… Our brains form and store likenesses for every sensation triggered by the things we encounter: our perceptions.
Perceptions can be everything for which we have a sense: colours, scents, tastes, sounds, the feel of things, but also movement, posture and one’s awareness of one’s position and orientation in a given space. As this and that happened, from where I stood, the couch was to my right, the window to my left, and my aunt sat opposite me while the cat slept behind me.
Each single perception is part of our overall perception, connected to other perceptions through a variety of associations, as well as their interpretation (emotions and feelings) based on prior experience. So, like a gigantic inner archive, our brains each hold complex impressions consisting of the many single perceptions.
Our perceptions always influence our decisions, conscious actions, and spontaneous reactions — regardless of how aware we are of that influence at any given moment.
Thinking in more abstract terms, we know that all of this works on a neuronal, biochemical, and psychosomatic level.
While suffering from RA, I asked myself how I could better treat my body so that my joints would no longer become inflamed.
I trained actively, improving my posture, movement planning, and execution by utilising my perceptions.
We can visualise every perception as a mental image, and in consciously perceiving, actively shape them.
For my HeilÜben exercises, I relied on my sense of touch and proprioception, forming deliberate mental images that helped me evoke memories of positive perceptions.
Those memories triggered good bodily impulses, which then triggered good reactions, resulting in good perceptions.
In the process, I learned how profoundly influential the imagination can be on our entire way of life. It’s not just our ability to see and form mental images: it is based on our sensations, our perceptions, and our interpretation and evaluation of them in the form of emotions, feelings, and prior experiences. These are interconnected to a complex structure, and it is easy to experience them all as being one phenomenon instead of many individual ones. A lack of differentiation, however, leads us to believe that rationally as well. And that can lead to difficulties in orienting ourselves when trying to answer deeply personal questions: What is pressuring me? What makes me anxious or worried? What am I missing? Why don’t I have more success? Why don’t I understand specific reactions my body responds with? And why can’t I connect with myself or others the way I need to?
While suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, my movement was heavily limited and mostly painful. I lived with the sum of my perceptions, which contained elements (e.g., emotions) or larger contexts (e.g., the association of feelings and emotions with my sensations and reactions) that, regarding the causes and possible solutions to my health problem, I had little or no understanding of or orientation in. I couldn’t figure out the source of my pain and inflammation until I began to consciously become more familiar with the parts of my perceptual structure, which I slowly began to recognise as such, and to connect individual phenomena better.
Having gained a clear understanding of my perceptions, today I have a strong awareness of myself throughout everyday life. This way, I can alleviate harmful, overloading tension before it unfolds into further negative consequences.
With my HeilÜben exercises, I differentiated between:
- Individual perceptions: That’s blue.
- Complex perceptions encompass a wide variety of individual perceptions of both what is happening inside and outside our bodies. Everything we can touch, see, hear, taste, smell, and specifically perceive statially via our proprioception contributes an individual perception each. This blue possesses a cool undertone; it looks fresh and shiny. If I touched it, I’d feel how smooth the surface of the blue-coloured object is, yet the shade itself doesn’t give it much dimension.
- Interpretation and evaluation of my perceptions
- In terms of emotions and feelings, I like this shade of blue. It makes me feel comfortable and brightens my mood.
based on
- Prior experience: Although it was too intense to paint the walls in it, my beloved aunt’s curtains look great in blue, and my mum likes this shade of blue as well.
and became aware of interconnections.
So, in my HeilÜben exercises, I examined the elements of my individual and complex perceptions, as well as their interpretation and evaluation separately, and then deliberately put them back into and observe them in their bigger context.
With my new strategy, I was able to pick up on the signals that provided a greater understanding of myself, and consequently, improved my ability to help myself in everyday life.
Next, I looked at the separate abilities and skills I possessed, how I typically used them and how I might train and develop them further into practical skills. That gave me a new insight into how I had lived up to then, and at the same time, showed me what I could do better and how.
