"Yes," said Harry.

He hesitated, and then the question he had to ask burst from him before he could stop himself. "Why? Why do they affect me like that? Am I just - "

"It has nothing to do with weakness,' said Professor Lupin sharply, as though he had read Harry's mind. "The Dementors affect you worse than the others because there are horrors in your past that the others don't have."

A ray of wintry sunlight fell across the classroom, illuminating Lupin's grey hairs and the lines on his young face. "Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope and happiness out of the air around them. Even Muggles feel their presence, though they can't see them. Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory, will be sucked out of you. if it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself - soulless and evil. You'll be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life, and the worst that has happened to YOU, Harry, is enough to make anyone fall off their broom. You have nothing to feel ashamed of." …

"So …" Professor Lupin had taken out his own wand, and indicated that Harry should do the same. 'The spell I am going to try and teach you is highly advanced magic, Harry - well beyond Ordinary Wizarding Level. It is called the Patronus Charm."

"How does it work?" said Harry nervously.

"Well, when it works correctly, it conjures up a Patronus," said Lupin, "which is a kind of Anti-Dementor - a guardian which acts as a shield between you and the Dementor."

Harry had a sudden vision of himself crouching behind a Hagrid-like figure holding a large club.

Professor Lupin continued, "The Patronus is a kind of positive force, a projection of the very things that the Dementor feeds upon - hope, happiness, the desire to survive - but it cannot feel despair, as real humans can, so the Dementors can't hurt it. but I must warn you, Harry, that the Charm might be too advanced for you. Many qualified wizards have difficulty with it."

"What des a Patronus look like?" said Harry curiously.

"Each one is unique to the wizard who conjures it."

"And how do you conjure it?"

"With an incantation, which will work only if you are concentrating, with all your might, on a single, very happy memory."

- from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling

the power of thought

"What is it?" I asked.

"It's a list of all the fun we had, all the times we laughed."

I almost gasped in amazement. With all the fear and anger and disappointment he had every right to be feeling, here he was trying to look out for [others].

"Like what?" I asked feebly, trying to regain my composure.

Chuck grinned and launched into a story I wouldn't have thought he had the strength to tell. "Like the time Mom and Dad and Chrissie and Linda and me were dressed up as those guys in the Fruit of the Loom underwear ad, and Dad's driving us to the costume party. Dad was a bunch of grapes and I was an apple, and the others were different things like bananas and stuff. And Dad gets pulled over for speeding.

"When the policewoman came up to the car she looked in and just started laughin' really hard. I mean, she could hardly stand up, you know? And we all started laughing, and the cop said, Where you all headed - a salad bar? Dad said he was sorry to be speeding, but his kids were getting so ripe that they were starting to draw flies.

"The cop laughed until she had to take off her dark glasses and wipe tears from her eyes, and then she said, Well, get out of here, but go slow. I don't want to find you squashed all over the highway."

Chuck laughed, and so did I.

Later that night, I looked over the pages to see a list that included Disneyland, horseback riding, camping, the speeding-fruit story and others, some of which made me laugh out loud.

What an incredible gift, I thought.

- from The Gift of Joy, by C. W. Metcalf

Witnessing a quantum event in the field of light waves may seem comparatively objective, but what if quantum reality were just as present in our own thoughts, emotions and desires?

... If I find a green meadow splashed with daisies and sit down beside a clear-running brook, I have found medicine. It soothes my hurts as well as when I sat in my mother's lap in infancy, because the Earth really is my mother, and the green meadow is her lap. You and I are strangers, but the internal rhythm of our bodies listens to the same ocean tides that cradled us in a time beyond memory ...

Nature is man's healer, because Nature is man ...

All of us can shift the biology of our bodies from one extreme to the other. When you are wildly happy, you are not the same person, physiologically speaking, as when you were deeply depressed ... An Ayurvedic physician is more interested in the patient he sees before him than in the disease."

- from Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind / Body Medicine, by Deepak Chopra

lost in space

Lost in space - above all, drifting
To a place where planets are shifting
The moon erased, its features lifting
The glare

But I am the stuff of happy endings
Though mostly bluff, belief suspending
But close enough for just pretending
To care

And I'm pretending to care
When I'm not even there
Gone, but I don't know where

Well, she's the faith and I'm the devil
Who keeps the pace and clears the rubble
And lost in space, fills up the bubble
With air

By just pretending to care
Like I'm not even there
Gone, but I don't know where

It split like a cell
And man cannot tell
The lie from the parallel

So baby beware
I'm just pretending to care
Like I'm not even there

Gone, but I don't know where
Gone, but I don't know where
Gone, but I don't know where

Copyright 2003 Aimee Mann

alone

Alone at home, I wasted countless evenings wandering from room to room to room, as if in mourning or awaiting the return of a beloved soldier. Listlessness, and for so many years. I sometimes felt as if there were nothing left to say, as if the heart just sometimes sickened, some distant star of love remaining. Life struck me as a senseless exercise in tolerance. How long, after all, is it possible to maintain a charade of meaning?

The interest I had in contuinity was feigned, was forced. Psychically, I felt annulled. This was a period of nicotine hues, of cigarettes smoked with one shoulder pressed to the cold glass of a window, of sunlight suddenly spilling onto the floorboards of a dim hallway, of such silence.

