be healthy. Then the next question is, “Who are you pretending is in charge of your choices, yourself or somebody else?
If there were no one against whom to rebel and you believed you actually had the power to create your life any way you wanted, if you believed that, if you believed you really had that power, what would it mean to you to be fully alive in every imaginable way? If you were fully alive in all those ways then, from that perspective, how would you think and behave about your body?”
This is what Mr. Wattles talks about in The Science of Being Well; he’ll say you can’t expect to be well and behave like a sick person. My understanding of that now is a person who, on the inside somewhere, believes that he or she is a powerless victim of whatever, family, religion, politics, the government, the state of the environment, whatever it might be.
If people feel like they are victims, then they behave like victims. That is the same behavior as sick people because they’re constantly rebelling against something. Health is for powerful, free creators, people who have actually been willing to step up to the plate, seize their life with everything they’ve got and really go for it. It’s a very different approach than what most people think of when they think, “Oh, health means I have to exercise and I have to eat certain foods, and I have to do all this.”
If you look at health from that perspective, somebody telling you what to do against whom you want to rebel, then you’re not going to do it no matter how many New Year’s resolutions you make. The only thing that actually allows you to do it is to rise up and become the person, and really follow Mr. Wattles’ advice, which is to go for the most life you can possibly live.
Be the most alive you can possibly be, and it’s from that perspective that it makes you want to do those things that actually result in you being in alignment with your real beliefs about what is healthy.
REBECCA FINE: So what kind of changes have you seen in people who’ve actually been able to grasp that, what you said? I know you explained it in a very simple, easy-to-get-hold-of manner in your workshops, tapes, and in your ezine. But what kinds of things have you seen people actually experience in terms of changing their own health, transforming their own health without all the stress, strain, struggle, and sacrifice we usually associate with it?
ALEXANDRA GAYEK: I was actually impressed to find that I got a big burst of testimonials right at the beginning when I released the book, and the largest group was people who came from your website, people who had already begun thinking along these terms, if they could have things that they wanted just by changing their thinking.
The testimonials I got were people healing things that had been the most difficult things that, as a doctor, I had encountered and tried to heal. If you really look from the medical community’s perspective, it’s very difficult to heal chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, arthritis, neurological problems, chemical sensitivity, those kinds of things that take an enormously long and painstaking time with lots of supplements and all kinds of drastic measures.
Often you don’t even get any results with all that. Those are the things that are the hardest from the doctor’s perspective to really help somebody deal with. Those were the testimonials I was getting from people who, practically overnight, found big changes. I think the reason is because they weren’t resisting. They didn’t know that those things should be difficult to heal, so they just read the book and went, “Okay, I can heal this? All right!”
You know, those of us who take the longest adopting all this are people who have medical training and a lot of experience where we think, “Oh, well, that’s not possible. You can’t really do that,” once again introducing the power of the mind to exact a shift in what we’re able to accomplish. Other than those things, probably the greatest number of testimonials I’ve had on any given subject have been weight loss.
Those are people who would read the book, and all they would do is change the most basic of the eating patterns the way he talks about in the book, which is eat when you’re hungry and you stop when you’re full. It’s really pretty basic. A lot of people would write me letters and say, “I’ve never thought of it like that because I thought you had to eat to stimulate your metabolism, or you had to eat a good, healthy breakfast because otherwise you wouldn’t have enough energy to make it through the day.”
Then there is the secret reason why a lot of people eat, which is for prevention. They’re so afraid that they’re going to run out of food later, or that they won’t be in control of their access to food later, that they eat more now. Anybody who grew up in a big family or with any sort of scarcity of food anywhere along the line might find themselves with that operating in the background; better eat now, might not have enough later.
It’s kind of comical when you actually think about what you’re up to, but people do that. If you really begin to pay attention to your body and its true signals, which for some people requires pausing long enough to actually notice the feeling of hunger. There are a lot of us, and I used to be one of these people who ate non-stop from the time I got up until the time I went to bed; I just never stopped grazing.
So I never got the feeling of what did hunger really feel like. Then there are people who don’t pay any attention to their bodies. They sit at their computer or sit at the job, and they don’t eat all day or all night and basically ignore the body, which like any other animal, would prefer to eat once in a while and would like to move about and go outdoors for some fresh air.
But it really is just a matter of beginning to tune in and relax enough to notice what is your body up to and what does it want? And it will guide you to what it needs.
REBECCA FINE: Just listen to your body, let go of the scarcity thinking, let go of the resistance. Those last two things, of course they apply just as well with The Science of Getting Rich. They are exactly the same principles, just applied in a different area of life. How do you deal with people in showing them how to release resistance and how to get away from that old kind of thinking and kind of shift into this new way that brings about these miraculous transformations?
ALEXANDRA GAYEK: Where to start? Is that kind of the summation of what you’re asking me?
REBECCA FINE: Yes.
