Written by Yehuda Tagar, Counsellor, Psychotherapist, Consultant and Coach
Yehuda Tagar is an Australian, South African, British and Central European counsellor, psychotherapist, organisational consultant and trainer of therapists, now based in Slovakia. Yehuda is the founder of Psychophonetics and Methodical Empathy, director of the Psychophonetics Institute International and Skola Empatie in Slovakia, UK and China.
Our mental/emotional wellbeing affects our physical health - this is widely accepted. Directing negativity towards the self has an undermining effect on the health of the body. Practicing self empathy, self acceptance and self love can radically shift the health dynamics within the physical body, moving from illness towards health.
“The first condition for sustainable spiritual development is committing to take personal responsibility for one’s well-being based on one’s intuition”. Rudolf Steiner
Negativity directed towards the self creates illness
To what extent are our mental‐emotional‐spiritual dynamics a decisive factor in our well-being, sickness and recovery? To what extent does waking up to and taking charge of our mental-emotional-spiritual dynamics prevent, reverse and heal physical sickness, potentially even in conditions as severe as autoimmune disorders? An autoimmune disorder occurs when the body’s immune system attacks and destroys healthy body tissue by mistake. There are more than 80 types of autoimmune disorders... No one is sure what causes autoimmune diseases. (US National Library of Medicine)
These are some of the most common diseases: Multiple sclerosis–the nerve system is being attacked; Spondylitis– the bones are attacked; Rheumatoid arthritis–the joints are attacked; Irritable bowel syndrome and Colitis–the colon is being attacked; Lupus–the blood vessels are attacked; Crone disease– the digestive system is being attacked.
It appears as though our inner guardian turns into our worst internal enemy, and there is no escape ‐ the body’s immune system is attacking the body’s own tissues and organs, and progressive, irreparable damage is inflicted on the physical body. There is no obvious cause. It is a mystery. There is enormous suffering and loss, combined with a debilitating powerlessness which results from this inability to protect oneself from this ‘internal enemy’. The inner guard becomes the enemy and there is no guard against this inner guard.
Self responsibility in creating health
Could it be that the sufferer is making a contribution to this condition unconsciously, and by becoming conscious of it and stopping it, could the sufferer reverse the destructive dynamics and make a practical contribution towards their healing? This article suggests that sufferers of multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune conditions potentially contribute to both: the process of sickness and the process of recovery.
The immediate impact of internal moods, reactions and extremely distressing emotions on the bodily processes and the states of their vitality and function is well documented and is available to self-observation: we all know, anxiety changes the rate of the heartbeat and tightens the whole body; hearing bad news can deplete the vitality of the body. However, a moment of feeling understood, accepted and loved brings down the blood pressure, muscle tension, and heart rate, and deepens the breathing and the circulation of warmth; while a meeting with someone you love uplifts the vitality of the body.
These experiences are common. But it is also a fact that a methodical process could be applied for awareness and change of how emotional dynamics affect the life and well-being of the body in a radical way. This is not common knowledge in medical circles. The internal self‐intervention suggested here can only take place consciously, methodically and by the client’s own free will. The ongoing continuum of body‐psyche‐body‐psyche cannot change itself by itself. An act of self-awareness and self-care is required.
Psychophonetics and its use in self awareness and self healing
Psychophonetics is a methodology of training people for self-observation, transformation and care. It has evolved out of collaboration between a psychotherapist and integrative medical doctors in medical clinics in Melbourne and Cape Town over 20 years of its development. It is a pioneering form of ‘Participatory Medicine’, engaging the client as an active team member of the therapeutic process. It operates across the boundaries of the physiological, energy dynamics, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual levels of the person’s existence. It involves the deep intelligence of body awareness, movement, gesture, spontaneous visualisations and the powerful invisible vibrations of the sounds of human speech. It is being practised and taught in Australia, South Africa, the UK and Central Europe.
Self-hatred into self-care
Early at the beginning of clinical work as a psychotherapist in the Melbourne Therapy Centre, I became aware of the enormous potential impact of self‐hatred in autoimmune disorders. I also became aware of the enormous healing potential of consciously reversing self-hatred into self-care. I realised that it increases the chances of recovery from the presumably incurable autoimmune conditions.
