[Neurons] 2009 Meta Reflections #29

[L. Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Meta Reflections #28

June 29, 2009

Unleashing Your Health Potentials #2

 

 

 

UNLEASHING

YOUR HEALTH POTENTIALS

 

 

 




                     Do you know that you have health potentials?

                     Do you know or believe that your body knows how to
heal itself?

                     And even more than that, do you know or believe that
your body also knows how to create and experience vitality and well-being?

 

What we know from all of the studies in medicine and the healing arts is
that we are not the "healers."  Instead we are the facilitators of our
mind-body system which heals itself.  What doctors, nurses, the hospital
context, and other health practitioners actually do is enable the body to
heal itself.  We clean wounds, set broken bones, apply medicines that reduce
pain and/or infection, restore chemical balances, etc.  Somehow the body has
innate information so that it "knows" how to restore healthy functioning.
The "healing" we do mostly goes into the category of cooperating with the
working of the natural healing powers of the body.

 

Unleashing health potentials is therefore primarily a cooperative
facilitative activity.  We learn to work with and effectively collaborate
with the mind-body-emotion system.  It is in that way that you tap into the
potentials of your mind-body-emotion system that releases well-being,
energy, vitality, and meaningfulness.

 

In the last Meta Reflection I wrote about unleashing health potentials via
cooperating and facilitating with our need for moderate eating and
exercising and effective relaxing and sleeping.  And when you do that, you
generate lifestyle habits of health.  You thereby use these experiences to
generate and use the energy of your metabolism so that you have the "health"
that supports your life.

 

Unleashing those health potentials requires that you get the mind-emotion
part of your mind-body-emotion system on board with your health goals.  And
how do you get your mind-and-emotions on board so they work for you instead
of against you?  You use your intentionality to direct and govern attentions
and you use your meaning-making powers to set the frames that allows you to
see and live the important of eating, exercising, relaxing, and sleeping.

 

After you do that, then what?  What comes next is the ability to use your
believing in the frames that you set so that you set up a self-fulfilling
prophecy, a self-organization attractor, that will unleash more and more of
your natural healing powers.  In the field of medicine, this is called "the
Placebo Effect" and for the majority in that field, this is a big mystery-
an area of confusion.

            "Anatomically the neural basis of the placebo is a mystery."
(Dylan, 2004, p. 72)

 

"Placebos are not only puzzles to be 'solved,' but-to the extent that they
elude ready solutions-they also teach us how far we still are from closure
on the question of what it will mean to create a science subtle and complex
enough to encompass all that is entailed in being human."  (Anne Harrington,
1997, p. 8)

 

What is the big mystery of placebos?  The mystery is the question about what
causes the effect of placebos and how is it that they have such a powerful
influence on our bodies for and/or against our health.  If the word
"placebo" is new to you, it originally meant "to please" (Latin, placere).
Doctors would please patients by making them think that they were giving
them something that would reduce pain or make them better.  Then they would
give them a little inert sugar pill or engage in some ritual (writing a
prescription, tapping somewhere on the body, etc.) and surprise of surprise
- it would often have a medicinal effect.  That it, the person's pain would
go away or they would get better.  While the pill or procedure had no
medicinal or healing value in itself -and yet it would work!  But how?   How
could that be?  How could a non-effective pill or empty ritual have a
medicinal value?

 

Today a placebo refers to any intervention that can be used to facilitate a
patient believing, expecting, and hoping that something will have a positive
value for health or healing.  It can be a pill, an injection, a cream,
surgery, diet, herb, or ritual.  Somehow in someway the placebo facilitates
a person to believe that something is going to be effective and somehow that
"belief" itself-as a state of mind-influences or effects the body to make
things better.

 

Now in Neuro-Semantics we have identified the structure of a belief as a
meta-state of a confirmation thought about a first-level primary thought
(Sub-Modalities Going Meta, 2005).   I came up with that in 1996 and
together with Bob Bodenhamer we co-developed the Meta-Yes pattern as a
belief creation and belief change pattern [you can find this pattern in most
of the Neuro-Semantic books and on the websites].  But don't be deceived,
while the pattern itself is simply; the structure is not.  The structure
profoundly transforms the "mind" and the matrix of frames in the mind.

 

Given this structure of what constitutes a "belief," a placebo belief
involves a person confirming his or her belief about a pill or procedure.
At the first level, the person believes:

"This pill is medicine.  This procedure will heal me.  What the doctor is
doing right now will reduce my pain."

 

At the meta-state level, the person believes something else.  He or she
believes:

"I know this will work!  Of course, this will work; no question.  No doubt."

 

In medicine, when a placebo works, it is called "the placebo effect."  Yet
if the effective agent is not the pill or the procedure, then what creates
the positive results?  Ultimately it somehow lies in the person's beliefs
which activate the body's powers of self-healing.  Placebos then become
powerful agents of healing through belief, expectation, and meaning.  Belief
somehow generates hope that sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy into action.
This creates the placebo effect which accesses some psycho-somatic mechanism
or processes within the body that results in a cure or healthful effect.

           How does a placebo do all of this?  What are the mechanisms
involved?

           Can we access and utilize these mechanisms for health and
healing?

           What processes will allow us to more effectively and
methodically harness the placebo effect?

 

Ah, great questions.  And the subject of the next Meta Reflection.  

 

 




 

 

 

L.  Michael Hall, Ph.D.

International Society of Neuro-Semantics

Meta-Coach Training System

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO.  81520 USA

1 970-523-7877

1 970-523-5790 fax

      <http://www.neurosemantics.com/> www.neurosemantics.com 

       <http://www.neuro-semantics-trainings.com/>
www.neuro-semantics-trainings.com 

       <http://www.self-actualizing.org/> www.self-actualizing.org

       <http://www.meta-coaching.org/> www.meta-coaching.org

       <http://www.ns-video.com/> www.ns-video.com 

 

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Hall are sent out every Monday and meta-Coach Reflections sent out every
Wednesdday to the Meta-Coaches egroup.

 

 

 

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