Take a deep breath. Sigh it out. Clear your mind. Relax. Listen to how meditation rejuvenated Ellen's mind, body and spirit.
Ellen's Story
"I was so scared I wished I could be hypnotized."
I grew up being a sensitive child, and I had various challenges where I learned that if I changed images in my mind, it would change my experience. Then in my post graduate work, which was in counseling, I happened to be doing an externship with a psychologist, and I jokingly said, "I am going to the dentist today and I am so scared I wish I could be hypnotized." He offered to hypnotize me, and in a matter of ten minutes, I had a very profound experience that I had never had in my life.
I had studied yoga and meditation, but I had never had anything so profound and deep. I felt like I was bathed in pure unconditional love. It was so profound for me that I decided I was going to make it a part of my life.
"Hypnotism or guided imagery is not anything new under the sun -- it is ancient, and we are all designed to experience it."
To access a different state of consciousness, you sit and you breathe. You become aware of your breathing, and you shift your attention from the outer world to what is going on inside your body. Just recognizing your breathing stops your stress response, and that alone can stop the progression of all kinds of unwanted aliments in the body.
When you achieve physical relaxation you seek to experience mental relaxation. One tool to experience mental relaxation is to count backwards. I start with 100 and count backwards, with each number that you count back you double your mental relaxation and all of a sudden the mind becomes quiet. Then you have access to your subconscious mind, which is powerful and is connected to universal mind, which is connected to your solar plexus, which directs your body processes, which is how people stop smoking or change the course of an illness in one session.
"It completely changed the way I deal with stressful situations."
Before I started meditating I had a lot of anxiety, digestion problems and chronic tension. I was a high achiever and very self critical. I had weight issues and I had people make fun of me. After experiencing the bliss of being hypnotized before the dentist visit, I applied it to everything. I have five children, and the first one I had with hypnosis and no anesthesia. Then I used hypnosis to lose the 50 pounds I gained with each child. Now I use it in my practice, which I call Imadulation, to help people with everything from relationships to chemotherapy.
"We have all the answers we need inside of ourselves; we just have to access them."
Our culture is outer-focused, and we always look for answers outside of ourselves. Really the answer is within. We need to have the tools to know that when we stop and are quiet and go within, we have access to everything that we need.
"Meditating affects not just our health, but also how we are in the world."
It takes some discipline to say, "I am going to be protective of my time everyday. Ten minutes before I start my day to use the power of my own creative imagination to choose how I am going to live my life, to choose how my day is going to be, to choose my health, my thoughts, the people I am going to attract in my life, the life I want to create for myself."
I am very protective of that time for myself. I take the time during the day or the evening to sit quietly and have my meditation time. It can be 10 minutes, but ideally it's 30 minutes or longer. If everyone took a few minutes every day to relax, there wouldn't be wars, there wouldn't be road rage. We wouldn't be violent, we wouldn't steal. We would be peaceful; we would be in touch with our own divinity and thus see it in one another and be able to connect to people on a different level.
"Being introduced to meditation and having that initial hypnosis completely changed my life."
It affected how I am in the world, what kind of mother I am, what I have chosen to do for my profession. I feel something immediately when I do it, and if I didn't continue it, I would feel the effects of not doing it. We need to take care of our bodies in all kinds of ways; we need to take care of the mind, body and spirit.
