Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

I mentioned in my post on gaining control by integrating your mind that I’m reading Ernest Rossi’s The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing at the moment. What it does is provide for mind-body healing the two things that are needed for any idea to be taken seriously by scientists: experimental data and a credible mechanism.

I won’t go into the experimental data here, I’ll leave that for later posts. But I found the mechanism quite fascinating. Basically, all of the body’s control systems influence and communicate with each other (which makes sense), and they’re centrally coordinated largely through the hypothalamus, a structure in the brain about the size of a pea.

Here’s my conceptual diagram of what Rossi sets out as the pathways of communication and control.

Experts would no doubt debate which arrows should go both ways and which should only go one way (not to mention that the characterizations of “left” and “right” brains are oversimplified). But that’s the basic idea.

What this means is that I can sit in a room with you and talk – or you can even listen to a recording of me talking – and your cunning brain can translate (or, in Rossi’s term, “transduce”) the words into symbols, memories and emotions which, through your hypothalamus, can influence your body all the way down to the cellular level.

The idea that words can affect physical reactions by means of engaging emotion isn’t far-fetched at all. After all, when you blush because someone said something to embarrass you, your mind is controlling blood vessels in your face. When your stomach drops as you imagine being on a roller-coaster, or when your body floods with adrenalin as you watch a horror movie, your mind and imagination are producing physical reactions. The whole multi-billion-dollar pornography industry is built on the foundational fact that words and images, combined with imagination, produce physical effects.

Since Hans Selye in the 1930s, we’ve known that mental stress affects our physical health. Dr Herbert Benson is famed for his use of this knowledge in reversing the phenomenon, using relaxation to enhance health. But increasingly it’s becoming apparent that “mindbody” is a single integrated phenomenon, which is why working with the mind can help heal the body by bringing it back into balance.

In the course of this series I propose to look at research on the use of hypnotherapy and other techniques for mind-body healing, and talk about how you can apply these techniques for yourself. Make sure you subscribe to keep the information flowing.

Technorati Tags: mind-body, healing, relaxation, hypnosis, hypnotherapy, hypothalamus, psychobiology, emotion, imagination

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