Australian Aborigines believe that the big stories are hunting the right people to tell them. “They are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting prey in the bush.”

So says Robert Moss, former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, a poet, author and journalist. His many books include ‘Conscious Dreaming’, ‘The Secret History of Dreaming’, ‘Dreaming the Soul Back Home’, and ‘Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbol and Synchronicity in Everyday Life’.

Robert says that all we need to do when the big stories are hunting us, is to put ourselves in places where we can be found. “That means listening to our dreams and allowing at least a little unstructured, unscheduled time in a day to pay attention to the many voices in which the world is speaking to us.”

“When we reach, consciously, for a bigger life story, we put ourselves in touch with tremendous sources of healing, creativity, and courage. The right story can help to heal our bodies.”

Robert explains that the latest research in biochemistry and neuro-immunology confirms that the body believes in images, and does not seem to distinguish between a physical act and an imagined event. “Give the body a story it can believe in, and the body will respond accordingly.”

Is this why some people heal against all odds? Dr Kelly Turner’s book, ‘Radical Remission’, summarises the results of her research in the radical remission of cancer. The people she talked to were those who, because of the type or stage of their cancer, were considered by conventional medicine unlikely to heal from it. Yet, they had.

“Oh, so doctors don’t know why the people are getting well? So, let’s ask these people who were sent home on hospice to die, why they think they got well,” Kelly writes. She found that 75 healing factors appeared in these cases, but nine were common among all of the cases she studied. Interestingly, seven of these nine key factors are psychosocial (mental or emotional) factors.

They are: Radically changing your diet; Taking control of your health; Following your intuition; Using herbs and supplements; Releasing suppressed emotions; Increasing positive emotions; Embracing social support; Deepening your spiritual connection; Having strong reasons for living.

Kelly writes that every single person she interviewed spoke about intuition, but a lot of them didn’t listen to their intuition at first, mostly because we live in a culture that says, “You’ve got to listen to the experts”.

So, these people took orders. They obeyed authority figures. They did what their families wanted them to do. They did everything they were told to do, even though they had a little voice inside their head or a feeling in their gut that said something else.

“For the people that I’ve studied, when they started listening to that voice, as opposed to ignoring it, that is when their healing started turning around,” Kelly says.

“Strings of coincidence can strengthen us in the determination to follow our deepest intuitions even when they run counter to conventional wisdom and logic and cannot be subjected to rational explanation,” Robert Moss says.

He says that the new approach to health care will help people to move into a bigger story with the clear understanding that finding meaning in any life passage may be at the heart of healing. “Each of us is living a story. If we don’t know that, we may be living the wrong story, a small and confining story wound around us by other people’s beliefs and expectations.”

After all, “If you have fairy blood, even in the tiniest degree, you must live close to Fairy Land, and eat a little fairy food, or else you will always be hungry”.

In her book, ‘Dying to be me’, cancer survivor Anita Moorjani says, “I learned that my only purpose in life is to be a full expression of myself”. She believes that this is really the only thing you have to do: Realizing that you’re here to honour your own path.

Some of us get to learn this by facing death. Then they can say, as John Yochanan Russell, one of dr Kelly’s radical remission cases, says: “We are not here to cure our diseases. Our diseases are here to cure us.”