Part 1

Hey Ronnie, do you want to play A Dangerous Game?

What do you mean… What Dangerous Game?

Greg, your brother, has been in a coma for 7 months, right? Nothing’s happening ……. the way it’s going, he’ll probably be in a coma forever till he dies…….. correct?

Yeah, that’s right… Why do you ask?

Well, I’ve been doing some interesting work with AIDS and proving that HIV is not always a death sentence and it’s got me into a lot of work….and some trouble….. called psychoneuroimmunology which is how the mind, and our conversations, properly understood,  can influence healing …. this is work that’s done by Norman Cousins in his book Anatomy of an Illness …………. and I’d like to see if you and I might invent a different approach towards Greg and his coma given the current model doesn’t have much to offer Greg at this point, does it?

No, it doesn’t. Ok…. what do you mean…….. I’m not exactly sure what you mean?

You know I’ve been doing a lot of work with entrepreneurs and startups and creating new businesses sometimes right out of nothing and I’d like to see if we might create an approach to Greg’s coma that didn’t exist before…in other words, we invent a new approach cuz what medicine’s doing and has available isn’t going to cut it with Greg at this point.

What do you mean, Tony ?

Well, I mean what if we approached his coma from a different model of healing, a different paradigm, a model that posits each person has the resources to at least influence in some way their disease or injuries…..both in preventing illness and injury and also in healing injury or illness……….such a model of well-being can be especially useful when medical science does not have all the answers readily available………….so I mean, Ronnie,  that we intentionally makeup, we posit, intentionally construct,  some premises or assumptions or presuppositions regarding Greg and his current condition…….which assumptions we are positing are designed to produce a breakthrough in healing …especially with a 7-month coma where there’s no readily available method nor established evidence or known path to a return to health… But given the last seven months that Greg has been in the coma,  we have nothing to lose. This “nothing to lose ” scenario was the case with at least 2 men (likely 3)  with whom we interrupted/stopped AIDS,  and it’s led me to offer/suggest this approach to you…..as I said, its formal name is psychoneuroimmunology……Dr. David Locke of Harvard Medical school wrote extensively about this relatively new field in his book, The Healer Within. So did Dr. Steven Pelletier in his book Mind as Slayer, Mind as Healer. Dr. Larry Dossey, in Healing Words, etc. There are many well-written books that explore this field. It is not mere fancy.

Ronnie then said, Get specific what do you mean …..with Greg…..

OK, Ronnie, The first premise we’re going to make up, to posit, to construct, or the assumption that we will take consciously and intentionally, is that the coma is not fundamentally, not primarily, or merely only a physiological event …………we’re going to make up, say, call it, relate to it as that it’s most fundamentally, at its source, an ontological event…..ontological means related to being, the fundamental nature of something…..that the coma may reflect who Greg is for himself…..that the coma is or simply may be an expression of Greg’s relationship to life at the time he induced it.

I am aware that Greg went into the coma after attempting suicide by attempting carbon monoxide poisoning from which he did not die……the suicide was not successful …but also he did not come back to life and the coma represents…. p e r h a p s…. a state of being called neither alive nor dead ….which is what a coma is…..and maybe the coma reflects Greg’s ground of being, his fundamental outlook on life,  of not choosing to be either alive or dead….. in that sense maybe the coma is a perfect expression of who Greg was being when he attempted suicide…..who he was being, meaning how he fundamentally saw life and himself……

Okay I follow your thinking Tony … go ahead

So here’s the second premise or assumption that would be useful to make up regarding Greg: he can hear you.  I know he’s in a coma and nonetheless,  I’m going to take the case, invent the premise, the pre-supposition, that he can hear you
Okay Tony I’m following you so far… So what?
The so what is then maybe it’s time to have a conversation with Greg,  directly, regarding really, completely choosing to be either alive or dead …… maybe just maybe the coma subsequent to a failed suicide attempt is an expression of a very. resigned weak relationship to life, to wanting to be neither alive nor dead….which is essentially what a coma is
Maybe it’s possible …..it is at least a useful speculation, yes ?….. and we have nothing to lose ….

