“The penguin sat quietly, keeping Amos’s feet warm.” — Philip Christian Stead, author
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Interoception
I am ready to assemble my book of hypnotic self-inductions for better awareness of your body’s internal functions. I created these visualizations while working with medical hypnosis, and developing clients’ extraordinary powers of healing.
Hypnosis can raise the temperature of your hands, put you to sleep, and excite your emotions. These are reasonable things that you’d expect to result from focusing your attention. But it goes beyond that.
Hypnosis can improve the synchronization of your heart (synchronizing breath with pulse), relieve skin conditions (caused by anxiety), cause warts to disappear (removing the symptoms of the human papillomavirus virus), alter internal blood flow to selected tissues (controlling internal bleeding during surgery), relieve addiction (also used in conjunction with neurofeedback), and change the ratio of your different white blood cells circulating in the body.
In these effects your mind affects your body through some means of which you are not conscious. For simple actions like warming your extremities, it’s easy to imagine that you have some voluntary control. For more complex interactions, such as altering the ratio of your leukocytes or removing warts, there is no testable mechanism. It happens with some consistency but not in all cases. That’s all we can say.
Self-Hypnosis
It’s unclear whether everyone can achieve extraordinary self control, but anyone can be hypnotised to varying degrees with more or less effort. This is said to be accomplished by “suggestion,” but that doesn’t explain anything. There’s a wide spectrum in the flexibility of people’s minds.
The ability to create an altered state varies with each person and issue. Experienced users of psychedelics, practiced meditators, athletes and professionals in mentally demanding trades are all able to enter and maintain altered states of mind.
One of the attractions of high-risk sports is their demand for your complete attention, which is necessary for survival. I’ve found a similar demand for my undivided attention in slack rope walking and mountain running where the smallest misstep will send you tumbling. Hyper focus is one of many hypnotic states.
You may not feel yourself hypnotized, but you frequently put yourself in a light hypnotic trance. Understanding hypnosis is really understanding consciousness, and our understanding is limited. Rather than be at a loss, why not create self-hypnosis visualizations to affect any part of your body?
Trance Induction
If you haven’t listened to my inductions before, let me explain how they work. You cannot self-hypnotize yourself by reading because the focus required to read interferes with the disengagement of hypnosis. On rare occasions you can read yourself to sleep, but once you fall asleep you don’t read any further.
In a hypnotic induction you move into a mentally detached state in which you’re still aware, awake, and responsive. You can still hear and think, but your thoughts are influenced to a greater degree by your feelings, memories, and associations. You are in an internal world somewhat like a dream, but more lucid. An induction that takes you into this kind of state must be spoken to you, and I do that using .mp3 audio files that you can download and listen to at your leisure.
There are two stages to hypnotic work, the relaxation and induction stage and the exploration and suggestion stage. Relaxation starts at the physical level and works to loosen your attachment to your sensations. These include your muscular, metabolic, and nervous systems. The more detached you are, the more deeply your subconscious thoughts come to the foreground.
The exploration stage invites ideas, images, and emotions. These are not ideas of which you’re unconscious, they’re rather ideas that play an indirect role in conscious thoughts. Mind-body hypnosis focuses on feelings and memories that create a connection between what you think and what you feel.
By imagining things you can make things happen. This does not work well in the external world—I disparage things like the Law of Attraction—but with hypnosis we’re working in the internal world. In the internal world you ultimately have control over everything your body does, you are just unaware of most of it. And while much of this control is involuntary, there may be elements of control that are responsive to your intentions.
With practice you can enhance your role in many of your internal functions. If you doubt me, then start with this induction for warming your feet. If you succeed, then what are your limits?
Warmth and coldness are unquestionable sensations, but you can also feel the quality of your circulation.
Poor circulation feels tight and dry and the feeling in your tissues—when you stop to focus on them—is thin and needy. Good circulation feels open and relaxed. Your tissues feel soft, full, and hydrated.
The feeling of being flush versus being needy is something you can conjure in your mind. You can use this feeling to affect your tissues.
Now Warm Your Feet
Begin by finding a comfortable place that’s warm and secure. Warm in temperature and warm in spirit. We all have worries, suspicions, and anxieties and these cause our bodies to tighten and restrict. Recognize these as life issues, find where you hold them in your body.
