CHAPTER SIXTEENCREATIVE IMAGINATION AND HYPNOSIS
People often wonder about the difference between meditation and hypnosis. Psychologist and writer Jeanne Achterberg often speaks about the case of a young girl who was kidnapped, raped, and tortured in the early 1980s. I remember reading about that terrible tragedy and hearing about it for weeks on the news. After raping the girl, the kidnapper cut off both her arms and left her for dead. Miraculously, she walked miles to safety without bleeding to death even though both radial arteries were severed. When asked how she managed to save herself, the girl replied that she thought of herself as the bionic woman, an invincible character in a popular television show of the time.
This young girl, who survived through the power of imagining herself bionic, had inadvertently used an indirect form of hypnosis to staunch the flow of blood. While meditation has to do with emptying our minds of images, bringing forth the nonspecific healing physiology of the relaxation response, hypnosis is about creating vivid mental images that our bodies respond to specifically.
About one in twenty people are so capable of absorbing themselves in fantasy that their bodies can respond like that of the girl mentioned above. All of us respond somewhat to mental pictures when we blush, get goosebumps, or experience sexual arousal through fantasy. And even a moderate ability to use our imaginations can help tremendously in the healing process.
Children hospitalized in burn units must endure the pain of debridement when dead skin is scrubbed off the surface of their wounds to hasten the process of healing. When skin grafting is necessary, sometimes the grafts take, but other times they are sloughed off. Both the pain of debridement and the chance of a graft taking can be positively affected by hypnosis. Some children can be helped to relax and then given the direct hypnotic suggestion that their burned area feels completely numb and comfortable. Through hypnosis they can achieve partial or even complete control of pain during and even after debridement. An indirect form of hypnosis can also help these children's skin grafts take. Children who are shown informational diagrams about graft attachment in which little hands from the graft bed reach up and connect with little hands coming down from the skin graft have a significantly better chance of successful grafts. Their minds automatically incorporate the idea that healing is in the process of occurring.
Psychologist Neil Fiore wrote a marvelous letter to the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine when he was recovering from treatment for testicular cancer. He noticed that when you become a patient, you automatically enter a highly hypnotizable state. All your senses are focused on getting information that has to do with staying alive. That's a powerful focus! When any information relevant to survival is presented, the mind pounces on it. Even casual comments by the receptionist, noted Fiore, can be effective hypnotic suggestions. He wanted the whole health care team to know how their slightest word, gesture, or facial expression sinks directly into the mind of the patient as an indirect hypnotic suggestion.
Under normal circumstances, our minds tend to be scattered. We think about so many different things that none of them has much power. In this state, images come and go like a light snow that immediately blows off the road. But when the mind focuses, images can become deeply imbedded in the body/mind like a heavy, sticking snow. A casual comment to a person who is sick can thus be a strong hypnotic suggestion. For example, when a person with a life-threatening illness is invited to go to a winter coat sale in August, the image that forms is one of surviving through winter! As we imagine ourselves reaching future goals, healing images are being sent indirectly to the body.
When Karmu the healer messed with Miron's mind by having him soak in a bathtub of purple medicine for 11 minutes, he was employing an indirect form of hypnosis to cure a cold. The novel situation focused Miron's mind and made it receptive to changing his paradigm, or usual hypnotic mindset, from helplessness and pessimism to optimism and limitless possibility. The resultant changes in neuropeptides, blood flow, immune measures, and other physiological processes resulted in an immediate cure of Miron's cold, even though the cold, per se, was never mentioned!
A more direct approach might have involved suggestions to mobilize Miron's white cells to destroy cold viruses. There is currently no research that speaks to the particular efficacy of either direct or indirect methods of hypnosis for healing from major illness. We have always felt that if a person feels particularly drawn to a certain type of healing image, then it's best to follow that intuitive lead. We're often asked whether an anatomically correct healing image is superior to a symbolic one. The best image is simply the one that feels most alive to you, whether it's a direct image of a microscopically detailed killer cell poking holes in a tumor cell, a knight spearing the enemy, or an image of attending your daughter's college graduation in seven more years.
One of the potential down-sides of using imagery for healing is the inadvertent creation of a life-or-death battle. When teaching imagery to cancer patients, I've noticed that some people get very excited and energized by the idea of their immune system conquering cancer cells. Other people find imagery a struggle. Either it doesn't seem appealing, or it actually becomes frightening because they keep wondering, “Am I doing this right? Am I helping myself enough? Will it be my own fault if I die? Could I be hurting myself by thinking wrong?” When Miron and I toured Australia with the recovered cancer patient, Dr. Ian Gawler, Ian gave a tremendous demonstration of how indirect negative imagery can subvert the entire healing process. He asked a group of workshop participants to close their eyes and meditate on anything they wanted other than a black horse. Close your eyes and try that for a minute. Hard, isn't it? Now close your eyes and meditate on a red rose.
