"Lisa, look at this! I can lift my arms above my head!" - Client who was seeking hypnotherapy to lose weight, resolved her chronic shoulder pain as a side benefit.
Here is the story...client comes to me looking for help with weight loss. She believes her 20 pound weight gain is due to her snacking when she's bored or stressed. Very common! Let's do some hypnosis to resolve this issue - we'll find the root cause of the snacking and work on the habitual aspect in our sessions.
After one session, this client had the insight that she actually mattered. She realized that she was in charge of her life and could make decisions. This made her feel empowered, so she decided to start making changes that will help all situations in her life. She started addressing the root issues and real problems.
A week later, in comes my client, looking a bit different. She's smiling more, standing up straighter and just has a different energy about her. She took the insights she got in her first session about food and applied them to her overall life. As a result, not only was her desire for snacking diminished, she took back her power in her relationship. An added benefit, her chronic pain had lessened, her chest felt opened up.
By her third session, she reported feeling like "there is such a weight off of me, the pressure is gone." She described feeling like she'd shed the emotional heaviness that was weighing her down - she felt physically lighter. She was down 7 pounds, but that was almost secondary to the changes she was making in her thoughts and actions in her daily life.
We didn't even discuss the chronic pain during our sessions. Turns out she had seen medical doctors over the years and nothing they recommended helped. She had just resigned to living with this pain. Today she reports that her pain is nearly gone, she's resolved the relationship issues and is loving life. What an amazing success story!
Sometimes our physical pain goes beyond the physical. Feelings of being scared, trapped, helpless, powerless, alone, etc. can manifest physically. These feelings can cause us to walk around in a protective type stance, shoulder caved forward, trying to make oneself look smaller or seem invisible, shoulders constantly scrunched up. Releasing the emotional energy trapped in the body can relax the physical manifestations.
Energetically, this area is tied to the 4th energy center call the heart chakra. Heart chakra love is about loving oneself through clearing old emotional wounds that hold us back and keep us focused on past issues, including grief and loss, sadness, despair and depression. If we don’t clear emotional wounds and patterns from childhood and our past, they can manifest themselves into similar patterns down the line in a new form. For example, fear of abandonment as a child can result in jealousy in adult relationships. They can also manifest as physical afflictions, as was experienced by my client.
Hypnosis is a tool that allows us to release these emotions.
Energetically, pain in the shoulders can be the result of feeling life is a burden; upper back problems may be associated with not feeling loved or supported; lung issues can be the result of our inability to take in life; arm issues can be associated with holding life’s experiences; heart conditions may be the result of not receiving or giving loving intimacy; breast issues may be the result of overprotective feelings of someone dear to you and your inability to nourish yourself.
How do we heal this? We can heal through forgiveness. When you listen to two children apologize to each other, one will say “I’m sorry” and the other will say “It’s okay.” We want to move beyond this child-like version of forgiveness into a more complex, soul freeing type of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the act of letting go of the attachment we have to wounds so we can move on from them. It is something that we do for ourselves. This forgiveness gets us past the victim status and moves us beyond the need for vengeance. Hypnosis is a powerful tool that allows us to get to this state of forgiveness. As a result, this type of forgiveness allows us to love freely and without condition, both ourselves and others.
Hypnosis is a tool that leads us to forgiveness.
So my client freed herself from the physical pain by releasing the emotional burdens she was carrying. She's down 17 pounds, which is almost secondary to the emotional freedom she has gained. Hers is a true transformation all around and an amazing hypnosis success story.