Imagery

You mowed your lawn, weeded your garden and pruned your rosebushes, and now your back sizzles like a red-hot firecracker. You figure that you just overdid it and that the pain will soon subside. But hours later, your back is swollen and sore. Most people would take a couple of aspirin and put up their feet for the rest of the day. But not you.

Instead, you might close your eyes, take a few deep breaths and imagine that a block of ice is melting inside your neck and dripping down your back. Within minutes, the pain ebbs, and you’re ready to dance the night away.

Far-fetched? Hardly, say a growing number of doctors, nurses and other advocates of imagery, who contend that the imagination is a potent healer that has long been overlooked by practitioners of Western medicine. They say imagery can relieve pain, speed healing and help the body subdue hundreds of ailments, including depression, impotence, allergies and asthma.

“The power of the mind to influence the body is quite remarkable. Although it isn’t always curative, imagery can be helpful in 90 percent of the problems that people bring to the attention of their primary care physicians,” says Martin L. Rossman, M.D., co-director of the Academy for Guided Imagery in Mill Valley, California, and author of Healing Yourself: A Step-by-Step Program for Better Health through Imagery.

Every Picture Tells a Story

“Imagery is the most fundamental language we have. Everything you do the mind processes through images,” says Dennis Gersten, M.D., a San Diego psychiatrist and publisher of Atlantis, a bi-monthly imagery newsletter. “If you think about your childhood, you will probably remember images, not words. You ask anyone about his first memory of his parents, and it’s not going to be a conversation.”

Images aren’t necessarily visual but can be sounds, tastes, smells or a combination of sensations. One person’s imagery may be sparked by imagining a smell. For others, imagining that they’re touching an object, such as a tree, will trigger vivid images, Dr. Gersten says. In fact, the more senses you can conjure, the more powerful an image will be.

Think, for example, of holding a fresh, juicy lemon in your hand. Perhaps you can feel its texture or see the vividness of its yellow skin. As you slice it open, you see the juice squirt out of it. The lemon’s tart aroma is overwhelming. Finally, you stick it in your mouth, suck on it and taste the sour flavor as the juices roll over your tongue.

More than likely, your body reacted in some way to that image. For example, you may have begun to salivate.

“Imagery is the language that the mind uses to communicate with the body,” Dr. Gersten says. “You can’t really talk to a wart and say ‘Hey, go away,’ because that’s not the language that the brain uses to communicate with the body. You need to imagine that wart and see it shrinking. Imagery is the biological connection between the mind and body.”

Unfortunately, many of the images popping into our heads do more harm than good. In fact, the most common type of imagery is worry, says David Bresler, Ph.D., co-director of the Academy for Guided Imagery. Because when we worry, what we worry about exists only in our imaginations.

In just 30 seconds, for instance, a fragment of a song may zip through your head, which in turn sparks images of a good friend. That friend, unfortunately, just lost her job. Oops, that couldn’t happen to you, right? Well, there is that important presentation on Tuesday. Suppose you don’t make your sales quota this month? Your boss was a bit testy with you yesterday; does that mean something? In less than a minute, you’ve gone from a pleasant memory of a good friend to imagining yourself getting fired.

The average person has 10,000 thoughts or images like these careening through his mind each day, Dr. Gersten estimates. At least half of those thoughts are negative. Unharnessed, a steady dose of worry and other negative images can alter your physiology and make you more susceptible to a cornucopia of ailments, ranging from acne to arthritis, headaches to heart disease, ulcers to urinary tract infections, he says.

But if you can learn to direct and control the images in your head, you can help your body heal itself, Dr. Rossman says.

“The imagination is like a spirited, powerful horse. If it’s untamed, it can be dangerous and run you over,” Dr. Rossman says. “But if you learn to use your imagination in a way that is purposeful and directed, it can be a tremendously powerful vehicle to get you where you want to go, which in this case is better health.”

