Our minds are powerful things. You have the ability to heal yourself on many levels because your body believes what your mind tells it. Understanding this gives us a lot of possibility – and responsibility – in changing our lives for the better.

Children play to learn and grow. They are experts in having fun because they believe anything is possible through using their imaginations. We all have the ability to play, but we often don’t exercise our imaginations in our daily adult lives.

Think about a book you’ve read or a movie you’ve seen. We can get drawn into the stories, and our bodies respond to the scenes as if we were really there. This is an example of our imagination changing our body chemistry in response to imaginary situations. We can elicit this same reaction in our bodies when we change our mindset or perception of a negative event in our lives.

We tend to let past experiences affect our present and future choices and responses. Many times we have trained ourselves to repeat past mistakes because our perception of reality is actually a misperception. Once we are able to view our past mistakes as misperceptions, we are able to learn from them and forgive ourselves (and others) of blame. This allows us to experience new things with an open and positive mindset. By changing how we think, we are able to induce healing for ourselves.

Next week: how to put self-induced healing into practice