Thoughts are things

Posted on November 20, 2015 by rick_ranum

I have been back in Minnesota to visit my mom, family, and friends. In the six months that have passed my mom’s cognitive abilities have slipped and two friends are dealing with cancer. There are so many stresses people are dealing with in their lives. I feel blessed to be able to be supportive and help with beneficial information. I talked with my mom today and she said while I was back “everything was good”. I wish I could leave that energy behind permanently for her. While I was there I bought a book by Dr. Masaru Emoto. I was familiar with his work and just wanted the book to support his ongoing efforts to research and elucidate the relationship between thought and material objects as exemplified in water. My simplistic summary of his research is this: Thoughts are things with tangible affects in our physical world. His research specifically shows the relationship between thoughts and the molecular structure of water. Here is a video you might enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_dmYT83ZKY Emoto’s research indicates that there are two words/thoughts that have the greatest power to affect matter in a wonderful way, those words are gratitude and love. I also got to meet my great nephew on this trip.

Wellness and Balance

Posted on November 20, 2015 by rick_ranum

As I update this blog page I am amazed that almost a month has passed since my last update. Spring is getting me outside on projects, projects such as maintaining our property, planting plants, and enjoying the sun. One project I am really interested in is wellness. I have been studying and making notes so that I can begin a new area of the website focused on wellness. The more I study the more I know how important it is to see our bodies as complex systems. When you think about it, there are few if any components of our bodies that we can do without. And that is most pronounced when considering internal components.

Our health is very dependent on harmony and balance. That harmony and balance begins in the mind. It is easy to realize our thoughts create our reality. There has been much research tying particular attitudes and emotional states to groups of diseases.

Our bodies take in food, water, and air. And then, they extract nutrients and assimilate those nutrients. If there is a problem assimilating any nutrient, there is a problem beginning or existing in the body because of the lack of assimilation. It is not possible to assimilate something if it is not available to our body and our diet is so important in providing the proper nutrients.

Our bodies take in nutrients and then have to eliminate everything not assimilated. Eliminations are another place where if the process of eliminating is not working correctly conditions will occur in the body that we consider dis-ease.

Circulation is another area of importance. Circulation includes the cardiovascular system and the lymph system.

So, as soon as I can, I am starting this section of the website. I wish you all a wonderful day.

Seeds of Change

Posted on November 20, 2015 by rick_ranum

As I have mentioned before, I have mentors living and dead. My favorite therapist, Milton Erickson, has been dead for quite some time. Fortunately there are so many books analyzing his life work. Recently I have been having synchronicities all around me helping me.

I was reading last night “Conversations With Milton Erickson Volume One” and found that Milton too expressed being disturbed at times. He said there were times “when I know a patient is going to go and deliberately give up”.

People sometimes say they want change and do whatever they can to avoid it. They prefer the comfort, predictability, and the perceived benefits of being a victim over the discomfort, change, forgiveness and personal responsibility of change.

A mentor and friend of mine here in town reminded me that sometimes a visit to me will be a seed that will begin to grow in its own time, perhaps months or years from now. I know this is true.

Ideals, Healing, Purpose

Posted on November 19, 2015 by rick_ranum

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.

Sunspots and Consciousness

Posted on November 19, 2015 by rick_ranum

There is significant talk about sunspots in the media these days. There are also complicated attempts by astrophysicists and others to predict such events. Because sunspots seems to occur in periods there is the idea of the sunspot cycle. In Wikipedia we read: “The solar cycle was discovered in 1843 by Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, who after 17 years of observations noticed a periodic variation in the average number of sunspots seen from year to year on the solar disk. Rudolf Wolf compiled and studied these and other observations, reconstructing the cycle back to 1745, eventually pushing these reconstructions to the earliest observations of sunspots by Galileo and contemporaries in the early seventeenth century.

Starting with Wolf, solar astronomers have found it useful to define a standard sunspot number index, which continues to be used today.”

But what if this time of observation has been too short to really determine the true cycles or other important variables? What if further examination would reveal a cause and effect relationship not yet understood by science? What if the cause and effect relationship is a bit too science fiction for science? Science requires testing, and is greatly constrained in this circumstance by the need to be able to gather sufficient data and to reproduce hypotheses?.

Of course, you know I am leading up to an alternative theory. The alternative theory posits that the phenomenon of “sunspots” is inextricably connected to instability and turmoil upon the planet earth itself. Whenever war, strife, and turmoil occurr in the affairs of humankind, sunspots occur as a natural consequence. In other words, instability among people leads to instability upon the planet and throughout the universe!

