Arthritis is not the only source of joint pain that affects our body. Old sports injuries and car accident debris can affect our bodies for years after one has supposedly recovered from the acute effects of the accident. The former high school football player with an injured knee, the chronic pain of an old whiplash injury, those residual pains are all too familiar to many of us. Chronic emotional stress can also settle on the joints. Carpal tunnel syndrome is just one example of how emotional stress, often related to work, can settle in the body.
What if you could teach yourself simple movements that can easily eliminate pain and restore flexibility and strength in your joints? Movements that can address all of the sources of joint and muscle pain listed above. These movements are easy and painless to perform and take as little as 5 minutes a day. In other words, in about the time it would take to find and open a bottle of pills, fill a glass of water, and drink, your clients could experience moving toward radical pain reduction and joint healing and strengthening. . This is the promise of a new healing technology called hypnotic movement.
The concept of hypnotic movement is simple. The body has a deep internal understanding of how it wants and needs to move to relieve stress on the joint, increase healthy circulation, restore flexibility, and relieve pain. These simple movements are easy and natural for anyone to experience. In fact, most of us have already experienced a hypnotic movement at one point or another. Have you ever noticed the way your body stretches sometimes when you wake up in the morning with a stiff back? Sometimes when you wake up stiff and take the time to get up slowly, you may find that your body is stretched into a slow, relaxed stretch, your muscles may shake a bit, and you may even sigh or moan in pleasure as you stretch. Have you noticed how good your back feels after you have stretched the kinks this way? This is an example of a hypnotic movement. Of course you didn’t think you were in a trance. But you were, just waking up, in a state of relaxation and connection with your body and its needs.
This state of relaxation with increased body awareness is not the usual deep hypnotic trance state that most hypnotists and their clients are familiar with, in which the body rests in peace while a hypnotist guides it on a journey. and offers you hypnotic suggestions. It is a state of “alert trance”, like the morning stretch, in which gentle relaxation is combined with a deep awareness of our body and its sensations. This state is similar to the trance that athletes describe when they run a marathon or play at their peak at a sporting event. They call it being “in the zone,” a state of bliss where they step out of their daily worries and feel fused with their body while performing flawlessly in sport. Athletes know this altered state quite well and look for it in every competition and practice, although few understand that it is a type of hypnosis. To achieve the results of the hypnotic movement, you should work with a hypnotherapist who is familiar with this alert trance.
While many of us have given in to our body’s natural hypnotic movements from time to time, few of us listen to our body’s needs for movement very often because, as a culture, we have been trained to override the feelings and needs of our bodies when we were children. How often were we as young children told to stop fidgeting (a move small bodies should do a lot) when we were forced against our nature to sit still at a desk? Stop moving, stay still, no, you can’t go to the bathroom, don’t make those noises, children should be seen and not heard … etc., etc. It’s no wonder that most of us start to think of our body as a stupid object, a vehicle that transports us at best, but then has all those aches and pains that we don’t understand. Then we are taught to believe that there is nothing we can do about our body aches except take it to a doctor. There we receive pills to improve it. We have lost the knowledge of the healing powers of our body.
Well, there is good news. Your body may have stopped doing these healing movements years ago, but it still knows how to move in all those miraculous ways. All it takes is some help to awaken these latent inner powers! And that help can be provided by a hypnotherapist trained in Somatic Healing, of which the hypnotic movement is one of many techniques.
Let me illustrate this with a story. A client came to see me with severe sciatica. Pain constantly radiated up his right leg, forcing him to contemplate leaving his job permanently due to disability. While some people may be delighted with a ticket to a life of leisure, this man loved his job in the construction business and wanted to get back on his feet. Unfortunately, the doctors were not very hopeful, given the depth of her pain. As I gently led him into mild trance alertness, I gave him suggestions that his body knew exactly how to move in its own way to ease his pain. I used several other suggestions to trigger this move. Soon her body twisted in the peculiar combination of stretching and wiggling that is the hypnotic movement. In about three sessions, her pain disappeared. But, this was not just because of his work in my office.
No, he learned how to use the hypnotic movement on his own and simply did these simple exercises every time the pain appeared and at night while lying in bed. Soon he was back at work. Then one day, he fell off a platform at work and sprained his ankle. The pain was severe, but by then she had mastered the art of listening to her body’s needs. No, he didn’t call me. He spent a few minutes resting at the workplace, relaxing into that deep state of body awareness we call “The Zone.” Then he let his foot move for a few minutes very slowly, painlessly, in a unique and proper way, as he had been taught. After half an hour he was no longer in pain and he got back on his feet. I was not there to witness this miracle, but he was delighted to share this story with me, and a co-worker called me to ask if I could teach him to use the powers that he had witnessed in such awe. That is why my favorite somatic healing practitioner, Brigitta D’Amato, calls this work “Somatic Self Healing.” Because we empower our clients to heal themselves!
I have trained hundreds of practitioners in these techniques as part of Somatic Healing training. Using hypnotic movement, we have achieved excellent results in a wide variety of conditions related to joints and movement, including:
o Rheumatoid Arthritis: I was crippled with the disease 29 years ago and developed this technology to heal myself. I have been completely symptom free since 1984. (I now use hypnotic movement to keep my body flexible and strong so that I can pursue my hobby of rock climbing and mountaineering. At 57 I have the flexibility and grace of a 30 year old. years thanks to the hypnotic movement) I have helped many more with this condition.
o Carpal Tunnel Syndrome – We have seen immediate reduction in pain, stiffness, and swelling, and continuous improvement through daily practice.
o Osteoarthritis – We have seen flexibility restored, swelling reduced or eliminated, and pain sometimes completely eliminated in the knees, hips, lower back, and fingers. One client was able to restore her ability to play her favorite Rachmaninoff piano pieces in one sitting by restoring the strength and flexibility of her fingers. Now he says that whenever his fingers start to swell and ache, he simply uses a simple massage and movement technique to restore complete freedom of movement in 5 minutes or less.
o Sciatica – I have worked with many clients helping them learn to rotate and realign their hips on their own
o Post-traumatic injury pain and stiffness: We have achieved remarkable results with long-term post-traumatic pain from car accidents and other injuries. We have had especially good results with whiplash injuries.
o Chronic back pain: the back responds quite well to hypnotic movement. Check out our web article, Back Pain Cure for more details, including hypnotic moves you can start doing now to improve your back.
o Post-surgical recovery: If you suffer from chronic pain even after corrective surgery, hypnotic movement can be very important for a full recovery. See our article on hypnosis and surgery for more details.
Would you like to learn these healing powers for your own body? I developed the process of the hypnotic movement in 1979. I have been teaching it since 1995. In all these years, I have discovered that almost anyone can learn to enter this delicious zone of body awareness, and can learn in a remarkably short time to become a master of the technique of hypnotic movement. It can be used in conjunction with pain relievers and any other medical and physical therapy treatments, which I find to work well with hypnotic movement. Tell your doctor that you want hypnotic movement therapy. So call our office at (800) 950-4984 and start learning now how to control and perhaps eliminate your pain while healing your joints!