And every day, fingering those same worn pages of my memory. I could find nothing in myself but want but could not find the energy to convert that want into a quest. My wish was to be liberated from myself and beyond that, I did not care, I did not care.

- from The Pure Weight of the Heart, by Antonella Gambotto

prozac-free homeopathic medicine for depression, anxiety, and other problems

In Prozac-Free, renowned homeopathic physicians Judyth Reichenberg-Ullman, N.D., and Robert Ullman, N.D., offer a revolutionary approach to treating depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and other mental health problems.

If you are taking an antidepressant, you owe it to yourself and your loved ones to read this book. It could change your life. Homeopathy is an improbable, mysterious, elegant therapy that just may help you to move safely through the terrifying darkness of depression.

Similar format to the authors' popular Ritalin-Free Kids. Excellent for current and prospective homeopathic patients as well as for practitioners.

Up-to-date information on conventional and homeopathic treatment of mental and emotional problems. Filled with case histories of patients successfully treated homeopathically for depression, anxiety, panic attacks, obsessive compulsive disorder, sexual abuse, multiple personality disorder, and other conditions.

Buy Prozac-Free Homeopathic Medicine for Depression, Anxiety + Other Problems !

Recently the term PLACEBO was inverted into a new term, NOCEBO, to describe the negative effects of a doctor's opinion ...

[Medical assistance should be associated with healing] If a patient regards any treatment as violence, then his body will be flooded with negative emotions and the chemicals associated with them. It is well documented that in a climate of negativity, the ability to heal is greatly reduced - depressed people not only lower their immune response, for example, but even weaken their DNA's ability to repair itself ...

Doctors push patients into predictable thinking all the time, because medical school training is focused entirely on the horizontal axis."

- from Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind / Body Medicine, by Deepak Chopra

The biochemistry of the body is a product of awareness.

Beliefs, thoughts, and emotions create the chemical reactions that uphold life in every cell.

... An aging cell is the end product of awareness that has forgotten how to remain new ... Perception appears to be automatic, but in fact it is a learned phenomenon. The world you live in, including the experience of your body, is completely dictated by how you learned to perceive it. If you change your perception, you change the experience of your body and your world ...

A meticulous 1987 study from Yale, reported by MR Jensen, found that breast cancer spread fastest among women who had repressed personalities, felt hopeless, and were unable to express anger, fear, and other negative emotions. Similar findings have emerged for rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, intractable pain, and other disorders ...

You can choose to see the rose bloom and die; you can choose to see the rose as a wave of life that never ends, for next year new roses will spring from the seeds of this one ... No two people experience their bodies in exactly the same way, because each of us interprets experience - including the experience of inhabiting a body - according to his own personal beliefs, values, assumptions, and memories. An aging body involves one style of interpretation; an ageless body involves an opposite style ...

No matter how separate anything appears to the senses, nothing is separate at the quantum level ... Reestablishing the memory of your connection with the quantum field will awaken the memory of renewal in your body ...

Major factors that accelerate aging: depression, lack of daily routine, lack of regular work routine, job dissatisfaction. Minor: inability to express emotions ...

Larry Scherwitz, a University of California psychologist, taped the conversations of 600 men, a third of whom were suffering from heart disease, the rest of whom were healthy. Listening to the tapes, he counted how often each man used the words I, Me, and Mine. Comparing his results with the frequency of heart disease, Scherwitz found that men who used the first-person pronoun most often had the highest risk of heart trouble. In addition, by following his subjects for several years, he found that the more a man habitually talked about himself, the greater the chance that he would have a coronary ...

Valliant was among the first researchers to establish that depression often leads to premature aging, chronic illness, and early death. Generally, at the root of depression is a kind of emotional numbness ...

Being holistic, exercise sends chemical messages back and forth between the brain and various muscle groups; part of this flow of biochemical information stimulates the production of catecholamines. Thus, whenever a doctor writes a prescription for an antidepressant ... he is handing out a proxy for the body's own inner prescription, which is filled by exercise.

If you hear the words I love you and your heart starts to pound, an ... astonishing metamorphosis has taken place. An emotion in another person's mind has been transformed into molecules of adrenaline rushing through your bloodstream ...

Child psychologists have found that young children are much more deeply influenced by ascriptive statements from their parents than by prescriptive statements … in other words, telling a child WHAT HE IS makes a much deeper impression than telling him WHAT TO DO ...

Pain in the present is experienced as hurt. Pain in the past is remembered as anger. Pain in the future is perceived as anxiety. Unexpressed anger, redirected against yourself and held within, is called guilt. The depletion of energy that occurs when anger is redirected inward creates depression ...

The emotions that frighten us are the complex ones, because they overwhelm the natural release mechanism. You cannot simply release guilt or depression. They are secondary formations that arose once you forgot how to release hurt

Music is metabolized in the same way as narcotics in that it creates the release of endogenous narcotics in the body. Exhilarating music creates natural anti-depressants in the body.

- from Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: A Practical Alternative to Growing Old, by Deepak Chopra


By this logic, the classic mental disorders - depression, schizophrenia, and psychosis - are actually brain disorders. This logic has obvious inadequacies; it is like saying that car wrecks should be blamed on automobiles.

- from Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind / Body Medicine, by Deepak Chopra