Dr David Hamilton Home Page

The Power of Intention
(www.drdavidhamilton.com)

Every thought and feeling changes something in your body. Think of a time when you got embarrassed. Your face went red didn't it? This is the power of your mind to affect your body. It is your thoughts about yourself or about what people might be thinking of you that do it.

The placebo effect is another example of this. If a person is given a fake medicine but believes that it's a real medicine then he or she will usually get better.

Some studies have shown the benefits of positive states of mind. It has been shown that thinking thoughts and feeling the feelings of gratitude or compassion, for instance, can make heart rhythms more coherent and boost the body's immune system.

In other words, if you intend for your immune system to get a little boost, just spend five or ten minutes thinking nice thoughts about someone.

The mind even affects DNA. Our 25,000 or so genes are in a continual state of switching on and off, like light bulbs, as the body grows and repairs itself. But scientists now know that many of these genes respond to their environment. In other words, to what you eat, how much exercise you take, what you are thinking about, and how you feel. There is now a clearly defined link between emotions and biology. Thoughts and feelings change the chemical balance all throughout the body, producing chemicals and hormones called neuropeptides, which switch our internal systems, and our genes, on and off. So the body is hardwired to respond to your mind.

Ever since Dr Bernard Grad in the 1960's showed that a healer could speed up the rate of healing of skin wounds on mice, there has been a lot of research into our ability to mentally intend positive changes in our bodies, and in the bodies of others. One explanation for how it works, in addition to the production of neuropeptides, is that mental intention sets direction for the flow of qi (chee, prana) around the body.

For thousands of years, eastern doctors have taught that qi travels around the body, following the acupuncture meridian system. If you have an injury somewhere in your body then the key to healing is to imagine it healed, or being healed. Qi will flow there, providing energy sustenance as well as vital nutrients for the tissue. And neuropeptides will also be produced that will boost the body's healing capacity.

There's a well-known story of a man who damaged his liver beyond repair in an accident. After spending a while in hospital he was sent home with tubes connected to his body. This was for life. But after learning about visualisation he spent hours visualising his damaged liver cells being repaired.

At first he saw the cells in his mind as black and shrivelled, but he imagined cleaning them, one by one, with an imaginary toothbrush, watching each turn a healthy pink colour.

After three months of visualisation he had an accident at home and one of the tubes was torn out of his body. He was rushed to hospital and x-rayed to survey the damage prior to an operation, where the doctors discovered that his liver was completely renewed.

Some scientists have taken the research even further. Recognising that a healer can affect a person's body without touching it, they have taken biological material from inside the body and tested the power of intention to affect it.

In 2004, for instance, scientists from the California Pacific Medical Centre, the Institute of Noetic Sciences and MD Anderson Cancer Centre at the University of Texas found that practitioners of qigong could influence the growth of cultured human brain cells. Each practitioner, for a period of 20 minutes, directed healing intentions towards the cells and was able to increase their rate of growth.

Where it gets really interesting is when our thoughts affect things much further outside of the body.

Some research has shown that a thought about a person registers in their body. While hooked up to devices measuring electrical resistance in the skin, scientists measured changes in people depending on the thoughts held about them by people in another room.

In a few other experiments, the brainwaves of two people were monitored. When the scientists startled one of them, the brainwaves showed a peak, but so did the brainwaves of the other person. This is why we often have a sense of who is on the other end of the phone, even before we answer. Through over 60 separate scientific studies on this and related phenomena, the success rate of 'guessing' was 54.5%, when chance said it should be 50%. This doesn't sound much, but considering it involved 33,357 individual trials, the odds of this just being chance are 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. That's a 2 with 59 zero's after it (202 octodecillion to 1!). People really do sense what others are thinking. I believe that this is why the law of attraction works. It is the law that says you attract what you focus on.

If you ask someone for help, more often or not they will. When you visualise something happening in your life, it is like sending out a call for help that is picked up unconsciously by people. Then, people who can help you are unconsciously drawn to you. Have you ever noticed that someone new has come into your life after you started hoping, praying, or visualising for something in particular to happen, or that someone you knew gave you new information or assistance. You also attract intuitions and suddenly get inspired with new ideas.

Quantum physics has revealed an interconnectedness to all things. And Carl Jung suggested that we share a collective unconscious mind. It has parallels with the Internet. Computers are separate from each other as they sit on our desks, but they are connected via the Internet, which is a shared repository of information. Similarly, the collective unconscious mind is a shared hive of information that all of us are connected to. When you hope, pray, or dream of something you want, your intention is felt by people at an unconscious level. Then the people who can help are drawn to be in the same place at the same time as you.

I often describe it using the metaphor of a spider's web. How does a spider know that a fly is trapped in its web? It feels the vibrations. So in the same way, people feel the vibrations (at deep unconscious and quantum levels) of your hopes, prayers, dreams, and intentions, as you do theirs.

So when you want something in your life, imagine it clearly. And imagine it as if it is happening now. Your thoughts will attract it, either as intuitions and ideas or as people showing up in your life.

Most of us are experts at what I call the law of repulsion. I was a master of it for years. Whenever I wanted something, I must have invoked the law because I always seemed to get the opposite. Things got worse. It led me, when I was growing up, to conclude that if I wanted something there was no chance I could have it. I could only have the things I didn't want, which was a bit of a bummer.

But the law of repulsion is really the law of attraction in disguise. We sometimes repel our goals because we spend more time complaining about how bad things are at the moment or that ' it's not happened yet ', than we do actually imagining what we want. And just as energy flows to where attention goes inside the body, so reality flows in the direction of what you put your attention on in your life too.

The key is to keep your intention, periodically, on what you want instead of the opposite, which is what is happening now. When faced with current reality, just affirm that it is changing. What you want is coming to you. Play pretend, like a child does, every day or so for a couple of minutes.

For some people, change is rapid when they do this. For others, it's a more gradual process and it takes discipline. But it's worth it.

You can even wish the best for other people. I have noticed that good stuff happens in their life when I do this. People often show up in their life too, or little miracles happen in their life. All you are doing is giving them a little unconscious mental assistance, like you're an angel I suppose.

I am a great believer in using the power of intention to make a positive difference in the lives of others, and in the world. I believe that we are far more powerful than we have ever believed ourselves to be. I believe that we have the ability to change the world. All we need to do is try.

Every act with a genuine heartfelt intent behind it sends out vibrations throughout the web that attracts new realities. So it's not so much what you do, it's the heartfelt intention behind it that's matters. In other words, it's the Thought that Counts!