Known for his books on the power of thought and the mind when it comes to healing, Dr. David Hamilton recently released his new book “I Heart Me,” focused on the scientific power of self-love, and how we can use the mind and emotions to change how we feel about ourselves — and create wellbeing, success and more.
Elevated Existence Magazine interviewed Dr. Hamilton for its March 2015 issue cover story, and below is a sneak peek at some of the insights found in the article!
The Healing Power of the Mind
The first book Dr. David Hamilton published after leaving his job as a scientist in the pharmaceutical industry, where he was building drugs for cardiovascular disease and cancer, was “It’s the Thought That Counts: Why Mind Over Matter Really Works.” It focused on the mind body connection, and the connection between our consciousness and the world — all backed by scientific research.
“While working as a scientist, I started to notice how many people were recovering on placebos for drugs we were spending a quarter of a billion dollars developing,” he tells Elevated Existence. “I started looking into the mind body connection while I was working full time, and I realized there was so much information out there nobody seemed to know about.”
So he resigned from his job and started to weave together his scientific background with consciousness, spirituality and the mind body connection. His book “How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body” shows how positive thinking and visualization can work remarkably well when it comes to healing physical ailments and disease.
“After I published my first book, people would come up to me at lectures and workshops and tell me how they used the mind body principles to heal themselves,” he notes. “People were visualizing cancer tumors shrinking, for example, and they were all intuitively using the same mind body principles like visualization. I started looking into the neuroscience and psycho immunology so I could build a framework and understanding I could explain to my mom, dad or anyone off the street. There was so much science that validated it.”
In the book, he shares a Harvard study where volunteers played a series of piano notes up and down a scale for two hours, over five consecutive days. The scientists saw significant changes in the area of their brains connected to the finger muscles. By the fifth day, the brain had grown like a muscle and was significantly bigger. They also had a group of people who visualized playing the piano in the same way rather than actually doing it, and they also had their brain mapped to measure the results.
“Amazingly, the same regions of the brain had changed to the same extent as those who were actually playing the notes,” he says. “The brain was not making any distinction between those who were actually playing the keys on the piano and those who just visualized playing the keys. I use this example to help people understand, what you think about, what you imagine, really has an effect. It gives people faith in themselves.”
Visualization for Self-Love
In the book “How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body,” Dr. Hamilton shares a variety of visualizations and techniques to heal the body of physical ailments. In his new book, “I Heart Me,” he explains how visualization can also change our brain when it comes to self-love.
“Instead of visualizing inside the body, like you would do to shrink cancer or make a blood vessel healthier, what you do is visualize moving your body,” he tells Elevated Existence. “Visualize how you are walking, standing, speaking, breathing, from a place of ‘I am enough.’ Watch yourself interacting with people where you had previously acted in a way you felt small. Watch yourself standing tall, speaking with confidence, saying the things you want to say. Because the brain can’t distinguish real from imaginary, you are now rewiring the brain.”
If done on a regular basis, we can actually shape the circuits of the brain and will find ourselves functioning in the world with the kind of body language we are imagining, he says. And it only takes five minutes of visualization a day.
“It’s like a fast forward way of changing how you actually function in the world,” Hamilton says, explaining if we want to speed up the process even more, we can do it for 10 minutes, three times per day. “Five minutes is easier for people, especially with the busy lives we have. But you will start to notice a change, and it won’t even feel like you had to put much effort into it.”
For more from Dr. Hamilton, see the full March 2015 issue of Elevated Existence, which includes an article on author Mira Kelley and past life regression; a Course in Miracles column from Gary Renard and more!