Negative sensations or emotions, such as peer pressure or anxiety, can be deliberately decreased by the skilled use of emotions, feelings, imagination, focus, and simple exercises for posture or movement, applied individually or in combination.
Our perceptions and the interpretations and evaluations we assign to them emerge almost immediately when needed, triggered by the respective situation we find ourselves in. This ensures smooth cognitive processing.
They influence our immediate reactions and, in turn, our subsequent interpretation and evaluation of what we’ve encountered, even when that assessment might be limited, thereby slowing our development. This process often happens unconsciously.
For example, ask yourself how you’d see your chances of successfully jumping from a standing position onto a footstool with both feet at the same time, if you had a clear image in your mind of painfully hitting your shin, even if the jump itself wasn’t too difficult. In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, such internal images (e.g., edge hitting shin) usually go unnoticed unless we consciously think about them.
We can clearly experience how certain intensely vivid images have arisen within us completely unnoticed and how deeply they impress us, for example, when we have a nightmare that conveys, primarily through imagery, things we haven’t yet sufficiently dealt with. Some dreams contain more specific images, while others include more abstract images that serve as metaphors for our feelings. And only later do we figure: This is precisely how I feel defensively about people who attack and belittle me, about my aggressive neighbour, my unfriendly mother-in-law, for example.
Once we have overcome our distress about the nightmare, we can reflect on its meaning and deliberately use visual images to explore its significance.
We can exactly picture what it would be like to no longer run away from the terror in a nightmare in a wild hurry, but to turn around and face it fearlessly. Even children can successfully use this strategy in the midst of a nightmare. The terror diminishes, and the threat grows tame, and the nightmare no longer repeats itself.
The less we realise how our mental images, which we automatically align ourselves with, form, the more the threads of our unconsciousness bind us. And while our unconsciousness undoubtedly plays a much larger role in the formation of these mental images (as we can’t possibly think consciously and in detail about everything all the time), we can still learn to intervene more consciously. By gaining a deeper understanding of the images that profoundly influence us, we can enhance our self-awareness and insight. We can learn to shape our mental images deliberately and, even after they have had an impact on us, learn to mitigate the effects of those that cause us harm, anxiety, or hinder our happiness and success.
Our mental images accompany us in all aspects of our lives and play a significant role in how we evaluate new experiences, impressions and perceptions. We naturally strive for harmony and consistency between them. The more harmonious, the more consistent, the more we feel that we understand ourselves and the world around us well, and that we can rationally explain the phenomena we encounter. Feeling like we can understand and make sense of life leads to positive feelings of orientation, safety, and stability; we gain confidence in our ability to take action and help ourselves. If we couldn’t do this, our ability to cope with everyday life would be seriously limited. Dealing with challenges that challenge our self-image, our beliefs, and our opinions, or that contradict or question them, becomes difficult when we experience more uncertainty than we have available solutions.
Ensuring we stay safe and within the parameters of what we know and can explain, at the most fundamental level, secures our survival.
At the same time, leaving our comfort zone to face the new and unfamiliar is just as important.
For some, these demands are mutually exclusive; others view them as two sides of the same coin. Steering for a functioning balance of the two often depends on chance, but also on focus and self-discipline.
Now, whether we do it deliberately or automatically, steering ourselves in one direction or another is something we do, for better or worse, anyway. The mechanisms that allow us to do so, influencing our minds just as much as our bodies, can include thoughts, mental images, emotions, as well as postures and movements. We can use and improve these deliberately, by using mental images we either choose or create ourselves. When aimed at improving our physical well-being, our mental images and thoughts, emotions or memories of bodily movement and posture they carry, become increasingly tangible parts of our physical reality. When used consistently and combined with other skills, our mental images become effective.
We can intentionally symbolise every goal with a particularly motivating image that reminds us of it in everyday life and helps us maintain motivation and effort even in difficult times.
It’s essential, however, to be aware that a detailed, helpful and positive mental image of our goals or of ourselves can trigger negative or burdening self-convictions and then feel weird or unrealistic.
