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Healing Resources: For the Body, Emotions, Mind, and Spirit |
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Excerpt
from
THE
HOLISTIC APPROACH TO EATING
Lose Extra Weight and
Keep it Off for Life
by Jane Mountrose
CHAPTER TWO:
THE HOLISTIC APPROACH
Now I want to explain what it means to me to be a whole
person. Above everything, the body, emotions and mind that take us through
our daily lives, we are beautiful, unique spiritual beings with abilities
and potentials that we are only vaguely aware of. We all deserve to love
ourselves and to treat ourselves accordingly, yet few of us do.
Together,
we are on a Journey of self-discovery, of becoming aware of our true identities
and abilities, and letting go of misconceptions that prevent us from simply
being ourselves. This is what the Journey through life is all about - about
loving ourselves and becoming more of who we really are. The rest is like
the stage and props we use along the way.
Eating food is an integral part
of the journey. We have to have it to survive and it can bring a lot of
joy to our lives. Eating should provide energy, vitality and pleasure.
Just think of all of the different types of food, with its wonderful aromas
and flavors, colors, shapes and textures. Preparing it can be a fun, creative
process and eating it is a social as well as a physical experience where
we can spend pleasurable time in the company of people we enjoy. So why
should we have to constantly suffer and worry about eating? My main point
is that we don't. We can nourish our bodies, enjoy our friends, feel good
about ourselves and have the ideal body we have been longing for.
RELAXING THE MIND AND
FEELING GOOD
If you are new to hypnotherapy and guided visualization,
I want you to understand how easy it is. Hypnotherapy is just a way to
relax the conscious mind, which is most active when we are in our normal
waking state and open to what is below the surface in the unconscious,
much like focused daydreaming. It is easiest to achieve this kind of a
relaxed state when you are alone in a quiet place. The short example I
am about to give you may be used anywhere to achieve a mild state of relaxation
to allow you to feel more focused and good about yourself anywhere. The
only exception is that I do not recommend using relaxation techniques when
you are driving.
The most powerful transformational tool we have is to
focus on our breathing, which is free and available at any time. In a moment
I am going to ask you to stop reading, close your eyes and take a few deep,
deep breaths. As you do this, imagine that you are taking in pure, fresh
air, and fill your lungs completely so your stomach moves out freely. As
you exhale, imagine that you are releasing all of the tension in your body
and exhale completely. Take your time and fully enjoy each breath. Try
this now...
Amazingly enough, most people notice a marked difference in
their state of mind just by taking a few deep breaths. A lot of the tension
we experience can be related to shallow breathing, so you can easily change
your frame of mind by focusing on your breathing and allowing yourself
to relax a little. This also increases your body awareness, which most
people need to do.
Next, I would like you to take another few deep breaths
and, as you inhale, do it in a loving way, nourishing and nurturing yourself
with each breath, feeling the loving energy flowing throughout your body.
Try this now …
You should feel noticeably different now. This is a wonderful
way to take a break and feel good about your self. Whenever you feel tense,
you can focus on your breathing and imagine sending that pure, fresh air
throughout your body, where there is tightness in your neck, shoulders
and back, to relax eye strain, anywhere you are tense, all the way down
to the tips of your fingers and toes. If you have so many thoughts running
through your head that you cannot focus, you can clear the thoughts with
the breath. In a short time, you can think more clearly and focus on the
task at hand. Just imagine that you are sending that pure energy into your
mind, allowing it to become clearer and clearer with each breath.
I recommend
going through this process a few times, until you can do it on your own,
without the script. It's so simple, you can do it almost anywhere. It doesn't
take any time to take a loving breath.
As a note, if you found that there
was a part that you did not love, or where your body seems to hold a lot
of tension, you can continue to breathe energy into that area, and simply
allow the feelings that are trapped there to come out. You can ask that
part of the body - if it could talk, what would it say? If you are honest
and open, you can learn a lot about yourself this way.
THE CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS
MINDS
Now that we have had an experience of it, I want to talk
about how the conscious and unconscious minds work. We could compare the
conscious mind to the tip of an iceberg, with just a small point poking
above the surface of the water. Many consider our conscious mind to represent
10% or less of what is really occurring. The other 90% below the surface
is like the unconscious mind, which is operating independently, with little
or no awareness on our parts.
The unconscious mind is quite amazing. It
takes care of a lot of practical functions that are needed for our survival,
like breathing, keeping the heart beating and sending blood through the
body. Fortunately, these functions occur effortlessly. The unconscious
mind also remembers learned responses like how to drive a car. Driving
takes a lot of attention at first, but becomes almost effortless after
a period of time. The unconscious mind is also considered to be the source
of our creativity.
The most important part for our purposes here is how
the unconscious mind takes in and organizes information. It is like a huge
computer that records all of our experiences and sorts them out so that
we are not overloaded with trivial information. This is a valuable and
much needed function. Then it creates programs based on the information
it has received. These programs determine how we will respond under a given
set of circumstances. Ideally, the information used to create the programs
would come from the conscious mind, which would determine the most appropriate
response, but this is generally not the way it works. More often, the unconscious
mind creates its own programs and sometimes they are based on faulty assumptions.
A lot of our programs were created when we were young, mostly before the
age of 7. This is when we decide what to value in ourselves, how to behave
under the circumstances that come up in our lives and so on. A simple example
is a young child whose first experience with a dog is being bitten and
frightened. This experience goes into the unconscious mind with a lot of
emotional intensity and the unconscious sets up a program that says … dog
= fear. … This child and future adult may always respond fearfully to dogs,
even though his experience was not typical of most dogs who are loving
and caring companions.
Another example from my own experience is a childhood
friend. Her father had two nicknames for her: stupid and clumsy. Whenever
he addressed her, he used one of these names. Each time her unconscious
mind took that information in and what came out was a self-image of being
stupid and clumsy. From my observation, she was quite intelligent, but
she had a big job ahead of her to understand that herself. In her mind,
she was stupid and clumsy, and that was a reasonable conclusion based on
her experience.
Examples like this go on and on. I'm sure you can think
of some in your own life. Any input a child receives from a parent, teacher
or peer has the potential of being taken at face value as an absolute truth
by the unconscious mind. This also extends into adulthood. And as a result,
most of us are going around with self-imposed limitations that are based
on situations that we have entirely forgotten. Unfortunately, the unconscious
mind never forgets and will continue to respond in the best way it knows
how until the programming is changed.
EATING AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
MIND
When we relate these concepts to food, we can understand
that we all have reasons for eating the things we eat. It is not that we
are out of control. Actually the unconscious mind has a reason for everything.
As was mentioned before, we are embarking on a Journey of awareness. You
are going to find out why you eat and work with your programming. Some
examples of programming related to food are obvious, like a child who picked
up the name Chubby at an early age. The name becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy, carried out by programs in the unconscious mind.
For now, the
important thing to realize is that the reasons we are the way we are, with
relation to our weight or any other part of our life, is because of the
way the four parts of our selves, the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual,
interact. It is all based on the programming in the unconscious mind. With
hypnotherapy all of this can be easily changed. As you have begun to see
first hand, hypnosis is simply a way to access the unconscious mind through
relaxation. Then you can make positive changes in the programming. With
this approach, we will use techniques to help you understand your programming,
make the changes you need to become your personal best and to stay that
way for life. This is in reality a lifelong Journey. You will probably
need to make adjustments as you go through the different stages of your
life and that it can all be joyful.
RESOURCES
If you want to
learn more, refer to these pages:
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