For my loving family: Jacob, Shirley, Julie, Eliya, and Maia (papaya) Selhub CONTENTS Introduction 1. FEAR: THE ULTIMATE SILENT KILLER 2. FEAR: A LACK OF LOVE 3. THE ANTIDOTE TO FEAR: THE LOVE RESPONSE 4. THE SHIELD: YOUR TOOL FOR TRANSFORMATION 5. BUILDING YOUR LOVE PYRAMID: SOCIAL LOVE 6. SOCIAL LOVE: CREATING THE BASE OF YOUR LOVE PYRAMID 7. SOCIAL LOVE IN ACTION: CREATING YOUR SOUL FAMILY 8. THE LOVE PYRAMID: BUILDING SELF-LOVE 9. SELF-LOVE: THE BASICS FOR BUILDING YOUR LOVE RESERVES 10. SELF-LOVE IN ACTION: REACHING YOUR FULL POTENTIAL 11. COMPLETING THE LOVE: SPIRITUAL LOVE 12. SPIRITUAL LOVE BASICS: LEARNING TO BELIEVE 13. SPIRITUAL LOVE IN ACTION: D.I.G. (DIGNITY, INTEGRITY, AND GRACE) Epilogue: Come Swim with Me Acknowledgments Notes References INTRODUCTION T hrough years of work with thousands of patients, I’ve learned one unequivocal truth about human health: just because a disease enters the body does not mean its symptoms will manifest. For most of my medical career, I have sought out the differences between a body that can fight disease and one that cannot, between one person prone to health and another to illness. What I found out is startling: THE BIGGEST OBSTACLES TO GOOD HEALTH ARE STRESS AND FEAR. and THE ANTIDOTE TO STRESS AND FEAR IS LOVE. The Love Response is built on these premises. My big moment of insight into stress and love did not occur in a clinical setting or through scientific means. It happened in a hospital delivery room the day my niece, Maia, was born. On April 16, 2002, when I snipped her umbilical cord and held her for the first time, all my worries, fears, problems, and stress seemed to dissolve, and for a moment the world stood still. As Maia grew, I experienced this feeling again and again whenever I was with her. Then one day, while the three-year-old Maia rested on my chest, she lifted her head to look up at me, gently swept some hair off my face, and said, “Auntie, I love you.” There it was again: all my worries and fears evaporated in that moment. I thought, “How can this be? Time can never stand still, so why does it feel this way?” I’ve had this experience other times too—when I’d gazed at a beautiful sunset, listened to music, or bonded deeply to someone or something. It happens when I am in a state of awe or appreciation. What I realized was that in moments like this, we connect to the rhythm and flow of life and the gates of infinite possibilities open up before our eyes and in our hearts. Time doesn’t stand still; rather, we are still. As the medical director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, I have witnessed the restorative power of the “Relaxation Response,” the series of biochemical events that occur in the body when you are in a state of deep relaxation most commonly brought on by the practice of meditation, tai chi, qi gong, or any other repetitive focus. I know how initiating the Relaxation Response enables patients to better handle stress, find wellness, and develop a belief that they can stay well in the future. Years of scientific research bears this out. Practiced regularly, the Relaxation Response reduces blood pressure, migraines, heart rate, muscle tension, and other symptoms of stress. In short, the Relaxation Response improves health. In that one moment with Maia, I realized that a short burst of love had the same positive effects on my body as a long session of meditation. It seemed that love triggered a similar positive biochemistry as the Relaxation Response. But instead of requiring that I sit alone in a contemplative state for twenty minutes or more, love could achieve the same, even more predictable result in mere seconds. I spent the next three years combing through research studies supporting this idea. As I pieced together the data, it revealed a scientific truth: when you experience love in any form—love for another, for yourself, for spirit or something greater than yourself— you are healing your body. Why? Because love takes you out of the state of resis tance that causes stress—the stress that lays the groundwork for disease. With love, you experience less stress and fear every day. Of course you should see your doctor when you are concerned about your health, but with less stress and fear, you can be happier and healthier for the rest of your life. So how can you bring the healing powers of love into your life? The Love Response will show you step-by-step, easy-to-use techniques that will keep you on a path to long- term wellness and well-being each and every day. THE LOVE RESPONSE The Love Response gives you the tools to heal your body from the ravages of stress and fear that most everyone constantly endures. It shows you how to build a life based on love in all its forms and how