“My pain is real; it’s physical and it genuinely hurts. Can hypnosis actually reduce my pain?”
Most of us often understand the mind and body as two separate entities. We’ve created a false division, labelling some practices as mental and others as physical, with corresponding treatments for each independently. But in truth, the mind and body are one, working together in union and cannot be separated. Physical healing happens because of mental processes. When we influence the mind, we are impacting the body as well. Many clients say, “My pain is real; it genuinely hurts. How can hypnosis reduce my physical pain?” What they’re really expressing is a misunderstanding of the mind-body connection. Like most people, they view the mind and body as two separate entities, not recognizing that they are deeply interconnected.
The simplest way to demonstrate the unity of mind and body is through a basic yet powerful technique that I am mentioning below.
Allow yourself to tap into your imagination as I guide you through this process:
Remember when you were a kid, hearing the bells of cart pullers selling Kulfi? The ones stored in the cool little box with cone-shaped moulds, a classic desi cooler! Now, picture this: hold out your hand and imagine I place a kulfi stick in it. With your other hand, create a cup below to avoid the dripping kulfi from falling on the ground. As you do, taste that cool, sugary, milky exterior—hard kulfi with a deliciously sweet coating. Now, as the kulfi melts away, it reveals the coolness and softness of kulfi. You can taste that flavour, can’t you? Swish it around in your mouth, and go ahead, chomp down on that imaginary kulfi. Chomp, chomp, chomp. Swallow it, and I’ll give you more if you want.
Now, think about what just happened. Did you notice anything? Chances are, your mouth is filled with saliva when you read about the milky, sweet flavour of the cool kulfi. The more you imagined licking and biting into it, the more intense that salivation became. Even though the kulfi was imaginary, your body responded physically. Interestingly, I never even referred to it as ‘real’ kulfi—I called it ‘imaginary’ kulfi the entire time. Yet, by tapping into the imaginative, creative, and intuitive parts of your mind and directing it towards a specific task, your body responded. In this case, your body produced saliva simply from the indirect suggestion of tasting cool and milky kulfi. This is a great way to understand how the mind and body are connected.
Clinical Hypnosis: Integrative to Psychotherapy and certain medical interventions
As clients engage in various forms of medical treatments, hypnotherapy can serve as a powerful tool, speeding the recovery process, enhancing comfort, and helping them achieve their goals more effectively. Often, people in tough situations have been unsure of how hypnosis or other mental or mindfulness techniques can help them. This simple exercise above demonstrates how engaging the imaginative, creative parts of the mind can directly impact the body. In this case, a mere suggestion about tasting the cool kulfi triggered a physical response.
When you shift your mind or introduce new ideas to it, the body responds. This concept has led to various developments in Psychology, Clinical hypnosis and Psychotherapy, especially curating techniques that help deal with many clinical disorders of Psychosomatic origin. These are the types of techniques that help clients to achieve meaningful results. Certain similar integrative therapeutic interventions lead to rapid responses, swift recovery, and quick healing for some of our clients.
