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.