ALEXANDRA GAYEK: I think the first place is always going to be to relax about where you are. Most people will, and I used to be guilty of making this even worse, show up at the doctor’s office, because we’re talking about healing here for a moment, and even in filling out the intake form, you’ve now just focused your attention on everything that’s ever been wrong with you and everything that could ever go wrong with you, because you’re asked to fill out your family history.
We know secretly inside our minds; it’s no big secret to know that when they ask you, “What did your grandparents die of?” or “What illnesses did your parents have?” that they’re really asking what you might get, too. Already you walk into the doctor’s office feeling smaller and more depressed because you’re focusing on, “Oh, I don’t want to miss anything on this intake form, and it asks me to list every single symptom I’ve ever had.”
The first thing is really just to take a deep breath and say, “It doesn’t matter where I am. It doesn’t matter what I’ve been through, how long I’ve had what I’ve had,” just to take a deep breath and say, “It’s okay.” You can get to any position of healing or anything else you want from wherever you are, and it doesn’t matter where you are that you’re starting from.
What you get to do, and this is something I love to talk to people about in coaching that I do, is you stand on your problems instead of in them. When you’re standing in them, I have this image of sort of quicksand, being up to your neck in the mud of your negative thinking and all this stuff that’s been going on, and how discouraged and overwhelmed a person might feel about the possibility of making the change that you want.
If you stand on it, what that means is you acknowledge that you’re in this position that you’re in as a result of everything that has ever come before, everything that has come before has brought you to this moment. I love this image I have in my head of being on the bow of a ship. You’re standing there with the wind in your face, and you have to have the steering wheel in your hands, too, to make this image work, but behind you is the wake of your life.
Everything that you’ve done in the past is behind you, all the things that have been said to you and done to you and everything you’ve ever done and said. All of that is behind you. There you are with the steering wheel in your hands looking forward and thinking, “Where do I want to go?” You cannot steer the ship looking backwards. You can use this metaphor while imagining driving a car also.
You cannot drive the car while looking only out the rearview mirror at where you’ve been. You also can’t look only out the side windows at where you are right now. You have to look in front of you to where you want to go in order to steer anything and move in that direction. You also have to acknowledge that you’re starting from wherever you’re starting from, which is the whole point of, “Okay, I’m standing on where I am. Now I’m going to move forward from here. No Problem.” That’s the first step.
The second step is to find ways to feel better about anything you can find to feel better about, and this one is something that most people are actually pretty good at. We all have our thing that we do that makes us feel better, and those things are often labeled bad things, like addictions.
If people would understand that what prompts addictions, what is behind addictions, is actually a very healthy impulse to feel better, whether it’s that somebody’s going to go get drunk or take drugs or go shopping or have sex or go gambling. Whatever it is that people do to feel better in the moment, that’s often regarded as running away from their problems is actually coming from a very healthy place. The problem is that it’s not preceded with “I really am okay where I am.”
It’s preceded with “This is not okay. I don’t like where I am. This is not okay with me. I just want to numb out.” It’s important to begin the process with a sense of “Okay, this is where I am. I am where I am. There is nothing I can do to make myself be anywhere other than where I am, so here I am!” Then comes do whatever you’re going to do to feel better. And the third step, which is also critical and most people don’t do because it’s scary, is use it.
You use the feeling better even if it’s from you just ate a pile of doughnuts because you get a temporary sugar high, or you just had a couple of drinks and now you feel more jolly temporarily. If you don’t use it, then you slide right back to where you were, and then the only solution that becomes obvious to you is to do it again, which doesn’t solve anything.
It just makes you feel better in the moment. If you want the problem, and it’s usually something that people are concerned about, we think, and this kind of brings us to a little bit of a different subject in a way but it feeds in here, when people are thinking about healing, what we know from research is more than 90% of diseases, no matter what disease we’re talking about, have their origins in stress.
What are people stressed about? They’re stressed about relationships, money, what’s happening in their job, what’s happening at home and in their relationships with their neighbors. “What do people think of me?” and “Am I good enough?” and “What’s the state of the political situation in my country?” and “What’s the state of the environment?”
These are the things that people are stressed about, not to mention thinking about what’s going on in my body. “I don’t like the way I look,” “I’m too fat,” “I’m getting old and wrinkled,” “I don’t feel attractive or sexy,” or “There’s something wrong with my body.” All those things contribute to the stress that someone is having, so if we want to actually heal and get well, we have to think what’s the thing that I need to feel better about that is causing the greatest amount of stress in my life?
That’s the part that’s kind of scary and challenging for people to get into because it requires looking at the very thing that you’re trying to run away from, facing the monster, as it were, and finding a way to take some of the power out of the monster, whether the monster is something like “I’m too fat” or whether the monster is “I’m going to go broke tomorrow.”
Whatever it is that’s the big source of fear, then you use the moment of feeling better from whatever it is you’ve done, even if it’s taking a nap or watching a movie or whatever. In that moment, when you’re feeling better, you use that energy and power to take another look at the situation that’s causing you stress and think, “How can I feel better about this subject that has been bugging me?”
