There is an issue with the cache - please click CTRL + F5 to refresh fully and display correctly. Thank you!

Healing the Mind

Created on: 2025-04-06

Modified on: 2025-04-07

Meditation, hypnotherapy, psychosomatic illnesses, depression, neurological illnesses.

The mind-body connection is strong. A fright, or an emotional disturbance can make one ill, and conversely, by resolving emotional disturbances, many times a chronic health problem can be helped.

In my 20s, I was utterly exhausted with my first full time job. It was high pressure, and I had low energy, and frequent insomnia. I lived in chronic exhaustion, which took a heavy toll on my health.

I learned meditation at about 22. I first learned it from a book, and following its instructions, began to meditate for an hour a day. I was entirely alone in my practice, so had no idea that most people consider that a long time. That's what the book said, so that's what I did.

Very soon I noticed improvements. My energy improved, I felt generally better - and my time expenditure gave good returns - I noticed I needed two hours less sleep per night.

I also started to experience "clonisms" - muscular twitches. For example, you might notice that between meditations, for no obvious reason, your arm starts to jump; these twitches can come in rapid succession, maybe for twenty seconds, and then stop just as randomly.

Soon after, I enrolled in a formal meditation course. I learned different ways of meditating, and that the clonisms are releases of chronic tensions that have been there in the muscles for who knows how long.

My mood improved, as did my energy, and my health.

From Meditation to Hypnotherapy

In 2000-1 I formally studied hypnotherapy. Hypnotherapy is the practice of psychotherapy, using the same kind of trance states that meditation brings about.

With hypnotherapy, a therapist guides someone into trance, much faster than they would be able to by meditation alone, and with the client in that state, the therapist guides the client through psychotherapy.

Hypnotherapy can often quickly resolve problems that are slow to resolve with normal talking therapies.

Why?

Because in many situations, the problem is not in the conscious mind. For example, with an irrational fear, the person suffering from it usually knows at a conscious level that it's irrational, so simply talking about it doesn't help much.

In such cases, the phobia comes from the subconscious mind.

In hypnosis, or trance, a person remains aware and in control, but in a state of deep relaxation, in which his or her subconscious mind is more accessible.

Many of our thoughts are driven by subconscious beliefs, memories, and automatic responses. In trance, we can become more aware of these memories, re-evaluate our beliefs, and change our responses. Choosing to make these changes at the level of consciousness at which they operate has a greater effect.

So when hypnotherapy is conducted with a client in a state of trance, phobias and other such problems can be taken out by their roots, so to speak.

As a hypnotherapist, I have had the privilege of seeing, and bringing about, very fast cures of phobias, PTSD, anxiety, etc.

I think it's great.

A committed, regular meditator may experience deep trances from time to time, and these on their own can benefit all of the above conditions.

But having experienced first hand the benefits of long term regular meditation, and hypnotherapy, as both client and practitioner, I can say that hypnotherapy takes a person into trance much faster, and deals with specific problems much more directly.

A Placebo Effect? Healing Traumas and Phobias

Critics of hypnotherapy sometimes say, "Oh, it's just a placebo effect."

Well, what is a placebo effect?

At one level, it's improving someone's health via a change in their mental state. That change in mental state can be achieved with a sham medicine (perhaps a sugar pill), or more effectively with an honest trance induction. But the placebo effect argument is only made by people who've never experienced trance. Anyone who has, knows it is a real and profound thing.

Also, the changes that can be brought often go beyond what people expect. They can also occur in people who do not believe in the process.

When I first learned to treat PTSD, my first client had, prior to contacting me, been crying uncontrollably for weeks, about a traumatic event she had witnessed, which had also created a new phobia in her.

After one session of therapy, the crying stopped - note, it was not suppressed, but instead no longer needed. She commented on how strange it was that she was no longer crying.

And quite unexpectedly, the phobia was also gone. No treatment had been done specific to the phobia, however, its foundation was evidently the emotional trauma, and when the trauma was resolved, the phobia just faded away. Neither she nor I had expected that to happen.

Heal the Mind, Heal the Body

The capacity for trance to heal goes beyond healing the mind. Many times a person takes up a committed practice of meditation, or regular self-hypnosis, and notices specific, unexpected changes in their health. Perhaps a chronic illness improves.

I heard an anecdote about a meditator who experienced a rash after getting into a regular practice, which he attributed to his practice. Then the rash cleared up as mysteriously as it appeared. From a natural healing point of view, the rash was caused by the release of toxins previously trapped within the body - a minor curative crisis, which passed.

How does healing the mind help to heal the body?

When we're in a state of chronic stress, the body does not get enough rest. The body over-consumes its nutritional resources, and metabolic wastes are not adequately removed.

Sleep itself is very much a process of detoxifying the brain. During meditation, a person goes into a restful state, and over time, this restfulness permeates the rest of their day - they can do the same work with less effort, so less nutrition is required to get through the day. And then at night, they sleep easier and deeper.

Hypnotherapy can be directed to specific physical healing goals, and has been scientifically shown to have a benefit, for example with IBS (irritable bowel syndrome). In this case it's believed the hypnosis removes chronic tension in the gut and alleviates symptoms.

There are clear situations in which healing the mind heals the body. However, there is a limit to what can be achieved in this way. It was when I reached these limits for my own healing needs that I moved towards natural healing, ultimately completing training to be a healer in 2021.

Heal the Body, Heal the Mind

If the cause of someone's illness goes beyond chronic stress, there are other, physical factors at work: malnutrition; damage to tissues; the presence of toxins and parasites.

Parasites are far more common than most people realise, and are a major cause of chronic illnesses.

In each case, the problem is best dealt with directly. Damaged tissues might be healed with appropriate nutrition, and parasites can be expelled with plant remedies. This is far better than using toxic pharmaceuticals, as they create significant additional risks.

Note also that parasites are to be expelled, not killed, because to kill them would release their toxic loads back into the body. Better to remove parasites entirely.

And something great happens when you deal with the root causes of chronic health problems:

Mental health improves as well. Anxiety is reduced, mood lifts, concentration improves.

Depression, for example, is often a mixture of: bad situations; bad beliefs and thinking habits; mental exhaustion; malnutrition; toxins.

Not always, but many times, a bad situation is the least of these. Many depressed people will acknowledge that their lives aren't so bad when looked at objectively. Yet that doesn't lift their mood if the cause is rooted in their health. In that case, the poor health creates the low mood, and every problem seems magnified. Rationalising about this helps, but it's much more effective to address the physical cause.

Other neurological illnesses are similar. Lack of concentration is a mixture of habit, lack of specific nutrients, and toxicity. Meditation can certainly help, but if the root cause is malnutrition, that needs to be addressed.

Similarly, epilepsy, Alzheimer's disease, autism, and even schizophrenia have physical causes, and have been reversed through natural healing.

Conclusion

As we've seen, there's a reciprocal relationship between healing the mind and healing the body. Working on each one can benefit the other. The optimal solution to any problem is to identify the root causes, and deal with them directly.

Mental problems blur into neurological problems, with more manifestly physical symptoms, all of which benefit from natural healing.

- Antony

Notify me of new posts:

Please leave this box empty!:

*Name
*Email
Join I agree to terms and conditions.