Maggie Phillips

Provides practices for overcoming both physical and emotional pain by releasing negative feelings, gaining inner confidence, calming the body and more. Original.

Reversing Chronic Pain offers a dynamic framework for joining body and mind to speed the healing of traumatic pain from the body level up. Each chapter presents a body-centered skill set that can be mastered through a broad menu of practice exercises. The resulting interlinked somatic building blocks help readers shift from physical pain to body awareness, and from unstoppable suffering to heartfelt connection and peace. Building on the AIDS cocktail approach that reflects the fact that chronic pain is complex and no one tactic is likely to solve the problem, renowned expert Maggie Phillips presents a 10-1 pain plan comprised of easy strategies based on somatic experience. Even if the reader's pain is perceived as a "10" at the onset of the program, with 10 being intolerable, the somatic building blocks help shift the pain one point at a time until it gradually diminishes to "1" or even "zero." Showing how the common professional interventions--medication, physical therapy, acupuncture, biofeedback--may be more harmful than healing, Reversing Chronic Pain stresses self-treatment throughout, involving sufferers in attaining lives not simply endured but actively enjoyed.

The focus of Eastern healing is on correcting imbalance of disharmony so that qi, the life force energy that generates harmonious transformation in the body, can flow freely again. Using vivid examples, this book explores the possibility that psychological methods can be used in a similar way to address subtle energies in mindbody systems and thereby restore health. The author has presented highly acclaimed seminars on Ericksonian and clinical hypnosis, imagery, and ego-state therapy. Here she adds EMDR, thought field therapy (TFT), and body-focused therapy to the tools that can open inner pathways to healing that have been frozen by stress, past trauma, and developmental issues. Throughout the book she emphasizes the principles of gathering and building on strengths that each client already owns, using tools that provoke energetic flow to dissolve barriers to health, and selecting strategies that utilize the powerful effects of positive expectancy. In the first four sections, vivid, intriguing stories illustrate how EMDR, hypnosis, imagery, TFT, and body-focused therapy can be used to solve the mysteries of health crises triggered by general stresses and anxiety, posttraumatic stress, and the challenges of organic conditions such as cancer, head injury, arthritis, and cardiac disease. The final section presents three creative models for combining and integrating energy therapies to increase healing possibilities for individuals with complex health situations that do not respond to any one approach. Finding the Energy to Heal is an especially useful guide for professionals interested in cutting-edge methodology as well as for readers seeking solutions to perplexing health challenges.

The authors synthesize traditional and Ericksonian styles of hypnosis in practical methods that work consistently within their four-stage model of treatment.