I am not an early riser. There are Larks and there are Owls in this world. I love the creative quiet time of night. Sometimes I do wake early and recently I did. I grabbed my camera and went to the living room window that overlooks a pond. The colors were so beautiful that I would like to share them with you.
I have a general rule about telling stories. The stories have to contain something wonderful, someone getting better, happier, being freed in some way, or something mystical. I am going to share a story of something mystical I experienced. It is my Christ Mass story for you.
About fifteen years ago I knew a woman, a nurse, who worked in Elmer Cranton’s clinic in Yelm. I came to know her when I was doing chelation therapy. One day after eating lunch on the beach of the Nisqually River, she and her husband got back in the canoe and pushed off back into the river. The canoe tipped. She had not yet put on her life jacket. She was pulled under a snag in the river and drowned.
Later I attended a wake for her and then returned home. I had a spinet piano in the bedroom where I slept. As I lay in bed with the light on reading and thinking about her, all the piano strings played. It was a unique sound. I could feel her presence in the room making her self known through the piano.
I remember having many emotions at that moment. One of the strongest emotions was feeling gratitude for her. I don’t know exactly what I said to her in that moment but I do know the piano made the same sound again. I am forever grateful.
It is very interesting how many people have had similar experiences. It is certainly not a subject that appears in small talk.
You and I have been there, we have had periods of time where we would not change. It is not that we could not, we would not. We had a skill and were competent at applying that skill to holding in place a particular view of the past, present, and future. For some people it is first experienced in early childhood, we might refuse to stop sucking our thumb. For others it starts in the teens and for a very long time they might smoke. Rigidity in thinking begins early in life.
We create a mental universe and we live in it. We defend it from change and opinions. And even when we know something is not quite right with our universe and seek help we are often too buttressed in our fortress universe. Thankfully, we have our vast subconscious storehouse of learning to draw upon.
My mentor in Hypnotherapy is Milton Erickson. (Milton has been dead for decades but his work lives on.) I have a great collection of worn and underlined books dissecting the minutia of his work. I particularly like his view of the subconscious: he says, “Now, the unconscious mind is a vast storehouse of memories, your learnings. It has to be a storehouse because you cannot keep consciously in mind all the things you know. Your unconscious mind acts as a storehouse. Considering all the learning you have acquired in a lifetime, you use the vast majority of them automatically in order to function.”
Erickson believed that the unconscious mind was always listening and that, whether or not the patient was in trance, suggestions could be made which would have a hypnotic influence, as long as those suggestions found resonance at the unconscious level. The patient could be aware of this or could be completely oblivious that something was happening. Erickson would see if the patient would respond to one or another kind of indirect suggestion and allow the unconscious mind to participate actively in the therapeutic process. In this way, what seemed like a normal conversation might induce a hypnotic trance, or a therapeutic change in the subject. According to Weitzenhoffer, “[Erickson’s] conception of the unconscious is definitely not the one held by Freud.”
Last week was wonderful! I heard from two clients that life was going very well. One released over four months of debilitating anxiety in one session and the other is finding joy in life after a crisis of meaning in four sessions.
Victor Frankl was a survivor of Nazi concentration camps and he learned and shared during his life in books and Psychotherapy. One of these learning’s was, that there are many things in our lives we have no control over, we do have the choice of how we respond to those things.
I worked with a client once who would get so mad at her husband if he changed his plans after saying he was going to do something. She couldn’t see that she did the same thing and allowed herself that flexibility. She would take his changes as directed personally at her. Her anger and name calling only served to make her ill. She said she didn’t like being ill. It appeared from her actions that she liked feeling mad, right, and victimized. Anger and similar emotions will make most anyone ill.
Our glands secrete according to impulses from the emotional and nervous system. Anger, resentments, contention, hate, self-condemnation, animosity, and related nervous tensions in turn deplete bodily energies, block eliminations and generally create a condition which predisposes the system to disease. Attitudes and emotions involve nerves and glands.
Here is some good news: Joyful thoughts create the opposite effect in our bodies. We get healthier.
Lao Tsu is one of my favorite people.
If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations, There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities, There must be peace between neighbors.
If there is to be peace between neighbors, There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home, There must be peace in the heart.
Lao Tzu
Psychosomatic medicine is an interdisciplinary medical field studying the relationships of social, psychological, and behavioral factors on bodily processes and well-being in humans and animals. A illness that has physical symptoms, but has the mind and emotions as its origin is called a psychosomatic illness. Although you may be told that it’s “all in your head”, these illnesses are not imaginary. The aches and pains are very real, but 
because your doctor is looking for an actual physical cause, they are very tricky to diagnose and treat. The key is to look for a source of stress in the person’s life that the person is not coping with. By treating the underlying stress and depression, it may be possible to heal the physical problems as well.
