This is an excerpt from The Intuitive Healer, published by St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010.

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Our words, thoughts, and feelings are vibrantly alive and have an impact on our bodies. For example, a literal pain in the neck can be triggered by frustration and aggravation at a person who is a metaphorical pain in the neck. Or the story of a group of senior citizens who remained healthy and active because they always believed they would. All your thoughts and memories, joys and sorrows, shocks and injuries, pleasures and pains, are stored in your muscles, tissues, and bones. Everything you've ever experienced, or understood is literally "embodied" in you. This is the nature of the body/mind connection. We are infinitely complex, multi-dimensional beings with vast amounts of data genetically encoded in our very cells. Wow! And you thought it was "just" a body. Remarkably, you can communicate with your body, each part, and discover what issues, grievances, and pain reside in it, and heal it.

Whenever you feel stressed, out of sorts, or simply ill, you can access your inner physician as a trusted advisor, and in partnership with the miraculous intelligence in your cells, root up old memories presently inhabiting your body in the form of a pain in your arm, an ailing hip, a migraine headache, or a heart condition. This process will teach you how to release emotional pain long trapped in the body that has produced a physical malady. The result is holistic healing.

Putting an Ear to the Stethoscope
An appropriate image to represent how the intuitive body speaks is a stethoscope. The stethoscope is used by a doctor to amplify the internal activities of the body. In this way your inner stethoscope - your intuition-amplifies what is occurring in your body/mind. This intuitive stethoscope allows you to do a body scan to diagnose ailing areas and discover what needs to be realigned for healing to occur. Through this intuitive dialogue with bodily distress, you can create appropriate imagery that will lead you on the path to radiant health.

The Body Speaks
The intelligence present in every cell of your body communicates in innumerable ways. A friend dreamed he was in a burning house and couldn't get his girlfriend out. He could not decipher the underlying message of this puzzling dream. Was it a warning to check his home for fire hazards? In dreams, the body is often symbolized as a house. And since fire is heat, the dream might have been warning of a fever or infection. But it might also have been telling him that he was involved in a risky situation with someone in trouble who was "burning him up," and whom he could not save. When I asked him about this last possibility, his eyes widened in the familiar "Aha!" look. He confirmed that he was constantly angered and frustrated by his troubled and troublesome girlfriend.

Creating A Metaphor
You can penetrate a person's character and learn the the real story, what makes them tick, by using the metaphor technique from my Intuition Workbook. Choose any person, study them intuitively, and create an image that seems to fit them. By comparing the person to somehing else - a movie or book title, or character or an animal, color, song, type of automobile, flower, piece of furniture or musical instrument, etc., you can retrieve amazing insights about him or her.

For example, if I see you an eagle, what does that suggest? Once I get the image, I need to amplify. My associations are that you might be independent, and sharp-eyed and love freedom. But the real "Aha!" comes when I realize that you have keen insight, a clear, sharp view of any situation. You can also use this same method to enter your body and discover the issues and themes underlying your physical ailments. Your intuitive imagination allows you to enter any bodily part, engage it in a dialogue, and derive from it an image or metaphor that shows you how to remedy the situation. For example, Janis wanted to heal her throbbing right knee Using this method to "view" her knee, she saw sagging rubber bands, and she used imagery to make them more taut. When she looked into this area for a color, she saw a light blue that reminded her of the igloos pictured in ice advertisements. She realized she needed to keep her knee cool and avoid excess heat in the shower or hot tub. When she listened to her knee for a song, she heard the golden oldie, "You'll Never Walk Alone." At first Janis wondered if that meant she would need crutches or a cane. But her intuition told her that her knee alone was not the problem; her whole body needed treatment. She then realized that if she lost weight, it would help alleviate her knee problem.

People attending my healing seminars have gained tremendous insights into their health challenges using this technique. Jenny came down with diabetes a month after she turned fifty-three. She saw a pincushion stuck with needles; the color was red; and heard the song "If I Had a Hammer." She of course, was the pincushion, constantly sticking herself with insulin needles. Red showed her anger. Jenny had been angry at family members, especially toward her brother, for years. She now saw how it had poisoned her life, and affected her health, and knew she needed to "hammer it out" rather than continue to nurse her resentment, which was like sticking herself with pins.

Choose one health concern so you can use your intuitive stethoscope to diagnose a physical ailment.

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Practice: Scoping It Out
The body area I want to work on is:



For this practice, you might want to put the directions on a cassette tape or have someone read them to you. If that is not possible, read the questions several times first, so you can recall them when you are settled into your quiet space.

Find a time and place where you will be undisturbed for fifteen minutes. Get in a comfortable position. Close your eyes and take three deep breaths. Really feel the air coming in and going out. Relax your body. Notice any distracting thoughts or feelings and let them go. If they persist, tell them that you will attend to them later but don't want to be disturbed right now. Now, let images bubble up in your imagination. Observe them without interpreting them in any way. If no images arise, that is all right. Simply continue to relax and look within.

When you feel centered, use your imagination to walk right into this ailing bodily area. As you enter into it, what object, idea, or image comes to you?
Does this area remind you of a place?
If this area were a color, what color would it be?
Does a book, movie or song title come to mind?
Does this area remind you of anyone you know personally? Of a famous person or a character in a book?
Can you come up with an image that seems to fit the pain?
What image can help you release the pain? For example, if you have sharp back pains, has someone stabbed you in the back? Then pull the knife out and let the wound heal.

As you prepare to return to outer awareness, silently count to five. One, two, ...three, move your fingers around...four, move your head from side to side...and five, slowly open your eyes and stretch. Record your images, metaphors and insight. Take as much time as you need to amplify or interpret the material you gathered in this process. Write it down. What objects, ideas,or images did you discover?



What do these things tell you about this area?



If this area were a color, what color would it be?



What associations do you make with this color?



What movie, book or song title came to you from this area?



How does the book or song title apply to this area?



What person or character, intimate, famous, or fictional, is associated with this area?



How or why do they remind you of this area?



As you integrate all the images and information you have received, what is your inner physician telling you about this ailing bodily part and how to heal it?

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Dr. Marcia Emery, PhD, is a noted psychologist, consultant, life coach, health intuitive, and author of three books ( Dr. Marcia Emery's Intuition Workbook, The Intuitive Healer, and PowerHunch!) who has been teaching people how to cultivate their intuition for decades. She is a much sought after speaker on the corporate and public lecture circuit. www.powerhunch.com