Holiday Greetings!
I wish you and yours a Happy, Healthy and Joyful Holiday Season! Here are some ideas for better sleep, pain control and happiness:
Better Sleep: I am hearing many people need help with sleep. Managing stress, paying attention to healthy eating, exercise, some sunshine, drinking adequate water, laughter and making time for adequate sleep are some important areas for our attention. Others tell me that their sleep is improved if they have a long Epsom salt bath before bedtime in very warm water. I have also found this to be true for myself, to enjoy a deeper sleep and for faster rejuvenation of my body and mind. I love ocean cruises, so sometimes I relax my body step by step from the feet to the head. Then I imagine that I am on a cruise ship balcony room bed, feeling gentle rocking, hearing calming ocean waves and the quiet hum of the ship’s engine. Then I imagine that I am remembering the entertainment that I enjoyed that day, the fine food of the day, and any other activities that I love such a specific beach in the Caribbean. I am usually asleep in just a few minutes.
Pain Control: It is not easy to sleep or even enjoy life when suffering acute or chronic pain. Discomfort is also distracting and drains a lot of energy. Hypnosis is employed by physicians, dentists, and pain clinics to help. Here are few of the methods used:
- Imagination: Putting the pain in a balloon and floating it away; loading it on a train, truck, bus, airplane, or rocket as it is being transported away; opening valves and draining it away. Imagining the pain is getting stronger and stronger, covering a larger and larger area; then weaker and weaker, reducing to a smaller and smaller area, then to a pinpoint, to disappearing on a rocket blasting away to an endless universe never to be seen again.
- Imaginary healer hands and healing places: Healing travel to Lourdes, Jesus, even Elvis, God’s Hand, whatever appeals to that person’s subconscious mind. You can ask the subconscious what cure will work. Did you know that some famous celebrities, like Elvis have visited patients in hospitals and the patients felt healed, happier? “If you believe, it is so.” Belief can release the pleasure chemicals. The brain and body create thousands of different chemicals.
- Dissociation. That part of your body is no longer yours. It is separate from you, “over there.” Gone. Watch it walk away, vanish in a puff of smoke.
- Reinterpretation: That feeling is interesting. Can I make it larger, bigger, wider, taller? Now make it smaller, narrow, thinner, a pinpoint. What color is it? Change the color. Change its shape? How much water can it hold? Altering, changing it gives you a feeling of control and the possibility to reduce or end it.
- Real to imagined: Put real ice on the discomfort area. Memorize the numbness. Bring that feeling back in your imagination whenever you wish. Numb like ice, like a hand in the snow; numb like wood, like wearing a leather glove, no sensations, no feeling there.
- Distraction with music and headphones; focusing on your breathing, the temperature on different parts of your body, what you are experiencing with all your senses.
- Relaxation Hypnosis. Pain often vanishes automatically with the relaxation of hypnosis, without any direct instructions from the hypnotist. If the body is tight and tense, there is always more pain. At every seminar, many people report pain disappearing during hypnosis. Post- hypnotic suggestions can be given to extend the time of comfort.
- Self-hypnosis training is also valuable to help people to eliminate or reduce discomfort. The fastest way to master self-hypnosis is to be hypnotized first by a hypnotist or with a hypnosis recording. Once you know what it feels like, it is easier to do it right by yourself. Practise makes perfect. Some days you will experience more benefit than other days. Post-hypnotic instructions may be given to enhance one’s self-hypnosis skills.
- Moving/changing the discomfort: Moving the pain to a less important area such as from the back to a finger or a toe. You can even give it a ride in a moving truck. Changing the sensation to mild tingling, electrical type sensations can also help.
- Hand transfer: Suggest numbness in one hand such as: all sensations in your hand flow out of your fingers like sand from holes in a sack; remember that feeling of numbness in your mouth from the dentist’s novocaine, bring it back; the numbness of your foot or hand tingling, “falling asleep”; the valve in your wrist turns off, stopping all hand sensations; closing the gate from your spine to your brain closes off all sensations; dip your hand in the pail beside you with all that thick, safe, magical, numbing liquid; put that thick numbing glove on your hand and notice how that glove causes your hand to become more and more numb, like wood, like leather, like wax, no sensations, no feeling and it does not even feel a part of you anymore, the hand is gone.
Or, now that numb hand becomes light like a helium balloon, floats up to that place of discomfort, touches it and that part also becomes numb, as the numbness transfers. That hand floats away and comes back and each time it touches that spot, the numbness increases more, and the comfort grows and grows. I used this technique to numb myself in my gums when a tooth was extracted. I was not aware of any discomfort and time passed rapidly, as it usually does in hypnosis. (Should you be interested, you will find my pain control hypnosis recordings available on my website here: https://vanceromane.com/product/pain-control-3-cds-or-3-mp3-download/ )
Have a Wonderful Holiday Season and spread some cheer to others. A phone call, a visit, a good deed, praying for others, pay it forward, bringing happiness to others will return to you many times. We often forget about our own problems when we help others.
“The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.”
– Mark Twain
“Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Happiness is perfume, you can’t pour it on somebody else without getting a few drops on yourself.”
– James Van Der Zee
Living in the moment,
Vance Romane