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You are here: Column Archives: Mind/Body Connection, Part 1 | ||||||
THE MIND / BODY CONNECTION IN HEALING: BEYOND THE FRONTIER “The bad news is: It’s all in your mind; In 1989, Bantam published a book written by Deepak Chopra, M.D. entitled Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Now this was not the first book ever written to explore the subject. A seminal work by Dr. Kenneth Pelletier, Mind as Healer, Mind as Slayer, was published in 1977. For that matter, mind/body medicine is at the core of ancient texts dating back to the Bible, the Vedas, and Chinese medicine. But in 1995, Chopra’s book about the nearly-forgotten role of the mind in healing spent two years at the top of best seller lists. America was ready to remember. In the Zone. Consider its power for a moment. Think of Michael Jordan taking a jump shot. Could he consciously “think” about it? Here’s MJ thinking about a jump shot: “Let’s see, the basket is 23 feet away, mmm... 10 feet off the floor. This ball weighs 1.5 pounds. If I elevate to 34.4 inches to clear the 6’9” opponent and propel this sphere at .7 ft/ms with an arc of 37°, it should arrive at the locus within the radius of the annular iron rim.” Yeah, right, Mike! His conscious mind could not do it! If the conscious, analytical mind could pull off 23’ jumpshots, we would have physics majors playing round ball, not athletes! In fact, athletes regularly use the word unconscious to describe a particularly successful performance. “I was unconscious out there!” they often say. Or describe the shift in awareness as being “in the zone.” Think less, know more. In the case of the subconscious mind, or as A Course in Miracles calls the "higher mind", less is more. The harder you try to do something the subconscious is really good at, the less likely you succeed. The more effort you consciously expend at remembering, say, a person’s name, the less likely you will be to remember it. It’s when you relax, maybe in the middle of doing something else or whatever, and the name just pops into your mind, effortlessly. Because the conscious mind “got out of the way,” the subconscious performed easily. To use this more powerful subconscious mind then, the first order of business is to get the busy-ness out of the mind; to quiet the chattering analytical mind and allow the subconscious to do its perfect work. Continue reading. For Part Two, click here.
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Michael Braunstein is Executive Director of Heartland Healing and certified by the American Council of Hypnotist Examiners in clinical hypnotherapy. He graduated from the Los Angeles Hypnotism Training Institute and was an instructor at the UCLA Extension University for 11 years. Heartland Healing is devoted to the examination of various alternative forms of healing. It is provided as a source of information and not as medical advice. It is not meant as an endorsement of any particular therapy, either by the writer or by Heartland Healing Center, Inc. © 1997- Heartland Healing All Rights Reserved |
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