Your mind is one of the most powerful aspects of you; of whom you portray yourself to be in the world. The body is an out picturing of the mind. So if your mind is powerful, what does this mean for the body? There is an innate mind/body connection that most of us have forgotten about. Yes, we know that the mind and body are parts of “us”, what make us whole beings, but what most of us have forgotten is how deeply the mind and the body are truly connected.

In spiritual terms, one can say that we have lived many lives, each time incarnating to learn lessons and work through patterns and beliefs in order to grow and evolve. We have lived so many lives that we have become quite good at being human, and have forgotten what it is like to be our true, spiritual selves. In other words, we have forgotten the power of the mind and how it relates to the body. At this time, many people are “waking up” and realizing that there is more to us than just the human self, and so the mind/body connection has become a hot topic.

Let’s go back for a moment to the power of the mind. We are thinking thoughts constantly, and none of those thoughts are “new.” All thought has been circulating for all of time, we simply re think them. Thoughts are energy, and energy cannot be destroyed, so when we think a thought, it goes into the ethers and meets other similar thoughts, and once enough similar thought has gathered, then those thoughts become dense, so dense that they eventually manifest into something physical, or something that becomes “real” to our human physical senses. This goes for negative as well as positive thoughts. This is nothing new, as everyone has heard about the power of positive affirmations.

What does this have to do with the mind/body connection? The body performs according to what our thoughts are. What you believe is what is true for you. This means that your thoughts absolutely affect your body, your health, your well-being.

From a spiritual standpoint, one can say that all thought comes from the Divine Mind/Source/God. All beings come from that Source, so we all began as a thought. Our physical bodies were created from like thoughts eventually manifesting into something much denser than thought. So our bodies are the out pictures of our minds, or of thought.

In terms of illness and dis-ease, there is a plethora of literature about the power of our thoughts and how they affect the body in both creating dis-ease as well as healing it. (The hyphen is there intentionally: Disease is nothing more than a disconnect in the ease in which our bodies were designed to function.)

The pharmaceutical industry would have us believe that we can treat most any dis-ease with a drug and in most cases we can be cured. I am not knocking medicine in any way, I am simply looking at the mind body connection from a different point of view; one that we can take a more personal approach with, one that we have some control over. Since our minds are powerful, and similar thoughts become dense enough to manifest into something physical, why wouldn’t we use this to our advantage?

Holistic health is based on the mind/body connection. Moving energy through the body while focusing the mind on healing is the premise behind Reiki and myriad other types of energy healing. Holistic therapy/healing is making a comeback. It is the oldest known medicine, and more people are finding that it is helping us to heal because we are deepening our relationship with the mind, the body and the amazing connection between the two. As our awareness of the way the mind communicates with the body expands, we find ourselves moving further away from just taking a pill to cure what ails us and taking more of a proactive and personal approach to our healing; one that we can actively participate in, using the power of our thoughts in a positive, healing constructive way.

Hypnotherapy is based on relaxing the body so that one is able to focus the mind inward to the sub conscious. This enables us to retrieve long buried memories of trauma and other issues, which more often than not turn out to be the trigger of the dis-ease we are suffering from. Since our mind can affect the way our body functions, and hypnotherapy can affect the way our mind functions, then it stands to reason that hypnotherapy can ultimately affect our body’s responses. Using hypnotherapy to change the way you think about and respond to dis-ease can change the way your body reacts. This effect can be a by-product of therapy or an actively sought response. For example, if you are coming for therapy to help reduce your levels of stress, a by-product could be better health. You are actively seeking to alter the body’s response to what ails it.

Another important aspect of the power of the mind is our ability to think about love, and then allow the thought of love to deepen into the body and become a “feeling” of love. (One might say that this aspect is the “key” to truly harnessing the innate power of the mind.) This is a direct mind/body link; one in which your mind focuses on the thought of love, then as you focus on it, you actively bring the thought out of the brain and “down the body” into the area of the heart. Once in the heart, you expand upon the “thought” of love, allowing it to become more of a feeling as well as a thought. From there you expand the thought/feeling into the rest of the body, allowing the feeling of love to flow through the physical structure, through every cell. We are all aware of how loving thoughts alter plants and other organisms in a positive way.

As a holistic practitioner and certified hypnotherapist I have had many opportunities to share this amazing and powerful mind/body connection with clients, often with amazing results. I have also experienced results myself which some would consider miraculous. Less than a year ago, I was told that I probably had uterine cancer that required immediate and radical surgery. I had 3 weeks before my surgery to focus my thoughts on my body, look deeply within, face all of the fears that surfaced and literally re arrange my thoughts patterns and beliefs in order to:

  1. Heal any potential cancer.
  2. Minimize the surgery.
  3. Help myself recover easily, quickly and with minimal pain.

Using hypnosis, intense energy work and by re patterning my thoughts I was able to go into surgery trusting that my work was not just helpful, but healing. 2 hours after going into surgery, the doctor reported to my family that I did not have cancer, and that she was able to perform the surgery in the least invasive way possible. I even came home the day of surgery, and 2 weeks later I was back in the gym doing gentle yoga and exercise. Granted, not all cases turn out this way, and there are many reasons for that. I share my experience to make the point that the power of the mind is immense, and when we utilize that power and energy in tandem with our body, the possibilities open up and we are less limited in the control we have over our own health and well-being. Embrace your body, and strive to deepen your mind/body relationship. It can only help you in positive ways.