A few years ago I was presenting on mindfulness at a growth day for IBM when I had a conversation I will never forget. It was so powerful that it has formed part of my teachings ever since. Shortly after I'd finished on stage a guy came up to me and asked if I had a minute. I said of course, and as I looked up at this big guy standing in front of me he said "I wanted to tell you this, but not in front of my colleagues or managers. Do you mind if I share it with you before you leave...?"
He went on to tell me that he had been suffering with a serious cancer, one which had turned his life upside down. As a young, fit man in his thirties he'd never contemplated that he wouldn't be around for many more decades, that was until he realised how serious this cancer was. He said that he was under the usual care of a team of doctors and had been having all of the normal treatments. One of the key measurements with his treatment was his white blood cell count, which he told me we can think of as our 'immunity cells'.
In an effort to try to compliment his treatment he told me that he had started meditating. Just learning from an app, being guided for ten minutes or so a day. He wasn't convinced at all that it was going to help him, like me years previously he considered mindfulness and meditation to be a bit weird, a bit new age, navel-gazing I guess. He was actually embarrassed about doing it so hadn't told anyone outside of his immediate family. However he had nothing to lose so continued to do a bit each day for a couple of months.
"What I noticed as the weeks went on is that my white blood cell count started jumping up", he told me. It was such a marked difference that after a couple of months the doctors asked him if he was doing anything differently? He said that yes he'd started meditating every day. His doctors simply replied "Wow really? Keep doing it!"
Whenever I present on, or train people in mindfulness I never try to convince them of anything. I don't make people feel as if they *should be* meditating, in the same way I'd never tell someone who might not be that active that they should be exercising. We all have enough "shoulds" on our list without me adding to them. But I had shared a slide on the benefits of meditation that day which included the words "boosts immunity". Whilst those two words are backed by rigorous, peer reviewed scientific studies from around the world, nothing could have been more powerful than if he'd have spoken up and told us of his direct experience. However I completely understood his reluctance.
I enjoy sharing these true stories because they make more and more people realise that mindfulness is the most normal, natural thing in the world. Taking time to look after your mind, the most powerful tool you have, can have profound life-changing effects, not just to people in a lab experiment thousands of miles away, but to real people like you, me and him.
As we walked out of the auditorium together I asked him if he thought it might've just been a placebo effect. "I did think that" he said "but these white cell count figures were printed out and shown to me in black and white, so I know I wasn't imagining that part. And whilst I went into it with an open mind, I was skeptical, I really didn't think meditating would do anything".
Of course I am not saying that mindfulness cures cancer. I'm not even saying that you should believe the science that shows that if you do it regularly it will boost your immune system. But in his experience it had reduced his stress, made him feel a little more grounded and resilient and maybe, just maybe that had played some part in allowing his body to start to heal itself.
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