Knowledge

About Knowledge

Information, research, and current news about Mind Body medicine, and answers to frequently asked questions about relaxation, guided imagery, and self-healing with mind/body approaches.

Read an excellent overview of Mind/Body Medicine from the NCCAM at the National Institutes of Health. This overview reviews mind/body findings in immunity, Parkinson’s disease, surgical preparation, and more, as well as brain research that is demonstrating the mechanisms of mind/body practices.

The non-profit Center for the Advancement of Health provides an excellent review of mind/body approaches in chronic pain

Read the NIH Technology Assessment Statement on the Integration of Behavioral and Relaxation Approaches into the Treatment of Chronic Pain and Insomnia.

The RealAge website reports that managing your stress through simple imagery techniques can reduce your physiologic age by as much as 16 years.

FAQ's

What Is Imagery, and Why Is It Important ?

What exactly is imagery? Essentially, it is a flow of thoughts you can see, hear, feel, smell, or taste. An image is an inner representation of your experience or your fantasies — a way your mind codes, stores and expresses information. Imagery is the currency of dreams and day-dreams; memories and reminiscence; plans, projections, and possibilities. It is the language of the arts, the emotions, and most important, of the deeper self.

Imagery is a window to your inner world, a way of viewing your ideas, feelings, and interpretations. But it is more than just a window; it is a means of transformation and liberation from unconscious distortions that may be directing your life and shaping your health. Imagination, in this sense, is not sufficiently valued in our culture. The imaginary is equated with the fanciful, the unreal, and the impractical. In school we are taught the three r’s, while creativity, uniqueness, and interpersonal skills are either barely tolerated or frankly discouraged. As adults, we are usually paid to perform tasks, not to think creatively. Our society puts a premium on the practical, the useful, and the real, and while these things also have value, it is imagination that nurtures human reality just as a river brings life to a desert.

Without imagination, humanity would have become extinct long ago. It took imagination — the ability to conceive of new possibilities — to discover fire, create weapons, and cultivate crops, to construct buildings and invent cars, airplanes, space shuttles, television, and computers. Paradoxically, our collective imagination, which has allowed us to overcome so many natural threats, has also been instrumental in creating the major survival problems we face on the earth today: pollution, exhaustion of natural resources, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Yet imagination, teamed with will, remains our best hope for overcoming these same problems.

What if I have trouble imaging at all?

What if I have trouble imagining healing at all?

If you've taken the time to work with various approaches to imagery and are still having trouble, there are two possibilities to consider. The first is that you may be discounting your imagery because you feel it's "not good enough." Usually, this is part of a larger "not good enough" thinking pattern. If this describes you, what are you comparing your imagery to? How do you know that your way is "not good enough?" The stories we share with you on this site come from people who have vivid images and others who just accepted less vivid thoughts that came to them when they asked for images. Please do the same for yourself.

The second possibility is that you have some unconscious concern about imagining healing. Perhaps there is a part of you that feels if it imagines healing and it works that you were somehow at fault for your disease. Perhaps there is a part of you that feels this smacks of mysticism or is vaguely heretical. Or there could be a part that feels if you really put your heart into this and it doesn't work you will feel too devastated to be able to go on. These are hard things to let yourself become aware of because they contradict what you are trying to do. If they are present,, though, it's important to find a way to work with them and move toward reaching your healing goals.

You can use the Learning from Your Resistance process described in Guided Imagery for Self-Healing and on my Healing through Awareness CD to explore this possibility. It will guide you to relax and go inside to your place of healing, then ask if there is any part of you that has any concern or objection to you imagining the healing process. If you get a sense that there is, you can invite an image of that part of you to appear in that special place so you can find out what its concerns are. You'll be invited to take some time to get to know the image, and let it express its concerns or fears. Don't judge it or try to change it before thoroughly understanding what it's concerns are. Then, see if you can find a way to attend to its concerns while still being able to help yourself move toward healing. Ask the part itself and your Inner Healer to help you imagine how this could happen. You can also use the Inner Advisor or Inner Healer process to explore this issue.

Imagery and Physiologic Change

Imagery in healing is probably best known for its direct effects on physiology. Through imagery, you can stimulate changes in many bodily functions usually considered inaccessible to conscious influence. Here is a simple example: touch your finger to your nose. How did you do that? You may be surprised to learn that nobody really knows. A neuroanatomist can tell us the area of the brain where the first nerve impulses fire to begin that movement. We can also trace the chain of nerves that conduct impulses from the brain to the appropriate muscles. But no one knows how you go from thinking about touching your nose to firing the first cell in that chain. You just decide to do it and you do it, without even having to know how. Now... make yourself salivate.

You probably didn’t find that as easy, and you may not have been able to do it at all. That’s because salivation is not usually under our conscious control. It is controlled by a different part of the nervous system than the one that governs movement. While the central nervous system governs voluntary movement, the autonomic nervous system regulates salivation and other physiological functions that normally operate without conscious control. The autonomic nervous system doesn’t readily respond to ordinary thoughts like “salivate.” But it does respond to imagery.