The black horse represents not dying. When your efforts to heal are focused on the fear of death, when you are trying to keep death from happening, paradoxically you focus intently on it. So, when imagery techniques or any technique is done to prevent death, we indirectly create ongoing images of black horses. The red rose, on the other hand, represents a focus on life. When we use imagery or any other technique to live life with more creativity, joy, and love, we automatically enhance indirect healing imagery. It may be that a black horse will gallop through our rose field from time to time, but it isn't our major preoccupation. We are not hypnotized by it. We're not saying that Ian's strategy is right for everybody. Only you know whether you will feel empowered by the use of specific healing images or whether they might indirectly bring up images of death or failure.
Our son Andrei gave us a delightful lesson in the use of creative imagination and hypnosis when he was only six. We had just returned from a visit to the pediatrician, who had checked the bottom of Andrei's left foot and recommended surgery for a large, painful plantar wart. We felt frightened by the prospect of surgery and were motivated to try other things first. Miron and I knew the work of Harvard psychiatrist Owen Surman, who had conducted meticulous experiments on hypnosis and remission of warts. Warts, it seems, respond very well to suggestion. A delightful variety of ancient healing techniques including applying moss collected at the full moon are known to sometimes cure warts. Surman reasoned that the warts were really cured by the placebo effect, an indirect form of hypnosis brought about by belief in the efficacy of a treatment. He conducted an experiment with people who had intractable warts that previous treatments had not cured and sure enough, under hypnosis, over half the people were cured!
Bolstered by Surman's study data, Miron and I decided to hypnotize Andrei. The problem was that neither of us knew a thing about hypnosis. We had visions of hanging a crystal on a string and swinging it back and forth in front of him until he began to follow it like a cobra in a snakecharmer's basket. At that point, we reasoned, he would be in a trance, and we could offer some direct hypnotic suggestions for disappearance of the warts. Andrei, however, had no interest at all in playing the snake to my charmer. So, in a burst of inspiration, I told Andrei that we were going to teach him a magical wart-removal incantation. Kids like magic, so that got his attention.
Very solemnly, we had him pick up his foot and cradle it in his two hands. He was then told to close his eyes and repeat, “Begone, begone, begone wart. Begone in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen,” three times. This wart exorcism was repeated religiously every night before bed. In a week the wart had begun to turn black as its blood supply dried up. A few weeks later, it fell off and left a bed of new, pink skin. Andrei was very pleased with himself and for several years thereafter we occasionally heard mumbling behind closed doors about “begone” this or that. He generalized his wart healing prayer to colds, chicken pox, and other assorted maladies!
Unfortunately, when Andrei reached adolescence, his childhood experience seemed somehow naive or silly to him, and he lost the power to heal through the magic of his mind. Perhaps Jesus had a story or two such as this one in mind when he commented that only when we become as little children shall we enter the Kingdom of Heaven. To children all things are possible. To the Creator all things are possible. For us to co-create the Universe, we must indeed become again as little children. Entering into the meditative mind, the space of limitless possibility, is one way to become as little children. The other way, as we will begin to explore in the next chapter, is to face our fears and transform the wounds that limit our perception into a universal sense of compassion and creativity.
At workshops, people often ask us the difference between hypnosis and meditation. At the most basic level, meditation is the removal of all mindsets so that we can perceive the world freshly, as it is. Hypnosis, in contrast, is the cultivation of a particular mindset. Guided imagery exercises may incorporate meditation as well as both direct and indirect forms of hypnosis. Dr. Herbert Benson studied the physiology of the induction phase of hypnosis. The induction phase of classical, direct hypnosis is generally a period of relaxation or focus on the breathing that disengages our mental gears from outer concerns and delivers us into a state of focused, open attention. In other words, the induction phase is similar to meditation and elicits the same physiological response, the so-called relaxation response.
In the relaxed, aware state of meditation, we are most open to the power of the imagination. The relaxation response is like a doorway into other mental/physiological states. Once we go through that doorway, our bodies can respond in remarkable ways to suggestion. If touched by a finger that we are told is a hot poker, our skin may redden or even blister. Some people can inhibit or augment their body's immune response to substances such as tuberculin. Yogis can stop their breathing and heart rate so they appear dead, yet can “come back to life” hours or even days later. These changes clearly go beyond the core changes of the relaxation response.
