A few years ago, I received an email telling me my biopsy results were available to view online. The report told me I had an “invasive carcinoma of an unknown type”, which are pretty scary words to read, especially when it’s 8:30 pm with no chance of speaking to someone who can help you interpret all the information in the lab report. Looking back, now that tumor is long gone, with no extreme treatment needed, it’s easy to feel like it wasn’t a big deal. At that moment, however, I had no way of knowing how things would go, and all the scarier options felt like they were very much on the table for me. It was several weeks before I was able to see an oncologist to discuss my situation, so in the meantime, I focused on what I knew I could control: lifestyle factors and mind-body healing with hypnosis.
At this time, a friend suggested I read “Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds” by Kelly A. Turner, and both the premise and information felt empowering. In the book, she identifies nine key factors that people who experienced spontaneous remission from cancer all had in common.
As a hypnosis practitioner, the thing that immediately stood out to me was that only two of the items listed in the book are physical interventions: radically changing your diet, and using supplements and herbs. In her continued research after the book came out, she has also added a tenth, exercise. The remaining seven are all related to our mind, emotions, and spirituality, and I knew that I already had some great tools for making enormous changes to these areas in my work with hypnosis.
This realization, and the healing experiences I had as a result, really marked the beginning of my passion for using my work as a hypnotist to utilize our mind-body connection for healing. Those remaining seven factors are things that can improve our health and our quality of living, whether we are experiencing cancer, having other health challenges, or just want to proactively improve our long term health.
Working with hypnosis, along with the related tools I often teach clients, provides benefits in all seven of these important aspects of well-being, efficiently and effectively. Personally, just knowing there were a lot of factors within my control gave me so much comfort during that stressful time, and that is why I feel it’s so important to share this with others who are experiencing health challenges.
So, what are these seven things that made such a difference?
- Having strong reasons for living
Spending some time really asking yourself what is most important to you in life, and allowing yourself to be fully honest with yourself about it can help you to connect more with this aspect of wellness. As a hypnotist, I often witness clients gain clarity in this area by addressing some of the layers of limiting thinking we often take on as a strategy to fit into our families, our culture, or society at large. If you take away all the rules you’ve internalized about what you can and can’t do, what you should or shouldn’t be, what you’re allowed to want, what is possible for someone like you, you’ll notice what is left, those things that are just deeply true for you. This understanding can go a long way to helping you connect to what makes you feel inspired in life. Hypnosis can be a helpful tool in digging through these layers to find the deeper truths for yourself.
- Embracing social support
For some of you, this might be as simple as joining some kind of group activity, like a support group, a team, or a club. In my work with clients, I know it’s often not as simple as just joining something, because many of us carry internal blocks to feeling connected to others, such as feeling unlovable, self conscious, or even too anxious to even attend or speak to people. When we work through these blocks, we can more easily build the supportive relationships that aid our well-being.
- Releasing suppressed emotions
Anything you can do to acknowledge and express the emotions that come up for you is going to help with this aspect of health, whether your feelings relate to something happening in this moment, or something from many years ago. Hypnosis definitely makes this process easier, allowing us to more directly access the unconscious mind to work with the specific memories and beliefs that often keep us stuck in unresourceful emotional patterns, especially when we’ve been suppressing something a long time. It’s often far quicker and easier to resolve these things than people realize, and much more comfortable than continuing to carry these things around in our mind and body.
- Following your intuition
You don’t have to be spiritually inclined to respect and benefit from intuition. Our unconscious minds are able to take in and process much larger amounts of information in any given second than our conscious minds can possibly be aware of, and to find patterns to synthesize this information into a useful message. When this happens, it can feel like this awareness is coming out of nowhere, like a “gut feeling” or just knowing without knowing how you know. We often dismiss these intuitive nudges as something we just made up, or tune them out all together, but connecting with our unconscious mind can help us make a powerful ally in our own untapped resources. This can help us make the food and lifestyle choices that aid us in healing, increase awareness of the emotional patterns and life circumstances that we need to change, and can guide us to greater well being in life in many other ways. Hypnosis is an easy way to begin improving your rapport with your body and unconscious mind in order to increase your access to intuitive information.
- Increasing positive emotions
Little kids don’t need to learn how to laugh, plan, and have fun: they laugh more than 100 times more often than adults. The suppression of this ability to enjoy ourselves and feel good is something we’ve learned along the way to adulthood, and it’s something we can unlearn too. If you feel like you’re not allowed to have fun, or that activities where enjoyment is the whole point feel like a waste of time, unimportant, or even make you a bad person in some way (ie lazy), then there are probably some unconscious beliefs involved. Enjoying ourselves is great for our health, so allow yourself to take time to do things you enjoy, to spend time around people who make you laugh, and to make your life more fun.
- Taking control of your health (a.k.a. empowerment)
Feeling like we have agency in our own lives is important in a lot of different ways, especially so in regards to your health. Even the most knowledgeable and experienced doctor in their field is still a human who does not know everything, and who does not have access to your own intuition about what your body needs. I have had many wonderful experiences with doctors (both naturopathic and allopathic) who listen to me when I bring research to discuss and share my impressions of what lifestyle factors and approaches feel most beneficial, where I feel comfortable and respected when I ask detailed questions about proposed treatment, and where, conversely, the doctor can respectfully communicate their disagreements with me in a way that is intended to inform rather than disempower me. If you have a doctor who makes you feel like you have no say in your own medical care, please find a different doctor and speak up about your concerns and questions. For some folks, this feels very uncomfortable or even impossible, and these feelings can be deep rooted patterns from childhood. If that’s the case, hypnosis can help you reconnect with your sense of agency, in health and in life.
- Deepening your spiritual connection.
This one, like intuition, is not necessarily about religion or having specific spiritual beliefs, unless you feel drawn in that direction. In the book, many of the participants fulfilled this aspect of their lives by developing a meditation practice, allowing them to slow down, turn inward, and observe a sense of feeling oneness and interconnection that is important for well-being. Hypnosis is a way to access similar states with guidance, rather than being fully reliant on self direction, and many folks find it easier to meditate once they have some familiarity with accessing these states through hypnosis. This is particularly helpful for folks that have a lot of anxious or stressful feelings come up when they sit still and try to meditate, as hypnosis can help shift those thought patterns more quickly and comfortably.
Regarding meditation generally, however, I want to stress that you don’t need anything to begin other than the intention to do so. Many people who say they can’t meditate think that meditation is supposed to be this state of peace or empty mind, but the practice of meditating is really about actively noticing when your mind has wandered and bringing it back to the focus of your meditation, such as your breath. You can spend the entire meditation time in this process of having your mind wander, catching it, and bringing it back to focus, over and over, and you will have successfully meditated even if you never felt anything. The feelings often come in time, but they are not the practice or even the main benefit of practicing meditation.
My hope in sharing these seven points is that regardless of where you are in your own health journey, you feel empowered by the many ways you can improve your health and overall well-being, just by paying a little more attention to the mind side of your mind-body connection. If you have specific concerns or questions about mind-body healing with hypnosis, I’m always happy to chat, just schedule a call.
Also, my monthly hypnosis healing circle, an online group session, is designed to address many of the mind body components of physical healing. Please join us if you have a health concern, and let others know about this event as well.
