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Is Disease Necessary in Order to be Healthy?

 

“This analysis implies that there may well be a wisdom to disease, and that people may need disease in order to help them to be healthy. In other words, the existence of disease provides people with essential feedback that informs them of the fundamental rules for survival and evolution.”

Gary Schwartz Ph.D. professor at the University of Arizona in his book The G.O.D. Experiments

I came across this as I was reading The G.O.D. Experiments with my morning cup of tea. It got me thinking about that suggestion that disease is necessary for health.

What could it possibly mean?

After a few moments of reflection I realised what it meant.

I wrote a little while ago about Louise Hay’s excellent book You Can Heal Your Life. In it the author associates particular illnesses and diseases with specific emotional problems. The suggestion is that if you resolve the emotional problem then the illness heals itself. I thought about that and thought about the opening quote and then reflected upon my own experience with minor illnesses.

If you’ve ever played 10 pin bowling you’ll know that there are buffers available to block the gutters so that beginners can learn to enjoy the game and develop their skill at knocking over pins rather than watch their ball go down the sides every time. Illness may be like those buffers – a guide to keep you on track for good health.

But of course this only works if you notice the pattern of circumstances that precede your illness. If colds always follow periods of stress then this might be a gentle hint from your body that says stress is not good for you and creates a lot of toxins in your body. The cold is then necessary to slow you down while your body repairs the stress damage and does a detox.

If the stress increases then you may find that something a little more serious than a cold is created. You could pursue this idea until the final warning becomes a life-threatening disease like cancer. So maybe disease is not really the problem, maybe the problem is the lifestyle, or, as I believe, the thought-style. If this is the case then treating the disease is pointless – it’s a bit like disconnecting the burglar alarm bell because you don’t like the noise. You want to know when there is a burglar in the house. The disease is perhaps letting you know this, and the burglar is the way you think, the things you eat, or even the way you treat other people or allow other people to treat you.

So reflect upon your patterns of illness and see if you can make your own connections between events in your life and the times your body switches on the alarm. If you need some help get hold of a copy of Louise Hay’s book.

And then if you still need some help with the process of healing, get hold of a copy of my book Change Your Life with Self Hypnosis in there I teach you healing techniques that have been used successfully for the treatment of a variety of problems.

Categories
Alternative health self-help

If the Mind Creates Illness, How Can We Use It To Create Wellness?

Let us assume, just for now, that the Body is the expression of the Mind. What I mean by this is that you need to pretend that your body reflects back to you what is going on in your mind. So, if there is an ache in your body then we must assume there is an ache in your mind. If there is a pain in your body then there is a pain in your mind. If there is irritation on your skin then there is irritation in your mind.

You get the idea.

Of course, you will be way ahead of me by now, looking within your own BodyMInd for those connections past and present to discover if what I say is true – but remember I said to pretend, just for now.

Naturally in your thoughts about this it will be obvious that serious disease processes in the body cannot escape from this allusion. So you would also have to pretend that problems like cancer, diabetes, asthma… all fall into this category. And then we step into that minefield of babies who are born sick, or develop life-threatening or debilitating diseases while they are very young. Then what about genetic problems like cystic fibrosis?

It gets very complicated very quickly.

Then there is another aspect too.

If your body’s ill-health is a reflection of your state of mind, then surely that means that all disease is self-inflicted?

Well that would be a yes too.

But there is a world of difference between deliberately causing something to be, with full awareness of the consequences, and innocently causing something to happen because you had no awareness of  the negative consequences 20 years later. No one in the process of dying from lung cancer would ever have lit up a cigarette 40 years earlier had they been fully aware of the anguish and agony they and their loved ones would eventually have to endure.

So yes, there are problems with this assumption, but let’s just keep it simple for now and pretend the assumption is true for minor illnesses and that it isn’t true for children at all.

Give yourself a quick body scan.

Is there any discomfort, irritation, ache, pain, anywhere in your body? If there isn’t then do this when there is.

Get a good sense of that area of your body. Feel into the discomfort fully. Move your mind, as best you can, into the space the discomfort occupies. Feel its boundaries and limitations. Then allow your mind to wander and feel your way to what these sensations remind you of. Say, for example, you have an itch – a skin irritation – who or what in your world causes you to prickle inside? Who do you want to scratch when you interact with them? Who makes you see red.

If you have a painful knee, then think about what it prevents you from doing that you don’t like.

Look for the connections between your discomfort and your world. See the similarities.

