Book Reviews (Nov 2009)

Laurel Parnell, PhD. Tapping In: A step-by-step guide to activating your healing resources through bilateral stimulation, Boulder, CO: Sounds True 2008.  290 pp.  $18.95     

Laurel Parnell, trained in EMDR, has adapted this method in an interesting way. EMDR invites people to focus on their trauma memories and current symptoms while alternating stimulating the right and left sides of the body. This produces intense emotional releases that rapidly clear these issues. When the negatives are cleared, positive cognitions are installed to replace the negative ones that have been released.     

Parnell focuses very heavily on the positives. She has people visualize a "safe/ peaceful place, nurturing figures, protector figures, and inner wisdom figures." (p. 45) These help people calm down when agitated, fearful, injured or upset in other ways. She discourages people from focusing on previous experiences that might resonate with the current issues.

Parnell reports dramatic improvements, not only in the primary issues being addressed, but also in attitudes, self-confidence, openness to accepting positives from others and more. She also notes that with repeated practice the positive effects with her method are more easily achieved and stronger. You will find many suggestions for positive images and cognitions one can install in this book.

My hesitation about what I read is that my personal experience of clearing current issues over a period of four decades and my experience of helping clients do the same has been that current issues very frequently resonate strongly with earlier issues. In many cases, the current issues appear to be invited to occur or even to be generated by the earlier issues. Without clearing the early issues, I would be concerned that further problems could easily arise down the rocky roads of life.

 

Tomy Bewick, My Mouth Hurts Too Much To Fight You: Poems by Tomy Bewick, Lulu and More 2008, p. 79-81.  grrnstar@hotmail.com

I was pleasantly surprised to sit on a lawn at the Guelph, Ontario Hillside Festival to hear poetry recited by Tomy Bewick. (The Hillside Festival is most known for its music.) His presentation was rivetingly dynamic and his poems touched the heart and often the funnybones at the same time. When I approached him for permission to publish one of his poems in the IJHC, he graciously handed me a copy of his book, with permission to publish whatever moved me. See one of his poems from this excellent book on our poetry page.Review by Daniel Benor, MD, Editor in Chief, IJHC 

Lynsi Eastburn, BCH, It’s Conceivable!  Hypnosis for Fertility.  Victoria, BC Canada: Trafford Publishing, 2006.  PB 132 pp   $21.00.

If you have experienced the emotional blow of being diagnosed as infertile and yet you “know” there is a baby in there or you have been given a diagnosis of unexplained infertility, then It’s Conceivable will help you to understand how your body/mind connection affects this process.  “The creation of new life goes far beyond…scientific understanding into the realm of deep mystery… To stand at the edge of this mystery is one of the most exhilarating and sacred of all human experiences.” (Jia Gottlieb, MD Introduction).

Lynsi Eastburn is a National Guild of Hypnotists Board Certified Hypnotherapist and Certified Instructor as well as a Certified  
HypnoBirthing® Childbirth Educator, specializing in Fertility.  She has created a Center for Women’s Wellness in Colorado where women have access to professionals in complementary modalities including hypnotherapy, psychotherapy, acupuncture, nutritional counseling and massage.  She developed the Certified HypnoBirthing Fertility Therapist program and the Gestalt-based Hypnotherapy program and is co-owner and instructor of the Eastburn Institute of Hypnosis in Colorado.  She is a faculty member of the Leidecker Institute in Illinois and the HypnoBirthing Institute in New Hampshire.  She has received awards for her groundbreaking work in the field of hypnosis for fertility and is a regular presenter at the National Guild of Hypnotists Convention in Marlborough, MA, the HypnoBirthing Conclave and Colorado Free University. 

It’s Conceivable details how the power of the mind, liberated through hypnosis, connects the mind and body into a single unit, allowing the body (a complex biochemical machine) to create new life.  “Our bodies know how to procreate and they know how to give birth… this is why hypnosis has been so successful with fertility assistance – it facilitates the mind/body/spirit balance which is simply in harmony with nature.” (p. 17) 

There is incredible pressure placed on a woman before the age of 35 by the medical profession that considers pregnancy after that age to be of high risk.  These pressures have a debilitating often devastating effect on a woman wanting to get pregnant.

An insensitive comment, intentional or not, can have a distressing effect and should the subconscious interpret the words, high risk, to be too dangerous, it can instantaneously put up a roadblock to pregnancy.  According to hypnosis professionals, these words are called “painted words” and become imprinted in the subconscious mind.  “Because the language of the subconscious mind is emotion, any words which elicit emotion will have a hypnotic effect.”  Therefore when a woman is told that she is high risk, these words trigger a fear response, which automatically bypasses her critical factor, deeply imprinting the suggestion that she is high risk. (p. 18) Insensitive comments are not limited to the medical world as well intentioned family members or friends often times use “painted words” that are equally devastating.  “Fortunately, hypnosis can quickly and often easily reverse the effect.” (p. 18)

A young woman friend trying to get pregnant and who has experienced the effects of such statements told this reviewer, “We’re constantly bombarded with news stories about infertility, ads pushing the need for drugs, and even well-intentioned people putting negative messages in our heads, that subconsciously I think it can be a huge factor in an individual’s well-being.”  She continued, that she had found the summaries of the case studies in It’s Conceivable to be the most inspirational and “a good way of reinforcing… that this book doesn’t just explore theoretical concepts but actually presents how these positive thinking techniques have been able to get real women pregnant.”  (LM, my friend) 

It’s Conceivable has 16 Chapters, explaining how Hypnosis will assist you in using your whole brain; how to stop negative thoughts; how to find the source of the problem; how to release subconscious blocks; a short section with wonderful case studies and a final chapter on creating your own reality.  It is a lovely, hopeful, empowering book. 

Reviewed by: Monte Mohr, Doctoral Student 
Holos University Graduate Seminary 
www.HolosUniversity.org