GUIDED IMAGERY AND METAPHORS FOR HEALING

"People are healed not by information but by inspiration." -- Bernie Seigel

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."-- Albert Einstein

Before we do this work, our intention has to be noble. We are not "healing" anybody, but assisting as at a birth -- it's not our baby and we can't take credit for it; it's their process, not ours We can't be attached to the outcome.

There is a tremendous power to creativity. Through the changes that can occur in the moment through the imagination, we can overcome obstacles and provide miracles.

Help people get out of time and space; there are levels of awareness, planes where illness doesn't exist. People suffer from time sickness - Type A people die at 45 because they think they've lived to 60. More people die Monday mornings between 8 and 9 AM than at any other time.

Metaphors can work at every level. Select the level based on the client's belief system. If they are "scientific" or literal, do the work literally, using your imagination to move them toward healing. If they have a spiritual belief system, you have more range in which to work.

• Literal, see the cells, see them improved

• Cedars guided visualizations - very literal. Every touch of the surgeon's hands is a healing touch. Your body can remember how to heal itself. You can picture and imagine yourself a week from now, a month from now, telling someone about how you healed and feeling wonderful.



• Carl Simonton, MD, approach. Literal, but still imaginative
• Pac-man eating cancer cells was the original Simonton approach. Later it was learned that some people resisted that particular visualization.
• Go with the person's temperament. If they don't want to "fight" the cancer cells, they could imagine the cells as brown leaves being blown off the tree of their life by the wind and new, healthy green leaves (cells) replacing them
• Let them come up with their own visualization in trance. What does the area look like to them? What would fix it?
• Studies show that people who pictured little men carrying calcium bricks to rebuild their broken arms healed nearly 50% faster than those who did not visualize
• This process is also useful for pain or nausea from chemotherapy and enhances the effectiveness of the treatment
• AIDS and visualizing T-cells for healing
• Pain control - literally imagine a control room and turn down the pain



• "I know a guy who...." This is especially effective in medical emergencies. In involves providing a reference to healing as a model. "I have a friend who had a burn like this and he thought about cool and comfortable and the swelling disappeared and you practically can't see a trace of it today." Or "There are great treatments at the hospital these days for this. They know just what to do about it." Let their minds go back to a TV feature they saw about how medicine can now sew body parts back or graft skin or whatever. This literal but also optimistic approach helps them to anticipate a future beyond the incident.

• Literal suggestion: In your dreams over the next few days an answer may come to you, a way of healing that you never before dreamed of, maybe than nobody's dreamed of and in you can imagine yourself dreaming of that very think and awaking knowing what you must do to be healed and whole.

• Concretizing and Manipulating



• Milton Erickson,.MD, noticed that hypnotized subjects often responded literally, e.g., "what do you feel?" "The wool of my trousers."
• After a symptom is concretized ("it feels like a hard ball in my head"), we can change its size, shape, color, location, function, motility and so on. For example, a patient with that headache could be directed to see it, concretely, as a red ball and might then imagine the ball as rolling down a hill, far away from his or her aching head. We could suggest that the pain, embedded in the ball, could be disposed of in this way. Or we could dissolve the ball with every breath, making it pinker, and softer and pinker and filmier and until it becomes a pink mist which can be exhaled away.
• Use their metaphors: "It felt like a knife in my heart"
• If the client does not present the feeling in an image, you could ask about its color? Shape? Does it move, or is it still? Hot or cold? What image comes to you as you are doing this? Simply by changing the color of anxiety from red to pink to white can often relieve the symptoms.
• Concretize processes such as chemotherapy and radiation. Help them to see these as "magic" powers which defeat or transform their illness. One patient of mine with brain cancer saw her radiation as hundreds of tiny, buzzing angles lighting up and purifying her brain cells. As you know, every thought has a physiological reaction and the body is a pharmacopia that can produce needed neuropeptides and chemicals to promote healing when the parasympathetic or right brain is stimulated by appropriate, positive mental images.

• . Concretizing and Dialoguing



• You'll need your imagination to match theirs. If they "see" a dancing banana or a weeping rock, you'll have to come up with ways to manipulate the image to allow for a healthier state. You could "dialogue" with the symptom, as one of my clients did (see attached article about Fear which appeared in Whole Life Times). She saw her cancer as a red, Superman suit, and then it asked her to dance. When she danced with it, it gave her a bill of particulars about how she should change her life for it to be able to leave.
• If they are imagining a frightening experience, say molestation or an angry parent, you can have them invite any kind of champion they can imagine to accompany them: Arnold Schwartzenneger or the Incredible Hulk or the Green Berets.
• Use a dream they've told you about. Return there for answers and interviews.
• Inner child work: hold her in your lap. Whenever you feel that sadness in your heart, you know it's little Suzie wanting you to comfort her. When she feels safe, you feel safe.
• Here is technique taught to me many years ago by a British physician, Dr. Atkinson-Ball, which mysteriously allows concretizing and dialoguing. You say to the client, "I'm going to count from one to three and then tap you on the forehead and when I do, an image will appear. Any image. It doesn't matter what? Don't deny or dismiss it, just tell me what it is." When they say "A square," or "an orange," that's fine. It's something to work with. It gives them some distance from responsibility, so that it's not they who tells what is going on in the subconscious, but an orange, and in that way, they are freer to communicate, as children do through puppets and dolls.
• By the way, when working with children (who slip in and out of trance themselves on a regular basis), puppets and dolls are extremely effective ways to get them into trance and to allow them to deal with subjects "they" can't talk about, but the dolls can.
  
