Symbols of the Mind – There For Your Healing

My twenty year quest to understand and help people to use the powers of their own subsconscious mind has been a neverending and open ended journey.  I have been most fortunate to have been mentored by some highly knowledgeable persons.  These people, some very interesting authors, and my clients have taught me so much.  It has been my honor to cultivate slowly the methods of how to help a person to access parts of  the  deep inner self, which in turn guides one  them on one’s own path to healing change, and creation.

Each way or method has brought its own fascination, and there are many ways which seem to work.  Past life regression seemed to me at first as a method just too bizarre to really work.  Yet I and many others of scholarly pursuit have found that in this methodology, some story seems to emerge from a person’s mind, whether it be a story coming down from the Collective Unconscious as defined by the renowned Carl Jung, or whether it be a true past life experience.  Amazingly,   this story always brings with it a source message about whatever this-life situation seems to  be.  Relationship issues, or deep-seated emotions such as fear or depression or anger can often find their resolution in this past life story.   It may be thought of as a symbolic message  emerging from the mind, as in the great concepts of metaphor, made famous by the remarkable works of psychiatrist Dr. Milton Erickson.

In another model I sometimes use, I will ask a client to enter a state of relaxation, and then to find a certain emotion that they are experiencing somewhere in their body.  Often it shows up around the heart or in the head.  A short series of exercises of giving this emotion form and color seem to lead to a dissolution of both the form and the color.  This often brings about  almost an instant change in how a person is feeling.

Some of the most fascinating outcomes happen when I am assisting  a client who  is experiencing an inner conflict which holds him or her back from achieving a certain goal, such as losing weight, or stopping an addictive habit.   I help the person  give voice and purpose to the conflicting parts in his or her  mind.  Bringing these heretofore unconscious parts of the mind to the surface brings out information and healing that the conscious and reasoning mind itself could never address in hours and hours of sessions.

Another way healing can be accomplished is though a directive form of  hypnosis, in which a client is given a general framework..in this case, modeling the problem in the format of a library..therein  finding ways to let go of troubling aspects of the past that have been affecting a client’s present life, and then setting a framework of intent and a behavioral programming to create more positive thoughts and actions in the client’s future. I like to use this model to help people who would be unwilling to recall unpleasant or traumatizing memories.  I sometimes use this model as an introduction, and the client may then choose to move on to even deeper work.

I would like to describe one client’s story of the eagle that suddenly emerged to give her a sense of hope and strength, a very powerful symbol of her mind’s intent to move forward and heal.  This lively mother of four has suffered from life-changing symptoms of  fibromyalgia for several years.  She seemed to access at first just colors,  mostly purple and green;  she wondered if she was “doing this right”, seeing no resolution to a complex set of problems that may have had some of their origin in her childhood history of severe bullying.  Parts of her psyche emerged which alternately “beat up on her”  and then offered her a chance to rest;  yet she felt very stuck, in a life experience of never really being able to succeed, and not being able to move forward.  She suddenly clearly saw an eagle, a persistent eagle that called for me to speak to that part of her.. and the eagle brought an overview to her of her inner life purpose, now, and an emerging future. holding hope and courage.  Most interestingly, she felt free after this session, and pain free as well.

elephant-photoSee this beautiful elephant?  It was a gift from a grateful client.  She accessed the powerful image of an elephant from her own mind, during a session in which we were addressing her crippling lifelong inner pain;  it became in a sense her own form of protection, in a way “downloaded” from the collective unconscious.  Her constant felt sense of pain, we learned, had its origins in some tragedies from her childhood.  We did some healing work to address those origins, in hypnosis, and through parts of this process, she sought to draw from and add to her own inner strength.  She informed me that her elephants are keeping her safe now.

Many minds tell their awesome stories, and what amazes me is the finding of the inner strength and answers to perplexing problems that seem to come from the deep recesses of the mind.

Some people ask me how I can listen to peoples’ problems, day in and day out.  Indeed I find it to be my greatest honor to help people to get to their own source, and emerge from their depths with a new sense of hope and a motivation that they had previously felt lacking.