Now this is a difficult theory to test. To test this theory we would have to create a significant period of peace on this planet and none of us can remember a time that would give us 5 -7 decades of peace. So just as this theory seems un-testable I would like you to consider the following evidence.

The evidence is referenced in a book titled “Gods in the Making and other writings by W.H. Church”. He has a chapter in the book called: Age of Glory, An interpretation of the 70 – year Sunspot Hiatus (1645 – 1715). Galileo invented the telescope in 1610 and close observation of the sun began in that year. The interesting point of this chapter is that for seventy years, beginning about 1645, with a couple of small exceptions, there were no grave wars or other disruptions. It was a real hiatus, a time of calm on the planet. It was The Age of Enlightenment. There was almost no sunspot activity through this period.

A second interesting indicator of this period and evidence was not discovered until 1922. In 1922 it was discovered in a museum in Europe that tree rings from that period were remarkable uniform. They did not show the variable cycles of widening and narrowing bands, a cycle now considered “normal”.

These days the physicists are more and more determining that there is a oneness of the vast universe and that everything therein is closely connected and coupled. Carl Jung used the term “synchronicity” to describe this same phenomenon on a human level. John W. Keely’s theories elucidate concepts of a sympathetic vibration that connects all things and energies, and that the harmony of these vibrations creates what we see.

Your Obituary as a tool for Transformation

Posted on November 19, 2015 by rick_ranum

Yes I have written my obituary. I have written it a few times throughout my life and it is time to write it again. When I write this current obituary it will again focus on the future and not the past. My experience in writing my obituary has always been helpful and revealing.

This exercise I first encountered in Stephen Covey’s book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. Over the years I have mentioned this idea and rarely has anyone gotten very excited about it. People do not like writing about death and especially their own.

I suggest writing your obituary beginning now and progressing until the end of your life. Writing about what has already happened is just reviewing history. You want to be writing about how you would want the rest of your life to be. Be fanciful and be realistic. It is most likely too late to join the space program or become a pole vaulter. This is about what you can really reasonably and fancifully create.

Your obituary is more than speculation, it is a constructive influence creating the future. Write it the way you would most like it to be, how you would feel fulfilled. If you later want to go back and write the history of life up until now, great. Now, write the future as you best imagine it. Write whatever comes to mind. You can come back and change it anytime so perfection is not necessary.

Do you know why Dr. Alfred Nobel established the peace prize? Because in 1888 a French Newspaper in error published a headline about him. The headline read: “The Merchant of Death is now Dead”. (He had invented and patented dynamite which became a very popular means of killing in warfare.)

What do you want the rest of your life to represent? How do you want to be remembered? Take up to an hour to write this. From this exercise you may more clearly define what you desire. You will gain in your sense of destiny, improve your clarity, purpose, and meaning.

Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending. This process has power.

The Nominal Life

Posted on November 19, 2015 by rick_ranum

I don’t know how this works for you, but sometimes I find myself rereading a book and discovering something I didn’t understand the first time through. A day ago there was just such a discovery. As I read there was this concept of living a “nominal” life. A person could be having a very good life, feeling healthy, enjoying their work, and more. However, it could still be a nominal life, and a nominal life is one without a great purpose, and a great purpose is one known to the essence of the person, and a great purpose could be many physical manifestations that are in accord with that great purpose.

Now if you are thinking Gandhi, Moses, Martin Luther King or a host of similar people your are correct in assuming they were not living nominal lives. And it is important to know that living a great purpose can be an obscure life out of the public view also. I have had the joy of knowing some people living a great purpose and all were living rather normal lives. So what is it that defines the difference between a nominal life and one in harmony with a great inner purpose? Does such a purpose just befall some people and ignore others?

There are stories of people surviving accidents and having a massive shift in their conscious engagement with life. There was a story on 60 Minutes last year about a man hit by lightning and finding himself drawn to learn to play the piano, to compose fine works and share those with the world. Of course there is no necessity to have a near death experience to begin a journey into finding the latent great purpose of our lives. No, it is a bit more mundane than that. It begins with a desire to be more than the nominal life, caught in habits, sleepwalking through the days, weeks and years.

Does it matter being more than nominal? No, not when you figure there is an eternity in this space time continuum. Every moment is an opportunity to choose and a person can choose an inward search for purpose or veg out on meaningless numbing pop culture. The essence of life is the opportunity for using our will to make choices, choices leading to greater unity and love or choices leading toward chaos and aloneness. I believe finding and living our great purpose, our soul purpose, is the reason we all are alive. Fortunate are those who just know that purpose and move inexorably toward it. For the rest of us it takes study, meditation, prayer, and desire.

