Here is a simple experiment that you can do right now to show you how the imagination creates reality. Imagine a large juicy lemon. It is a big thick, fat lemon, swollen with tart lemon juice. The fruit is very yellow and ripe. Now you can see yourself holding a knife, a sharp knife. You carefully cut into the lemon skin and slice around the lemon rind. The juice of this lemon starts to drip down the knife onto your hand. It is cool and sticky. You put down the knife and peel open the lemon exposing the yellow pulp. As you squeeze the lemon juice into a bowl, it smells tart and sweet.
Take note now of how your mouth is reacting; do you have saliva flowing freely, is your mouth puckering up. Can you smell the scent of the lemon? If so, you have a good ability to visualize and to imagine. When the imaginary lemon created these sensations, you were experiencing guided imagery. Your physical body reacted to imaginary stimuli, the lemon, which did not really exist except as a thought image by producing digestive enzymes in your mouth. Your body in other words was getting ready to eat a lemon and digest it.
Your mind created a change in your bodies’ chemical structure and began producing enzymes in your mouth and throat designed to digest an imaginary lemon. In other words from a state of non-reality you produced a state of reality. If you fully understand this process, it is not hard to expand the idea into learning to use thought and image to change many of the ways your body produces healing chemicals and rids it’s self of toxic chemicals and emotions.
The primary use and benefit of guided imagery in Qigong is in preventive maintenance. A good practitioner will seek out the little nagging problems, knots, areas of tension and misalignments, to eliminate them, thus showing you what your body should feel like all the time. Each time you practice Qigong with guided imagery, your body is given an opportunity to relax and align itself a little more, if only for a short time at first. This alignment is not only in a physical sense, such as alignment of muscle and bone and properly working systems, but mental and spiritual alignment may be achieved as well.
Therefore, no matter what the method or exercises, we must buy into the process and create a marriage of mind, imagery, and focused attention with body; all things working in synergy to produce the desired results. Dr. Painter has been able to successfully apply the principles mentioned here both in the healing Qigong practice of his Daoqiquan arts and in the martial training of “power standing” for developing internal power or Jin energy skill. As he says< “One treatment may seem like a ‘drop in the bucket’ . . . drop…drop…drop…drop. . . they keep building up until the bucket overflows with good health and internal power.”
Excerpted from: Qi-gong The Li Family Methods By: Dr. John P. Painter ND.
NOTE: It should be understood that, as a beginner, you should never try to cure your own disease without proper guidance, and you should always consult a competent medical doctor first if you suspect yourself or a friend to be seriously ill.
Thank you for the very interesting article on the link between our thoughts and our bodies’ reaction. at the bottom of the article it says: ‘excepted from Qi-Gong the Li Family Methods By: Dr J.P Painter’ – is htis a new book coming out? if so i am very interested in purchasing it – as your nine dragon books are the best books i have ever read on internal concepts and practical applications in over 25 years of interest in such matters. thank you ..Mike
Early in my professional career I was trained to use imaging, deep relaxation and hypnosis for therapeutic purposes. Later when I started my training in Jiulong I was amazed to encounter the sophisticated methods of relaxation and imaging that the Li Family had been employing for years to enhance health and martial prowess. It is a system that may be rooted in the past but it is supported by modern neuroscience.