A New Look at an Old Remedy

The belief that your imagination can help cure your ills isn’t a new one. Imagery has been considered a healing tool in virtually all of the world’s cultures and is an integral part of many religions. Navajo Indians, for example, practice an elaborate form of imagery that encourages a person to “see” himself as healthy. Ancient Egyptians and Greeks, including Aristotle and Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, believed that images release spirits in the brain that arouse the heart and other parts of the body. They also thought that a strong image of a disease is enough to cause its symptoms.

Imagery continued to flourish during the Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the Swiss physician Paracelsus wrote that “the power of the imagination is a great factor in medicine. It may produce disease.......and it may cure them.” As recently as the early 1600s, imagery was thought to have such a powerful influence on the body that it could even affect embryos in pregnant women.

But over the next 300 years, Western medicine discarded imagery as a heal ing tool as more and more doctors were indoctrinated with the teachings of René Descartes, a seventeenth-century French philosopher who believed the mind and body were separate and couldn’t possibly have any influence on each other.

Although Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and other European psychiatrists dabbled in treating patients with imagery, it was largely ignored in the United States until O. Carl Simonton, M.D., a radiation oncologist in Los Angeles, began using it in the early 1970s to help cancer patients. Dr. Simonton claimed that activity of the immune system could be boosted by visualizing strong white blood cells attacking weak cancer cells. Dr. Simonton tracked 159 patients, all with incurable cancer and all told that they had about a year to live. Using imagery as part of their treatment, 40 percent of those patients were still living four years later, and 22 percent of those went into full remission. In another 19 percent, the tumors shrank. Overall, people in the study who used imagery in conjunction with medical treatment lived twice as long as those who received medical care alone.

The Proof Isn’t an Illusion

“There’s definite evidence from Dr. Simonton and others that using imagery can dramatically enhance the quality of life and, in some cases, extend life,” Dr. Gersten says.

People with cancer, for instance, who used imagery while receiving chemo therapy felt more relaxed, better prepared for their treatment and more positive about care than those who didn’t use the technique, according to researchers at Ohio State University in Columbus.

Several studies suggest that imagery can also boost your immunity. Danish researchers, for example, found increased natural killer cell activity among ten college students who imagined that their immune systems were becoming very effective. Natural killer cells are an important part of the immune system because they can recognize and destroy virus-infected cells, tumor cells and other invaders.

In another small study, researchers at Pennsylvania State University in University Park and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland found that seven people who suffered from recurrent canker sores in their mouths significantly reduced the frequency of their outbreaks after they began visualizing that the sores were bathed in a soothing coating of white blood cells.

Imagery can also help alter menstrual cycles and relieve symptoms of premenstrual syndrome. In a preliminary study, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston found that 12 of 15 women, ages 21 to 40, who used imagery for three months lengthened their monthly menstrual cycles by an average of nearly four days and slashed their perceived levels of premenstrual distress in half. They also reported fewer mood swings.

At the University of South Florida in Tampa, researchers asked 19 men and women, ages 56 to 75, who had chronic bronchitis and emphysema to rate their levels of anxiety, depression, fatigue and discomfort before and after they began using imagery. The researchers concluded that imagery significantly improved the overall quality of these people’s lives.

Other studies have shown that imagery can lower blood pressure, slow heart rate and help treat insomnia, obesity and phobias, according to Anees Sheikh, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Marquette University in Milwaukee, and editor of Eastern and Western Approaches to Healing.

Is Imagery Virtual Reality?

How imagery works its wonders in the body is still a mystery. Some evidence suggests, however, that the brain reacts the same way to an imagined sensation as to a real one.

“Imagery is like reality in the sense that if you look at activity in the brain when you’re imagining something, it is strikingly similar to the activity that occurs when you’re perceiving reality,” Dr. Sheikh says.

Remember the lemon described earlier and how it probably caused you to secrete saliva in your mouth? Scientists know from PET (positron-emission tomography) scans, tests that show areas of brain activity, that imagery has similar effects on other parts of the body. Vividly imagining that you’re swinging a tennis racket, for instance, can actually stimulate the muscles in your shoulders and arms.

