Those who are unfamiliar with spiritual healing or who are just beginning to consider its possibilities for their own lives may naturally have some questions. They may wonder, for example, why the activity of prayer, which is essentially a mental activity, should have any direct impact on healing a bodily illness, which appears to be essentially a physical condition.
But it's worth examining whether or not it's true that, just because the body is sick or injured, this necessarily means the condition is essentially physical. Then it will be easier to address the question of why the condition of one's thinking would directly influence the condition of one's body. To come to a satisfactory answer to this question, I've found it helpful to approach the whole issue from a fresh standpoint—one that is, in fact, radically different from what is often believed to be true.
It might help to start with an example. Quite a few years ago, I took in a stray dog. He was only a couple of months old at the time, and it was obvious that he had been abandoned. The dog was completely undisciplined. Over the next couple of months, he was constantly getting into some kind of trouble, and one evening I looked out the window to see him uprooting—for the third time!—a tree that I had recently planted in the backyard.
