The mind-body connection. Visualize health.

     Imagery is a healing tool that has been used by almost all ancient cultures.  It is used present-day to help treat cancer, to decrease hypertension and stress, to lose weight, quit smoking, and for athletes to increase their competitive edge.  The mind and body are connected.  The brain processes everything in images, and it communicates those images to the body.  The body, however, cannot tell if those communications from the brain are from real or imagined images.  Therefore, you can cause a mind-body intervention by guiding your imagery, your visualizations.  You need to make it personal and emotional to you....you don't want your body to perceive it as being false....plus you need to involve all your senses. 
     I recently read an on-line news story where a man cured his recurrent bladder cancer through intensive visualization of a healthy bladder wall.  Many people use sensory images including the loud buzzing of millions of white cells busily at work fighting cancer cells.  Others use a Pacman type image of white cells or ravenous polar bears floating through their blood streams gobbling all the evil intruders they see, which is what I did when I was diagnosed with a type of breast cancer in 1994.
     But I think Dean's imagery is the best.  Probably his right brain is more developed than mine because he is left-handed.  A little background info:  when he was a boy his family spent 2 weeks every summer at a rustic cabin at Cedar lake near Upsala, Minnesota, where they fished and swam.  In Dean's imagery he is back in his early twenties, young and strong.  He is in the boat on a warm summer afternoon, over in a back bay northwest of the cabin.  The boat is at anchor where the lake color goes from light green to darker green, where there is a drop off and the water deepens.  He is lying back against the boat's motor, dozing in the sun.  He feels the warmth of the sun and the sweat on his skin.  The sweat bubbles have little black cancer cells in them, which  have escaped his body through the pores of his skin.  And when the sweat bubbles break, the black spidery cancer cells run across his body, over to the side of the boat, and fall in the lake where circling large-mouth bass and northern pike quickly gobble them all up.

"Imagination decides everything."   Blaise Pascal