  

• Practical Imagination



• Dr. Atcheson-Ball also suggested that you have the client take the afflicted part out of the body and onto a workbench or table or some :appropriate area where they can "work" on it. For example, on of my clients had what seemed to be a cancerous growth on her tongue. In trance, she took her tongue out onto a workbench and I asked her what needed to be done to "fix" it. Did she need a hammer or glue or a saw? Sugar, she said. She would have to pour sugar on it in her mind three times a day. We later realized that her unconscious had come up with this image because the growth had come after a bitter disappointment and argument and she needed sweetness to heal it. She practiced the visualization for a week, went in for the operation, and much to the surprise of her surgeon and her dentist, it was nearly dissolved and no threat to her health at all.
• A simple technique which is very powerful is to have the person evoke a "roll model" which they can adapt as their personna in difficult times. My cousin Sandy was in Germany with her husband, a professor, and was barely fluent in German when she was expected to publically speak on several topics. She invoked the image of Mrs. Emma Peel, the jumpsuited wonder-woman of the series "The Avengers" and was able to be up to the task. Others who need grace under pressure remember Jacqueline Kennedy at JFK's funeral. It is also possible to evoke an animal and incorporate their strengths into one's own. The wisdom of an owl, the sharp insight of a hawk, the stealth of a cat, etc.

5. Ericksonian Magic

• The late, great Milton Erickson,.MD, used stories to change outcomes. He said he was giving the unconscious permission to come up with other methods and outcomes than the one the mind was using at present. He believed that any change, even a change for the worse, meant that change could happen and that, once a person had shifted out of a stuck position, they could decide for health. His stories focused on the person's world and his view of it. One farmer who was in excruciating pain heard Erickson in trance talk about the way tomatoes grow, that they just grow, without any thought of what they were to do, that it was so natural for them to unfold and become the plants that they were and that the farmer probably knew and had noticed this even better than Erickson. By the time Erickson was finished his little talk on nature's wisdom, the man was no longer in pain and lived pain free. His unconscious had found a better way to deal with the situation.
• Metaphors are descriptive: "This is what you are doing. This is how it looks to others. Here is the situation you are in."
• Metaphors are prescriptive: contain problem-solving strategies, coping skills or new perspectives.
• Metaphors invite the client to invent or project meaning: Why did the therapist tell me this story? Self-generated meanings are inherently greater than anything we might have said directly. And they are less likely to be rejected.



• Metaphors can correlate with nature. Erickson once told the story of a tree with a broken branch to help an elderly patient with phantom limb pain from an amputated arm.
• My favorite image, when people aren't "flowing" with the situation in which they find themselves, is water. Water just flows. Nothing stops it. If there's a rock in its way, it goes around or over, wearing the rock down. If it has a heavy load, like a ship or a log, it carries it. If it rains, the water absorbs it. If the sun shines, the water dances with it. When I tell this story to someone in trance, often the next week they report that they are seeing things differently, letting things happen, "going with the flow."
• From My Voice Will Go With You, The Teaching Tales of Milton Erickson, edited by Sidney Rosen. Erickson often "directs" or "Places" a symptom into a particular geographical position. "For example, he will have a patient experience all the poewr of his airplane phobia in one chair. He will then direct the patient to "really experience the phobia in that chair" and then to "leave it in that chair." The implication is that he will not experience it anywhere else -- only in that chair."



• Magical Imagination



• Beyond concretizing there is a creative imagination that can be called upon to manifest as a "guide," a being of wisdom who can help your client. Depending upon the client's spiritual beliefs, you may be able to invoke this source of inner wisdom and/or connection to the universe, whichever it may be, in order to help your client help him/herself.
• Guides come in all forms. One of my clients saw "Tinkerbell," another worked with "Glinda the Good Witch of the North." Others are less recognizable. One was a "Russian Monk" who turned out later to be "Grigor," one of the tallest angels. Searching for a guide requires that you use your imagination to ask the questions that gets your client there. Is there a house? Is anyone in it? Have they left a note for you? Pick up the telephone and see if anyone needs to talk to you. Is there an open book? Is there an animal? Can it lead you to your guide?
• If your client does not like the first figure he/she encounters (which often happens), have that figure take you to your guide. When you feel confident that you've finally found the guide, ask him or her if he's "from the light." This is important. If the client hesitates, or if "he" says "no," you must move on. The client must feel certain that this guide is there to help him or her. Ask immediately what it can do for your client.
• Guides often "know" what the client needs to do to heal. Sometime they can put the client together with the person with whom a relationship must be mended. Sometimes they know about what's going on inside the client's body. Sometimes they can say in exactly how many days the client will be recovered if he or she performs certain tasks.
• "Entities" may or may not exist. I believe they are concretized images of hologramatic energy, but that by "removing" them, the client is freed of negative behavior patterns. If there is a part of the client who in trance indicates that he/she does not wish the client well, does not care about or want to be part of the client's healing, it could be viewed as an "entity." Ask its name. Tell it that it is in your client and is very unhappy there. Invite it to leave, to go to the light, where people who know and love it are waiting for it. Get its agreement and ask it to move to the light. Have the client move his/her index finger (ideomotor) when it is gone. Then fill the empty space with light.
• One of my clients even felt herself to be in "God's womb." This was a profoundly healing experience for her.



