Commentary
Monday, January 29, 2007 6:03 PM PST
Mental outlook is key to happiness
Rebecca Villaneda
Last week I was hypnotized.
I interviewed a couple for a story who are hypnotists, and they reaffirmed my mind is capable of creating and maintaining a positive spot in this big world.
As a kid I had a happy disposition, but as life got more complicated it sometimes became a struggle to dig out that carefree aura.
Still, for the most part I’m able to be at peace and hope that it reflects in my personality.
Since my session with the Tooleys, my hypnotists, I’ve been intrigued with how the mind works and begun exploring the power it holds.
I’ve learned that positive thinking and affirmation, meditation and visualization can help enhance many aspects of my life.
My hurt knee was the focus of my hypnosis that evening with the Tooleys, and I’m convinced that the injury — and the cure — were both mind-related.
I began a workout routine and I think it got the best of me. I used my knee as a reason to stop.
The hypnosis basically went like this: I closed my eyes and Duncan Tooley talked me through some breathing and guided me to a deep mental state. I clearly remembered everything and was completely conscious of all that was going on around me.
He had me visualize a knob that gauged the pain I felt in my knee and then had me mentally turn it to zero.
Then he had me repeat, “I feel great. This was easy, and I like this. If I ever feel pain, I will do this.”
My knee was better the next day and I’m currently back to my exercise routine.
I truly believe that mentally picturing myself getting better and believing it was getting better allowed my knee to heal.
After I told some skeptics about my experience, they asked what’s the difference between self-hypnosis and positive affirmation or meditation.
Basically not much, I said.
With self-hypnosis, a hypnotist guides clients to a centered state in their mind and gives them correct terminology to use that will enhance, cure or break habits. They call this a guided meditation.
Once you have the tools, a willingness and believe in yourself, you can apply these techniques to any aspect of your life and repeat them so that the mind registers it.
You begin to manifest what you are visualizing by repeating it in your head.
The mind is powerful, and by evoking its capabilities I’ve learned we can create our own well-being.
The latest issue of Time magazine features a user’s guide to the brain, dissecting its powers, characteristics and qualities.
There is a piece about happiness and meditation that uses Buddhist monks as an example of mental training. Some monks have spent 10,000 hours meditating.
The conclusion of the MRI scans on the monks was that “the positive state is a skill that can be trained.
“The brain’s emotional regions seemed to become stronger with more years of meditation practice, as if the brain had forged more robust connection between thinking and feeling. The conscious act of thinking about their thoughts in a particular way rearranged the brain.”
Another favorite publication of mine, Ode magazine, also examines the mind’s capabilities and uses excerpts from Lynne McTaggart’s book, “The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World,” which explains the power of intention using athletes and people with cancer as examples.
It shows how an athlete can simply visualize victory to attain it. And the same goes for a cancer patient.
“One school of thought proposes that mental rehearsal creates the neutral patterns necessary for the real thing,” reads a passage from the book.
The author uses Muhammad Ali’s boxing career, saying that much of his training was learning how to take punches. “Ali used every self-motivational technique: affirmation; visualization; mental rehearsal, self-confirmation; and perhaps the most powerful epigram of personal worth ever uttered, ‘I am the greatest.’”
For the power of intention to heal, Ode shows that cancer patients fight the disease when they successfully visualize themselves getting better through “powerful imagery symbols … [that] could hold a clear visual intention, imagining themselves receiving effective medical treatment and overpowering the cancer.”
Time also proves that the mind is so powerful that it can convince even a brain-dead human to make the body perform what it wants.
A doctor writes about a man who was on his last breath and who hadn’t communicated with his family in more than a week. When he returned to see the empty bed where his patient once lay, he found a nurse that told him the man woke up for five minutes to say his goodbyes, then died within the hour. “What woke my patient … was simply his mind, forcing its way through a broken brain, a father’s final act to comfort his family.
The mind is a uniquely personal domain of thought, dreams and countless other things, like the will, faith and hope.”
It’s important to remember that we as humans are capable of so much goodness when we put our minds to it.
We can never disregard that we are privileged to train our minds to create positivity, happiness and peace within ourselves — and remember, those qualities are contagious.
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