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Affirmations, Guided Imagery, and Muscle Testing for natural healing.
Natural Medicine by Brain and Thinking
AFFIRMATIONS and Natural Healing One kind of natural healing technique is affirmations. To make an affirmation, you simply state out loud a positive belief about your health which you want to come true. For example, you might say: “My headache is clearing up.” It is a way of tapping into the power of your subconscious mind. When you create an affirmation, avoid using the word “not” because you want to describe the things you want, not what you don't want. Affirmations are useful since your body continuously regenerates itself over time. Your mind can rely on the affirmation to instruct your body to eliminate illness and create a perfectly healthy body. It takes 18 months from the onset of an illness in the patient’s energy field and body to show symptoms. What if you had been using affirmations all that time? You would have been able to avoid getting a full-blown illness, or been able to heal if the sickness had shown symptoms. Proponents of affirmations believe that the mind has the natural power to heal the body. All expressions of emotions and thoughts trigger chemical reactions in your immune system, bloodstream and organs. When you repress a negative emotion, illness results. When you use positive thoughts and feelings, healing can result. This is now being accepted by some members of the medical profession. Affirmations require faith in the power of words and repetition over time. And remember, affirmations should not be used as a replacement for good medical care – rather, the two should be done in conjunction with each other for best results. When you practice affirmations, you must first take responsibility for the state of your health. No one else but you can manage your health. Second, you must acknowledge your uniqueness as far as your health is concerned. This means that the care you require may differ from that of others. Last, you must remove all toxins from your system. The toxins could be drugs, poor food choices, or negative thoughts and emotions. Whatever it is, it is a negative element in your life which you could well do without. GUIDED IMAGERY - Natural Healing The technique of guided imagery, which is also known as visualization, is founded on the concept that our imagination helps in the body’s healing process. Through guided imagery, pain is reduced, healing is hastened and many ailments are eliminated. Though guided imagery does not always have the power to cure, it is thought that 90% of physiological complaints received by primary care physicians can be mitigated through its use. How does guided imagery work? The basic language of the mind is imagery since it relies on images to sort out our daily activities. Images mean information from our senses, including scents, tastes, sounds – not just visual sensations. When we remember things that happened before, our mind doesn’t rely on words but rather on imagery. The images that crop up in our memory may be either pleasing or distasteful, depending on what sensations we experienced at the time. For example, if you once tasted a slice of roast beef, you can remember digging in with your knife and fork into the brown meat. You recollect putting a tidbit into your mouth and slowly chewing on the tender beef. The juices of the meat had then squirted onto your tongue and you now recall how good the roast beef tasted. At the very moment you start to recall eating roast beef, your mouth has probably begun to salivate. That is how your mind communicates with your body. In the same way, natural healers rely on the power of imagery to make ailments go away. This is an aspect of mind-body healing. You use your imagination to see the location of the illness – like, your hand or your foot – and visualize the healing process taking place there. It would be nice if we were to use imagery for positive purposes all the time. But unfortunately that is not so – we more frequently use imagery in negative ways. Usually, this takes the form of worrying. When we start worrying about whether we will get that promotion we have been working for, or pass the exam we just took, the thing we are fretting about actually only comes to life in our imagination. It isn’t real yet but the worry is. The average individual is believed to create 10,000 images in his mind everyday. When these images are negative, your physiology changes accordingly and leaves you vulnerable to falling ill. The illness could be as simple as a headache or as complicated as heart disease. Your thoughts directly affect how you feel and behave. People who usually brood on negative things are probably not very happy with their lives. And they may be more likely to fall ill. The mind exerts a strong influence on our body. But because our mind can affect our body, wouldn’t it be great if you could harness the images in your mind to heal the body rather than make it ill? We can use its strength to make us healthier, rather than cause us to become sick. And you do not have to spend a great deal of time on the process either – you only need a few weeks to train your imagination to focus on the positive. This translates to visualizing two to three times daily. By practicing, you can learn to do it anytime you need to, though it is beneficial to do it as soon as you wake up and again before going to bed. Visualization, like affirmations, requires one to think positively. Peak performers in various fields rely on visualization to succeed. One example of good visualizers are the astronauts in the NASA program. These visualizers have to do procedures in simulation many times over before they get to do them in outer space. They have to do them perfectly first on earth so that when they are in outer space – where mistakes are not acceptable – the outcome will be certain. This is because visualization allows you to practice actions over and over in your mind so that when the time comes to actually do it, you will be able to do it proficiently. Research has shown that visualization is good for reducing stress. This is because imagery is a key relaxation technique. It helps trigger neurological chemicals which soothe the brain naturally – leading to lower heart rate and blood pressure, and less anxiety. Physicians who are devoted to using imagery in their practice frequently prescribe it to patients who have stress-related conditions like cramping due to premenstrual syndrome, high blood pressure, persistent aching of the neck and back, and headaches. MUSCLE TESTING - Natural Healing The muscle test was discovered by George Goodheart in the 1960's. Goodheart, a chiropractor, found that under stress, muscles will go weak, while in their normal state they remain in a state of tonicity when solicited. This is true of all muscles, but the effect can only be detected if a muscle is tested in isolation from other muscles. Several muscles working together can overcome the subtle effect of a stressor, but if a single muscle is tested in a cooperative person, a difference can be detected. Either the muscle will lock, that is, remain in place without help from its neighbors, or it will go weak. If an arm muscle, such as the deltoid or the anterior deltoid, is tested, the arm will fall if the muscle tests weak, but it will remain in place if the muscle tests strong. What makes this test so incredibly useful is that when you ask a question of the person while performing the muscle test, it is the body that answers according to the thinking of the subconscious mind, and the body does not lie. In others words, the muscle test is like having a direct phone line to the subconscious. In fact, it acts in the same that a pendulum does, by amplifying processes in the body that are so subtle that we ordinarily are not aware of them. Opinions differ as to how far one can go with the muscle test, because opinions differ as to what our subconscious minds really know. For David Hawkins, author of Power vs. Force, the subconscious is in contact with universal knowledge, and so the muscle test can be used to discover universal truth, but not many people go that far. For some therapists, the subconscious mind is not unified and can be composed of different or even many parts, which develop as a result of trauma, even if they do not develop into full-blown multiple personalities. Thus, depending on which part you are in contact with, you might obtain quite different answers. Specialized kinesiology has combined the muscle test with a series of energy exercises designed to correct energy blockages in the meridians, the chakras, and in other parts of the body. It counts on the innate wisdom of the body/subconscious to tell the therapist which energy correction out of many the person needs at that moment. But the muscle test can be combined with any healing modality to verify whether a particular course of action is the right one for the person, or to see if the body is responding positively to a treatment.
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