KAJAMA.COM NEWSLETTER

by Heather Tick, M.D.

Guided imagery, autogenic training, biofeedback, and hypnotherapy are all techniques that can enable us to reach deep states of relaxation. It was once thought that the autonomic nervous system and things such as heart rate and blood pressure could not be voluntarily controlled. But it turns out that with proper training we can, for example, be trained to slow our heart rate and lower our blood pressure. We can dilate our peripheral blood vessels and make our cold hands warm. This type of training can also be used to control our response to pain and thereby change our experience of pain. All these techniques require practice and have increased benefits with frequent use or training.

Guided Imagery

This is usually done with a recording or a guide who talks you through the exercise. It is a form of focused attention that leads you along a path of images, though they need not be only visual images. Some people can see images in their imagination, and others prefer to imagine hearing things, feeling things, or tasting things. It is generally relaxing and often involves mentally going to a safe place of your own choosing. There are many guided-imagery CDs and MP3s on the market. I am going to give you an example of taste imagery. It is best if you have someone read it to you while you are sitting comfortably with your eyes closed.

Imagine you are in a kitchen. Food is cooking quietly on the stove. You go over to the refrigerator and take out a plump, juicy lemon. You hold it in your hand, feeling the coolness. You put it close to your nose and get a faint aroma of lemon through the intact peel. You go over to the counter and take out a cutting board, and with a knife you cut the lemon in half. Some of the juice has spurted out and the aroma of lemon is strong. You see the beads of juice on the cut surface. Then you cut each half again so the lemon is in quarters, and you notice where a seed has been cut through. You pick up one of the quarters and hold it close to your nose and appreciate the lemony smell, then you bring the lemon to your mouth and bite into it.

Are you salivating yet? This is an example of how a mere image in your mind can change your body function. There is no real lemon there, but most people will salivate as if there were.

Autogenic Training

Autogenic training is another relaxation technique that helps you to reduce the effects of stress in your body by taking you through a series of images and affirmations. Mostly the statements address the symptoms of stress and aim at helping you achieve relaxation. There are tapes and therapists who can help with this practice. The scripts vary, but they go something like this.

Sit or lie down comfortably. Make sure you are not cold. Repeat each of the following statements three times and try to feel, in your body, the sensation suggested by the words.

I am completely calm.
My arms feel heavy and warm.
My legs feel heavy and warm.
My heartbeat is calm and regular.
My breathing is calm and regular.
My abdomen is warm and comfortable.
My forehead is pleasantly cool.
My neck and shoulders are heavy and warm.
I am at peace.

Biofeedback

Biofeedback, another relaxation technique, has traditionally used electronic instruments, such as blood pressure monitors and galvanic skin response meters, to aid in the training, but something as simple as biodots, small temperature-sensitive discs applied to the hands, can teach some of the same principles. People can learn to control specific functions; for example, they can increase their blood flow and relieve muscle tension and even migraine headaches.

Hypnotherapy

Hypnotherapy is a way to focus attention and achieve a state of deep relaxation. Some people fear hypnosis because they remember the nightclub acts where it seemed that people could be made to do things they would not normally do. Unlike in extremes of brainwashing, as seen in spy movies, you are in control when you are hypnotized. Hypnotherapy is often used for pain relief in childbirth and with headaches and other conditions as well.

Humor

Humor is a great way to de-stress. People have used humor in tragic theater since the Greek chorus in ancient times. Shakespeare made comic relief a regular part of his tragedies. Comedy helps us cope with the catastrophic. Laughter is infectious, and brain and body chemistry change in response to humor. There is now laughter yoga, which uses nonverbal exercises. Most participants start out pretending to laugh along with the program and usually end up in genuine fits of laughter. Laughter causes some of the same physiological changes as exercise and helps balance the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems.

Some research from Norway indicates that humor may prolong life. Norman Cousins, in the autobiographical Anatomy of an Illness, explains how humor was his best distraction from pain and helped him recover from a debilitating disease that his doctors had not expected him to survive. In his book, he lists funny lines from newspaper want ads that his friends collected for him. No matter how many times I read them, I am in hysterics. Loretta Laroche and Patch Adams, M.D., are health care professionals who have turned to laughter and humor in medical settings, and there is an entire program for medical clowns in Israel called the Dream Doctors. The Dream Doctors program is a three-year course to train medical clowns who have become part of the pediatric hospitals around the country. They are developing a graduate program as well. Patients and health care personnel state that the Dream Doctors reduce stress and help the children through traumatic and painful events. Look at someone who is frowning, then look at someone who has even a little smile. Does it feel different for you? Who would you rather be faced with? Remember you have that effect on others when you smile.

