How to Use Visualization Exercises to Take Your Health to the Next Level

HJ: Visualization exercises are some of the most powerful tools you have to create, maintain and enhance your health.  We have been taught to believe that health begins and ends in the body and that diet, nutrition, and exercise are the keys to lifelong wellbeing and old age, however, mainstream science is now beginning to recognize what metaphysicists have known for ages — that health is more closely related to your state of mind than what you eat.  Visualization exercises allow you to directly influence and shape your thoughts and beliefs, thereby allowing you to create whatever state of health you desire for yourself.

Our health is typically unconsciously regulated until we become conscious of the power of the mind in this area.  People wonder why they put on weight and can’t lose it, why they get serious diseases even though they eat and live very healthfully and so on.  The reason always leads back to their longterm thought patterns and beliefs on some level.  Once you become conscious of this fact, you can then begin to take control of this situation using visualization exercises.

In fact, there is a detailed coaching program on how to use visualization exercises for the specific purpose of weight loss which you can find here, although these same methods can be used for any area of your health.

This is a truly remarkable series of articles that will empower you with incredible knowledge and tools you can immediately begin using to take a more proactive role in the creation and maintenance of your health via the immense power of your mind.

– Truth

By KJ Mclean | KJ Mclean

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Is it possible to use the power of thought to positively influence the body? In this short essay we will try to combine the synergy of spirit, mind and body to positively influence health. First I will state a couple of definitions:

The human body is surrounded by an (at present) undetectable field of subtle energy, or human energy field. A human being is a three-part entity: spirit or consciousness, mind, and physical body. Human consciousness and the human mind can be considered to be interchangeable, for in our conception, the mind is itself a function or attribute of consciousness. Consciousness may be regarded as a pure creative potential, or a virtual, nonphysical energy that has the characteristic of self-awareness, with the ability to negatively or positively influence the body’s cellular structure. The cells of the body, in our conception, are conscious on some level, being composed and surrounded by the subtle energy of life force (chi, prana, etc.). Therefore the human being is a synergistic whole composed of three intimately interrelated parts. Within the human energy field are virtual templates that program the body’s organs and systems for optimum health. The human body is in the middle of this field of subtle energy, the densest portion.

The human body is an extension of the human energy field.

The human body is therefore an extension of human consciousness.

The effect of consciousness on the human body has never seriously been studied, because it is believed that consciousness originates within matter. So what’s the point? When you’re sick, you better go get some drugs or surgery.

However, hopeless medical conditions, such as cancer, have been known to spontaneously go into remission, and even vanish. The so-called miracle cure is dismissed, however, because it doesnt fit into the western medical paradigm.

In Perfect Health, Deepak Chopra tells us that “There exists in every person a place that is free from disease, that never feels pain, that cannot age or die.. When you go to this place, limitations which we all accept cease to exist. They are not even entertained as a possibility. This is the place called perfect health. (1) Chopra goes on to say that although we experience our bodies as solid, they are in fact more like a fire that is being continually consumed and renewed. Chopra says that the body gets a new stomach lining every five days, for example. The cells in the skin replace themselves every five weeks, so in effect, we get a new skin almost every month. I wonder what skin care manufacturers would say to that! In fact, according to research, 98% of the atoms in our bodies are replaced every year. According to Chopra Ayurveda, the Indian system of medicine, tells us that perfect health depends on contacting our own spiritual awareness, bringing our energies into balance, and then extending that balance to the body.

Chopra is describing a system that is, despite his western medical training, antithetic to it. He is expressing ideas that are much more congruent with the idea of consciousness as the virtual, nonphysical, and creative principle. He is saying, in effect, that awareness of yourself as a spirit will bring you in contact with the life-giving energy of your own consciousness. This life force energy also has healing properties, and is the basis behind vibrational healing (like Reiki).

In the vibrational universe model, we postulate certain templates of energy within the human energy field that program the cellular structure for perfect health. This programming, however, can be overridden at any time by the choices of a conscious being. Focus on sickness, disease, or other self-limiting choices can disrupt the meridians of life force energy that nourish each and every cell. Each cell is conscious, and asks for perfect health. The body is designed to age, but there is no reason that health cannot be present at every stage of life.

We hear horror stories of death from every quarter. My aunt hung on for years in a diseased body. My friends mother lived for over 10 years in pain, constantly shuttling back and forth between home and hospital. If the body is designed for perfect health, then why is there so much physical illness in our society?

Because that’s what we focus on. As a society, our attention is directed far more intensely toward sickness than health. We even call food that is good for us health food! What are we eating the rest of the time then? Watch TV for a couple of hours and count the number of advertisements devoted to illness and the mitigation of some disease or unwanted condition, and advertisements that promote health. When I did this I did not see ONE commercial devoted to health.