The seven most common causes of psychosomatic illnesses are. Conflict (conflict between what we want to do and feel we ought to do) Organ Language (use of language such as pain in the butt) Motivation (e.g.; creating illness to avoid public speaking) Past Experience (an event, remembered or not, which immediately or later, creates a symptom) Identification (e.g.; smoking now because long ago smoked with mom and enjoyed her company) Self-Punishment (from real or imagined guilt) Suggestion (at a vulnerable time an idea is accepted by the subconscious as correct)
It is possible to have more than one cause connected to a symptom.
What an interesting week thus far. I heard a wonderful story from a wonderful woman. She was pregnant and working at the time at a large retail store. Her baby had been trying to come several times way too early, and she was very worried.
One day as she was working a woman wearing a colorful Hawaiian shirt came to her, talked with her, and assured her the baby would be fine. They spoke for awhile. Later on two people who worked security and watched video cameras asked her why she had been having a conversation with herself in the store. The security people and the security cameras did not “see” the woman in the Hawaiian shirt at all. They thought this woman was going crazy.
She had “forgotten” this experience for some time. There was no validation for such a mystical event. Such wonderful events are sometimes not talked about because of the social stigma of seeming to be crazy. In time, and a little early, she had her baby and it was fine.
Someone once wrote a very simple answer for the big question: The meaning of life, existence. He said peace and harmony is the purpose for existence, and peace and harmony come from understanding that life and death states are one.
Now that is about as simple as you can get.
A picture from my childhood. My peers from the neighborhood gathered together for my birthday party at Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis Minnesota
Human beings, we view the world as if through a big picture window. A window with vast vistas, fascinating possibilities, we see the world, all we are consciously aware of. And then there are a few spots on the window. These spots are traumas from our past and they have become dark spots on our window into consciousness. For some people the 
spots become their focus. A beautiful nearly infinite vista of life existing out that window, and all they see are the spots. This is the way it is for most of us. Do we give it our all throughout the day, only to lament our lack of perfection as we prepare for sleep? I do sometimes. We tend to focus on the spots.
The spots are negative memories, self-criticism, guilt and other such emotions. How do spots consume us? Why don’t we look past the negative memories and other issues? How does focusing on these memories affect our lives?
Perhaps the words of Tyron Edwards in the 1800’s explain how we are affected. He wrote:
“Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”
If family members tend to die in their fifties, does that indicate a genetic component? Maybe. It is also possible, that the previous generations of family members, those who tended to die in their fifties, might have come to that as a matter of expectations learned from their ancestors.
A friend of mine was talking about his family history in this manner today. Hearing him say that, reminded me of the chicken and egg conundrum. Which came first. I have often contemplated how much of our aging process is simply because our mind “knows” we are supposed to age and does so.
My mom at 30.
Here is an interesting finding from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2002:
“Recent study findings by researchers at Yale University in Connecticut suggest that looking forward to growing old could actually help you to live longer. Results of the 23-year-long study of people aged 50 and over revealed that those who had a positive attitude towards aging lived roughly seven and a half years longer than participants who were dreading reaching their twilight years. The apparent life-extending benefits of a positive attitude remained even after the researchers accounted for other factors that can influence longevity, such as health, gender, and socio-economic status. In comparison, other healthy attributes such as maintaining low blood pressure and cholesterol are thought to extend life by just 4 years.”
In a book I was reading the other night I read about the prisoners of war during the Korean War. About half of the Americans in captivity died from feeling hopeless. They were not ill but rather what we might call deeply depressed or in despair. None of the Turkish captives died. This indicated a difference in outlook that gave the Turkish soldiers a better chance of surviving captivity.
You know how it is, you get so busy, and busy can lead to stress and then to activities to release stress that themselves can be stressful. It is not always easy creating time to gift yourself with the fulfillment of a passion, time to help others, and, balancing life with laughter, joy, exercise and inner reflection.
Can you imagine living in inner peace. Can you imagine living in inner peace for five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes, sixty minutes or more? Most of us have been in this mysterious place. It probably occurred most often when we were children.
Being a child before the age of six or seven is to live in the brainwave state of trance. A state of trance awash in the meanings coming to us through intuitive feeling, sensing, and knowing. We float around in a theta brainwave state, like experiencing a lucid dream. No wonder we are so “programmed” by our complete surroundings in those early years. One of the few simple ways of re-experiencing this state of mind is through hypnosis. We go to an altered state without falling asleep or being unaware.
A client this week estimated our hypnosis session lasted ten minutes. It was over an hour. There are places we can go in consciousness that change the flow of time.
Is that why time seems so different now that we are adults? I often hear people talk about how mystifying time is, at times. Many say it seems compressed, faster, or indescribably different.. People have so many responsibilities and sometimes living in the moment may not seem like a good use of time.
As a child, before classifying something with a “name”, we just experience it. A rose is just a beautiful thing to be understood through four senses (delicate petals, thorny stem, alluring scent and brilliant color). Adults see the flower classified minimally as a rose, or in detail, as a Autumn Damask / Quatre Saisons variety. We are the many who sometimes address our attention to the negative. We see the rose and before we allow ourselves to embrace and experience it, we turn our attention to the weeds growing around it. Can you imagine weeding a garden as you embrace and experience the garden?