I have read several times that mentally practising your basketball shot will improve your ability to make the basket as much as actually practising. I have read that monks in Tibet or somewhere over there wrap themselves in wet sheets wearing only loincloths under them and stay out in extreme cold, using mind power and imagination to heat up their bodies.
I think it takes a little extra effort to remember to use the imagination and actually take a moment to clearly and purposely envision what it is that you want. That effort to purposely set your mind on the intended target is important and corresponds to the work by Michael Merzenich. He is the scientist that showed that purposeful concentration in many tasks makes a difference, even to the point of being able to find physical differences in the brains of those who purposely tried and those who merely performed an action without thought or focus.
Personally, I doubt if you can think me to death. If you carefully imagine me having a heart attack, or winning the lottery for that matter, I don't think you will effect me one way or the other. It is surprisingly difficult to check it out. If you do set to work imagining (how long is optimal? How long do you need to hold me in your head?), probably nothing will happen. And of course, if I do keel over, or get notified of a dollar a year for a million years, it is extra difficult to show convincingly that what happened to me is BECAUSE of your thinking. I have even read of people in the hospital taking LONGER to heal when a group secretly prayed for them but I am not convinced that thought or prayer has any negative or opposite effect, either.
There are two areas where mind power seems clear and important: back pain and acting. The psychologist and therapist Ronald D. Siegel and a group of other authors have a whole book in the subject of back pain and much of the book is about the attitude and convictions people have about the cause and treatment of back pain. You can see that the idea is not just simply thinking one's back is ok or not ok but one's ideas and the ideas of the surrounding family, city, culture and historical epoch about pain, backs and related subjects. If you had heard all your life that back pain requires that you sacrifice a chicken, you might feel better after we perform a little properly conducted butchering.
In the last chapters of "The Body Keeps the Score", the author examines healing from trauma by acting a part that relates to facing in the play a situation similar to the one that is haunting your dreams. Traumatized people can sometimes be coached to "be" in the play something or someone they have not been able to be in real life. Once they feel themselves fulfilling the role and feeling the feelings they have been wanting to be able to realize, they can often feel ok about themselves and their earlier serious experience.
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