Some researchers theorize that images are formed as a result of electrochemical reactions in the limbic system, a portion of the brain that processes emotions such as pleasure, pain, fright and anger. As these images arise in the limbic system, they are probably interpreted by the cerebral cortex, which is involved in higher brain functions such as reasoning and memory. Without the cerebral cortex, these images would probably be meaningless to us, Dr. Gersten speculates. The limbic system is also connected by nerves to the hypothalamus, a portion of the brain that regulates body temperature, heart rate, hunger, thirst, sleeping and sexual arousal, and to the pituitary gland, which oversees all of your hormones.

So after an image forms in the limbic system and is deciphered by the cerebral cortex, the hypothalamus and pituitary gland scramble into action, causing physiological reactions throughout the body.

If you imagine yourself waterskiing, for example, your brain triggers the release of nerve impulses, chemicals and hormones from the hypothalamus and pituitary gland that affect every one of your cells. In return, the cells can send signals back to the brain that make the experience seem more vivid and cause the mind to release more chemicals to sustain that image.

So for better or worse, nearly every image has an effect on your body.

“Let’s say you’re stuck in traffic and you’re going to be late for an important meeting. What happens? You see all of those people impatiently waiting for you at the meeting. You’re not in that situation yet. You don’t even know if that’s what they’re doing. But you’ve created that image, and as a consequence, your heart rate goes up, your breathing becomes more shallow, your palms get sweaty, your hands get cold, and your muscles get tense. So that image is having a real physiological effect. You’re producing adrenaline, which is going to keep your body unnecessarily on alert,” says Barbara Dossey, R.N., director of Holistic Nursing Consultants in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and co-author of Rituals of Healing: Using Imagery for Health and Wellness.

On the other hand, if you could momentarily forget about the meeting and imagine a favorite scene, such as lying on a beach, climbing a mountain or playing with your child, that could spark the release of natural tranquilizers that would slow your breathing and heart rate, lower your anxiety and stimulate your immune system, Dossey says.

Getting Down to Basics

So if you can learn to use the images in your mind instead of letting them flow over you like a wild, untamed river, they can have positive, long-term effects on your health and well-being, Dr. Gersten says.

Is it difficult to master? “Everybody thinks, everyone feels, and everyone has images,” Dr. Gersten says. “It’s just a matter of practice. Virtually everyone can successfully use imagery. It’s a question of patience and persistence. It’s just like learning to play the piano. You put in the time, you put in the discipline, you can play the piano. Practice with imagery will produce results just like learning to play a musical instrument.”

How much time it will take before you begin to see results depends on the severity of your ailment, the vividness of your imagery and your own determination. A person who has a sprained ankle, for example, may get pain relief in just one five-minute imagery session, while it may take weeks for a person who has severe burns to notice any significant pain reduction.

“For almost any chronic ailment, it’s going to take a lot more time for imagery to work,” Dr. Gersten says.

Most proponents suggest practicing your imagery for 15 to 20 minutes a day initially to ensure that you’re learning to do it properly. But as you become more skilled and comfortable with the technique, you’ll be able to do it for just a few minutes at a time as needed throughout the day, Dr. Gersten says. (For more information on how to use imagery successfully, see “Making the Most of Your Images”.

To improve the quality of your images, become a keen observer of life, Dr. Sheikh advises. “Improving your observational skills is the most important thing you can do to make your images more vivid. If you’ve never really paid attention to what a rose looks like, smells like or feels like, your image of that rose is going be very vague and weak.”

The best images are the ones that you conjure for yourself, because they have personal meaning and will help you learn more about yourself than any imagery that can be suggested to you, Dr. Gersten says.

“Imagery always represents a part of yourself,” Dr. Bresler says. “It’s very much like the old Rorschach ink blot test, but people are making their own ink blots or images.”

The images suggested in Part II of this book will probably help you. But if they don’t, don’t give up. Instead, use these images as catalysts to help you create your own, Dr. Gersten recommends.

“These images will give you an idea about how to get started, but they may lead you to an image that is totally different, and that’s okay,” he says.