Belleruth Naparstek discusses Guided Imagery - An Enlivening View

Staying Well With Guided Imagery by Belleruth Naparstek.

Belleruth Naparstek’s excellent book offers a step-by-step guide to the tenets of guided imagery as applied to physical, mental and spiritual concerns. Our sensory images are the only language the body understands and it can barely discriminate between the sensory images originating in the mind or in what we call reality. Naparstek is a psychotherapist and the author of Health Journeys guided imagery tapes. Her new book shows how people can find their own images to maintain health and wellness as well as fight major diseases. The book also clearly outlines current thinking about imagery, explains how and why it works, and describes the conditions under which it works best. This is a definitive look at a most healthful method of alternative health care.

 

The following is a edited version of Belleruth Naparstek’s Bodhi Tree presentation.

 

Belleruth Naparstek:When I talk about guided imagery, I'm talking about a deliberate, directed form of daydreaming using all of the senses. Visualization is not an acceptable word for this, because it's really sensory imagery involving all of the senses. Research has shown that probably the most powerful sense that we can use is the kinesthetic sense for imagery. You want to feel it in your body, because when you start thinking about sensory memory -- sights and smells and sounds and tastes -- it slides you over into the right side of your brain where you want to be to do effective imagery.

 

We're talking about the purposeful use of the imagination to help the body heal or to stay well -- or even help with behavioral change, performance anxiety or anything else that you have to face and would like to improve.

 

There's a lot about imagery that is really powerful. It's gentle, anybody can use it and you can apply it to so many things. There are circumstances that make guided imagery work best and there are different kinds of imagery. I will show how to play with them. 

 

Imagery works because images that we create in our minds can be almost as real to the body as an actual event. For instance, when you’re reading a recipe book, your mind starts creating sensory images of the food as you read the ingredients; you start to taste the food, smell it even. Maybe even hear it cooking. And your body responds - you salivate, get a little hungry, maybe your stomach starts to contract. It's because the body truly does not know the difference between the image and the real thing. And we can put that principle to work with imagery by tricking the body into thinking something real is going on just by engaging all of the senses.

 

The second reason why imagery works is that in the altered state -- a state of very focused relaxation where you're concentrating on a relatively narrow band of things -- you’re capable of more. We learn better, we heal faster. We change. We can be physically stronger and more competent. Guided imagery is the means to deliberately and purposefully elicit sensory memories and images in this altered state.

 

And the third reason why it works well is because it's a totally in-your-control kind of a technique. It depends on nothing but you. You get to do it how you want, when you want, where you want. You're utterly and completely the prime mover. And we know that when you feel like you're the locus of control, you have more self-esteem, more optimism, more energy and more motivation to do stuff in life.

 

Say you're sitting in a chemotherapy room waiting for your treatment and feel completely out of control. If you start to apply a technique like imagery -- it doesn't have to be imagery, so long as you apply something that's completely yours - you just settle back down into your body and feel in charge again. It can help you feel okay. 

 

So. Guided imagery is the deliberate creation of sensory images in the altered state and you do it when you want.

 

There's been a tremendous amount of research about imagery in the past ten years that has really shaped the way we look at it and changed what we think. We now know it's more powerful when you do it in a group than when you do it alone. And if you're having trouble doing it alone, it's good to do it in some kind of a group first. There is a contagiousness to the altered state that makes it much easier to sort of hitch a ride on somebody else's brainwaves in a group. And, interestingly enough, even if you've been having trouble alone, once you've worked in a group, you can more easily access a rich, deep intense altered state on your own. You've made the pathway with the group. 

 

The more you can deliberately elicit all of the senses, the more powerful it is. It's good to remember, for instance, sitting on grandma's lap feeling very safe and prized and protected as a four year-old when she told you your favorite story for the 200th time. But it's even better if you can imagine the smell of the soap she used on her skin and the feel of her lap being all soft and squishy and surrounding you. Or the look of her warm nubby blue sweater with all the little pills on it. And the sound of her low voice, maybe her breath tickling your ear. All of that sensory detail puts you in a trance state and you can't apprehend those sensory things without sliding over to the right side of your brain where you want to be for the most powerful imagery.

