The Genie Within: Your Subconscious Mind (4 page)

       
    Some doctors, dentists, and therapists use hypnosis for medical purposes. I recently read, for example, that hypnosis is being used on severe burn patients. Other examples include control of chronic pain, anesthesia, birthing, and eliminating phobias. On the same PBS TV show mentioned above, a hypnotherapist cured a woman of a lifelong fear of snakes in just a few minutes. She fearlessly held a boa constrictor and let it wrap around her shoulders. The hypnotherapist also cured a man with a lifelong fear of spiders. The man let a tarantula crawl on his shoulders.

       
    Dr. James Esdaile, a Scottish surgeon, practicing in the 1800’s used hypnotism in operations before anesthesia was available. His rate of success was ten times above that of his colleagues. The hypnotized patients felt less pain and anxiety, which allowed their immune systems to repress infections. Dr. Esdaile also planted suggestions in their subconscious minds to expedite healing. The
mortality rate for operations in the mid 1800’s was 50 percent. In 161 operations performed by Dr. Esdaile using hypnosis, the mortality rate was a mere 5 percent.

       
    A young man I knew was embarrassed about the thick glasses he wore. He read two books by Margaret Darst Corbett who wrote about the theory of ophthalmologist, Dr. William H. Bates. Dr. Bates believed that poor eyesight was epidemic in our society due to stress caused by our hectic culture. This stress tensed the eye muscles, which distorted the eyeball. The distorted eyeball shifted the focal point and blurred vision. Dr. Bates cited examples of aboriginal cultures, which were free of the stresses of modern societies, where the people seldom had poor eyesight, even at old age.

             Dr. Bates’s cure was eye exercises designed to relax the muscles in the eye sockets so the eyeballs could return to their original shapes, making the use of glasses unnecessary. Eliminating eyeglasses was not popular with opticians, oculists, and ophthalmologists. It was not popular with anybody else either because the exercises were tedious, required dedication, and results were uncertain.

             The young man used his subconscious mind (the method discussed in Lesson Eight) to relax his eye muscles. Within weeks he could read without glasses.

       
    Phantom pregnancies (pseudocyesis) occur in some woman due to psychological reasons. When a woman has a phantom pregnancy, her subconscious mind causes:

                 •   Cessation of menstruation

                 •   Breast enlargement

                 •   Desire for strange foods

                 •   Progressive abdominal enlargement

                 •   Labor pains

       
    Impressive examples of the power of subconscious mind have been reported in medical journals in cases of patients with multiple personality disorder. Multiple personality disorder occurs when, due to severe psychological trauma, a person develops more than one personality to cope. Cases have been reported in which one personality:

                 •   Has asthma while another personality—in the same body—does not have asthma. Incidentally, cases of patients in which the doctor (one case was reported by Carl Jung) found that the asthma was due to a traumatic experience associated with breathing. Thus, the subconscious mind is capable of creating asthma. So one would assume it is also capable of eliminating it.

                 •   Has a high IQ, while another has a low IQ. This is not so impressive because it is easy for the subconscious mind to make anyone act dumb.

                 •   Is drunk, but when the person changes personalities, is sober. This is impressive because the subconscious mind, it seems to me, has to alter the chemistry in the brain.

                 •   Is right-handed; the other is left-handed.

                 •   Has different colored eyes from the other personality. I knew a man who changed the color of his eyes from brown to blue. It took him weeks to do it. But the person with multiple personality disorder does it in minutes.

                 •   Has scars, cysts, or tumors, while the other does not. This is plausible because there are records of hypnotists who have caused blisters to form on subjects and then make them disappear just as fast. The hypnotists touch the subjects with an ordinary object, such as a pencil, suggesting to them that it is a red-hot poker, and blisters form. Then the hypnotists suggest the subjects’ skin is normal and the blisters disappear.

                 •   Has an immediate healing. A multiple personality disorder patient who was allergic to wasp bites was stung near the eye. The eye area swelled so much that he was rushed to a hospital. Before arriving at the hospital, he changed personalities and the swelling disappeared.

       
    This following experiment demonstrates the effect our attitudes and beliefs can have on our bodies and health. In 1985, a Harvard professor, Ellen Langer, conducted an experiment that showed people could become younger
¹
. The professor recruited 100 people over 70 years old in the Boston area. She sent them on a 10-day vacation to a resort where she arranged the decor to resemble that of the 1950’s, a time when the subjects were decades younger. She played 50’s music, displayed 50’s magazines and newspapers, and had the subjects dress as they did in the 50’s. The professor also instructed the 100 people to “act as if” they were back in the 1950’s.

             Physical and psychological tests were performed on the 100 subjects before and after the 10 days. In every
category, the subjects tested younger. What changed? What took years off their apparent age? The only cause was a change in their thinking. Their subconscious minds accepted the concept of being younger.

       
    Your conscious mind sets limits for you. When you rid yourself of these limits, and let your subconscious mind take over, you can do things you thought impossible. Fifty years ago, experts wrote papers explaining why the human body could not run a mile in less than four minutes. Everyone, except Roger Banister, thought that running a mile in less than four minutes was impossible. When Banister broke the four-minute barrier in 1954, other runners duplicated the feat within months. What changed in these other runners? They did not magically become better conditioned or alter their running style. They changed their
belief!
They now knew a four-minute mile was possible, and if Roger could do it, they could do it.