Dear Nancy,
If you are not acquainted with Louise Hay's work, get one of her books. She focuses on what our bodily manifestations are reflecting about our conscious or unconscious beliefs, and then provides affirmations to counteract particular mistaken beliefs.

To understand how this can work to heal you, a little explanation of the "bodies" will be helpful. Our physical body can be thought of as the "effect" of what we hold in our belief system. For example, when we observe figures of speech that reflect psycho-social stressers: (e.g., she looks as thought she is carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders) we often see that they are actually manifested into the physical body.

So how do these move from the belief level into the body? The aura that can be seen by psychics is made up of vibrations of ever more subtle bodies. The slowest vibration, and the most solid, is the physical. It is surrounded and interpenetrated by the etheric body which is the pattern for the physical; the astral or holder of emotions; lower mental where resides our thoughts; the higher mental or causal which holds belief patterns that manifest karmically; and the spiritual.

When we look at an illness from a "spiritual" point of view, we look beyond the physical, realizing, as I said above, that the physical is the "end product" or effect of the more subtle levels of reality. So, for example, if you are having pain in your arms, seeking medical treatment and changing jobs may improve your pain level but will not heal the real cause which may be a mistaken belief (mental body) or fear (astral body) that you cannot safely embrace the world.

This is where the work of someone like Louise Hay comes in. If you can find the underlying cause of the problem and heal it, then the physical when healed by medical intervention will be more likely to remain healed. Our physical ailments can be embraced as "roadmaps" to our mistaken beliefs. By following their signs we can discover where our understanding of reality is "off" and begin to heal our lives at the most fundamental levels of our reality.