By Dr. Emmett Miller

If you are unfamiliar with using your imagination, meditating or otherwise guiding your awareness within, it may take several listenings before you begin to experience the profound levels of peace and serenity towards which you are being guided. Be patient; the more difficult you find it, the more valuable it will be for you to discover how to relax so deeply.

You will be guided to what Dr. Miller calls “The Healing State,” Link to Glossary a state of a focused attention during which your imagery will be most effective. In addition, by finding mental images which our most meaningful to you, you will be most able to engage the ability of your brain and nervous system to create the inner conditions best suited to healing, comfort, and the highest level of function.

Dr. Miller will suggest that you call upon your inner healer. If you are a religious person, you may find that God, Jesus, or a saint, prophet, or other religious figure can best serve this purpose. On the other hand, you might choose a mythological figure, a cartoon character, a movie superhero, an animal, a color, or even an invisible spirit or energy as your inner healer. The more vivid the image of this healer, the more emotion it taps into within you, and the more you can let yourself believe in it, the more effective your inner healer will be.

If you choose chemotherapy, you might imagine your treatment as if it were a cloud of insecticide killing a swarm of locusts. If you receive radiation, you can imagine dart–like particles flying towards a gnawing rat; in short, use whatever symbolic expression is most meaningful to you.

The more emotionally powerful your images are and the more vividly you can imagine them, the more effective they tend to be. Because the treatments generally prescribed for cancer have significant side effects, patients often become negative about them. This negativity can often impair their ability to continue with the treatments, and even when they continue, their inner resistance may actually inhibit the ability of the treatment to work. As you listen to this track you will learn to make friends with your treatment, to welcome it into your body, and to visualize it bypassing the cells of your body and acting directly upon the cancer cells.

You will imagine that, because it is bypassing the cells of your body, that this will block the side effects that might otherwise occur. Interestingly enough, people who do this actually do experience much you are side effects. Furthermore, there is good evidence that the treatments are more effective. There is a high correlation between those people who had a successful outcome of their cancer treatment–even full remission, and those who managed to keep a positive attitude all the way through their treatment.