Remember we are pretending. This is just a game of the imagination to see if you can see connections and similarities. Don’t forget also to let your mind drift back into the past. Sometimes these things take a while to germinate. Have fun with this and don’t take it too seriously.

See what you come up with, maybe keep a notebook on you. One of the interesting things that happens with this game is that you may not be aware of a connection while you are deliberately looking for one, but that connection can pop into your mind at any time. A notebook is a handy way to make sure you don’t forget those fleeting connections.

Just collect the connections – no matter how crazy they may seem. Once you have a dozen or so, ponder on your records and see if you think this was just an interesting game or a new reality you have just entered.

If you would like to get a little deeper into this exploration and learn some techniques to actually change your body’s responses then check out my book Change Your Life with Self Hypnosis. In these pages I go into much more detail on this subject. In fact a large section of this book is dedicated to exploring the possibilities for using the Mind to Heal the Body.

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Angels, Pre-Cognition, and Causes after Effects

Something really nice happened today.

It was one of those interesting moments that reinforced the idea that minds are something magical and can do extraordinary things.

I’d been enjoying my lunchtime coffee while savouring a fascinating book The Intention Experiment: Use Your Thoughts to Change the World. This book is written by one of my favourite authors, Lynne McTaggart. I was reading about all of the rigorous scientific experiments that demonstrate that intention, in other words focused thoughts, can act backwards in time and bring about statistically significant and measurable change.

I was pondering on the ramifications of this, while waiting in the post office with the big bag of gold dust that is required to purchase a single stamp these days, and the thought of someone popped into my mind. This person is not a close friend or someone I know especially well – just someone I know well enough to stop and pass the time of day with. This person is also someone I gave a copy of my Angel Healing – Meditation Cd to. But that was many years ago. I had not seen or spoken to this person for around two years.

I’m sure you’re way ahead of me by now.

I’d meandered my way into the library by this time and was on my way out when I saw this young lady heading towards me. Normally I would have just said ‘hi’ and passed on my way, but because I had experienced pre-cognition, or maybe pre-monition, I stopped.

It seemed that this young lady, who throughout her life has experienced serious health and mobility challenges, had cremated her mother the day before. She was telling me how calm and peaceful she had been since discovering the body of her mother a fortnight ago. She attributed her ability to cope so calmly with this traumatic event by listening daily to Angel Healing. She thanked me profusely for the help and support I had provided for her with this gift and how it had reassured her that her Guardian Angel was with her and watching over her.

We chatted for around ten minutes. I offered a few words of comfort and encouragement and left the encounter feeling so much lighter. I love it when the Universe reminds me of the benefit that my work continues to bring to others.

It was also really nice to discover that a moment’s generosity had such long-lasting impact.

Michael

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Chakra Healing & Meditation Video

I’ve spent the last few days putting together a video presentation as an introduction to the chakras and what your energy centres can do for you.

I’ve included some of my personal experiences that suggest that this chakra ‘thing’ is real and needs paying attention to.




Because of all of this I’ve created an accompanying Meditation CD for you to purchase.



Or if you’d prefer an MP3 version for your immediate download Chakra Meditation MP3 Download

Michael

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The Search for Alternative Health.

I’ve been reviewing my bookcase over the last few days. My bookcase, if you ignore the gardening, photographic, and tarot books, is full of self-help and spiritual volumes. It was these I was looking at with a view to seeing what was actually helpful to me. I found it quite interesting just looking at the titles (it took a while because ‘bookcase’ is actually three bookcases in three different rooms) and I realised that they reflected my personal journey and how my interests and focus had changed over the 15 years or so I’d been buying this stuff.

The only authors I own more than one volume of are Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, and Esther & Jerry Hicks. They have all been favourites at one time or another. Deepak Chopra approaches health from a medical background with a scientific basis and I highly recommend Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Wayne Dyer is a psychologist whose books, read in order of publication, take on a deeper spiritual perspective as time goes on. Esther & Jerry (why am I thinking about ice cream?) leave the physical world pretty much alone and focus on what they call the Law of Attraction, or what I used to call creating your own reality.

Now the creating my own reality is the thing that really grabs my interest and I knew it was happening long before I came across Ask and It is Given. In fact my own book Mirror Mirror – The Looking Glass Self delves into this territory from a spiritual perspective. But you know what, it was like I had all the pieces of this huge jigsaw, but didn’t have the box and so had no idea what the picture was and then Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires showed me the picture on the box. Can’t say I’ve got it working properly just yet, but I’m certainly moving in that direction.