Dr. Heather Tick is the author of Holistic Pain Relief and has been an integrative medical practitioner for over 20 years. A sought-after speaker, she lives in Seattle and works at the University of Washington, where she is the first Gunn-Loke Endowed Professor for Integrative Pain Medicine. Visit her online at heathertickmd.com.
Adapted from the book Holistic Pain Relief ©2013 by Dr. Heather Tick. Published with permission of New World Library.

I hope you are all in very good health! For some time, I have been experiencing some intrusion into my state of being from members of a religious group I used to be involved with. They are doing everything in their power to get me under their influence. I am no longer involved with their group and made a decision to cease contact with them ages ago. As a result of that, they tried using tactics to change my mind, such as offering me holidays, expensive gifts, etc. I still declined their offers and politely told them that I am sticking with my decision. I thought that they would eventually stop influencing me, but to my surprise, they continued to send me gifts and mail and regularly call me on the phone. Some of these members have appeared in my dreams on numerous occasions. I am very concerned about this and would be grateful if you could kindly advise me on how to protect myself from them spiritually. Thank you very much in advance for your kind help and support.

John

Susyn:

Thanks for your well wishes.

Your situation is not uncommon. I think it speaks to a much bigger social problem than religious groups. As humans, we are often bombarded with outside pressure by people who are trying to control, manipulate and influence us to their way of thinking. Remaining true to ourselves and our spiritual values is a challenge we face every day.

Religious groups have long been high-profile institutions that seek to control their members. Over the last thirty years, thanks to a global spiritual awakening, many of us have discovered that we can form a relationship with Spirit directly, and no longer need these groups to tell us how to live or what to believe.

Years ago, I had an experience similar to yours. When I made a decision to leave a religious group I had gotten involved in, some members became highly focused on changing my mind and getting me to come back into their fold.

Of course, the ideal religious or spiritual group operates on the basis of attraction rather than promotion. We are drawn to these groups because of the joy, peace and enlightenment we witness in their members. We should be the ones who seek them out, not the other way around.

There is good reason to be cautious or even alarmed when a religious group employs tactics such as gifts, frequent contact, and the haunting of your dreams. Here are a few ways to stop this unwanted activity and attention:

The first thing I recommend to bring these intrusions to a stop is to perform a freezing ritual. This won't harm the people in question but merely employ Spirit to block them from coming into your head, heart and home. You can find the directions for this freezing ritual in the Special Features area of my Kajama profile.

By performing this freezing ritual, you are asking the Universe to take care of this problem for you. Afterward, these emails, gifts and phone calls should diminish or stop completely. In the mean time, I recommend you ignore them. As spiritual beings, we are wise to avoid addressing or trying to deal with negative people and groups on our own; instead, we should turn these matters over to Spirit.

If you choose, you can also pray for this group and ask that its members become more enlightened. As you bless them and send them on their way, youíll be completing the very important lesson the Universe has just taught you, and in turn may teach them a very important lesson about the meaning and power of true spirituality.

*****

Mata:

According to physical law, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is why relationships tend to continue: one person does one thing and the other person responds, which incites yet another reaction. It's only when one person ignores the natural inclination to respond in kind that relationships change or peter out.

The first thing to do is quit reacting and stop taking their calls. Give these people none of your attention and energy. If they offer you something, simply ignore the offer and go on with your life like they don't exist. Do NOT keep anything they try to give to you, for you don't want to feel obliged to them in any way. Besides, anything you exchange will create an energetic connection between you. If you have anything they gave you, give it to someone else or donate it to a local charity.

That they are entering your dreams suggests there is a hole in your psychic defenses that needs to be healed. No doubt this stems from your fear that these people will be able to influence you against your will. You must overcome that fear with faith in your authority over your own life. To do this, you must seat yourself in your personal power.

Hopefully you are familiar with the legend of Excalibur, in which the English throne could only be held by the one person able to pull a magical sword from a stone. To claim dominion over your own kingdom of experience, you must affirm and wholeheartedly believe that no matter what others say or do, only you have the power to rule in your realm.

When others try to influence you against your will, imagine them with fake plastic swords and then visualize yourself holding Excalibur and shining with divinely ordained sovereignty over your own life and experience.

This will have the multiple effects of boosting your faith and personal power, raising your vibration, and disempowering those trying to influence you on an astral level.

On this metaphysical level, they are waving the equivalent of plastic swords at you, and by being afraid that they can actually force you to do something you don't want to do, you've given those swords power as though they were real. Now that you know they're plastic and that you possess the most power in your own domain, you can just laugh at them and be on your way.

Finally, remember that you have powerful spiritual allies. Pray to your guides and angels to shield you from these efforts and then fill your heart and mind with the thoughts and feelings of all the good things you want to create in your life.

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.