Reviewed by David Brizer
Why Do I Feel This Way
Healing Energetic and Epigenetic Patterns To Live Your Life Fully
by Laura Mayer, M.A., OTR
HeartShine Publications
June 2026, Paperback, 168 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1964802473
Laid up with sciatica two months ago, after an unexpected diagnosis of essential hypertension, I had no idea what was to follow. Just like Woody Allen, who insists he’s got a brain tumor after experiencing a ringing in his ear (“I’ve got a brain tumor!”, he whines, in Hannah and Her Sisters, 1986), I was certain that ruin and certain death would surely follow next.
I was wrong. I got hooked up with an extraordinary treatment team under the relatively new aegis of ‘Integrative Medicine.’ The team included a physical therapist, acupuncturist, neurologist, internist and pain management doctor. In a mercifully short time, I was feeling better – less worried about stroking out – and walking pretty much pain-free, without a cane.
What happened? Something (or everything) was working in my favor. All I know, is that twice weekly acupuncture sessions, coupled with two epidural steroid infusions, graduated physical exercise, and attention to ‘mental hygiene’ (read: ‘mindlfulness’, meditation, body and feeling awareness), helped me understand my ‘illness identity’ and got me back on both my proverbial and actual feet.
This is a road some of us have walked on, or perhaps dismissed, before. Along with Louise Hay, the short list of prominent authors linking mental states to physical health includes Wayne Dyer, Joe Dispenza, David Kessler, the Simontons. They focus on self-empowerment, positive thinking, and the mind’s ability to influence bodily healing. More marginal offshoots of the pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps school of thinking were Edgar Cayce, media personalities Gary Knoll and Joe Rogan, and grievously misplaced attorney-at-law and rabble rouser, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The major pitfall of ‘home schooling’ and home remedies for medical problems [aside from continued untreated illness, poisoning or death] is blaming the patient for their illness. If we are responsible for our return to health, then it is a quick logical detour to assume we are also responsible for our illness.
This is an overly simplified view, as Laura Mayer points out in her excellent book, Why Am I Feeling This Way? After giving the devil his due – after according environmental and life stressors their requisite weights to our overall state of health or disease – there is still room for work. Enough room, in many if not most clinical scenarios, for the patient’s understanding of their life narrative, of the role their illness plays in it, to make a significant difference in the response to treatment.
Mayer, an occupational therapist, healer, and writer based in Arizona, New York and Florence, Italy, practices healing based on personal experience. In her book she lauds the relevance of epigenetics, a relatively new approach to gene expression emphasizing the hitherto under-appreciated role of historical and behavioral components of pain, illness and suffering. Components which she and other authors increasingly demonstrate as vitally relevant to the diagnosis and management of disease.
Mayer pulls no punches – one of the many merits of this slim but remarkably powerful volume. She describes her terror on learning, at age 15, of a diagnosis of anterior horn disease. Terror multiplied by the attending neurologist’s statement that she would be on a respirator by age 25.
One of the residents lingered behind walk rounds to speak with her. He could not believe the attending’s insensitivity, leaving her without hope like that. This sparked her will to live, important during the 18 subsequent tendon transplants she received to salvage motor function of her hands.
She suffered, she endured, she learned. As she writes, “My healing journey began with one plea, Either I heal, or I am out of here. She learned, among other things, that she had suffered birth trauma of epic proportions: her parents didn’t want a baby, her father chased her mother (pregnant with her) at gunpoint down a flight of stairs, resulting in the premature delivery and birth of baby Laura. Laura and her Harvard-trained neurologist Dr. Steven Horowitz then embarked on a decades-long healing journey whose pitstops included multiple hand surgeries, and extended medical leave from school. Her greatest wish: a hospital visit from the Beatles.
Her progress over the next few years was slow but sure. Mayer found that a newly emerging approach – that of Integrative or Holistic medicine – aided and abetted by the powerful use of story, of metaphor, of visual imagery – was key to managing her illness; key to her return to the ranks of the functional living. She came to understand that her motor neuron disease had literally disarmed her; later, requiring a small bowel resection for post-hysterectomy adhesions, she felt she could not digest certain people in her life.
These were not casual or glib mystifications, far from it. Mayer’s interpretations, framing the body as a blank canvas upon which the life narrative is written, became a fount of exegesis and healing. Why Do I Feel This Way, a clarion call to the heart, is a quick powerful read, lyrical, passionate, reminiscent of exciting passages from Joseph Campbell and C. G. Jung. Mayer, after the champions of integrative medicine, asks readers to consider illness from the point of view of story. What are the symptoms and illness trying to say? Norman Cousins described his victory over retroperitoneal fibrosis, achieved after many months of medicine, mega doses of Vitamin C, and laughter (he famously watched Groucho Marx and Three Stooges films, hour after hour), in his 1979 book Anatomy of An Illness. Louise Hay published over several decades, starting in the 1970s, with her most famous work, You Can Heal Your Life, released in 1984. Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978), the books of Andrew Weil, Gabor Maté, and Jon Kabat-Zinn, and most recently, Blindsided by Richard M. Cohen (2025), highlight the illness narrative as powerful therapeutic tool.
The illness narrative itself is an epigenetic modulator of illness and potential recovery. Robin Holliday is recognized for proposing in the 1980s and 90s that changes in gene expression through the methylation of DNA (specifically 5-methylcytosine) were a primary mechanism of “epigenetics” [see Ute Deichmann, ‘Epigenetics: The Origins and Evolution of a Fashionable Topic’ (Developmental Biology 416(1): 249-254 (2016)) for a dismissive discussion of the same.] Dismiss epigenetics all you want, but the fact remains that scientifically validated approaches like the Ornish diet (2011) and the Herbert Benson Relaxation Response (The Relaxation Response, Harper Collins (2000)) are, arguably, how-to handbooks of healthy DNA ‘methylation,’ induced by rational healthy diet and a stress reduction lifestyle including meditation, self-awareness, and regular exercise.
Laura Mayer writes from experience. Her first book, Unlocking the Invisible Child: A Journey from Heartbreak to Bliss (Balboa Press (2011) fully chronicles her recovery from anterior horn disease through alternative modalities. Why Do I Feel This Way?, her latest contribution, is a heartfelt memoir, deeply sensitive and intelligent, that will appeal to all readers facing their own illness/wellness journeys. Mayer’s book is must-read.
About the reviewer: David Brizer is a Bronx, New York-based writer whose work appears in AGNI, TYPO, Exacting Clam, Another Chicago, Calliope, failbetter.com, New England Journal of Medicine.