But this is what I find with a lot of these self-help and personal development books – they are a great read; they inspire me; my thinking changes for a while and then it slowly drops back to the way it was when nothing seems to be changing. Or what I usually experience is that change happens almost immediately but then I can’t reproduce it and I’ve spent a lot of years looking for why that is.

Now trying to attract money or the perfect relationship, say, is pretty much a read about and take whatever action the book says. So that’s when we get into all that visualisation and emotional processing and looking for the blocks and the things that are in the way because they all pretty much say that if you don’t experience your abundance then the only reason for that is that you are somehow preventing it from arriving. That’s the best get out clause ever. Do this, but if it doesn’t work it’s your fault. I’m hugely sceptical of a lot of things, but my own experiences suggest a lot of truth in this particular ‘catch-22’.

There is also another niggle that I have with all of this. When results don’t appear after a reasonable amount of time – and for me a reasonable amount of time is always as soon as possible – is it because I’m not doing it right/hard enough/long enough or is it because it’s crazy to think I can influence the material world with my mind and I’ve been suckered into believing something that just isn’t true? Is it my desire for a solution that I can orchestrate and control within my own mind, and without having to interact with anyone else, that is blinding me to reason and sense?

Sometimes things just don’t work and I wonder sometimes if this is just an industry that’s tapping into our desire for easy magical solutions to life’s natural problems.

The trouble is, of course, that my own experiences, and probably yours too, have shown me that there is some sort of a creative connection between my mind and the exterior physical world. My research has also shown me that there is an overwhelming body of evidence that supports the idea that what you do in your mind can bring about miraculous, or less spectacular but still amazing, changes in the body.

Now one of the problems with the search for healing is that you pretty much need it to work and you need it to work straight away – especially if you’ve got a health problem that’s trying to kill you. In these circumstances you can’t really afford the time to fool around and spend years looking for all of your inner blockages and childhood frustrations that are causing the ill-health. You just need it fixing.

One thing I’ve found worked at healing a couple of minor problems that I had was using the tapes that Brandon Bays has to accompany her book The Journey. The Journey tells Brandon’s story of how she used her mind to remove a large life-threatening tumour in the space of around 6 weeks. Then she details the processes that she has devised and that have worked with other people too. I like this because it’s very like what I do with hypnosis to heal physical problems and I have to admit I have had some successes with that – but not with anything life-threatening, and that’s largely because people with life-threatening problems, quite rightly, tend to visit doctors rather than hypnotherapists.

Another problem I’ve discovered is that illness is not always the best time to seek out new alternative treatments. That sounds a bit daft, I know, but when you are sick the anxiety the illness causes makes it difficult to concentrate on mental exercises like visualisations. Pain also makes it difficult to focus and if you have something like a cold or flu there is very little energy in the body to apply to self-healing.

So what is one to do?

Clearly the answer is to put the information into practice when you are well so that you never get sick.

But that brings to light another difficulty that I’ve found. When you are well there is little to drive the motivation to spend time engaging in regular activities, like meditation or visualisation, when you could be doing something much more interesting instead. I’ve found time and again that minor problems that don’t interfere with life are ignored until they go away. It’s only when a health problem interferes with the smooth running of my life that I then invest time and energy in doing what I hope will bring about healing.

And when self-healing activities are only ever instigated when there is a serious problem there is also that problem of a lack of belief in one’s own ability to create the change – which of course prevents anything from changing.

If you practise diligently on the small problem, then when you have a big problem, you will know that you have the ability to heal yourself and your chances of success increase tremendously. This is because belief plays a huge part in the ability to self heal. If you have no doubts that you will succeed then you increase your chances of success tremendously. By dealing with small problems as and when they arise you also very much decrease the chances of the big problem ever appearing.

And don’t forget, you don’t have to do it on your own. Don’t neglect the help and support of the medical world. That doesn’t stop you from doing the mind-work that you need to do, and the relief that medical assistance provides may actually free up some of that worry space, or that pain space, so that you can use it for self-healing.

If you like the idea of using your mind to affect your world I highly recommend you check out The Sedona Method and The Silva Mind Control Method. They both produce inexpensive and helpful books and very expensive and helpful CD courses.

If you enjoyed this, or have any questions about self-healing then please leave a comment below.