Learning a mnemonic technique is a self-empowering skill. It boosts our creativity and memory, thus supporting the incorporation of what we’ve learned into our daily routine. We can use it to recall new information while showering, shopping, exercising, cooking, and so on. The more practice we gain, the easier and better we get at it. That’s why I’ve incorporated some basic, general elements of mnemonics into my HeilÜben exercises.
Deliberately forming more positive, supportive, and powerful inner images of ourselves has a profoundly positive effect on how we perceive ourselves. Mnemonics were a great help to me in replacing burdening self-convictions with newer, more encouraging, and more helpful mental images.
Burdening self-convictions are connected to significant experiences and often, over time, grow to a nasty, complex package that now has many different roots. It’s challenging to identify them all one by one, especially when one can’t remember every little detail about how they got into one’s mind. Good mental images helped me break down burdening self-convictions by offering me opportunities for comparison (What feels better? How can I make more of myself and my life?) and opportunities for change, for rethinking. In this way, I focused my attention on what I wanted to be and what I wanted to achieve.
During my rheumatoid arthritis, I found that this was how I could shift from focusing on the illness to focusing on health.
Our thoughts are directly and inextricably linked to our physical reality. They are impulses for movement planning and execution, as well as for tension, relaxation, and overloading tension.
Often, fears and worries, or even illness, become dominant in our thoughts (and feelings) and outweigh our constructive ideas of how we want to be and live. Our body then receives corresponding signals from our thoughts, ideas, emotions, physical sensations, posture, and movement.
With the HeilÜben exercises, we can practice sending deliberate and holistically constructive signals to our bodies. No matter how small our first steps seem compared to our goals, we’ll achieve more with each passing day.
In Level 1 Part 1 of my HeilÜben exercises, I took a close look at some of my goals. I created particularly motivating mental images for them. I intentionally linked them to a greater sense of well-being, more relaxed body movement and posture, my perceptions (e.g., through my sense of touch: “That’s smooth” or through my proprioception: “I’m about an arm’s length away from the wall to my left.”), my feelings, and my emotions.
I assigned each of my competencies a mental image that best represented the individual competency to me personally, to the point where the association became automatic for my brain. Using mnemonic techniques, I stored these images in my memory in a specific order. This way, even under stress and distraction, I could remember them and practice moving more healthily and recovering more quickly from rigid postures in all everyday situations.
Working with mental images allows everything we might have already and unconsciously connected to them to surface – our associations. We can choose between letting them flow to us freely in a meditative approach or deliberately focusing on specific themes and strings of thought, provoking those associations tied to our interests to rise to the top, ready for us to contemplate them. With practice, deciding on a mental image and its specific associations becomes a straightforward process. How controlled that process is mirrors our current level of training and our skills.
An example of the conscious use of a mental image: Let’s assume that I want to visualise a very beautiful glass plate in an exercise so that I can use it to remember something important. I see this glass plate in my mind and then, spontaneously, remember my childhood. A plate just like this one, an heirloom passed on by my grandmother, stood in our living room filled with sweets. And suddenly my thoughts are focused on the sweets, for example, or on the living room from my childhood, or on my grandmother, or … In such cases of unplanned mental excursions, I’d simply return to practising and remind myself of the entry point into the current exercise.
That was a pleasant example from my own experiences. However, due to many influences, we are often confronted with negative, malicious, ugly, hurtful, frightening, and unsettling individual mental images and even entire stories from our environment, sometimes subliminal and sometimes obvious, that it is an art in itself to deal with them successfully and create our own beneficial mental images. But the more often we try it, the better it works. Everyone can do their best for themselves. Mastery here is always open-ended. It’s not about chasing after ideals or comparing ourselves to others.
When I wanted to consciously change an exercise because I had gained new insights in the meantime – for example, about myself – it was sufficient to adapt the exercise’s content and practice it again using the usual procedure until it ran smoothly on its own.
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