to change your thoughts and feelings of dread and pain to relief and joy in moments. Each person has physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual strengths as well as weaknesses. Health is not an end result but a lifelong process of discovering how to support your strengths and leverage your weaknesses as opportunities for growth. The Love Response gives you the tools for this process, so you can tune into your instincts in your own way, on your own timeline, and in harmony with your individual needs, goals, and motivations. The Love Response enables you to build a life that reflects who you really are—a being meant to live in the dynamics of love, with bodies that can heal disease and sustain a lifetime of health. MY STORY Long before Maia was born, however, the pieces of the Love Response puzzle began to reveal themselves to me. Indeed, I learned the power of the Love Response through personal experience: I was my own first patient. At age twenty-eight, I was a doctor on my way to specializing in pulmonary medicine. Then, in literally one moment, everything in my life changed forever. On a beautiful June day, just weeks away from completing my second year of residency, I had been working for twenty hours straight in a Boston hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU). All ten ICU beds were occupied by gravely ill patients. At 2 a.m., exhausted, two interns and I shuffled to the call room. I had just dozed off when the emergency buzzer awakened me. A patient’s central IV line had fallen out and needed replacing. Being superwoman, I let the interns sleep and went to handle the problem myself. I made my way to the comatose patient’s bedside and located the errant IV line. I had just managed to insert the IV needle into the patient’s vein when suddenly, without any warning, he began coughing and bucking. The needle slipped out and punctured my finger, right through my glove, exposing me to the blood of a patient who had fullblown AIDS and hepatitis C. My mind raced in panic: “Oh, God! I’ve been stuck! Look at all this blood … I have to wash it off. If only I could cut my finger off now. “Should I tell someone? … I don’t want to tell anyone. I feel like a fool, like a failure. How stupid! What will people say … what will they think? They’ll think that I’m not good enough to be doing these procedures. “Maybe if I squeeze hard enough, all the blood will come out … If only I could chop this finger off! Keep rinsing … get some ammonia, alcohol … something. “Should I tell someone? I need to tell someone. Who? I don’t think I’ll be able to get through this alone.” Before this moment, I had never experienced the threat of a real illness, either physical or psychological, that I could not handle on my own. I prided myself on being robust, self-sufficient, motivated, and capable. Like many women, I strove for perfection. To be anything less was not good enough and would mean that I wasn’t good enough. Asking for help was not part of the agreement I made with myself. Asking for help would imply weakness, vulnerability, shame. Now, in seconds, all those presumptions crumbled. I met my mortality face-to-face and everything that I had been striving toward became irrelevant and obsolete. For the first time in my life, I felt completely out of control of my body and health. I needed to ask for help. In one stroke, I felt like a victim. I did tell someone; I did seek help. That night, I consulted with an infectious-disease physician about the HIV needle stick. “High-risk exposure” was all I heard. To my mind, this meant I was going to die. The attending physician attempted to comfort me with statistics. All I could do was cry. No reassurance could stop the fear and frenzy of thoughts raging in my head. The next day, I started an experimental regimen of anti-HIV drugs. I also decided to tell my family, which for me was no easy feat. I had always seen myself as “the strong one,” the one everyone else depended upon. I felt ashamed for “failing,” for being vulnerable, for being human and making a huge mistake. Telling my family would bring them pain and me humiliation. I loathed the idea of worrying them. Nonetheless, there we sat, my father, mother, sister, and brother in my small living room, holding one another and crying. From that moment on, they rarely left my side. In the ensuing six weeks, I grew anemic from the medication I took, experienced profound fatigue, and suffered through excruciating bouts of abdominal pain. I now understood what it was like to be ill, anxious, distressed, relying on the help of others, and feeling totally out of control. The needle stick marked the beginning of a six-month downward spiral of personal disasters, including the death of my