“Remembered Wellness” – SourcePoint Therapy

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Photograph by Josh Schrei The Himalayas

Before Andrew Weil and Bruce Lipton, there was Herbert Benson, MD. He is the author of the fascinating book Timeless Healing: the Power and Biology of Belief, first published in 1995. Dr. Benson was ahead of his time in researching the effect of the mind on healing. His book is full of scientific studies on what is commonly called “the placebo effect.” He prefers to call it “remembered wellness” and I find this term very compatible with the principles of SourcePoint.

“Remembered wellness” is what happens when you connect to the blueprint. The body is recovering its memory of wholeness and completeness, of innate order, balance, harmony and flow. When you work with the points of SourcePoint Therapy, you are reminding the body of something it already knows.

Dr. Benson prescribes “the relaxation response” as a means of experiencing that remembered wellness. This is essentially a meditative technique to quiet the mind and connect with healing energies. As you know if you have experienced SourcePoint, a treatment can easily bring you to that place of deep relaxation.

There are other ways to evoke this remembered wellness that I have found through my own healing and work with other people. You can work with the conscious mind to evoke that memory. It’s best to work with a relative simple and minor injury to start with. It’s easier in that instance to let go of old belief systems and use the mind to alleviate the effect of the injury and support the process of the body’s natural self- healing.

As anyone who works with trauma knows, moments of trauma, even if they are minor, can get stuck in the body-mind. The flow of life is moving along and then something happens that disrupts that flow and that event gets frozen in time, in the memory. Instead of staying stuck in that moment, you can use your imagination, which is a powerful tool for healing. You can imagine the past differently to replace the memory of injury with a memory of wellness.

Let’s say I sprain an ankle, and I remember the principles and practices of SourcePoint. I immediately place my hands gently on my ankle, imagine the Diamond Points, breathe calmly and regularly, being aware of the breath, and repeat the words source, grounding, activation, transformation, as I visualize the points. Of course, if there’s someone around to hold the points for me, that’s even better.

Then I use my imagination to replay the event in my mind. I see myself walking along, coming to the place where the injury occurred, and instead of seeing the fall, I imagine myself continuing to walk right through that space and going on with my day. I feel myself doing that. At the level of space-time I am returning to the location of the injury, to the time of the injury, and seeing it differently, allowing the flow to progress along an alternative probability path, not getting stuck in the injury. As I imagine this, I am giving the body a deep message of how it was before the injury, before the wound, before the moment where the flow of health and wellness was disrupted.

I have used this approach frequently. It isn’t denial. It’s imagining a different outcome of a particular moment in time and letting my body experience that alternative. Studies have shown that the body reacts to imagination and visualization as it does to an actual event. In one study, some participants went to the gym and worked out; others did “virtual workouts” mentally. Those who went to the gym had a 30% muscle increase. Those who stayed home and did it mentally had a 13.5% increase, or almost half as much!

We aren’t looking to replace treatment at the physical level with this approach. We are looking to support the body in its healing, to bring in another level of support.Injuries need physical attention first!

After I imagine, I do the Guardian Points and invoke the guardians of the body to help me heal. The Diamond Points and Guardian Points in these acute situations for me are a kind of “energy first aid.”

I think we have barely tapped the surface of what Dr. Benson calls “timeless healing.” The potential of the healing power that comes from connecting to that original state of wellness, the blueprint for human health, we are really only beginning to discover and explore.