Good health is an integral part of Physical Joy. There's no Joy connected to poor health. God gave us our bodies, and the responsibility to care for them the best we know how. That requires serious considerations of diet and exercise. The only way to daily exercise is to convince yourself that exercise is the most important thing you'll do all day. Some people call upon St. Jude to help them exercise. Be careful. You may find yourself jogging in the cold and darkness of the morning, confused and wondering how in the world you got there. Good health is part of the Joy. It's much easier to have Fun, Give, and Love when we're healthy than when we're not.
The secrets of good health are quite simple. Stress is detrimental to our health. Not only do our external circumstances produce tension, our state of mind is a key factor as well. Whenever we get angry, tension causes our muscles to strain. This shows that our state of mind affects our body. We have a saying in Korea that when you get angry you start to age. If you get angry once, you move one step closer towards old age. So if you are often angry you will age quickly, but if you smile and have a peaceful heart, you will remain young. Then how can we overcome our anger? Of course in certain situations we get angry; then how can we overcome this? This is another form of developing our mind. Especially older people and religious people should try to keep a strong healthy spirit. This is an important goal in life. How can we keep our spirit calm, sound and healthy? It depends on the degree to which our spirit is developed. If our heart and mind are well developed, we can easily overcome disturbances, otherwise we are easily influenced by events of our lives. We should be able to control our circumstances, not be controlled by them. When we lose control over our circumstances we get angry and our health is impaired.
-Rev. Young Hwi Kim
Some writers, like Paul Pearsall, Ph.D, in his excellent book Super
Joy notes the phenomenon of health being restored through somewhat unexplainable circumstances and finds that this self-help to health is through a person's self-hypnotic ability.
Researchers have shown that your hypnotic ability, your ability to focus your attention intensely while reducing your awareness to peripheral stimulation and while suspending critical and analytical thinking in favor of more visual and emotional processes, is directed related to your ability to use your beliefs to promote healing. No one hypnotizes you. All hypnosis is self-hypnosis sometimes assisted by someone else who helps you to focus and enter into a different state of consciousness. Hypnosis is always something you do. Not something that is done to you. About 10% of us show high hypnotic ability, while another 10% show a very low hypnotic ability... Most of us fall somewhere between the extremes of hypnotic ability.
Call it what you want. Call it self-hypnosis if you want. I call it prayer. But who cares what you call it if it works. Calling on St. Jude works.
Stories of health being restored through the intercession of St. Jude abound everywhere. Shrine directors and parish priests alike tell of crutches and braces and similar paraphernalia being left next to statues of St. Jude. Stories in newspapers and multitudes of letters of gratitude to St. Jude, which are sent to shrines and churches, attest to the Power to heal through this humble saint.
