Mental Imagery, or visualization, is a powerful tool for healing physical and emotional disturbances, mending relationships with others, and tapping into our deep source of wisdom and creativity. Almost anyone can learn how to apply this simple tool to reverse chronic daily disturbances and attitudes or to find solutions to seemingly impassable roadblocks in their lives. And, it takes only seconds to do a day – yes I did say seconds!
Many years back, my late husband, Dr. Jerry Epstein, worked with a 28-year-old woman diagnosed with Hepatitis C years before there were any powerful medications available to treat this disease. After making the rounds to normative and holistic doctors and practitioners, she found her way to our doorstep. She wrote:
Help came when I met doctor [number] ten. I’d heard of him through a family friend who’d been diagnosed with stomach cancer and given two months to live. After she put herself in the care of this man, she lived another ten years. Dr. Gerald Epstein was smiley and chubby like Santa. He welcomed me by cupping my hand in both of his. It felt gentle and caring, and I liked it. He showed me his book, Healing Visualizations: Creating Health Through Imagery, then asked me what I liked to do. I told him I liked working as a commercial artist but really loved to paint. That’s when he said, “I want you to paint a perfectly healthy liver, hang it next to your bed, and stare at it every morning when you wake and again when you go to sleep. Imagine that your liver is as perfect as that painting.”
Skeptical, I expressed doubts and confessed my fears of slowly dying with chronic pain from cirrhosis.
“Forty percent of people with chronic Hepatitis C live out their entire life with no symptoms and die of old age. Just be in that forty percent.” He said it so matter-of- factly, it sounded as easy as Abraham Lincoln saying, “People are as happy as they make their minds up to be.”
I borrowed an illustrated medical encyclopedia and studied the healthy liver as I rendered it with acrylic paint on watercolor paper. It took two hours and looked perfect. I bought a frame, hung it on my bedroom wall, then [visualized] it as if it were an exact replication of my own liver.
Dr. Epstein also told me to get annual blood tests to keep an eye on my liver enzymes, eat healthy, and stay away from toxins—drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and processed foods. That was twenty-five years ago 1 . I’ve followed all his advice, and now I’m fifty. My liver enzymes are as low as they were when I was first diagnosed. They are only slightly elevated, just enough to show that the virus is still in my system, but it is dormant. I just got a liver ultrasound that showed my organ is the perfect size and color. Just like the one in my painting…
(Excerpted with permission from Easy as A, B, C by Dorri Olds)
1 Ed: now about 34 years ago; Dorri worked with Jerry circa 1990.
