You sometimes hear people say that your body gives signals about how you are doing mentally or how good your life is. If you have pain somewhere, it has a physical cause, but that physical problem is ultimately due to something mental. This is where body work comes in. You then work with the body to solve emotional and mental problems in your life.
This doesn't mean you can always sport away problems. In this blog, I explore exactly what bodywork is and how hypnosis can contribute to it.
What is bodywork?
Bodywork is an alternative form of healing, this includes osteopathy and homeopathy, but you also have people who do bodywork alone, who then actually grab a collection of alternative healing methods that work with the body. Besides osteopathy and homeopathy, bodywork also includes reiki, yoga, pranayama, breathwork, therapeutic touch and a few other techniques[1].
So bodywork also has an overlap with energetic work.
You work with the body and mind to rebalance everything and restore the body to health.
Generally, in healthcare, the body is treated as something separate from the mind. You also have all kinds of departments in health care. You often go to the hospital for your body and to mental health for your mind. With bodywork, however, you start more from the whole. Your physical health is then more related to your mental health. This is then, for example, about your emotions and how your social life is going. The emotional and social factors of your illness are then also included.
I do have to admit that this is increasingly being incorporated into mainstream care as well, for example for minor problems, for advice on one's lifestyle and to prevent illness.
But then, if you really have something, you can still go to someone for bodywork if you are not satisfied with the solution offered by mainstream care.
Osteopathy often involves working with the body, while homeopathy often involves a conversation with the patient after which that person is given something to take home to use to solve their problem, such as certain herbs or something similar.
In homeopathy, symptoms are also not seen as signals that someone has a particular illness, but as signals that the body is working to heal itself. Action is then taken especially if the symptoms are chronic, because that would mean that healing has become "stuck.
With homeopathy, you can then get a remedy that will normally trigger the symptoms, allowing your body to get back to the healing process.
Observing clients also plays a role, such as how to see self-confidence (or lack thereof) in someone in or on the body[2].
This observation also plays an important role in hypnosis. So in that sense, there is overlap.
The body gives alerts
In addition, then, the body is trying to tell you something when you are sick, and if you don't listen to your body you will become even sicker in the future. So for example, you may have something and then you can ask yourself, "What does this say about me and what do I need to work on?"
So illness is not just something negative that comes with life, but a signal that interrupts your flow and forces you to think and try something new in your life that makes you feel better again.
It can be a positive force for change in your life. The body is a partner of the soul, not the personality. You can see complaints from your body as a signal from your subconscious and not something from what your ego cares about.
In bodywork, then, it is important to get a complete picture of the client. For example, of character, what someone likes, what someone dislikes, what someone is sensitive to, how someone handles their body, how someone handles their emotions, aspects of physical and emotional symptoms, what someone is suffering from, what aggravates symptoms or what improves symptoms.
Where in the body a person feels emotions. Fear, for example, can be felt in the heart, abdomen or legs, and so where this sits in turn affects the advice a homeopath gives.
Everyone has a story
The story a person has about themselves is also important for bodywork, because therein can be found possible causes. For example, you can use regression to go back to the first moment when a person felt a certain emotion and work with that to change the interpretation of that moment and therefore the emotion[3]. This is especially important if the emotion is important to the client's problems.
Because people often do not want to make connections between certain symptoms and life events, regression, a hypnosis technique, can help you convince people of certain connections because they experience the connection themselves with this technique.
As with energetic work, healing touch also plays an important role in bodywork.
In addition, story is also important, because in bodywork the idea is that your whole life is stored in your cells. Events create certain habits, tension and/or pain. In this way, the life story is then stored in the body.
Emotional bodywork
In bodywork, attention can be paid to your way of breathing[4]. The way you breathe often says something about your emotions, and if you can control the way you breathe, you can influence your emotions. In this way, breathing can be emotional bodywork.
Conscious breathing is also something you can do during meditation and yoga.
Breathing well is important for your physical and emotional health. It affects your immune system, stress, hormones, enzymes, blood pressure, brain signals, bowel movements, your posture and muscle relaxation.
All those physical effects, in turn, have emotional - psychological effects. It makes you feel better and allows you to breathe away negative emotions, so to speak.
Hypnosis can help with emotional bodywork by providing guided visualization while breathing. For example, by giving suggestions about breathing out negative emotions and breathing in positive emotions, you can already do a lot to support emotional bodywork.
In addition, as mentioned earlier, they also look at where in the body an emotion may be. Then again, there are hypnosis techniques to move the emotion into the body and even pull it out of the body.
Do you work with bodywork and want to learn more about hypnosis and how it can support your treatments? Then come to the free online master class.
Or enroll in one of our seminars or trainings. Trainings are conducted online with plenty of one-on-one assistance to ensure the flow of your learning curve.