 

Your kinesthetic sense is remarkably powerful. One of the major things we've learned over the past 20 years -- both in spirituality and in healing -- it's a good idea to be in your body. For instance, it's a nice idea to imagine a tumor shrinking and seeing that happen, but it's an even better idea to imagine what that would feel like inside of your body. It's a very good idea to put your hands over the site and actually feel the warmth from your hands moving into your body as a way of connecting more deeply with that kinesthetic image.

 

Music gets apprehended on the right side of the brain, so it's a kissing cousin to imagery. Music that soothes you is useful to use, except perhaps if you are an ex-music major who analyzes music whenever you hear it. Then you slip over into the left side of your brain. Students of music really have a hard time listening to music and letting the music affect them. 

 

Any sort of imagery content that gets you feeling emotional in any way is good. Emotions, like music, are taken in and processed on the right side of the brain. Some people notice that while they're involved in some imagery, they start to just feel schmaltzy inside. Usually, it means that you're in the right side of your brain and the imagery is working. Actually, the two emotions that are effective for all-purpose healing are love and gratitude. If you remember times when you felt full of those emotions, you’ll be able to engage good healing imagery and it will get you over to the right side of your brain.

 

A lot of people say, if they've done imagery for the first time, "I don't know what happened to me. I started to cry. I didn't even feel bad, I don't think." Either you're rinsing that first layer of grief that we all carry around or you're just moved because you got back in touch with yourself and it feels rather sweet, so you get a little leaky.

 

There's absolutely no question that your skill at using imagery increases with practice; the intensity with which you can access a deep, intense, powerful imaging state expands. Some people are naturals at it, but, regardless of where you begin, you get better with practice. It might take you 25 minutes to get into a deep imagery state in the beginning. But you can get to a place where, literally, you're stopping for a traffic light and instead of getting aggravated with the traffic, you may choose to do some imagery and lower your blood pressure, in a matter of seconds. 

 

It's important that the imagery you use be congruent with your value system. Don't let anybody, including me or my book, tell you what kind of imagery is good for you because you'll know right away if it doesn't work for you. My friend Will had AIDS years ago and he was told by devout imagers that he should imagine that his white blood cells were beating up on his virus, attacking it and doing it in. The problem with that was that Will was one of the most gentle, unwarlike people in the world. So he decided that he would imagine that a pink Pepto Bismol-like goo was coming down and coating his virus, and he told it, "Don't worry, little virus, no one's going to hurt you, so just go to sleep." And, interestingly enough, this was years before they found that if you put the virus in a test tube and coated it with protein, it actually cannot enter a T-cell where it begins its cycle of damage.

 

Positive expectancy is not as important as some of us thought. It used to be that you have to believe it's going to help you or it won't. It helps if you think it's going to help you. But if you feel sort of cynical or "well, let's see about this" -- that's okay too. All you really need to do is be willing to put your critical judger on pause and just give it a try. You do not have to be a believer for it to work powerfully for you. Also, people who are perfectionist with themselves, who think that they blow it if they're not paying perfect attention needn’t worry. The right side of your brain could care less about paying strict attention. That's the mellow, meandering, dreamy, totally non-judgmental part of your mind and it will go wherever it feels like. If you drift away, just take your attention back.

 

There's now been significant research to show that you can fall asleep listening to a tape and you will completely get the information anyway. I knew a diabetic who used my diabetes tape. Her blood sugar was around 250, and you have to go on insulin when it's that high. Only, she kept falling asleep as soon as the tape started playing and her blood sugar was still going down, to the point where, by the time I met her it was below 125. You can't give it all to imagery but I think she got so excited and motivated that she was actually making a dent in her blood sugar that she started behaving better. And she never heard the tape. One day, she decided she was really going to listen to it. When she finally managed to see the thing through, she discovered the images on the tape that she had never consciously heard had been going through her head anyway. Some people say it may make a better dent while you're sleeping because there's no conscious resistance, you know. And you can get under your own resistance by tricking yourself.

