A healer for the mind

The turning point for Cooke townsman Paul George came in 2014, when he lost his mother to cancer.

“She was diagnosed at the end of October 2013, and a few months later, in March 2014, she lost the battle. In her case though, it was her mind that lost the war, and she wasn’t mentally strong enough. She kept asking me for antidepressants, etc. Eventually, she succumbed to a simple cold that turned into pneumonia because her immunity wasn’t strong enough.

It didn’t stop there. After the death of his mother, for a year and a half, he fell into a major depressive disorder, had to take a break from his professional life and finally had to rely on medication. Like many, George was skeptical about visiting a therapist until things got really bad. “It was the first time I decided to see a therapist and all these techniques and tools started to help me a lot. I realized that if only I knew about them earlier, I could have managed a lot better. things, and I realized that so many people were unaware of those coping mechanisms as well.

And so, with the help of his therapist, George decided to train as a professional cancer recovery coach and decided to work with the people he knew all too well about the disease – cancer patients. “It wasn’t the medical help that worried me – it was their mental well-being that needed to be bolstered. I learned so many patterns from these patients. They would be diagnosed and their entire family structure would be affected. I realized that in many ways your belief systems are the tumors – that’s why I called it (the book) Chemotherapy for the Mind – and these mental blocks can affect you more than the medicine does. -same.

Speaking of the book, George says his idea was to engage young minds and help them understand the immense mind-body connection, especially in those terminal illnesses where the mind plays a central role in healing. “There were a lot of parallels that we drew from these patients. Many of them had stifled their dreams and ambitions while others had a somewhat fragmented family life. I wanted to fill in the gaps in these cases using a variety of techniques like Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). There is such a big role played by culture and belief systems in these cases,” he says. “With all these angles in mind, the different

the subjects talk about these areas. Everyone knows what cancer is, but no one really knows what chemotherapy is.

As the saying goes, it’s mind over matter at the end of the day, something George knows all too well.

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