The Power of an Idea

“What’s the most resilient parasite? An Idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules.”—Inception

Sometimes our ideas seem to get lost or mixed up inside of us. We know the kind of person we’d like to be—a thin, healthy, nonsmoking, confident, successful, outgoing person. But the reality we experience can be far different than that idea. The movie Inception has really inspired me, validated for me in a sense, the idea that we are living a created reality that originates from within our own minds. Learning to interpret first the symbolism in novels as a writer and English major, then within dreams and myths, has created a way of viewing my world as a waking dream.

All around are symbols. Some I notice and wonder about, but the more I work with dreams and with Past Life Regression, which also contains a symbolic dream-type language, I have come to accept that it is up to me what I notice, and what I notice forms my personal reality.

Research has shown that we are able capable of noticing a finite number of images at any given moment. In other words, if you are staring out at a beautiful lake, you will see the water, a boat, a water bird, but as soon as you attention is drawn to the way the light sparkles and reflects, you will no longer be as aware of the person standing beside you. Research also has shown that we notice first things we are familiar with and can easily recognize. Strange, unusual or unexpected images will be missed. I would not expect to see an elephant standing on the shore. And who is to say there is not one there just because I haven’t seen it? Until the idea is planted in my mind that I am recognizing a visual pattern that I’ve seen before, in a photo of an elephant perhaps, I will not be able to see it, or I will misidentify it as something I do expect to see—a large gray rock perhaps.

When we work with hypnotherapy, dreams and past life regressions, what we are doing is forming an understanding of the ideas within our own minds—where they come from and what they are actually telling us to do. An impulse to pick up a cigarette or eat a bowl of ice cream may well come from the part of our subconscious that has noticed that we never do anything nice for ourselves, but are always taking care of other people, and in order to be healthy, we need to relax a little bit. So when we get this urge to do something that consciously we believe isn’t very good for our health, we are really acting upon a deeper, stronger belief that “I am worth pampering and deserve to take a break, even if its only for the length of time it takes for a cigarette to burn out.”

And why would we want to do away with that idea or part of us that is actually looking out for our own mental health? We wouldn’t. Rather, we would like to redirect it. Using the tools of hypnotherapy, Parts Therapy, Regression Therapy and Integrated Imagery, we can uncover what that seeded message is, and then empower it to help us create ourselves as we know we can be, healthy, thin and trim, confident and successful.