We recognize that at any given moment, we have access to a whole range of thoughts about any given subject. You can make yourself feel worse about just about anything by focusing on the doom and gloom aspects. You can stay right where you are by continuing to think the thought you were thinking, and usually you can find some way to think that’s slightly more comforting than what you were focusing on.
“This doesn’t have to last forever.” “Other people have healed from this.” “It’s not the end of the world.” Whatever the thought might be, I can do something about this. I can think differently about this. There are some options I may not have explored yet, and all that kind of thing. Those would be the steps that a person would go through when they’re trying to move toward healing. Did that answer your question?
REBECCA FINE: That more than answers the question, but, of course, it leads me to another one that ties right in here. I’ve heard you talk also about appreciating our own bodies right down to the cells, and that it actually has a physical effect on our bodies.
ALEXANDRA GAYEK: Definitely. There’s research that’s been done; some of the people on the call may have heard of Candace Pert, the one who discovered the opiate receptors. She’s done a lot more research that’s not in that book on how the chemical messengers in the body affect the cells of the body. In order for people to understand what was in “What the Bleep,” the woman wrote ‘I love you’ all over her body and she felt better.
But why is it that appreciating your body could actually lead to a physical effect? One time, I told the story of a friend of mine, and all she did for, I think, a month was she stood in front of the mirror, and she told herself “I love you” to her body, and she lost 20 pounds or something. She didn’t change anything else. So what we’re talking about here is that the thoughts that you think create physical pathways in your brain.
The thoughts that you think frequently are kind of like fatter pathways. The thoughts that you think every once in a while are little thin pathways. And the thoughts that you’ve never thought of before don’t have pathways, and you have to create new ones. Thus, it takes 30 days to form a habit, and that kind of thing.
This is both in answer to your question and also why it works on a habitual framework instead of just “Okay, let me sit down once and do some affirmations,” and wonder why that didn’t have the effect. We’re talking about shifting the pattern of thought. It’s the pathways that are created in the brain, but simultaneously recognize that thoughts are physical things in the body, meaning they’re energy that has a physical effect on things moving around.
The things that move around are both the arrangement of the nerve cells and also the movement of electrical patterns, electricity through the body, and also the release of chemicals that travel in your bloodstream primarily. When people think mind, body, medicine, there’s the brain and then there’s the body. The brain sends these little chemicals all over the body and they have an effect.
Most people can think about it like that, but what they’ve discovered is that every cell in the body has receptors that are common to what receptors are in the brain. For example, everyone’s heard of estrogen, a hormone. You have receptors for estrogen in your brain, which is why when our estrogen levels change we experience thinking differently or having different feelings.
But it also affects all the tissues of your body because you have receptors in all those tissues for that hormone. Similarly, when people think of things like adrenalin, that affects different tissues in your body. Basically what they’ve discovered is they used to try to separate the nervous system, the endocrine system, the immune system, the digestive system, and all these different systems in your body for the ease of us studying them and trying to understand them.
It’s not at all the way the body works. It’s one system; everything communicates with everything else. For example, most of your immune system is in your guts, in your intestines, physically located there like the receptors and the cells that are involved in your immune system. But all your immune cells have all of the receptors that are in your brain, so if you feel good or you feel bad, it’s going to affect your immune cells and how they respond to invaders.
The whole thing about appreciating yourself creates a physical network of electrical signals and chemical signals all over your body, which changes the way the individual cells perceive their environment, which changes the way they respond to their environment. If you think about a little cell floating around out there with little receptors on its membrane, those receptors detect what’s in its little environment. I’m going to give you a graphic example here.
Let’s imagine there’s a molecule of mercury out there, and people may have heard mercury is a toxic substance, and there are also molecules of food substances out there. If the general emotional pattern that a person is in is one of love and appreciation, what does the cell do with those molecules that are in its environment, but takes in the ones that are nourishing and ignores the ones that are toxic.
Compared to someone whose general emotional framework is one of “The world is a dangerous place. Everyone’s out to get me. Those terrible multinational corporations are doing all these evil things and destroying the earth, and it’s a dangerous place. If I don’t eat organic food I’m going to die,” the fear perspective, then those cells that are in that environment respond to that mercury whereas the other cell didn’t.
It’s so much more; I could go on and on about this stuff! To me, it’s a completely fascinating thing to understand what’s the connection between all these different layers? How do thoughts affect the physical body? And why does it work the way it works? Things that are not necessary for the basic person who just wants to heal.
REBECCA FINE: Right. This is kind of amazing, too, that back in 1911 when Mr. Wattles wrote The Science of Being Well, he was actually saying, in very different language, some of the same things without, I’m assuming, knowing the reason behind it, the reason you’re giving, the medical reason. But he was saying you could live in a factory town with what we would consider bad, polluted air, but you could be fine breathing that air as long as you changed your thoughts about it.
It can basically work with everything. What have you found in working with this older material that was just so amazing to discover, and bringing it up to date? What has been the major subject that you’ve had to supply there that was missing, or the major updating to bring it into a format that works today and with information that we know that we can trust today?
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