In terms of action, what’s called for is a conversation with Greg in which you bring him to a choice about being alive or dead… It’s okay to let him know you have a preference in the matter but in all instances, it’s h i s choice….. this is a conversation I actually want you to s p e a k  t o h i m…….remember we’re positing that he can hear you… And we shall see… By the way Ronnie I’m not going out to San Diego, so I’m not going to be the one to have the conversation…

Okay that’s okay I can go out and I can bring dad and his girlfriend and we can go visit him
that’s great ….. 

That’s exactly what I’m proposing.

Okay, Tony and I can have that conversation and we’ll see what happens…..

Great Ronnie……….. so the conversation is something like letting Greg know that you love him, you’re inviting him back to life, that you have that preference, if that’s the case and I know it is with you, and Greg, and no matter what, it’s time to choose to either be in Life or out of life …………….

Okay I’ll have that conversation; I’ll let you know what happens

Thanks, Ronnie

3 weeks later it occurs to me I haven’t heard from Ronnie so I decide to call him up and ask him this:
 What happened with Greg?
Oh, I didn’t tell you? It’s amazing…………. I spoke to him and shortly after that, he came out of the coma, sat up in bed, we watched the game together we started talking about Assisted Living….his short-term memory doesn’t work fully and he doesn’t have the full use of his legs but he was back all the way

I let out a loud hoot and simply said f****** amazing f****** wonderful ……….Ronnie and I talked a little bit more and hung up.

Part 2

Not long after this surprising outcome with Ronnie’s brother Greg,  my executive assistant, a deeply religious black woman from the Caribbean who had a son about 15 years old who got diagnosed with spinal meningitis and went into a coma… She was hysterical with fear and upset and sadness and was operating as if he had already died suddenly… I calmed her down and we started to talk about how comas don’t mean you’re going to die……. simply means you’re in an altered state of consciousness
Again I had some awareness of the family dynamics which were essentially that the single mother was quite strict/demanding/judgmental towards her son….. demanding, “moralistic” and not providing a whole lot of space or freedom to be for a 15-year-old young black man to start to discover who he is in the world ….I surmised that this tight moralistic leash could be quite suppressive, even suffocating, to a 15-year-old young black man trying to express and discover who he is in the world as a man….with as I recall, no father at home to guide him.

I suggested to Jeanne that she keep her intention for Gerard’s recovery alive and well…and that comas can go many which ways……..in a few days her son was able to open his eyes but his body was still frozen stiff …in our office, I coached her to “speak herself and her love for Gerard…. with her eyes”….the way you can often read someone through their eyes….. speaking her love with her eyes would take something but can be done……to make contact with his eyes, to communicate to him that anything whatsoever he needed to say she would hear without judgment, she would receive, she would honor, she would accept and that first and foremost she loved him absolutely ……… if you have never worked on what your eyes might say it takes some practice but it is possible to communicate your intentions with your eyes……….. in any case she said she would do that and she did do that ….she said the next day “yeah I did whatever there was to do to let him know that I love him unconditionally, I want him back unconditionally”……she was giving up judging she was doing…..she was saying that whatever you need to say or do I can be with and accept it all …………I said thank you and we went on about our business……….. 15 days from the start of the coma came the end of the coma…. the principal set out a note saying that Gerard had miraculously came out of the coma….. they say they have no idea why………. he was already back at school and playing basketball.

Part 3

Similarly, a close friend of one of my business consultants fell off a ladder, went into a coma and his twin brother told me about it ……I  said to him, “Dominic you know what to do” with supporting David coming out of the coma …….. which is approaching him from the possibility, from the stand,  that he can come out, that he’s wanted back and intentionally talk to and be with, visit with, him, from that place….as if the can hear you, as if he can receive your intention…………he came out in about 2 weeks.

Part 4

Not too long after that, a man I knew through the Sterling men’s weekend was diagnosed with full-blown AIDS ……….1991 he was in my office with me about what it was like to be living with AIDS. I had founded a project called The All’s Well project that was based on demonstrating that not everybody with HIV would die of AIDS and that’s unquestionably the case and not such a small number …… I guesstimate that it’s likely in the thousands.