In the late 1970s, I came across a wonderful book that I purchased for a dime at a garage sale. It was entitled Magic and Mystery in Tibet, by Alexandra David-Neel. I sat riveted as I read David-Neel's account of dressing like a man and actually sneaking into a Tibetan monastery to study. She reported some remarkable feats of creative imagination that she had seen the monks perform. Tibet once had a tradition of long-distance running called Longompa. The runners, however, prepared in a way totally antithetical to sports physiology. They meditated for years, using complex visualizations, while sitting in the bottom of ten-foot-deep holes. They were ready for competition when they could levitate out of the ground! That practice certainly caught my imagination.
Another practice that David-Neel described was called gTumo yoga. In Tibetan, gTumo means “fierce woman” and refers to the Qi or kundalini energy. This fiery energy is visualized running through certain subtle channels to purify people's negativity and bring them to spiritual awakening. A by-product of this practice is the liberation of intense heat. David-Neel described how gTumo practitioners were draped in wet sheets during a festival that falls on the full moon each February. Sitting in the cold, at high elevations in the Himalayas, they were able to dry several sheets in the course of the evening's prayers due to the heat caused by gTumo visualizations.
I was a postdoctoral fellow in Behavioral Medicine at Harvard Medical School at the time that I was reading David-Neel's book. My mentor, Herbert Benson, who was interested in studying advanced forms of meditation, found gTumo fascinating. Shortly after we had discussed it, his holiness the Dalai Lama came to Harvard, and we had the good fortune to meet him. He and Dr. Benson had a lively conversation concerning the physiological benefits and possibilities of meditation. When asked whether there were any practitioners of Longompa left, he laughed with his characteristically twinkling style and remarked that Longompa is no longer needed. We have airplanes now!
There are, however, still practitioners of gTumo, and his holiness allowed Dr, Benson and several other scientists to come to Dharamsala in India to study them. Their experiments indicated that the Tibetan monks could indeed raise their body temperatures more than ten degrees externally, although their core—or inner-temperature remained unchanged. Similar changes can be accomplished through biofeedback by simply asking people to “think warm.” One interesting experiment performed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers concerned gloves for Arctic climates. Men were put into a cold chamber under three conditions: thin leather gloves alone, thin leather gloves with the instruction “think warm,” and Arctic gloves. The men in the thin leather gloves who were told to “think warm” had hand temperatures equivalent to those in Arctic gear. It is a relief that we don't have to be accomplished yogis to use the power of our minds in ways that can help our bodies.
Meditation is also often used as a clinical treatment for Reynaud's disease, a condition in which the capillaries of the extremities constrict, with the result that hands and feet are cold, painful, and sometimes even blue. Some of my patients actually had to wear gloves in the supermarket when walking down the frozen food aisle. When they learned how to “think warm,” bringing to mind images of sitting in a hot bath or plunging their hands into warm sand, the gloves were no longer necessary. Similarly, hand-warming frequently cuts down on both the incidence and severity of migraine headaches. (There are several excellent books on the use of guided imagery for healing listed in the resources section.)
If you have any doubt about the power of imagination to affect your body, try this experiment.
Take a few letting-go breaths and allow your eyes to close. Now imagine that you are in the kitchen, opening your refrigerator. There on the top shelf is the biggest, juiciest yellow lemon you have ever seen. Take it out and feel its weight in your hand. What is the texture like? The color? Can you locate the end where the stem once was? Lift the lemon to your nose and smell it. Now scrape the lemon with a fingernail and smell it again. Is there a difference? Can you feel the lemon oil where the skin has been scraped? Now imagine taking the lemon over to a cutting board, picking up a sharp knife and cutting it neatly in half. Pick up one of the halves and watch the juice welling up. Now stick out your tongue and lick the lemon.
Did you notice any physiological response? Sometimes I pucker up in anticipation of doing that exercise, before I've actually imagined anything in particular. Our bodies respond not only to visual images but to simple thought. Some people can see in technicolor. Others see little or nothing, but they might have a particularly well-developed sense of touch or hearing, smell, or taste. Each one of us imagines in our own way. However your imagination works is fine. Can you remember the last time you ate at a restaurant? Whether you flashed on the taste, the emotions you felt, the sounds or the sights, doesn't matter. You had your own way of accessing the memory. This is all you require to use the power of the imagination for healing.