It started in a meeting in 1993 in a Melbourne clinic with a remarkable woman who, at the point of starting to lose her eyesight, after nine years of suffering, healed herself from severe multiple sclerosis. Her story became a turning point in my career as a psychotherapist. She told me that one day she said goodbye to her teenage daughter, feeling a wave of love towards her. She reminded her very much of herself at that age, and suddenly the thought occurred to her: what would happen if she would direct towards her own body the same love and appreciation she felt towards her daughter’s growing womanhood? That was a completely new thought for her. At that moment she realised just how much hatred, resentment, rejection and negativity she had been directing towards her own body for decades since puberty. It had started in response to invasive, aggressive, sexual attention towards her from boys at her school at the time. It became hatred towards her body ‐ blaming it for attracting such destructive attention. It became a habit. After realising how intense, persistent and regular such internal aggression had become for her, she began to consciously catch herself directing negativity towards her own body, and stopped it many times a day. She replaced it with consciously directed love, appreciation, compassion, tenderness and care towards her suffering and scared body. This continued to be inspired by her capacity to love her growing daughter during that time. After a while the MS disease stopped its relentless progression, and slowly started to be reversed, against all medical predictions, assumptions and prognoses. She became completely free of the MS condition within a few months.
What can work for one, could it work for many?
I took this insight into account in psychotherapeutic sessions with people who suffered from autoimmune conditions, in cooperation with medical practitioner colleagues, exploring the contribution that Psychophonetics could make to the condition of multiple sclerosis. The results were encouraging: people could catch themselves directing self-hatred, resentment, judgment and negativity towards themselves and could see that this had been happening for many years before the onslaught of MS. In catching it and reversing it – there was a marked and self-perceptible positive change in the condition.
I worked as a psychotherapist in three medical clinics in Melbourne and Cape Town for over 18 years, with collaboration and supervision from medical doctors. I continued in clinical private practice in the UK and a coaching practice in Bratislava. In these clinics, I applied Psychophonetics with people suffering from Multiple Sclerosis, Spondylitis and Rheumatoid arthritis. The results were encouraging but unfortunately, they were not scientifically validated, recorded and published. I can say with certainty that in all of these cases, we found severe pre‐existing conditions of self-hatred, self‐resentment, self‐criticism and self‐rejection formed through biographical experiences.
A picture emerged from all of these discoveries indicating the possibility that the entrenched, mostly unconscious, dynamics of self‐negativity have metamorphosed into a condition of self‐aggression of one’s immune system against one’s tissues and organs.
Based on these observations I am convinced that a case could be made for the possibility that people’s self-hatred, resentment, criticism, judgment and rejection directed towards themselves and their bodies over many years results in the immune system and its particles starting to behave in a likewise manner by echo, resonance and imitation: the immune system starts to treat its own physical body in the same way that one treats oneself on the emotional‐mental level: self hatred becomes in time auto‐immune dynamics.
Participatory medicine
In Psychophonetics, the client becomes a colleague of the therapeutic process. Using a range of Psychophonetics tools through Exploration, Resourcefulness, Inner Child and Psychosomatic processes, the client can mobilise positive, nurturing, caring, healing dynamics, originating within their inner resources, with which to care for their afflicted bodies and biographical wounds. These nurturing and healing processes can be taken home as homework for independent self‐application and as an ongoing self-administered process of recovery.
Based on these experiences, I believe a case can be made for a methodical psychosomatic approach in the condition of autoimmune disease with a process of coaching for self-empathy and self-care, such as Psychophonetics. Our independent intuition, Heart‐Intelligence, individual spirit and self-compassion can enter the therapeutic process as a new element by entering consciously into this disease and making a decisive therapeutic change, and by consciously stopping the dynamics of self-hatred, and engendering consciously the dynamics of self-care.
Love as a healing force
I do not claim here that I have found a proven universal cure for multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune syndromes. For such a claim to be made, objective scientific research must be conducted. However, I suggest this is a promising direction for research.
Before such research is completed, it is safe to try out these ideas – to catch any negative judgmental emotions towards ourselves, to stop them, and to replace them with self-respect and self-care. This is a good and beneficial thing to do by anyone, with or without a diagnosis of an auto‐immune disease.
Hatred is a poison and love is a medicine, whether they are directed towards others or oneself. The transition from self-hatred to self-care can be made consciously, practically and methodically. Psychophonetics is one way of doing it. Find your way. Only when you do it practically can you see the results for yourself.
Yehuda Tagar, Counsellor, Psychotherapist, Consultant and Coach
Yehuda Tagar is the founder of Psychophonetics Institute International and co-director of Skola Empatie – School of Empathy, in Slovakia, where he teaches Methodical Empathy – a method of deepening one's ability to See, Hear and Know oneself – generating the empathic capacity of Seeing, Hearing and Knowing another's reality. Methodical Empathy is the core practice within Psychophonetics Counselling and Psychotherapy. "The future of humanity is empathy, if humanity has a future at all." YT.
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