Self Induced Healing- Taking Matters Into Her Own Hands To Defy The Odds-EVY McDonald’s Story
- liveblueconsulting
- Jun 5
- 4 min read
Change your thoughts, change your outcome.
Evy McDonald, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease) in 1980. She was told by her neurologist, "Evy, you have six to twelve months to live. If you want to do something nice, leave your body to science."
Evy’s day got worse!
The day she was diagnosed, in the afternoon she was fired from her job as a nurse, because she'd been out sick so much. When she returned home, her house was vandalized and cherished stuff stolen.
This is the stuff movies are made out of…
Evy recalls, "Death seemed inevitable, and a part of me was truly looking forward to ending this life. But my story is not over, I had unfinished business: a strong compulsion to discover what unconditional love was about before I died"
Evy did not deny her mortality. It’s just people like her don't go home to die just because some doctor has sentenced them. They use their diagnosis as the spur to start living, and then feel too good to die.
The truth, Evy knew that her journey would have to begin with an acceptance of her own body, which she had always hated. The first step had to be self-love.
She sat in front of a mirror in her wheelchair. In the six months since she had been diagnosed as having ALS, her once firm, strong muscles had wasted away into flaccid, useless ones.
She was dying from a particularly rapid form of this incurable disease and had at best six more months to live.
As the hours of her day were now relegated to sitting alone in her wheelchair, she began to observe rather than react to her thoughts.
She noticed there was one consistent thought throughout the fabric of her life, a relentless obsession with weight. She was sure that if she became "skinny" enough, an admirable body would magically greet her in the mirror.
Evy sat in a wheelchair with acutely atrophying muscles. Her arms and legs were shrinking!
Was it just coincidence that I'd always wanted a smaller body and that ALS was granting me that very desire?
Evy was determined in her last months of life, she wanted to experience unconditional love. She wanted to know that sweetness.
How could she hope to realize that goal if she couldn't accept her own body?
Evy’s plan of action.
The first step was to notice and write down how many negative thoughts she had about her body in the course of each day, and how many positive ones. When she saw the huge preponderance of negative thoughts on the paper, she was forced to confront the degree of hatred for her body.
To counter this habitual and ingrained negativity, every day she singled out one aspect of her physical body that was acceptable in her view, no matter how small. Next, she used that item to begin the rewriting. Every negative thought would be followed by a positive statement like "and my hair is truly pretty," or "I have lovely hands," or "My bright eyes and warm smile light up my face." Each day a different positive item would be added as each day the rewriting continued.
She felt like a jig-saw puzzle being put back together; and when the last bit was in place, her mind shifted and began to see her whole perfect picture. Evy couldn't pinpoint just when the shift occurred, but one day she noticed that she had no negative thoughts about my her body, she was filled with gratitude and a new perspective.
She was totally at peace, with a complete, unalterable acceptance of the way her body was a bowl of jello in a wheelchair.
For the first time in her life she knew her body to be esthetically pleasing.
Once the old scripts and demeaning images were finally and totally gone, they were never to emerge again. It didn't need to be any different; it could be whatever it was and become whatever it was to be. ...
Her illness was a challenge and a gift. She was stimulated to examine her deepest thoughts, desires and beliefs. The journey of self-discovery restructured her life and led her into a powerful experience of the mind-body connection. She learned about unconditional love through the darkest time, yet her most enlightened time.
Her "physical body stopped deteriorating (in other words she didn't die)," she says in her letter, "and began reversing the havoc wreaked by ALS.
This reversal was a by-product of all the other changes. Physical healing did not occur because she set out to 'cure' herself, but because her job on earth was not complete....
She choose to awake each day with joy, filled with enthusiasm, and continue to play a role in the transformation of medical practice.
Her goal was to discover the experience of unconditional love, not to avoid dying. So she was not setting herself up for failure, but for an experience that was within her power to give herself. Love and healing are always possible, even when a cure is not.
Evy’s story is an incredible teaching moment. A powerful message:
In order to really think about your life, people should live ten minutes at a time! EVY’s micro steps of rewiring negative thoughts into positive ones, transformed her outcome.
What is one negative self thought you can turn into self love? How could you benefit from Evy’s approach to understand what unconditional love is and truly feel the benefit of that gift?
I hope you enjoyed her Story.
Danielle Pointon
Live Blue Consulting
Ps- here is a picture of our dog enjoying some water time the other day-dogs do respond when you talk to them.
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