Relax for a moment and imagine that you are holding a juicy yellow lemon. Fell its coolness, texture, and weight in your hand. Imagine cutting it in half and squeezing the juice of on halving into a glass. Perhaps some pulp and a seed or two drop into the glass. Imagine raising the glass to your lips and taking a good mouthful of the sour lemon juice. Swish it around in your mouth, taste its sourness, and swallow.

Now did you salivate? Did you pucker your lips or make a sour face? If you did, that’s because your autonomic nervous system responded to your imaginary lemon juice. You probably don’t spend much time thinking about drinking lemon juice, but through a similar mechanism, what you do habitually think about may have significant effects on your body. If your mind is full of thoughts of danger, your nervous system will prepare you to meet that danger by initiating the stress response, a high level of arousal and tension. If you imagine peaceful, relaxing scenes instead it send out an “all-clear” signal, and your body relaxes.

Research in biofeedback, hypnosis, and meditative states has demonstrated a remarkable range of human self-regulatory capacities. Using focused imagery in a relaxed state of mind seems to be the common factor among these approaches. Imagery of various types has been shown to affect heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory patterns, oxygen consumption, carbon dioxide elimination, brain-wave rhythms and patterns, electrical characteristics of the skin, local blood flow and temperature, gastrointestinal motility and secretions, sexual arousal, levels of various hormones and neurotransmitters in the blood, and immune system function. This tells us that imagery can affect the major control systems of the body.

How Does Imagery Work?

The ultimate mechanisms of imagery are still a mystery. In the last thirty years however, we have learned that imagery is a natural language of a major part of our nervous system. Critical to this understanding is the Nobel prize-winning work of Dr. Roger Sperry and his collaborators at the University of Chicago and alter at the California Institute of Technology. They have shown that the two sides of the human brain think in very different ways and are simultaneously capable of independent thought. In a real sense, we all have two brains. One thinks as we are accustomed to thinking, with word and logic. The other, however, thinks in terms of images and feelings.

In most people, the left brain is primarily responsible for speaking, writing, and understanding language; it thinks logically and analytically and identifies itself by the name of the person to whom it belongs. The right brain, in contrast, thinks in pictures, sounds, spatial relationships, and feelings. It is relatively silent, though highly intelligent. The left brain analyzes, taking things apart, while the right brain synthesizes, putting pieces together. The left brain is better at logical thinking while the right is more attuned to emotions. The left is most concerned with the outer world of culture, agreements, business, and time, while the right is more concerned with the inner world of perception, physiology, form, and emotion.

The essential difference between the two brains is in the way each processes information. The left brain processes information sequentially, while the right brain processes it simultaneously. Imagine a train coming around a curve in the track. An observer is positioned on the ground, on the outside of the curve, and he observes the train as a succession of separate though connected cars passing him one at a time. He can see just a little bit of the cars ahead of and behind the one he is watching. This observer has a “left-brain” view of the train.

The “right-brain” observer would be in a balloon several hundred feet above the tracks. From here she could not only see the whole train but also the track on which it was traveling, the countryside through which it was passing, the town it had just left, and the town to which it was headed.

This ability of the right hemisphere to grasp the larger context of events is one of the specialized functions that make it invaluable to us in healing. The imagery it produces often lets you see the big picture and experience the way an illness Is related to events and feelings you might not have considered important. It allows you to see not only the single piece but also the way it’s connected to the whole. A “right-brain” perspective may allow you to put ideas together in new ways to produce new solutions to old problems, to see the opportunity hidden in an illness or problem.

The right brain has a special relationship not only to imagery but to emotions, another of the major strengths it brings to the healing adventure. Many studies have shown that the right brain is specialized in perceiving emotion in facial expressions, body language, speech, and even music. This is critical to healing, because emotions are not only psychological but physical states that are at the root of a great deal of illness and disease. Rudolph Virchow, a nineteenth-century physician and founding father of the science of pathology, remarked that “much illness is unhappiness sailing under a physiologic flag.” Studies in England and the United States have found that from 50 to 75 percent of all problems that patients bring to their primary-care clinic are emotional, social, or familial in origin, though they are being expressed through pain or illness.

Emotions themselves are, of course, not unhealthy. On the contrary, they are a normal response to certain life events. Failure to acknowledge and express important emotions, however, is an important factor in illness, and one that is widespread in our society. As a result of how our culture shapes us, we are in many ways emotional illiterates, lacking clear guidelines and traditions for expressing emotions in healthy ways. It is difficult to know how to respond to distressing emotions such as grief, fear, and anger, so we cope as best we can. We may unconsciously build layer upon layer of inner defense to protect us from feeling unpleasant emotions. But strong emotion has a way of finding routes of expression. If not recognized and dealt with for what it is, it may manifest as pain or illness.