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Do that either by feeling the issues and sensing where in your body they reside, or by scanning your body and noticing the ideas that arise. Real or not, these are not issues of your present, physical comfort. They may be problems, but they may not be your problems now.
Start by sitting comfortably, arms and legs uncrossed, on a recliner, a couch, or a bed. Make sure there is insulation beneath your feet, a rug or pillow, and that your feet are protected.
Close your eyes and run your awareness up and down your spine, readjust your body so you’re not holding it in any position. Travel out along your arms and legs. Release any tension in your knees, elbows, wrists, and ankles and find a position where your limbs are comfortably supported.
Relax into your breath. Slowly count to four as you inhale, filling your lungs on the last count and immediately relax and let the air out, counting again to four, slowing you exhale so that you’re fully relaxed and, after the last count, begin to inhale again.
Do this once or twice to feel comfortable with the rhythm so that you can replace counting in your mind with the pulse of your heart, just feeling the rhythm in your body and your lungs. Let your heart beat synchronize your breathing rhythm.
Find a place within your body that is both relaxed and warm. This might be in your thighs or arm pits, or maybe around your heart or in the center of your body. Focus on and relax this area, breathe into it and imagine you’re blowing air across a coal causing it to glow. Like air blown on a smoldering fire, with each breath you feel the heat of that warm spot expanding into something fully tangible that you can see in your mind’s eye.
Place yourself in the center of the sensation of warmth. Scan your body and let the warmth make your joints soft and muscles limp. Relax wherever you feel structure or rigidity. Relax your spine, neck, and shoulders. Settle more deeply and adjust yourself so you are thoroughly comfortable.
Relax your hands and face, cheek, and jaw letting your features sag like when you’re going to sleep. Settle more deeply into a comfortable position, relaxing your body from your shoulders to your hips, thighs, knees, calves, and feet.
Return to the warm sensation inside you, and each time you return to the warm spot it becomes more noticeable, more independent of you, more of a separate sense of warmth inside you.
You can move this warm feeling, first around the area combining the warmth with sensations around it. Bring it to the surface of your chest and down to your stomach. Sliding like a heating pad over your groin, across your thighs to your knees. Your knees are often chilled and without sensation, so move the warmth across your knees to invigorate them, and then further down to your calves and shins.
Take a breath and combine the sensations in your calves with the sensation of warmth. Breathe in warmth… and breathe out any tension, feeling the warmth settle into your bones. Move the warmth down further to your ankles. There is no weight on your ankles so they can relax. Imagine your ankle joints are fluid and flexible. They are soft as marshmallows, and cannot bear the usual weight.
Inhale… and exhale… Move the warmth down to your feet, first to just below the ankles, then your heels, the tops of your feet and then the arches, balls, and toes. Your feet are supported and in contact with things that are soft and warm. The warmth relaxes the muscles and ligaments. Blood flows through your feet, through relaxed veins and arteries, and your feet become soft, warm, and hydrated.
The blood moves through your feet, flowing in to heat the tissues, the soles of your feet, the sides of your feet, and out to your toes. The blood deposits its heat, returning up your legs, back to your heart, to the source of your warmth. It regains its heat and flows back down your legs to warm your feet. All your blood makes a complete cycle of your body every minute.
Anchor the sensation of warmth. A tangible sensation as memorable as the heat of the midday sun and the radiance of sitting close to a fire. Lock this memory into your feet as something you’ll recall whenever they feel cushioned and insulated. They are warm and will stay warm, relaxed, and comfortable.
Now return to scanning your body, your spine, neck, back, shoulders, and head. Keep the sensation of warmth in your feet as you connect with the rest of your body. You’re aware of your breath and pulse. Imagine a halo blanketing you, circulating energy outside and inside your body, and your feet are within it, warm and protected.
Open your eyes and imagine this halo like an aura around you, a heat field, a shimmer maintained by your mind, your metabolism, your focus, and your circulation. As you move, this shimmer moves with you, and your feet and hands stay warm. Warm whenever you relax and move the life energy to them.
Breathe in to the count of four… and breathe out. Come back to awareness of the world a little differently, and you are more relaxed. Your circulation is improved, your feet are warm, and you are comfortable.
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https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com/product/warm-your-feet/
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