The power of suggestion is profound. Everything is intricately connected; there’s no separation between me and all human beings, between me and the air I’m breathing, or between you and life itself. The birds, trees, plants, and the universe—all are intricately connected. This interconnectedness is why suggestion holds so much power for us as human beings. Often, we believe we are individuals, but the reality is different.
When we think of the power of suggestion, we may imagine that there are external influences providing suggestions to us. However, it works differently. There’s a field of consciousness we’re all in. Entities that are outside of me can intersect with me in all sorts of different ways. We’re like sponges that way. Sponges of consciousness.
It’s easy enough to understand how it works if you’ve ever been criticized, particularly if you were criticized when you were young. We’re often told that we’re bad—then we hold that forever.
My teacher, Osho, once said, “I can tell you over and over and over again how beautiful you are, and you will never believe me. But if I tell you you’re bad once, you’ll hold on to that forever.”
That’s the way we are, right? The power of suggestion.
We have a lot of control over what we take in and the way that we take things in, but most of it comes from outsid. This is so important to understand as we’re studying spirituality because this is what Native and natural spirituality is based on.
If a human being is raised in an awake tribe they will naturally awaken themselves, because all the suggestions they’re given throughout their life will be suggestions about unity: looking at the trees and how we are related to the trees, asking permission before you gather food, listening to the rivers when you’re sitting next to the rivers. Wise elders in Native societies will ask, “Who are you? Who are you?” If you are asked that in the right way, then the answer is easy to know.
All of our ancestors from way, way back, 60,000 years ago, lived ripe spiritual lives. They were spiritually alive. They knew who they were, and they knew what their purpose was.
We don’t live in that society. We live in a society that has told us we’re bad, that we’re wrong. We’ve been told you’re going to go to heaven, or you’re going to go to hell. So many conflicting, confusing messages come to us all the time.
It’s what marketing is based on, right? We are constantly marketed with suggestions for wanting new things. Marketing executives know how our minds work. They know that there are methods they can use to take masses of human beings and make us desire a particular thing.
The power of suggestion is strong.
I have a little story about how suggestion works… So, I was diagnosed with cancer. It was a bad kind of cancer. The hope of recovery from it was very small, so I was just working step by step through all the things that needed to happen. There were two moments where the power of suggestion was very powerful.
One was my wicked stepmother. I do have a wicked stepmother. It’s important to know! She’s a fabulous gal with a good sense of humor. She was talking to me on the phone before I went down to the doctor.
She said, “Now, Connie”—she’s got this very strong New York accent—”Be nice to the nurses. You’ll have a better outcome.”
What’s funny is that I was going to be nice to the nurses anyway. I mean, there’s really no reason to not be nice to a nurse, right?At least I hope so.
I was going to do it anyway, but having her tell me that, in that particular way, was very powerful. Particularly because I was in a state of openness and receptivity. I know that she loves me, and she’s older than me, and she’s wise. She’s been through things. She’s lived her life very awake.
So she says, “Connie, be nice to the nurses. You’ll have a much better outcome.”
This was powerful because it was the first thing that implanted in my mind, since I had the diagnosis, that a better outcome was possible. This was the first little crack in the statistically horrible nature of the particular cancer that I had.
The power of suggestion—this little statement stayed with me through the whole thing. I had many opportunities to do my duty. Every time a nurse took my blood pressure, hooked me up to the chemo drip, or did any little thing, it was easier for me to be consciously nice to them. To be nice on purpose because my stepmother had told me to do it.
Somehow this added power to it. And so, I tell you now… be nice to nurses.
This enhanced my ability to surrender because not only was I surrendered to the process of what was going on, but I was surrendered to what I had been told by my ancestor, right? A person who told me this out of great care.
This simple thing became a thread of both groundedness and action on my part. It was kind of like the fasting that I was talking about in the last video. We have control over so very few things, but we do have control over whether or not we’re nice to nurses, and we have control over how conscious we are about doing that, right? One very small statement became this powerful healing agent.