 

Let me talk a little bit about the different kinds of imagery. The first is all-purpose, simple and very effective. It boosts immune functioning. It reduces blood pressure and it boosts general healing and re-growth in the body. I call it "feeling state imagery" and it’s simply the grandma's lap image that I gave earlier. It shifts your mood to something very positive, sweet and loving, safe and protected. If you never do anything but that, you'll be using imagery to your advantage. Dr. David Spiegel did a famous cancer study where he divided 68 patients into two groups. One group got state-of-the-art medical treatment and the other got the same medical treatment plus they met in a weekly support group where they did guided imagery and self-hypnosis. That group lived twice as long as the first group, and the only imagery they did was imagining themselves floating on the water with the sunshine on them. Absolutely simple.

 

End-state imagery is the process of seeing your body working the way you want it to. But you should experience it as close to what you can realistically expect to be able to do. An MS patient was talking to me about using end-state imagery to get out of bed without having her husband pulling her out. After two weeks she managed to get out of bed by herself. But it would not have worked for her to be doing end-state imagery that was seeing herself playing championship golf!

 

The fancier stuff is cellular imagery, where you need to understand how your cells work and what condition you're trying to work on. If you get it wrong and believe it works, it can mess you up. There's wonderful cellular imagery for cancer. When you produce a mutant cancer cell, these little natural killer cells can sniff it out, because there's a sort of biochemical trail that it leaves. So these cells start to collect around the cancer cell and throw little tentacles into it and poison it. It explodes from the inside out and then it collapses. Finally it collapses into this lacy looking filigree and little feeder cells come along and eat it up. They eat up the debris so that everything's just as clean as a whistle.

 

When you're doing cellular imagery, you really need to get it right. I knew a guy with diabetes who imagined that his cells kept the sugar away from them. That's exactly the wrong thing to do. You want to imagine the cells soaking the sugar in from the blood stream because if it stays in the blood stream, it corrodes everything and the cells are left starving. So, the cellular imagery is that the insulin finds those cells.

 

I want to go from cellular imagery to psychological imagery because I think there is a strong connection. I think that if you look at the way the cells behave in the body, you get a wonderful little hologram of a key psychological issue that's very important to the whole being. I'm not saying it's causal, but I think the issue for the whole being with somebody with diabetes has to do with permission to take from the environment, that there's some sort of resistance to letting yourself have sweetness or nourishment. You're born with an inherited tendency towards diabetes and you're probably also born with an inherited tendency towards a psychological stinginess with yourself. Just yourself. The psychological imagery would be another way to get at this diabetic hologram. The psychological imagery would be seeing yourself somehow getting permission to take. Letting it in.

 

Asthma is an interesting cellular issue. With asthma, you have these mast cells in the lungs. They're these little round cells and they've got these masts sticking out that are very sensitive little feelers. Every time some neutral little particle comes down, the cell explodes into a histamine response as if it were the enemy, even though it's not. It's the explosion that is the problem.

 

So what you want to do is find out what the problem is physically and how it needs to move for it to be healed; what a surgeon or what medicine would do or what natural healing would look like. And then imagining in a realistic way, something that the body can really do. For instance, if you've got gunky plaque-filled arteries, you might want to imagine that as the blood moves along the inside of the arteries, it's eroding in a very gentle, safe way the inside of those arteries so that they're becoming nice and soft and juicy and flexible again.

 

Energetic imagery uses the idea of energy in the body, free-flowing energy being what is healthy. Symptoms or problems in the body are indications of energy that's held away from the general flow. You want to imagine it joining the flow in the body, which basically moves up through the chakras in a snakelike pattern. 

 

Metaphoric imagery is taking any of the things that you're working with and using a metaphor instead. The right side of the brain really likes poetry and symbol and responds to it well. If you don't like to use this cellular imagery, you can use, for example, an army of noble soldiers marching through the body protecting the sovereignty and crushing the enemy.

 

Spiritual imagery is anything that connects you with your idea of God or all things, giving a sort of a mystical sense of oneness with everything. Kids will respond to this immediately, and parents intuitively know this, too. When a kid is having night terrors and can't fall asleep, many mothers will say, "Well, just imagine that there’s an angel in the room with you and looking out for you!”

 

And general wellness imagery basically takes the three basic things that a body is doing all the time to heal itself - it clears it out and it grows new good stuff. Imagery that you feel in the body. Don't feel like you have to analyze it. Just try the experience and just go with it.