grandfather, the death of my dog, a smear campaign from someone I had never met who tried to destroy my reputation with the medical board, a fire that raged through my apartment, leaving nothing but a black pit of ash, and, finally, the hospitalization of my father for a heart attack. Even though I was eventually pronounced HIV-free, the strain of this six-month period did me in. I had experienced too much loss in too little time. I shut down. I could not smile, think, or remember. I was supposed to take my medical boards very soon, but I had no desire to study. I had fallen into a dark abyss and couldn’t see a way out. As much as I wanted to give up on life, life—in the form of my friends, family, and colleagues—did not give up on me. They saw something in me that was worth loving. They rallied around me, forcing me to attend social events when all I wanted to do was stay home and hide. They stayed with me when I felt alone, reminding me that every day holds new hope and possibilities. I managed to step back into life, complete my residency, and embark on a career of primary care medicine. But I wasn’t done battling my demons yet. Less than two years later, in the midst of seeing sixteen patients in a four-hour period, I began experiencing anxiety attacks. Teetering on the verge of hyperventilating, I forced myself to take deep breaths in between patients just to stop my heart from racing. I had never experienced anything like a panic attack before. Why was this happening? I had a litany of reasons: I hated my job. I lacked enough time to connect with my patients or colleagues. I missed my friends who had moved away to other cities. I felt abandoned and alone. I felt trapped by working nonstop, then fighting traffic to arrive to an empty home and an empty life, only to have the cycle start up again the next day. These were all true. But I didn’t think that any of these problems— even in combination—could account for something as extreme as panic attacks. I had to look deeper. I found that I hated my job because I felt manipulated and disrespected by the system. I found that I missed my friends so much because I was still deeply brokenhearted about a relationship that had left me feeling betrayed and dejected. I found that I felt trapped by my life because nothing in my existence gave me meaning or validation. As I contemplated my predicament and became quiet internally, I saw a consistent pattern: no matter the circumstances, no matter the people involved—my friends, family, work, relationships—I could not get enough love and recognition. In truth, I did not love myself, and because of that, I did not believe that someone else could love me. This realization blew me away. I knew I needed to change this distorted belief, so I began to repeat slowly under my breath: “I love myself, I love myself.” Saying these words—even though I didn’t really believe them at the time—seemed to relieve my anxiety. I repeated those words again to myself whenever a panic attack reared its ugly head. Hold on, Eva. This physical reaction is a reflection of something that isn’t right internally. What is the universe telling you that you are not listening to? What are you reacting to? If you truly loved yourself, what would you want? I tried making a list of what I wanted, but all I could think about was what I didn’t want, so I started from there. It was a long list, but soon after, I matched my “don’t wants” with my “do wants” and discovered that I wanted something else, something better than what I had worked so hard to achieve. I wanted to do something I enjoyed and believed in. I wanted to work in a different kind of medical environment, one that did not only treat patients once they were acutely ill but kept them from getting sick at all. I envisioned a friendly, supportive work environment, where I could spend an hour with each patient. I wanted peace in my heart and stillness in my spirit. A month later I quit my job. I began intense studies in alternative medicine, Chinese medicine, and energy work. I learned how to align with and value myself. I learned to allow the people and pets around me to love me, which, in turn, taught me how to love myself. I learned to give and receive love to something higher than myself, to Spirit. DEVELOPING THE LOVE RESPONSE Through all my study in alternative medicine, I tried whatever I learned on myself first and then taught my patients. I began my consulting practice as an integrative health specialist working with patients from all walks of life suffering from many different diseases. I used Western medicine to treat their acute problems and alleviate the symptoms of illness (which can cause fear) and Eastern medicine to address the actual causes of disease.