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 married young; I was 18 and my first husband was 23. We had a son and after six years of marriage, I left him and got a divorce. I am now 58 and have fallen totally and completely in love with him again. I miss him and want to be with him in the afterlife. Every day I fall in love with him more and more. Though I have remarried, I badly want to be with my ex-husband when I die. Is that possible? I didn't love him the way a wife should love her husband, but I was young and dumb and now I realize what a wonderful man I had.

- June

Susyn:

You speak of your first husband as though he has already died. Whether or not this is the case, it doesn't sound like he is present in your life right now, so it's interesting that your feelings for him are stronger than ever before.

First let me assure you that when we cross over into the afterlife, we will be reunited with all the people who touched us in special ways. There may not be marriage or partnership like what we experience here on Earth, but when our spirits leave our bodies and move to the next level, our hearts and souls become open enough to love and spend time with whomever we choose.

It's difficult to live with regrets, especially when we have no way of going back to either change things or make amends for our behavior. Also, now that you're older and have much more life experience, it's only natural for it to be easier for you to identify your part in the demise of your marriage. Once we can look past life-changing experiences and learn from them, our deeper, truer feelings can begin to shine through.

To alleviate your fears and regrets, you may want to write a letter to your ex-husband designed to make amends. It doesn't matter if he is living or crossed over, for this letter will be for you - you won't actually send it. This will help you get your thoughts down on paper, make your apologies, and release the hold the past has over you. Once you have finished the letter, burn it with a white candle as a ritual of release; this act alone should soften the strong feelings you've been struggling with.

There is no doubt that you are sincere in hoping that the two of you can someday be together. As love is at the core of all attraction, you have only to embrace your loving feelings to be led back to your first husband in the afterlife. Your biggest challenge now is to live in the present and continue to seek spiritual guidance on how to live the remainder of your life with joy and purpose. Knowing that you and your first husband will one day reunite should bring you peace, but you must not neglect the other people and activities in your life that require your attention now.

There are important lessons to learn in all of our life experiences. It sounds like in looking back, you have learned to see beyond the difficulties of your first marriage to the true love and blessings it contained. As you move forward, there will be many more experiences that can affirm life's never-ending lessons and the magical ways Spirit can support, guide and enlighten you.

*****

Mata:

I wish you had shared what happened to make you feel this way now, for knowing that would illuminate a great deal about why your feelings have changed and what this strong desire may mean on a deeper spiritual level.

For example, it is possible that your strong feelings may not be about your ex-husband at all, but instead are about some needs you have that are going unfulfilled in your current marriage. They may also have arisen because your soul is calling you to further heal and release the past so you can grow to fully embody the wisdom you've gained over the years.

The main thing that leapt out at me from your question was a sense of how your current perspective on all of this seems rather limited. If you step back to view the big picture, hopefully you will realize that if you feel this way about your ex-husband now, it is entirely possible that if you were with him, your feelings would shift again and you would feel the same way about wanting to be with your current husband.

It's human nature to see the grass on the other side as greener and to want what we can't have. It's also very easy to look past all we don't like about a relationship or situation when we never have to actually live with it. In our minds, we may glorify the past by remembering only the good times, and gild the future by imagining that what we think we want to happen will truly make all our dreams come true.

I'm not saying that your desire is false; I'm just suggesting that you would be wise to learn from this experience by recognizing the good in your current husband and making the most of that relationship.

All desires are eventually fulfilled, and all karma must one day be resolved, so it is certain that you will not only reunite with your husband in the afterlife but also reincarnate with him in order to finish what you started in a more positive, fulfilling way. If you strongly desire to be his wife again, then that is almost sure to happen. Love is eternal, so if you two truly love each other, your souls will naturally be drawn back toward each other again and again.

I would offer you this bit of advice: be careful about making one relationship or love more important than another. On some level, we are all one, so what we do to one person, we do to another as well as to ourselves. With this in mind, if you want to cultivate a happier, more fulfilling future, you would be wise to give the best of yourself to every person in your life, and make every relationship as good as it can be.

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.