Dear Soul Arcanum:
I’ve noted that you’re a big fan of hypnotherapy, and I’m thinking about trying it for help with losing weight. Before I do, can you please explain why you believe in it, what you recommend it for, and how it works?
– Sue
Dear Sue:
Hypnotherapy is basically guided creative visualization from a relaxed, high vibration, which is very powerful. Since we create our own realities, I believe that hypnosis can help us achieve any type of goal.
While many people know that hypnotherapy can be used for things like losing weight and quitting smoking, few know its power to heal physical ailments like IBS and TMSoul Arcanum In fact, in many cases, hypnotherapy is either the most effective treatment or the only truly effective treatment for chronic physical and psychological conditions.
This is true for a couple of reasons. First, the body and mind are not separate, but aspects of our whole being. What we think and feel definitely affects our bodies. In some ways, this is obvious. For example, when we feel afraid, our bodies respond by producing adrenaline. Everything we think and feel affects our bodies to some degree, however, so whenever we move into healthier territory in our hearts and minds, our bodies naturally follow.
As I mentioned above, I also believe that hypnotherapy is effective with every sort of goal or problem because it guides us in actively visualizing what we want to create from a high vibration, which is a very powerful way to manifest whatever we desire.
One scientific study after another has demonstrated hypnotherapy’s effectiveness. For example, it has been proven effective in managing pain during and after medical procedures, and in reducing pain and anxiety in dental patients. It is also very effective in managing pain from things like arthritis, migraines and even childbirth.
This is not just a temporary relief of symptoms, either. For example, research involving cancer patients has shown that those treated with hypnotherapy not only experience less pain and nausea during treatment, but they have a much higher long-term survival rate than those who don’t receive hypnotherapy.
Many studies support hypnotherapy as the most effective treatment for stubborn chronic ailments like IBS, TMJ and psoriasis. It’s also highly effective for psychological problems like panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sleep disorders, eating disorders, social anxiety and phobias.
As for how it works, here’s a common metaphor: Imagine that your mind is a computer. Your conscious mind is composed of all the programs that you have purposefully opened so you could work with them, while your subconscious mind is composed of all the programs running in the background that you can’t see and probably don’t even realize exist. Once in a while, of course, something pops up and lets you know that it has just done a scan or an update. Otherwise, these processes remain in the background, silently doing their thing. Most experts estimate that when it comes to our minds, only about 10% of the processes running are conscious in nature, and the other 90% are happening on an unconscious level.
Now let’s say that you decide you want to lose weight – you want to run a weight loss program. In the background, however, is a program that is working counter to this. Perhaps when you were younger, you learned to equate eating certain foods with being happy. Since being happier is your ultimate reason for wanting to lose weight, you now have two programs running at odds with each other.
When you have conflicting programs running between your conscious and unconscious minds, you will feel like you are of “two minds” – like part of you wants to achieve your new goal, but part of you is resistant to this idea. As a result, you may push yourself very hard and lose weight for a while, but eventually the effort it requires to stay ahead of the other program will exhaust you. Whenever you aren’t consciously working in that weight loss program, the other program will gain ground.
Hypnotherapy can help in that it can identify any programs running in the background that may be counter to your higher goals and help you to rewrite those programs so that they are in harmony with your true aims. If you go into that subconscious program and rewrite it so that being slim and fit = happiness, it will be easy for you to lose weight.
Human beings also tend to repress intense negative feelings in order to avoid the pain of emotional suffering. These feelings never go away, however; instead, they are stored in the subconscious. As the body is governed by the subconscious mind, these stored energies can affect not only our mental and emotional health, but also our physical health.
As nature must return to balance, it is only natural for repression to create tension, which means that whatever has been repressed will come up again and again to be released. If we try to avoid or keep a lid on these energies, they will push out any way they can. This is when we end up with neurotic, self-destructive habits or chronic ailments. In order to truly resolve these energies and issues, our subconscious minds will lead us into circumstances that will evoke those same feelings time and time again.
This brings us to age regression and past life regression. With age regression we can explore all sorts of limiting beliefs and subconscious programs that we may have picked up in early childhood. Young children are like blank slates in terms of programming, and we all have beliefs we absorbed as children that may work against our happiness and fulfillment as adults.
Most of our ideas about what constitutes being a “good” person were determined very early on. In fact, psychologists tell us that our basic personalities are pretty much set by the time we’re six years old. If we were chubby and adorable as preschoolers and got lots of love and attention because of it, we may unconsciously correlate our cute pudginess with our sense of self-worth.
The same holds true for beliefs, phobias, vows and intense or traumatic experiences from past lives. These may be general, such as a desire to hold onto extra weight if we starved to death in a past life, or they may be specific, such as a love of bread if we made a living as a baker in a particularly happy incarnation.
Some may think that re-experiencing traumatic events from the past could make things worse, but there is great power in conscious awareness. Whether the experiences affecting us at a subconscious level stem from our past in this life or another life, if we are unaware of why we are doing what we are doing, then we are not in conscious control of our actions. By contrast, when we become aware of why we tend to feel and act the way we do, we can integrate the unconscious and conscious minds and achieve our goals with relative ease.
– Soul Arcanum
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