Michael

Categories
hypnosis

Hypnosis – Quick fix or permanent change

Look, I want to have loads and loads of money, but I don’t want to do any work in order to have it. Have you any suggestions? Seriously, apart from buying a lottery ticket – do you have any suggestions? I want to laze around all day and just have money arrive in my bank account, and not just little bits of money – loads and loads of it, and I want it guaranteed for life. Not only that but I want it right now, and I’m only prepared to pay you £40 for you to give that to me, and even that seems a little steep, so if you could give it for free that’d be great. I don’t want to hear you saying that you might be able to help me, or that I might be able to learn something that might take a couple of months, I need it and I need it now.

I hope you are laughing.

I hope you are at least smiling.

Sounds a bit like a child doesn’t it?

If you change money, to a cure for anxiety, or stress, or phobia, or smoking, or losing weight, or nail biting, or marital problems, or excessive drinking, or blushing, or headaches, or pain, or a whole host of other physical and psychological problems… then what you have in the opening paragraph is what most people expect from hypnosis.

Many don’t want to be responsible for their own health, and don’t want to put any personal effort (other than turning up for one, or at most two, appointments) into getting better and although a hypnotherapist is always the last resort, they expect miracles from him or her that they wouldn’t dream of expecting from a psychologist, psychiatrist or medical doctor.

Hypnosis needs the full involvement of the patient in order for results to be achieved. It needs a commitment to stick with treatment until the problem is resolved or it is quite clear that the treatment is having no further impact on the problem. Sometimes we need our problems, but that’s another article. And when we need our problems we are quite often strongly resistant to having someone help us to resolve them – or even to allow someone sufficient access to our minds to discover what exactly the reason is.

Another reason for the unreasonable expectations people have of hypnosis and hypnotherapists is that hypnosis is seen as some sort of general anaesthetic. I’ve lost track of the number of people (even doctors) who expect me to ‘put them out’, and are disappointed when that doesn’t happen. But because they see hypnosis as a general anaesthetic they expect some sort of ‘mental operation’ to take place while they are ‘out’ and to be ‘fixed’ when they ‘come round’, as if their life-long anxiety pattern, or over-eating habit was some appendix that could be whipped out, the hole sewn up and the pain gone.

These problems can be helped, eased, or restored to what might be considered normal, using hypnosis. Sometimes it’s straightforward, sometimes it takes effort and determination to resolve the issues that are reducing quality of life. I remember in my early days as a hypnotherapist, at the end of a course of treatment a patient said to me that what I had given her was like coming down on Christmas morning and opening a gift to find in it what she most desired in the world, it was like I’d given her her life back.

That’s the potential of hypnosis.
Michael Hadfield D.Hyp., MBSCH

Categories
psychoneuroimmunology self-help

I Feel Lousy – Isn’t that Great!

Do you ever listen to other people’s conversations? I mean when you’re standing at a bus stop, or having a drink in a café after a hard morning’s shopping. You know, those people whose voices are just a little too loud and you can’t really help listening; after all you are on your own, and other people’s lives are quite interesting.

What do they talk about? Their problems I’ll bet, with health issues being high on the list. And have you ever noticed how it’s a bit like a game of ping pong. One party will bat a little titbit “my back’s been playing up something awful”, and the other will respond with something ‘better’ and before you know where you are, you know all about all the cancers, and the hip operations, and the chronic chest infections, that their family and friends have had in the past ten years.

Sound familiar?

So illness seems important. If it isn’t, why do we spend so much time talking about it?

Have you ever noticed how you suffer with a bad cold, or dose of ‘flu, or possibly something more serious, when life itself is becoming tedious, work is getting you down, or your husband seems to have lost interest in you. Have you ever noticed how, when you are happy and life is full of joy and excitement, you rarely experience illness? It has been known for a long time that ‘stress‘ has a depressant effect on the ability of your body’s immune system to fight infection. Illness is the body’s way of saying ‘you’re not looking after you‘, and usually the way you are failing to look after yourself is in your mind – your emotional well-being is generally the part which is being neglected when you start to experience illness.

Now, the scientists say that disease organisms, viruses, bacteria, genes, and even your age, cause illness. They may be right. But if they are then those same ‘experts’ are your only hope for defeating illness. Yet with all the drugs and all the scientific advances over that last fifty years – shouldn’t the hospitals be emptying out by now? How easy is it to get an appointment with your doctor? How full was the waiting room last time you visited? All that science seems to be accomplishing is to change the nature of illness without actually removing it.

If illness is a necessary warning system to let you know that you need to slow down, or look at how you are living your life then this is exactly what we would expect to see with scientific advances; a change in the style of illness, but no change in the quantity or quality. Smallpox and bubonic plague have been eradicated, but doesn’t AIDS do pretty much the same sort of job.

