Enhance Healing by Guided Imagery

What is Guided Imagery?

Guided Imagery is a relaxation technique aimed at easing stress and promoting a sense of peace and tranquility at a stressful or difficult time in a person's life. It can be used by young children all the way up through the elderly.

Guided Imagery has been shown to promote wellness and optimize overall health.

Aristotle and Hippocrates believed in the power of images in the brain to enliven the heart and body. Today, research shows they were right. Guided imagery is helping patients use the full range of the body’s healing capacity, according to the January issue of Mayo Clinic Health Letter.Guided imagery is more than listening to relaxing sounds. It’s a learning process to listen to someone’s voice, relax the breathing and consciously direct the ability to imagine. The effect of guided vivid imagery sends a message to the emotional control center of the brain.

From there, the message is passed along to the body’s endocrine, immune and autonomic nervous systems. These systems influence a wide range of bodily functions, including heart and breathing rates and blood pressure.

Guided imagery has been shown to benefit patients by:

Reducing side effects from cancer treatment

Reducing fear and anxiety prior to surgery. Studies have shown that surgery patients who participated in two to four guided imagery sessions required less pain medication and left the hospital more quickly than those who hadn’t used imagery.

Managing stress

Managing headaches. Studies have shown that guided imagery may aid in reducing the frequency of migraine headaches as effectively as taking preventive medications

Stress, Illness, Health and Law of Attraction

The single most critical factor affecting productivity of workers is stress.
Performance eventually begins to decline if there is too much Stress.
Clearly only quality people can produce quality goods and services.
There is a direct relationship between the amount of Stress in our life and our performance.

Workload issues lie behind much of the stress we experience. Not only can a heavy workload be tiring in its own right, it often drives us to work much longer hours than we would really like. This means that we spend time working that we'd prefer to use for the things that give life value. It also means that we're working when we should really be resting. Worse than this, a heavy routine workload leaves us little time to deal with the emergencies that come up from time-to-time. This adds to the feeling of being "Burnout" or "out of control" that is so much part of stress.

Burnout is the term often associated with too much stress.

When Stress continues to go up, so does strain- which is an emotional and physical reaction to stress. This stress/strain relationship can occur either at work or at home and if permitted to build up, result decline in performance, but can have a negative impact on health too.

Understanding Stress

Peace or stress is a state of mind. The true key to stress management is the finer understanding of this experience and approaching it holistically. Most of the people believe that stress comes from external sources. Some complain nagging wife, hysterical husband, demands of the work or the exploitation of management as its cause. People throughout the world live with this conviction that factors outside themselves produce stress.

STRESSORS or the Stimulants of Stress are the pressures from the inside or the outside, which cause stress. Stress is never outside of ourselves. Stress is your RESPONSE to these stressors. Some common stressors are anger, conflicts, illnesses, violence, money difficulties, job problems, tests, tense relationships, competition, changes and losses.

Events are outside, and stress occurs when we react to them with certain emotional and biological responses. This gives us a great deal of control over life. We can choose to respond to anything in a relaxed, even-handed way, or succumb to the fight or-flight reactions that occur automatically when we feel threatened. Our fight-or-flight response was developed back in cave man times, and is designed to protect us by activating certain physiologic processes. Typically, a situation that produces feelings of fear, anger, or anxiety causes the adrenal glands to produce adrenaline. This powerful hormone causes a rise in blood pressure and signals the liver to dump cholesterol into the blood stream. The blood produces additional clotting factors to protect the body in case injury occurs. However, since most modern stress results from psychological pressure, there is no combat or physical struggle to dissipate the blood factors and clear the bloodstream. Instead, we literally internalize the reaction so that it registers on the permanent record of the blood vessels.
The hypertensions thus build up leads to various health and heart related problems.

Where your mind is anchored?
Have you ever tried to find out where from our stress originate?
If you do, you will find that all stresses originate from our mind, very clearly from our thoughts. A simple thought is not the issue. Any thought coupled with an emotion that is negative, agitates the mind.


The Laws of Universe

The Laws of Universe, also referred to as Spiritual Laws or Laws Of Nature are the unwavering and unchanging principles that rule our entire universe and are the means by which our world continues to thrive and exist.
Life works according to principle and physical law. The laws of the universe are totally dependable, impartial, unchangeable and impersonal.


Law of Attraction

Every thought, word, feeling and action we express contains a vibration and that vibration attracts like vibration.

Like attracts Like. This is the Law of Attraction.

It is similar to the law of gravity. Whether you believe the law of gravity or not, like all other natural laws, it is always in effect.
It doesn’t care how old you are, how young you are, how short, how fat, how skinny, your religion, your nationality or whether you are a male or a female. One thing is sure if you jump from the fifth floor of a building, you will land on ground, if nothing holds you in between!

We attract what we deeply believe, speak about and act upon. The mind attracts whatever is familiar to itself. A frightened mind attracts frightening experience. A confused mind attracts more confusion; the abundant mind attracts more abundance.

If that is the case, what is happening when we are under stress?
Have you noticed, whenever we are under stress our thoughts are either in the past or in the future and never in the present. They are all the time focusing on what should not happen instead of what should happen.

Whatever we expect to happen is determined by the thoughts we dwell upon plus the intensity of the emotions behind those thoughts. It is worth knowing that our subconscious does not question the validity of the data we present to it. It merely processes it and attracts to us what we believe to be true.
What we here need to understand is another rule of nature.
Whatever we focus on will expands.

When we are undergoing any stress that is what really happening. The thought what we are consciously or unconsciously focusing on, getting expanded by attracting similar thoughts or experiences of the past or anxieties of future and it goes on building up.

So in the final stages of managing stress or coping with stress, one need to clearly understand what exactly our Mind is and how our thoughts work. With that clarity, If we learn how to manage our mind and our thoughts, we learn how to manage and cope with most of our stresses.
In that clarity, you have the answer for most of your stress and health problems.