If the brain expects that a treatment will work, it sends healing chemicals into the bloodstream, which facilitates that. That's why the placebo effect is so powerful for every type of healing. And the opposite is equally true and equally powerful: When the brain expects that a therapy will not work, it doesn't. It's called the "nocebo" effect.

Since the conventional belief about human embryology is that genes control the development of the fetus, the mother's role in her child's gestation is deemed to be not much more than providing nutrition, feeding her child.

Once we go beyond this and start to open up and question and experience things in a different way, we can move forward.

Just like a single cell, the character of our lives is determined not by our genes but by our responses to the environmental signals that propel life.

As soon as you start to tell yourself in your perception that you can't do something anymore, then your biological system will adjust to prove you right. You will not do what you think you can't do.

I was exhilarated by the new realization that I could change the character of my life by changing my beliefs. I was instantly energized because I realized that there was a science-based path that would take me from my job as a perennial “victim” to my new position as “co-creator” of my destiny. (Prologue, xv)

Human beings are not meant to live alone. There is a fundamental biological imperative that propels you and every organism on this planet to be in a community, to be in relationship with other organisms.