Contemplation

Posted on November 19, 2015 by rick_ranum

I recently pulled a weathered legal pad from a box in the basement, a pad full of notes and quotes from my youth. On the first page I found this quote: “Contemplation of Deity in all manifestations is the true work of the soul”.

Thanks to google I could easily find where I had read this originated, it was from a book titled, Prayer: a history By Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski

Stress

Posted on November 19, 2015 by rick_ranum

It seems these days that so many health practitioners from diverse modalities are citing stress as the major component in disease. We have just experienced massive stress in the Pacific Northwest from a snow and ice storm. Throughout all time entire civilizations have disappeared when some crucial variable changes. Today we have crucial variables in our energy systems. Having the power out for an extended period of time would bring our current version of civilization down. I believe on some primitive level of knowing, we know just how vulnerable a population can be. We remember Hurricane Katrina and many memories go much further back.

I think that disruptions like the one we recently experienced break the everyday trance like state we live in. When the power is out and people are trapped in their homes, fear and stress are a common response. If people were more prepared this wouldn’t be as much of an issue, however it would still have impact. From talking with people since the storm there seems to be a great desire to not consider how bad something like this could become — back to the prior trance state. Or as some would say, no point in dwelling on the past.

When a major event takes place, for example, the great depression, there is usually a shift in the thinking of the population. My parents because of being in the group experiencing the great depression, were forever changed in the way they conserved everything. They did without, saved money, and tended to be more prepared mentally and physically to deal with such stresses.

Currently our group experience of the change in the fortunes and the nature of America will have long lasting effects on most of us. In many ways we are learning what our parents knew. We are also experiencing a “mini-shift” in our consciousness from the storm.

So, stress is a very difficult thing to live with. In ancient times, stress was not as continuous as it is now. I mean, if a big storm was approaching we would not have days of broadcasts filling people with fear and anxiety, the storm would come and we would deal with it in the present, the now.

We are immersed in stressful lives. We are bombarded by the media. Something made me open Bruce Lipton’s book The Biology of Belief last night and he wrote: “We live in a “Get Set” [on your mark, get set, go] world and an increasing body of research suggests that our hyper-vigilant lifestyle is severely impacting the health of our bodies, our daily lives (particularly the media) are constantly activating [this stress] priming our bodies for action…. Almost every major illness that people acquire has been linked to chronic stress.”

Stress, fight or flight, strong emotions, fear masked as anger, hurt, fear of pain or loss; what are we to do about it? Back to one of my favorite book titles again, Your Body Believes Every Word You Say, it also believes what you think and remember consciously and unconsciously. You become what you think, you become what you say, as ever is your mind the creator of all aspects of your reality. (consider psychosomatic possibilities)

And, as much as I focus on our minds and important causal agents in our lives there is something else to consider. Sometimes stress, fear and anxiety are coming from physiological conditions already created by our thoughts and actions. Choices can result in injured bodies. Diet can lead to imbalances. The functioning, health, and balance of the nervous system and the endocrine glands is another important area.

Stress is a very big subject area.

Maturity

Posted on November 19, 2015 by rick_ranum

Our New Year celebration is a quiet one with a few friends. We meet at Marion’s house to eat and share. One tradition is to draw a card from a deck of Osho Zen Tarot cards. This year we drew a card representing 2011 and one for 2012.

Here is the commentary written about the card I drew for 2012 called Maturity (needless to say this card does excite me about this year). “This figure stands alone, silent and yet alert. The inner being is filled with flowers–that carry the quality of springtime and regenerate wherever he goes. This inner flowering and the wholeness that he feels affords the possibility of unlimited movement. He can move in any direction–within and without it makes no difference as his joy and and maturity cannot be diminished by externals. He has come to a time of centeredness and expansiveness–the white glow around the figure is his protection and his light. All of life’s experiences have brought him to this time of perfection. When you draw this card, know well this moment carries a gift–for hard work well done. Your base is solid now and success and good fortune are yours for they are the outcome of what has already been experienced within.”

The group wanted me to draw another card and I did. Before I drew I decided to draw for the benefit of the group; that is, what the group as a whole might contemplate. There are 79 cards in this deck and my card had been shuffled back into the cards lying face down on the table. I picked the same card again.

The card for 2011 was very accurate titled “Go With The Flow”. That certainly represented last year very well.