We have observed that an important enhancement in self healing seems to occur right when the patient makes the decision to get well. Visual imagery involves using your imagination to create pictures in your brain that communicate emotional safety, comfort and pleasure so that your body can shift into a relaxed state where healing can occur.
Step 1: Creating a meaning about yourself that supports you and empowers you is the first step in getting well.
Step 2: The second step in getting well is to master your ability to direct and control the state of your physiology and emotions. This will be a natural outgrowth of step 1. You will feel better as a result of evaluating your current situation more effectively.
When you feel better physically and emotionally, it is much easier to visualize yourself in an optimal state of being well. Therefore, practice daily getting into an empowered state, to whatever degree you can begin with and then go to step 3.
Step 3: Make the conscious decision to get well. This will cause your brain to change what you focus on. The quality of our life at any given moment is determined by what we are focusing on. The quality of our health an any given moment is dramatically influenced by the quality of our life (or by what our brain is focusing on).
Your quality of life has nothing to do with what is going on around you. It has everything to do with how you evaluate things.
People who are most successful in staying consistently well have the ability to evaluate things more effectively.
Step 4: Practice daily asking yourself better questions. Your brain is like a computer, it will give you information on whatever you ask of it. Notice the questions you have asked yourself in the past that have caused you to be in an unpleasant state. What are some questions you can ask yourself about your current challenge of getting well that could make you feel great, no matter what else is going on!
What you focus on determines the quality of your life and health. Asking better questions daily forces your brain to make better evaluations. How you evaluate things is going to determine how you feel and what you do.
Step 5: This requires the daily practice of holding specific images of what you want, not of what you don’t want, reality follows image. Many people spend much more time during the day thinking about the things they are afraid of that might happen, rather than focusing specifically on what they want.
Many people with serious health concerns have highly developed photographic memories, that is, they have the ability to recall in detail past memories and visualize them in living color. Our research has shown that there is a tendancy for our patients to hold more pain-related memories and to relive them over and over.
Since the body does not know the difference between real or imagined danger, it will gear up for survival response when there is a perception of ensuing fear. When we continually hold images in our minds that create pain, anger or fear, our bodies remain in an overly activated defense response, which eventually drains us of our energy and can actually get in the way of our survival.
Source: First published in Healing our world Magazine, Volume 34, Issue 3, page. 44.