Excerpt from Finding Your True Self (out of print)
Create an Image of Yourself as Someone You Love
Create an image of yourself as someone you love. Take some time and write about the future you, filled with self-love. As you fall asleep at night, hold that image in your mind. Your subconscious has nothing to do for the hours that your conscious mind is sleeping. You will benefit greatly by giving it some positive work to do. Remember, your subconscious is not capable of disagreeing with you. If you have negative thoughts that arise during this exercise, they come from your chatterbox. Acknowledge those thoughts and return to your image. This process will also re-train your mind to work for you rather than against you.
Learn to Love Your Body
Start to love your physical body. Thanks to the media, we are inundated in this country with an unrealistic image of how we “should” look. The bottom line is that we do not look like super models and never will. So, start to love the body that you do have. When you shower or bathe, as you wash each part, say something like this, “I love you legs; thanks for moving me forward in life. I love you face; thanks for smiling back at me in the mirror.” And so on. You may feel silly at first, but just do it.
Experience the Sensations of Love in Your Body
Here is a self-help exercise that will help you to experience yourself as an individual who deserves love.
Place yourself in a comfortable position, close your eyes, and take a few deep breaths. Allow your body to relax. Now, think of a person, place or thing that you positively know you love. Bring it to life in your imagination. What does the love feel like in your body? Where do you feel it? What are the sensations? Notice how you experience this love.
When you have a clear feeling of this love, imagine it flowing toward that person, place or thing, then circle the love around them, and bring it back to yourself. If you lose the feeling, start again. Feel it all over your body.
Notice your reactions to this exercise and record them in a journal. If you have a negative self-image, you may not find this to be a positive experience at first, but keep practicing. As I remind my clients, you did not become like this overnight, so you won’t make permanent changes that way either. Yet, when you persevere, you will gain assistance from a source greater than yourself.
Connect with Universal Love
Love, in my experience, is a quality of the universe. In fact, I have been able to tap into an all encompassing love in a very interesting way. One night, when I was driving to my dance lesson, I turned too early. Or so I thought. As I drove down what I thought was the wrong street, I passed the Sacramento Shriner’s Hospital. I thought to myself how ironic it was that I would be driving past this hospital while on my way to a dance lesson. You see, the doctors at Shriner’s in San Francisco got me up and walking for the first time when I was two and one half-years-old. Until then, I had spent a year in a body cast and almost another year in stretcher bars. The doctors that I’d seen at Orthopedic Hospital in Los Angeles wanted me to stay off my feet until I was eight or nine years old.
As I drove past Shriner’s that night, I felt an overwhelming feeling of pure love for those doctors. I believe that I was drawn to turn down that street and experience that feeling of love. It was a gift for me, and I believe that, on some level, it was also a gift for them. One of these days I will stop at Shriner’s and thank someone, it won’t matter who, for helping me to walk and eventually to dance! Since I can’t personally thank the doctors who treated me, I’ll thank someone in their place. I’ll feel good to have expressed this feeling verbally to someone, but in the meantime, every time I think about the doctors, I feel that love and express it in some fashion. Because I am willing to receive love, I’ve become a channel for it.
Improving Self-Esteem
Improving self-esteem is one of the easiest changes to make with hypnosis. It is the first improvement that I made to my own life back in 1981. I attended a self hypnosis workshop and learned to use hypnosis to manage chronic and acute pain. After the workshop I bought a self hypnosis tape on the subject of improving self-esteem from the instructor. The tape induced hypnosis and gave me positive suggestions for improving my self-esteem. At the time I was in the beginning stages of my first divorce. My self-esteem had not been good for years and at this time in my life it had hit an all time low. I had been married for almost fifteen years to an alcoholic. When he left me for another woman I remember thinking, “I’m so hard to live with that even an alcoholic doesn’t want to be married to me.” Whew. There was certainly nowhere to go from there except up.
I started listening to the self-esteem tape every night when I went to bed. After a few weeks I noticed some changes. I was thinking nicer thoughts about myself. That constant mental barrage of negativity was lifting. This was an incredible change for me. I had been in the trap that many of us experience of constantly belittling myself. But, as I continued to listen to the tape, the tide was turning. I began to like myself. My inner voice was supporting me rather than degrading me. I began to ask myself an important question: what do I want? For the first time in years I recognized that my needs and desires were worthwhile. Hypnosis opened a door within my subconscious that created a permanent shift. And since then I have never again fallen back into that low self-image. The growth process continues to this day and will for as long as I am on this planet.
I listened to the self-esteem tape daily for twelve weeks. I felt like a new person. When my new outlook weakened and those old patterns resurfaced, I played the tape again for a week. Once again I felt confident. I no longer play that particular tape because my self-esteem is now permanently restored. There is a list in the back of this book of the self hypnosis tapes that I have recorded.
Be joyful, be grateful, live in peace,
Katherine Zimmerman
Clinical Hypnotherapist
Photo by Alex Eckermann on Unsplash.com