If you are healed what will you do differently with your life? (Why correct the physical condition unless there’s also going to be an inner correction? People who are looking for both inner and outer healing are the best candidates for restored health and vitality.)

Why do some heal from a disease and others do not? Is healing some large biology experiment? Will changing this food, adding this vitamin, getting a massage or chiropractic adjustment, eating certain foods, or changing your mind bring healing? All of these and more can be helpful. My research and experience point to the necessity of reestablishing balance in the physical body to help facilitate healing from within. The first fundamental idea about healing requires a creative balance between two principles: 1. Being in attunement and harmony with our spiritual source. 2) Taking responsibility for our own healing process.

Illness can be understood as the result of dis-ease in life, that we are not at peace, or living our lives in accord with deeper purposes – we are out of balance. “Dis-ease” starts when one part of the body draws energy from another part. One portion of an organism may become overcharged with the creative life force, while another portion becomes undernourished. The result is a gradual disintegration of the body and the onset of illness.

With an understanding and application of deeper purposes rejuvenation is possible. Rejuvenation requires the creation and alignment with spiritual ideals, proper bodily assimilations and eliminations, skeletal alignment, full nervous system balance and alignment, and a purpose in life. In other words we need a balance of body, mind, and spirit. Balance will even keep the body rejuvenating itself.

Our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and purpose in life contribute to health or illness. Yes – the attitude we hold regarding health and healing is important. So what do we do to heal. How can we create and maintain an ideal attitude for healing? There is an ideal attitude for healing for each person. An ideal attitude is derived from personal ideals which give stability, guidance and orientations and a criterion for judgments. I recommend the following cognitive-behavorial approach since it brings to awareness the attitudes and beliefs upon which a person is operating and links the mental dimension to concrete behaviors. That approach is to write down one’s ideals on paper. The process involves making three columns headed: SPIRITUAL, MENTAL AND PHYSICAL and listing words under each which signify the meaning of each category. The spiritual ideal is a person or concept which conveys the highest sense of purpose or meaning to which one may ascribe. The mental ideal is the mental attitude which is consistent with the spiritual ideal. The physical ideal is the behavior or physical manifestation of the spiritual ideal.

The use of ideals has important clinical implications. Persons who have high spiritual ideals, but whose mental attitudes and physical behaviors fall short of these spiritual ideals, may be prone to self-condemnation (and depression) for failing to live up to their own standards. Or, they may project their perceived shortcomings onto others. Self-blame or blaming of others is likely to lead to psychological and/or interpersonal problems. On the other hand, a person with low spiritual ideals (or the complete absence of them) may find life meaningless, boring and empty. A person without a sense of ideals will often experience illness as a tragedy (even life as a personal tragedy). Disease provokes fear and a sense of being victimized by something outside and beyond oneself.

Focusing on ideals shifts consciousness. We have to take some degree of responsibility for our situation. We must define a course of action that takes all aspects of our experience (spiritual, mental and physical) into consideration. People who are able to make such an attitude adjustment feel more empowered to deal with illness. They have a greater sense of purpose and meaning in life. They have a reason to be healed – to manifest a high spiritual ideal.

After you have done the ideals exercise above (do it on paper), use the following questions to help you discover your Ideal Attitude for Healing.

• What is your purpose for being healed?
• Is health merely a goal to be achieved?
• Do you daily give thanks for whatever degree of wellness that you experience?
• Do you truly desire to be well or merely to avoid pain?
• Do you expect to be healed?
• Are your thoughts and attitudes conducive to being healed?
• Is your lifestyle (behaviors) conducive to being healed?
• Have you included the spiritual, mental and physical aspects of the protocol into your ideals?
• What is the ideal attitude to hold regarding health and healing?

What if you are not ill? Then now is a wonderful time to engage the processes above to allow a healthy life to continue unabated. This unabated healthy life flows from being in accord with your ideals and some simple principles such as:

• Maintaining a well-balanced diet (high percentage of vegetables and fruits)
• Regular exercise (walking very good, but anything that raises your heart rate)
• The role of attitudes and emotions
• Relaxation and recreation
• Keeping our physical bodies cleansed – both on the outside and the inside

Hypnosis and Healing: I think of hypnosis as helping create harmony and balance in the lives of those desiring to change.

Where you are in your life right now? What do you think about? What do you do? How do you feel? Your inner voice, is it kind, angry, sad, happy, depressed, delightful, guilty, unworthy or other? Where are you physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually? Do you have a purpose? Are you all that you want to be? On a scale of one to ten, with one being very depressed and 10 being living in joy, what number are you? Could your life be more balanced? More purposeful? The wise ones all say life must be lived for something, not just lived.

So the role of hypnosis is to bring change. Change that helps to bring balance. Let’s imagine there is a goddess trapped in an onion. She could be a large onion, with many thick layers, or a small onion with fewer and finer layers. Imagine one of her behaviors is heavy smoking and the heavy smoking is stuffing some emotion or emotions, and the emotions are connected to events in her life. Lets say she is in an abusive relationship and her emotions about that are too much for her conscious mind to deal with. So, she smokes to stuff the feelings, to deaden her senses. Now, the guy in the relationship may not be the real issue. The real issue may be a childhood experience that was very traumatic and she is being run by that event on an emotional level with certain triggers she picks up on from people. She doesn’t know why she reacts the way she does.

To peel this issue from the onion, is going to require peeling one or layers; stop the smoking layer, changing or ending the abusive relationship layer, reframe childhood trauma layer, and more. Events are reframed so that she experiences forgiveness. Forgiveness is a necessary change in coming into balance.

That is just one example. The most important thing to realize, is that hypnosis is, at present, and in my estimation, the best way to produce change in the subconscious mind, then change occurs at the conscious level.