The other thing about it was that it didn’t come from me. It wasn’t me. I didn’t read a book about being nice to nurses. I didn’t have to put a sticky note up on your mirror that says, “Be nice to nurses.” I wasn’t manufacturing it myself. It came from outside of me, and it came from someone who loved me.
If we know how to listen enough, these little things are always available to us from the wise people around. I remember another time, many years ago. I was in a very bad mood about something. I’m driving along and a car passes me on the left. I look over and here is a young girl, looking out the window at me with the brightest smile I’d ever seen. Crack! It busted the sadness in an instant.
These wonderful things pop up everywhere. Always listen and look so you don’t miss a thing.
We’re so interconnected. We’re not individual, we’re not separate. The more I try to have ‘my will’ be the thing that’s driving reality, the more out of step with reality I am, the more in illness I am. So, for you and for me and for everyone, every time something happens that can open us up to our connectedness with everything, we need to take it with the utmost gratitude.
I’m sure this is one of the reasons why in Native societies, they would spend a lot of time simply listening to the leaves, listening to the water, listening to a spirit animal. If you have ears to listen, things will come to you—little things. It doesn’t have to be huge. We modern folks move too fast to be able to really hear.
It’s the little things. “Be nice to nurses. You’ll have a better outcome.”
The other thing that happened was really funny. The doctors sent me off to do the worst chemo possible. I had this one oncologist who didn’t want to give it to me at all because he knew it could destroy my heart. It was a really bad chemo. But I had a really, really bad cancer. I needed to have this horrific, horrible red chemo of death. (It was actually red).
Anyway, I go to see the surgeon for my first time. This is the person who’s going to give me the mastectomy, but after the chemo is done. He talks to me a while about what is going to happen. He’s nice, you know, he’s trying to give me a little hope.
When I’m getting ready to go, he looks at me and says something like, “Okay. You go home. You take all these rounds of chemo so that when you come back, the cancer is one hundred percent gone. Then I can do this surgery.”
So again, inflammatory breast cancer is not a lump. It’s not a simple lump they can take out. It’s more like a cancerous virus. It doesn’t have edges so in order to live the whole thing had to be gone. By the time I got into care I was at a fairly advanced state. The only thing that could have worked was this strong, strong chemo of death. I needed to let it do its work.
This doc looked at me and said, “You go home, do this chemo, and come back with the cancer completely gone.”
I said, “Okay.”
I shut down everything else, and completely relaxed into a six months schedule of chemo.
Chemo is crazy. What this drug does is gets you the closest to death that they possibly can without killing you. So, they give you just as much as you can possibly stand, and then you recover a little bit, and then they give you some more, and then you recover a little bit.
I wasn’t well any more. I was quite sick. So, I relaxed into this process as much as I could. And… when I came back, they did little biopsies, and they couldn’t find any cancer. Then they gave me the surgery, and they biopsied every cell of everything that they took off and couldn’t find any cancer left.
And the doctor comes back in to see me, and he’s like, “Wow, it’s all gone.”
I said, “Well, you told me to do that.”
He really laughed. He was like, “I cured you!” And I’m like, “Yes, you did.”
Okay… one more story, because we’re telling stupid stories, right? There’s this really, really lame joke.
A guy goes to the doctor for an operation. The doctor asks him, “Any questions?” and the guy says, “But, Doc. Am I going to be able to play the violin?”
The doctor kindly says, “Well, yes, yes, you will.”
And the patient goes, “Good, because I couldn’t before.”
Our goal was to lay this joke on as many people as we possibly could. So, everywhere I went I’m looking for the foot in the door where I could lay down my joke. We got a lot of people with that one!
Anyway, I still cannot play the violin. But the power of suggestion is part of what makes us human. I hope that paints an idea of how we are so intricately connected. It doesn’t have to do with belief; it has more to do with surrender—surrender to life.
And actually, that’s what “die before you die” means anyway.