So, how can this awareness help you?

Well it can help you if you want to feel better and be less ill. Because the first step to freeing yourself from this pattern of stress/illness is to recognise that the illness is helpful. Now, I know pain isn’t much fun, and I’m not suggesting that life-threatening problems should be ignored. In fact I’m not even suggesting that you stop visiting your doctor for treatment. I would actually strongly advise that you take all the help you can get if you have a health problem.

What I am suggesting is that if you want to be free of illness, you need to start by looking at what illness gives you, and welcome those gifts. You might get a few days off work, early retirement, forced retirement from a job you hate; illness may be the only occasion when anyone looks after you or gives you affection, if you are lonely then illness at least brings you into close contact with people (doctors and nurses) who touch you and treat you gently; if you are trying to cram too many things in your life then illness gives you a break and gives your body a much needed rest.

It would be beneficial then to see what changes you could make to your life so that this ‘benefit’ was no longer needed because you already had it. If you don’t like your job then consider the possibility of doing something you enjoy instead; if you are alone then open your mind to the possibility of this being different. If you are simply too busy then build relaxation into your schedule and see it as just as important a part of life as the ‘busy’ness.

But whatever you do, don’t neglect illness, it is your mind’s way of telling you it’s time for change. And if you decide that change is appropriate for you have a look at Herbert Benson’s excellent The Wellness Book: The Comprehensive Guide to Maintaining Health and Treating Stress-Related Illness which looks at simple techniques to restore health and well-being. Or Carl Simonton’s Getting Well Again: The Bestselling Classic about the Simontons’ Revolutionary Lifesaving Self-Awareness Techniques, which demonstrates the truly awesome power of the mind in the face of life-threatening and (from the medical perspective) incurable illnesses.

Michael  Hadfield    D.Hyp., MBSCH

Is a hypnotherapist who works with visualisation to bring about life changes

Tel: 01928 575784

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Hypnosis or Magic?

I find myself in a strange occupation – hypnotherapy. I consider it strange because even people who come to me for my expertise in it don’t really have any idea about what it is or what it can do. Many of them expect something akin to magic, and even though I go to great pains to explain that magic it isn’t, I sometimes find myself producing magical results. And that gets me to think about magic. True magic is akin to what religious people might call miracles. Only mere mortals, like myself, are not allowed to perform miracles, that is the realm of God and his/her/its minions.

Yet on occasion I have indeed produced results that if I proclaimed myself as a messiah, might well be termed Miracle. I must admit I’m much happier calling it magic. But what exactly is the difference between miracle/magic and something else?

I believe that the only difference is TIME. If I take six sessions to bring about a change and some progress is visible between each session then that is therapy. And it looks a lot like physical healing. If I take ten minutes to bring about the same change then that is miracle/magic.

It does not seem to matter that the result is the same either way, fast is what gets the praise, fast is what gets people talking.

And yet I know from my experience working with people that fast is frequently the very worst way to bring about profound change. The problem with fast is that there is no adaptation. If you have had a problem for a long time, then you have adapted to it. You live your life around it, you adjust your activities based on the problem. If in a moment the problem is gone then all of the coping strategies are instantly redundant and there is a psychological chasm now. This is an inability to deal with life without the problem.

When change time is slower, it is much easier to adapt. You do it quite naturally a little bit at a time.

Another aspect of the Time problem is that most of us have been taught that nothing worthwhile comes easily. So although we might all want instant healing, if we get it, effortlessly, then we do not value or appreciate it. We doubt its effectiveness. I’ve removed or reduced quite severe pain in a matter of minutes, and my patients leave wondering whether or not I’ve somehow tricked them (after all, the doctors’ said nothing can be done), or when it will return. Now I know that if you spend most of your waking time wondering when the pain is going to return then it probably will because the mind is focused on pain and the mind produces what it focusses upon.

So the benefits of slower ‘healing’ are that it allows adaptation to the beneficial change and that there is actually a price (the time spent in therapy and the cost of that therapy) so it must be worthwhile, therefore it will be valued and appreciated. From the patient’s point of view they actually worked quite hard turning up for appointments and listening to me talking for an hour and a half and they paid quite a bit of money for that privilege. These things make the healing acceptable.

The only problem is that they wanted what they didn’t really want – magic!

Author: Michael J. Hadfield

Source: Hypnosisiseasy