Dr. Emmett Miller argues that deep relaxation is the foundation of healing. Visualizations work by occupying the analytical mind so the right brain can do integrative work, allowing the body's innate healing capacity to activate.
Questions this video answers
Dr. Miller states that relaxation itself is the curative foundation; visualizations and goal‑focused imagery are tools that engage the left brain, allowing the right brain to achieve a unitive, non‑polar state. This centered receptivity is what ultimately enables the body’s innate healing processes.
Welcome to Ask Dr. Miller, where Dr. Miller answers your questions about mind-body health.
How much of the healing that you see with your patients and yourself in general, how much of it do you think is simply related to relaxation, to the fact that people You know, how much is due to simple relaxation, psychophysiologic, coming to terms with things so that in one way or another, whether someone practices deep relaxation as you so masterfully guide them through, or a meditation, or a prayer, or they come to terms and they relax. How much is due to then focusing on particular goals? Visualizations or imagery, goal states, and how much is due to the receptiveness or the receptivity that you have when you reach a centered, relaxed kind of state. I don't know that you can quantify that, but what's your perspective on that?
I believe that the imagery that we use, whether it's of a peaceful garden or if it's the imagery of working effectively, or if it's the imagery of your cancer cells fighting off the bad guys, or being beaten by the bad guys, etc. Whatever image, or that there is an inner guide within you, that's a story. Each, every one of these is a story. [Speaker:Q] Right. Most of those stories are simply about how to accomplish what we're calling relaxation, simple relaxation. A person can become a little relaxed or more relaxed or still more relaxed. What if we keep going down that continuum? What we get to is there's nowhere you have to go, there's nothing you have to do, there's no problem you have to solve, there is only this moment. Surrender into this moment and discover that you are a bubbling fountain of love and power and joy and potential. Now let it flow into your life. So when you say relaxation, what you're aiming at is exactly the state that I'm talking about. And my sense is that's what's curative, and that the different images and goals we give are are simply ways of entertaining the left brain so that the right brain can do what it needs to do. Every image, every effective image, in effect, links, shows the oneness, or brings together things that were separate within a person. And so I'm feeling uptight and sick, and I go inside and I meet this really healthy wise part of me, and we have a dialogue and energy flows between us, ah, and I feel better. What we've taken is two things represented on the left cerebral cortex as two separate things and allowed them to come together and become one. So it moves us, every image simply moves us to more of a unitive approach, a unitive way of thinking, which is a non-polar way of thinking, an organic way of thinking, which then allows us to let go of the fences that we had to protect us from the polarity because we no longer— in other words, relaxation, movement toward the center. So I'm not sure that it's all not just a way of entertaining people while they become the magical being that they are.
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