Below are the best articles we could find featuring belleruth naparstek about guided imagery.
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There are several studies claiming a 70-percent improvement rate for returning warriors who are treated for combat stress with various cognitive behavioral therapies and/or prolonged exposure strategies. But this is a misleading number.
Our service people are over-medicated downrange, mostly with legal drugs. This creates problems—from slower reaction times to possibly an increased vulnerability to suicide later on.
The tools that work so well are neither complicated nor expensive. They’re interventions that ping on the primitive structures in the brain, where posttraumatic stress sits and wreaks its havoc. These are tools like guided imagery, relaxation, meditation, hypnosis, and breath work.
We've come to understand that what best serves our sense of strength, wholeness, vitality and personal power is owning whatever it is we feel, no matter how unpleasant, and then just breathing it out.
Guided imagery is the lazy man's meditation (or woman's). It's a kind of deliberate, directed daydreaming, using soothing music and narrated suggestions designed to calm, empower, heal and nourish.
You can recover from posttraumatic stress. Certainly, you can significantly reduce—not just manage—its symptoms. But—and here’s the thing—not with traditional treatment.
Guided imagery (sometimes called guided meditation, visualization, mental rehearsal, and guided self-hypnosis) is a gentle but powerful technique that focuses the imagination in proactive, positive ways.
Photo Credit: Photographed by Karen Ollis / Distributed under the CC BY-SA 4.0 International license