Living Skillfully: Your Mind and Health

Euclid is said to have told a king looking for a quicker way to learn mathematics, “There is no royal road to geometry.”

photo credit: POSITiv

Part of the challenge of practicing hypnotherapy is to balance two truths: Hypnotherapy can bring about rapid and significant change, but only regular practice brings about the deepest change.

And regular practice does reliably do this, as Brain Blogger reminds us in Reflections on Plasticity.

Plasticity is a buzzword in neurological circles at the moment. The study of the brain has been thrown into a furore by the relatively recent discovery that even in adulthood our brains are constantly changing their structure in response to the challenges we give them (unless we don’t give them any, of course).

As the Brain Blogger post points out, this is also true of our bodies. Anyone who has kept up an exercise programme for any length of time has seen outward changes to their bodies, but the body also rearranges itself on the inside to meet the physical challenges it encounters regularly, changing how it processes and stores energy, for example.

photo credit: jcoterhals

Anything you’ve been practicing over a long period of time changes your brain (and quite probably your body) to make that practice the most straightforward thing to keep doing, in other words. Which is why when people come to me for help to change, I can’t just stop at helping them to shift their thoughts, feelings and behaviour into a new pattern. I need to give them a way to nurture and sustain that new pattern so that it can fully replace the old one.

The CDs I give people to listen to are part of this, but one of my key tools is a small blue bookmark which sets out two simple practices. I bang on about these all the time (they’re in my book, and they’ll probably be in the next one for that matter). I do this because they work.

The Welcoming Practice is a way of defusing the power of anger and fear in our lives. It’s a practice of paying attention to our negative emotions, pausing, acknowledging them, and then letting them go so that we can decide what to do next out of our whole brain instead of just a part the size of an almond.

photo credit: mynameisharsha

The Relaxation Response Practice is a way of returning our bodies and minds to their rest state on a regular basis. As I teach it, it’s also a way of practicing letting go of thoughts and emotions, so that when we get thoughts and emotions that potentially will drag us off to a place we don’t want to go, we have a mental muscle developed, and a reflex developed, which enables us to let them go instead.

In my first session with almost all my clients, I take them through a visualization in which they let go of the thing they no longer want or need. Thinking about this while writing this post, I need to emphasize to them that it is likely to keep coming back, and for as long as it does, they’re going to need to practice continuing to let it go.

The first letting go is an indication of a long-term intention for change, which brings about a significant shift. The long-term practice is what makes the change permanent. It’s like the difference between a wedding and a marriage.

photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography

Technorati Tags: practice, relaxation, personal change, plasticity, development, regular practice, welcoming practice, relaxation response

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