Religion tells us that man was designed in Gods image. Would God design the human body for weakness or strength? For illness or health? In a universe of free will, it is always possible to choose illness, but why would you want to? Examine your life mindfully and write down the percentage of time you spend thinking about positive things and the time you spend complaining or thinking negatively. If your life (or your health) is not where youd want it to be, my bet is that you spend the vast majority of your time on the negative end of the scale of emotion/vibration. This scale plots the amount of life force (healing) energy you allow into your human energy field and into your body. When you spend the majority of your time in the lower ranges, you are, at the same time, subtly influencing your own health. It takes a LOT of negative focus to acquire a longterm illness, or an unwanted condition, because the body WANTS to be healthy. Every cell is asking for health! Thats how miracle cures can occur. When all resistance to health is removed, the body is allowed to respond, and it can bounce back quickly.

My chiropractor tells a story of an old woman who became bent over with disease. By the time she died her back was so crooked she couldn’t even raise her head. When her body was placed into the casket, however, it didn’t fit. The body had straightened out!

If you are ill, see your doctor. But at the same time, understand that you may have a very profound effect upon your own health. Realize that the body is designed for health, not sickness! That is why many people benefit from yoga or meditation, or even exercise. During these periods worry and anxiety is lessened and you find a place of calm and peace. You allow life force energy to flow, unrestricted and unblocked, back to the cells to promote health.

You may conduct your own personal experiments, by visualizing yourself as healthy. I will describe these below. These experiments are, of course, no substitute for medical attention if you are sick. Personally, Im open to help from every quarter and I use herbal extracts to strengthen and maintain my body. When I became ill with mercury poisoning from dental fillings, I immediately had them removed (this procedure MUST be performed by a dentist who is trained in a rigorous protocol, however. Go to the website of Dr. Hal Huggins for details and referral dentists). So don’t be a dork and ignore an acute physical condition. Get the help you need, but don’t, by any means, neglect to use the power of thought to make yourself feel better.

Visualizing Health

Working consciously with visualization can have a positive effect on physical structure. The degree to which it can help you is directly proportional to your belief in it. We’ve talked a lot previously about the power of belief, so we wont go further into it here, other than to say that a positive belief releases a powerful stream of creative/healing life force energy into your mind/body system. A belief that such a thing is idiotic will, of course, block the flow.

If the human body is really an extension of the human energy field, as we postulated above, then positive visualization may help you. Heres how it works:

Sit comfortably in a chair with feet flat on the floor and spine as straight as possible (Or lie on the floor with a pillow under your head). The idea is to remain conscious during this process, and not fall asleep. If you know how to meditate, quiet your mind. If not, take a few deep breaths (without hyperventilating) and get yourself as calm as possible. Visualize your body as surrounded by a cocoon of life force energy. Visualize every organ of the body with a corresponding template of life force energy in this cocoon, which is programmed for perfect health of that organ. Imagine a flow of healing life force energy from your human energy field into the body at the appropriate place. Feel the wellbeing entering the body. Continue this as long as you can with a feeling of wellbeing. At any time you begin to feel uncomfortable, stop!

Even if you can only get the feeling for 1 second, you have accomplished something. The idea is not only to visualize the healing energy, but also to actually feel it. When you can feel the energy, you know you’re doing it right.

This process, if continued on a daily basis, can be a very powerful positive force in maintaining (or even regaining) physical health.

As I said above, visualization is no substitute for medical attention if you are really sick. But it can be a very powerful adjunct to it.

One more thing: You dont have to be ill to benefit from this procedure. In fact, I like to do this every morning for a couple of minutes after I shower and before I get going. It gets me off on the good foot!

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Excerpt from Creative Visualization (Psi Tek)

The Simonton process of visualization for cancer

Dr. Carl Simonton, a radiation cancer specialist, and his wife, Stephanie Matthews-Simonton, a psychotherapist and counselor specializing in cancer patients, have developed a special visualization or imaging technique for the treatment of cancer which is now popularly known as the Simonton process. Ridiculed at first by the medical profession, the Simonton process is now being used in at least five hospitals across the United States to fight cancer.

The technique itself is the height of simplicity and utilizes the tremendous powers of the mind, specifically its faculty for visualization and imagination, to control cancer. First, the patient is shown what a normal healthy cell looks like. Next, he is asked to imagine a battle going on between the cancer cell and the normal cell. He is asked to visualize a concrete image that will represent the cancer cell and another image of the normal cell. Then he is asked to see the normal cell winning the battle against the cancer cell.

One youngster represented the normal cell as the video game character Pacman and the cancer cell as the “ghosts” (enemies of Pacman), and then he saw Pacman eating up the ghosts until they were all gone.

A housewife saw her cancer cell as dirt and the normal cell as a vacuum cleaner. She visualized the vacuum cleaner swallowing up all the dirt until everything was smooth and clean.

Patients are asked to do this type of visualization three times a day for 15 minutes each time. And the results of the initial experiments in visualization to cure cancer were nothing short of miraculous. Of course, being medical practitioners, Dr. Simonton and his psychologist wife were aware of the placebo effect and spontaneous remission of illness. As long as they were getting good results with the technique, it didn’t seem to matter whether it was placebo or spontaneous remission.