• Anchors



• It is extremely effective to use the symptom as the key to healing. As you are doing a healing session, when you get to a resolution or a protocol that the client should practice every day, e.g., visualize pouring sugar on your tongue, then let the symptom such as pain be the stimulus to that action. "Every time you have a pain in your tongue, you can say 'thank you for reminding me,' and visualize pouring sugar on it to heal it.
• Anchors could be used in emotional situations, as well. "Now that you know that your father is only yelling at you because inside he is a frightened little boy who is worried that if you fail, he'll be failing, you can experience his yelling as a time to sympathize with him. Let his yelling remind you of how weak he feels and then think of your own strengths and how you will grow into a stronger, more confident person." (See Emotional Issues section for a visualization along these lines.



• . Amulets
• This practice takes "concretizing" to the material level. Allow your clients to hold in their hand something into which they can put the healing energy of the session. I offer rocks I have picked up in the beach or in the forest. The client holds it and allows the glow of the energy from the session to infuse the rock, to fill her hand, move up her arm, to flow through her body and out into her auric and etheric bodies. Let them sit quietly in the glow, which becomes identified with that rock. Then, whenever they need to go back to that place, they can pick up this amulet and re-experience the healing.





• Emotional Issues



• Forgiveness is a most important step in healing. Recently, one of my clients told me that she "realized" that the two men who had betrayed her had not really meant to hurt her. They were wrong and thoughtless, but it had not been their plan to go out and find her to make her sad, they just were inadequate to the relationship. And after that, she never had another herpes attack again.
• Repositioning is a powerful way to change the charge on an issue. Dr. Bernie Siegel tells the story of the time when he's son's garage was robbed. All of his bikes and work-out equipment was stolen. He was furious. Siegel wondered aloud about the thief. It was around Mother's Day. Maybe he just needed the money to get his mother a nice gift. Yes, that was it. He wanted to buy a present for his mother, poor guy, who meant so much to her. He probably forgot the year before and his mother had not made him a desert since. By the time he finished the story, Siegel's son was laughing, and he never again could think of the robbery without shaking his head at about his crazy father.
• There are guided visualizations that can help a person recognize that the mistakes of their parents were partly because of the parent's own inadequacies and weaknesses, rather than because they were a "bad" child. One such visualization has the patient go up to the clouds, see the parent on a pedestal, and imagine the parent's inner child coming out from behind him or her. What would it take to heal the inner child? What was hurting it? When the parent is seen as weak, hurting, vulnerable, it allows for another level of understanding and for forgiveness.





• Transforming the Past in the Present



• Past life regression therapy, is more complicated than general hypnotherapy and requires training. However, here are some of the values of it.
• It allows a greater understanding of life as a big picture
• It helps to remove the fear of death
• It helps the client to find the meaning of this life as well as the meaning of suffering
• It can change the perception of the past to change the way the client functions in the present
• It can help the client see that we are all everything, good and bad and promotes tolerance

Stages in the process:

Identification:

Disidentification

Transformation

or

Re-living

Symbolic and metaphorical exploration

Insight leading to creative productivity and service

or

Identification

Search for patterns

Integration of new models

The uncovering of repeated patterns is one of the strongest assumptions in regression therapy. According to Hans ten Dam, "All problems are merely symptoms of core issues. Each core issue or theme has its own character postulate or basic belief structure. In its essence such a character postulate is a self-judgment, usually formed in a prior existence, which actualizes connecting traumas in all four main areas of recall: transpersonal, past lives, prenatal, and biographical (contemporary). The task of therapy is to recover the originating and reinforcing components of the core issue."

Dr. Ernest Pecci states: "Out of past-life work, patterns begin to emerge that give special meaning to existence and timing to all trauma, suffering, and life challenges. All of these come to be seen as unique opportunities for making a shift in attitude toward current life patterns."

• A Hero's Journey



• Ultimately, if your client is willing, you can help him or her create a mythology that allows them to see their life as a journey with meaning, purpose and focus.
• It is desirable to move clients from the mundane details to the big picture. In the East Indian explanation, to see themselves this way: You are the sky. Sometimes there are clouds, light fluffy white ones, sometimes their are dark thunder clouds, sometimes there is rain, or rainbows, sometimes sun, sometimes the moon, sometimes no moon, sometimes stars. Always behind it all is the sky. That is who you really are. The rest is weather and it comes and goes.

Other subjects:

Overcoming resistance to going into trance, visualizing and healing.

Readiness for healing as a predictor of success. Questionnaire to ascertain readiness.

Mind/Body medicine