In any case when he was in my office, and given my having gotten clear that people can make choices that have physical consequences, I had the temerity to ask him point-blank, “John, are you going to die of AIDS?”  I’m probably the only person on the planet that ever said that that directly to someone with AIDS ….. the room got very quiet and he looked at me and I looked at him and I said, “ John, that’s a yes or no question.”  He was silent……….just absolutely silent….then he looked up at me and said simply,  “no.” I said thank you and I invited him to do the landmark forum which is a very deep cut at how we construct our lives, both the events that happened a n d more importantly, the decisions we make and the choices we made in reaction to what happens, to our life events……………he said he would and he did. That was a clear turning point that John was willing to try on the statement that he had something to say regarding anything…including ‘always fatal’ AIDS……….. to do whatever it took to take on and engage with the challenge we knew as AIDS.

John then went on to get cancer along with his AIDS !! This all happens in1991, 5 years before David Ho got a drug cocktail that could work with stopping HIV from becoming AIDS. Amazingly, John, in the face now of both AIDS and cancer, chose to become a marathon runner, trapeze artist, and a skydiver………. in other words, he chose to interpret his physical conditions in a radically different matter than was predictable and somehow, stopped his AIDS and his cancer, returned himself to vitality and health. Somewhere around 2011 I saw him again,  twenty years later and he sold me two pieces of artwork and a poster from the exhibit of his artwork in Paris, France on which he wrote, “ Tony, I did not die…. Love, John.”

Part 5

In and about the late 1980s in the early 1990s when I was most experimenting with psychoneuroimmunology… The impact of the mind or better said of language… on Physiology including the physiology of injury prevention and recovery and the prevention and recovery of diseases including AIDS and this instance here, infertility.

While driving to our farmhouse in Vermont for a weekend, I stopped in to see an old football teammate of mine from Harvard College, a wonderful man, an athlete who came from a long family of athletes and football players including that his brother was offensive Captain of the Green Bay Packers under Vince Lombardi. He had been decisive in my staying on the team after I got hurt senior year and I held a deep affection for him. I suppose at some level I wanted to pay him back the favor. Given my recent surprising track record of so-called “healing miracles,” I found an opportunity to do so with my teammate.

While visiting him in his Law Office in Connecticut, I asked him how his wife was, she being a woman who is just terrific, a perfect mate for him. In the course of the conversation, I asked him if he and his wife were planning to have kids? Whereupon he went into a rolling of his head and a deep sighing and looked at me like somebody getting an end-of-life prognosis and said “Tone, we can’t. The medical evidence is overwhelming that we’re not able to have children so that’s never going to happen.”

As I was in the midst of producing medical results that were/are unpredictable and already had been on local NYC television regarding these “breakthroughs”, a couple of times for it, I decided to take a shot at healing with my teammate and I asked him to step outside and we began a conversation in his parking lot regarding the “prognosis” that they could not ever have children. As I asked him about it and the circumstances and the evidence, I also discovered that he deeply wanted to have children and was deeply resigned that he and his wife simply couldn’t. Psychoneuroimmunology makes available, when engaged appropriately, with skill, commitment and heart, the impact that maybe what seems impossible isn’t.  As I shared with my teammates some of the medical  “breakthroughs” I’ve been participating in and generating regarding AIDS and comas, so I started to introduce to my teammate what we called distinctions… In other words, new possibilities… that “doctors don’t know everything,” and that no matter what the evidence says, it is possible that he and his wife could have children. I introduced much more evidence than my own experimental endeavors from the considerable field of psychoneuroimmunology …………. ( see Google for follow-up research].

I got clear that my teammate was clear that I didn’t mean doctors don’t know everything merely as rhetoric or an adage or some home bromide but literally, that it is actually the case that doctors don’t know everything and they too are in an inquiry and their prognoses are based on the best assessment they can make from past data which are n o t totally definitive. I intruded a bit with my teammate in my style and communication so as to quite intentionally shake him up and leave them with the palpable, inescapable possibility that in fact, doctors don’t know everything and maybe that cannot-have-children prognosis was not a death sentence on his Parenthood.