The Simontons also noticed that those who got cured had a distinct personality. They all had a strong will to live and did everything to get well. Those who didn’t succeed had resigned themselves to their fate.

While the Simontons were exploring the motivation of cancer patients, they were also looking into two interesting areas of research at that time: biofeedback and the surveillance theory. Both areas had something to do with the influence of the mind over body processes. Stephanie Simonton explains in her book The Healing Family:

In biofeedback training, an individual is hooked up to a device that feeds back information on his physiological processes. A patient with tachycardia, an irregular heartbeat, might be hooked up to an oscilloscope, which will give a constant visual readout of the heartbeat. The patient watches the monitor while attempting to relax…when he succeeds in slowing his heartbeat through his thinking, he is rewarded immediately by seeing that fact on visual display.

The surveillance theory holds that the immune system does in fact produce ‘killer cells’ which seek out and destroy stray cancer cells many times in our lives, and it is when this system breaks down, that the disease can take hold. When most patients are diagnosed with cancer, surgery, radiation and/or chemotherapy are used to destroy as much of the tumor as possible. But once the cancer is reduced, we wondered if the immune system could be reactivated to seek out and destroy the remaining cancer cells.

The Simontons reasoned that since people can learn how to influence their blood flow and heart rate by using their minds, they could also learn to influence their immune system. Later research proved their approach to be valid.

For instance, according to the Time-Life Book The Power of Healing, “chronic stress causes the brain to release into the body a host of hormones that are potent inhibitors of the immune system”. “This may explain why people experience increased rates of infection, cancer, arthritis, and many other ailments after losing a spouse.” Dr. R.W. Berthop and his associates in Australia found that blood samples of bereaved individuals showed a much lower level of lymphocyte activity than was present in the control group’s samples. Lymphocytes are a variety of white blood cells consisting of T cells and B cells, both critical to the action of the immune system. T cells directly attack disease-causing bacteria, viruses, and toxins, and regulate the other parts of the immune system. B cells produce antibodies, which neutralize invaders or mark them for destruction by other agents of the immune system.

The Power of Healing concludes: “The idea that there is a mental element to healing has gained acceptance within the medical establishment in recent years. Many physicians who once discounted the mind’s ability to influence healing are now reconsidering, in the light of new scientific evidence. All these have led some physicians and medical institutions toward a more holistic approach, to treating the body and mind as a unit rather than as two distinct entities. Inherent in this philosophy is the belief that patients must be active participants in the treatment of their illnesses.

Using visualization for minor ailments

Today, many scientific breakthroughs have proven that minor infections and viruses may be healed, or at least lessened in severity by employing mental techniques similar to those used by cancer patients who have successfully shrunk tumors through positive imaging or visualization.

The theory is that creative visualization can create the same physiological changes in the body that a real experience can. For example, if you imagine squeezing a lemon into you mouth, you will most likely salivate, the same way as when a real lemon is actually being squeezed into your mouth. Einstein once declared that, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

In the 1985 World Conference on Imaging, reports OMNI magazine (February 1989), registered nurse Carol Fajoni observed that “people who used imagery techniques to heal wounds recovered more quickly than those who did not. In workshops, the same technique has been used by individuals suffering from colds with similar results.” The process has been hailed as a positive breakthrough and is currently being used by more enlightened doctors, according to OMNI magazine.

Visualize that part of your body which is causing the problem. Then erase the negative image and instead picture that organ or part to be healthy. Let’s say you have a sinus infection. Just picture your sinus passageways and cavities as beginning to unclog. Or if you have a kidney disorder, imagine a sick-looking kidney metamorphose into a healthier one.

“In trying to envision yourself healthy, you need not view realistic representations of the ailing body part. Instead, imagine a virus as tiny spots on a blackboard that need erasing. Imagine yourself building new, healthy cells or sending cleaning blood to an unhealthy organ or area.”

“If you have a headache, picture your brain as a rough, bumpy road that needs smoothing and proceed to smooth it out. The point is to focus on the area you believe is causing you to feel sick, and to concentrate on visualizing or imaging it to be well. The more clearly and vividly you can do this, the more effective the technique becomes.”

Another method for banishing pain was developed by Russian memory expert, Solomon V. Sherehevskii, as reported by Russian psychologist Professor Luria. To banish pain, such as a headache, Sherehevskii would visualize the pain as having an actual shape, mass and color. Then, when he had a “tangible” image of the pain in his mind, he would visualize or imagine this concrete picture slowly becoming smaller and smaller until it disappeared from his mental vision. The real pain disappears with it. Others have modified this same technique and suggest that you imagine a big bird or eagle taking the concrete image of the pain away. As it flies over the horizon, see it becoming smaller until it disappears from your view. The actual pain will disappear with it.

Of course, the effectiveness of this imaging technique depends on the strength of your desire to improve your health and your ability to visualize well. But there is no harm in trying it, because unlike drugs, creative visualization has no side effects.

Practice any of these visualization techniques three times a day for one week and observe your health improve.