By Frank DeMarco, Editor-in-chief

(I wrote this for a friend, and it came out well enough for me to send to the usual suspects -- among them, you. Do try it, and by all means let me know how it works for you. Experiment. If you find useful additions or changes, I’d be very interested to hear about them. To your health!)

The biggest problem with this powerful technique seems to be to get people to take it seriously enough to really try it. It sounds too simple to be effective. Well, it is simple. It is also effective. Give it one long open-minded try, and if it doesn’t work for you, what have you lost? A little time. If you find it useful, feel free to pass it on to others.

1) The meditation on the waters of life and health

Envision yourself beneath a waterfall, continually being soaked from head to toe by an unending powerful (but not harmful or uncomfortable or annoying) flow of water. The water falls not only on you and around you, but through you, bathing each cell as it passes down your body. As the water falls, it carries away the results of past injury and disease, leaving you refreshed and revitalized.

Use your imagination actively to follow the flow as it passes down and through your body. Be willing to pretend! This is important, as it engages the imagination, which is vital to the process. Pretend you can actually see and feel the energy flow – the waterfall – proceeding smoothly down your body. Pretend you can feel the results.

When (perhaps to your surprise) you occasionally feel the flow get “stuck” in one or another part of your body, merely focus your attention there and intend for the waters to repair whatever is wrong in that spot. Pretend that whatever happens is real.

If you wish, you can expand this meditation to encompass your four bodies: physical, yes, but also the energy body and the mental and emotional bodies. Some people envision them as four bodies one inside the other, like Russian dolls. Some envision four copies of themselves standing hand-in-hand under the water. Some change their visualization from time to time according to how they feel at the moment. And some never visualize four bodies at all, thinking that visualizing even one is quite enough to do, thank you very much! So far as I can tell, it doesn’t matter which you do. Whatever seems natural, do that.

2) Pictures for the subconscious

Step one was aimed at removing general blockages to health, and works from the assumption that we ourselves are the cause of our own health problems, in that for one or another reason we block the self-healing that ought to occur naturally. Step two moves beyond this to address specific problems. You have done the waters of life and health meditation, but now you want specific relief, and fast.

The way to get it is to draw cartoons for your subconscious, so that you can tell it to focus its attention on healing the throat. The subconscious mind runs the body. (How do you think you process sugars? When was the last time you consciously regulated your adrenaline secretion?) But the subconscious isn’t really good with words. It does better with pictures.

Let’s suppose that you have a sore throat. While doing the meditation – which, by the way, should put you into a pleasant mildly altered state – you now create a picture of your throat as it is in its sore condition. This does not need to be at all anatomically accurate. It’s a cartoon. So maybe you think of your throat as red and scratchy. Get that image firmly in mind, and then morph it into a picture of your throat in a healthy condition, perhaps pink and smooth. Again, accuracy is not the point: You just need to communicate intent to the subconscious. You are telling the subconscious mind what you need, in a way that gets its attention and allows it to understand. That’s all. But that’s all that’s needed.