5 weeks later his wife was pregnant…after years and years of ‘futility’….. and she gave birth to a beautiful baby. His son went to the high school where I went and wore the number of his Green Bay Packer uncle on the football field then went on to Harvard and Wall Street to be simply a brilliant human being. Years after his birth, of course, I met him outside the Harvard-Yale game at the Yale Bowl Stadium and as I grabbed his elbow and his hand, I   looked into his eyes, and I simply said, “Nice to seeee you” and we both simply laughed.

So what is a miracle? This word miracle has been used so much like many words it has devolved into a buzzword where it loses its unique meaning so it behooves each of us to take a rigorous look into defining it / distinguishing it, for ourselves and in our own words. Here’s how I define a miracle:

A Miracle is a wondrous and surprising interruption of, and exception to, the established order of Things.

Magical: I Define ‘magical’ as any relationship, event or environment conducive to miracles.

So clearly I am not suggesting one should avoid or ignore modern medicine (noting that both my grandfathers were leading doctors).  Given the impact medicine itself has had in a relatively short hundred years or so, a hundred and fifty years, one could say that modern medicine itself is miraculous. But like any systematic approach, it may have blind spots or holes in it that call forth other and new approaches to, new discoveries,  and new realizations.

The All’s Well Project, which was the original platform I founded and from which I undertook these medical miracles…..founded in conjunction with my Sterling Men’s weekend support team to address the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, to see if we could generate substantive medical breakthroughs beyond the normally predicted or expected medical outcome. The All’s Well Project became a demonstration project for psychoneuroimmunology …..mind-body impacts…………and what that can contribute to and in some cases,’ cause’ healings and recoveries that are completely unexpected and unpredicted.

So how does one apply this? Start with being in ongoing communication with your health care practitioners, interview them, deeply listen, carefully to what works and what you can take on, so you are at least informed and available to what conventional medial practice recommends. I’ve worked in health care regarding mental health and drug addictions treatment for years and it’s clear to me that Healthcare attracts some of the most committed and competent people on the planet and one should not misuse or ignore their resourcefulness and effectiveness.

That said it and meant, there is no question that one’s mind, attitude, outlooks, beliefs, and assumptions … especially when developed over time with a trained counselor or guided support group … impact the whole range of behavior and well being, from preventing injury and illness to restoring being well from injury and illness in terms of pain and discomfort, in terms of time of recovery, in terms of even if there is a recovery, in terms of complications, in terms of conducive relationships with your health care practitioners, in terms of peace of mind,  in terms of how your injury or illness impacts others while you’re recovering.

All of these health impacts are directly related to how one relates to one’s mind, Outlook,  attitudes, beliefs and assumptions…both .seen and unseen, both said and unsaid….. regarding illness and injury. Bottom line: the most productive relationship to have towards injury and illness is the statement. ” I have something to say in the matter of this.:  it’s not happening out there or in there, independently of me,  it’s happening in my body, and my body and my mind are in ongoing communication” …….that’s clearly obvious. Ask: Could I quite literally communicate with my body? Could I even listen to it for what it wants and needs? and if you do, you’ll ‘hear’ it ‘speak’ to you in some form of communication…..mostly words and pictures………..consider: our internal dialogues, our inner voices, our thoughts, in our minds have d i r e c t impacts on our well-being, preventatively and correctively.

So this article Healing Spaces is literally that: the space of healing or the possibility of healing can be facilitated by the stand one takes, that one has something to say in the matter, that one can interact with one’s body intentionally, and facilitate healing and prevention……that can complement and empower standard medical practice.

What does the productive engagement with psychoneuroimmunology take? It takes giving up the mythology that you have nothing to say, that you can’t be at cause in the matter or that for the most part, you are a victim of the circumstances. People who engage in healing powerfully and expeditiously think differently; their point of view is the individual does have something to say and the saying can (and does) quite literally, physiologically, impacts the onset, course, and outcome of injury and disease. Please see the references listed in this article. You’re welcome to comment on this blog and you’re welcome to be in touch with me directly if you so choose at tonys@vsacoach.com.