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Acorn Health Blog

What we love is great health...

...and we like to write about how we can all achieve better health, naturally. Sometimes tips on how you can DIY to better health and sometimes on the therapies that can make a difference to you, your health and wellbeing.
Thank you for reading, We hope you enjoy :)

Gratitude as a Gateway to Mental Health and Spiritual Growth

General Health & Wellbeing Posted on Thu, December 19, 2024 01:07PM

In today’s fast-paced world, it’s easy to overlook the small blessings that enrich our lives. Gratitude, the simple yet profound act of appreciating what we have, has been hailed as a powerful tool for enhancing mental health and deepening spiritual growth. When combined with energy healing practices like Reiki, Access Bars, hypnotherapy, and shamanic drumming, gratitude becomes a transformative force that fosters inner peace, resilience, and spiritual enlightenment.

The Mental Health Benefits of Gratitude

Numerous studies have shown that practising gratitude can significantly improve mental health. Regularly reflecting on what you’re grateful for reduces stress, anxiety, and depression by rewiring the brain to focus on positive experiences. It fosters a sense of contentment, even during challenging times, by shifting the perspective from scarcity to abundance. For those seeking natural remedies to enhance their mental well-being, gratitude acts as a foundational practice that harmonises beautifully with energy healing.

Energy Healing and Gratitude

Energy healing encompasses various modalities designed to balance the body’s energy fields and promote holistic well-being. Integrating gratitude into these practices amplifies their effectiveness by aligning your energetic vibration with positivity and receptiveness. Let’s explore how gratitude intertwines with specific energy healing methods:

Reiki

Reiki is a Japanese energy healing practice that involves channeling universal energy to remove blockages and restore balance. Incorporating gratitude into Reiki sessions can deepen the connection between practitioner and recipient. A grateful mindset opens the heart chakra, allowing energy to flow more freely and enhancing the session’s effectiveness. For those seeking spiritual guidance, Reiki combined with gratitude can illuminate the path to self-discovery.

Access Bars

Access Bars is a technique that involves gently touching 32 points on the head to release mental and emotional blockages. Gratitude complements this practice by helping to dissolve limiting beliefs and promoting mental clarity. During an Access Bars session, reflecting on what you’re thankful for can create a powerful synergy, enabling profound mental and emotional shifts.

Hypnotherapy for Stress and Anxiety

Hypnotherapy is a transformative tool for managing stress and anxiety by accessing the subconscious mind. Gratitude can be integrated into hypnotherapy sessions as an anchor for positive emotions. Hypnotherapists often use gratitude as a focus point to replace anxious thought patterns with empowering ones. This combination helps individuals cultivate a calm and optimistic outlook.

Shamanic Drumming

Shamanic drumming is an ancient practice used to induce a trance state for spiritual journeying and healing. Gratitude enhances this experience by grounding you in the present moment, allowing for a deeper connection with the spiritual realm. Expressing gratitude to the spirit guides encountered during a drumming session fosters a sense of trust and openness, enriching the spiritual journey.

How to Cultivate Gratitude in Daily Life

Gratitude is a habit that can be cultivated through simple daily practices:

  1. Gratitude Journaling: Spend a few minutes each day writing down three things you’re grateful for. This practice shifts your focus to the positive aspects of your life.
  2. Mindful Meditation: During meditation, visualise feelings of gratitude filling your body and radiating outwards. This is particularly effective when paired with Reiki or Access Bars sessions.
  3. Express Appreciation: Take time to thank those around you for their kindness and support. Verbalising gratitude strengthens relationships and uplifts both giver and receiver.
  4. Gratitude Rituals: Incorporate gratitude into your energy healing practices by setting intentions of thankfulness before sessions.

The Spiritual Impact of Gratitude

From a spiritual perspective, gratitude is more than an emotion; it’s a state of being that aligns you with the universe’s higher frequencies. When you approach life with gratitude, you attract more positivity and abundance. Energy healing practices amplify this effect, helping you break free from energetic stagnation and connect with your higher self.

Final Thoughts

Gratitude is a powerful ally on your journey to mental health and spiritual development. When combined with energy healing modalities like Reiki, Access Bars, hypnotherapy, and shamanic drumming, it creates a holistic framework for inner transformation. Whether you’re seeking relief from stress and anxiety or looking to deepen your spiritual practice, gratitude holds the key to unlocking your fullest potential.

Take the first step today. Embrace gratitude, explore energy healing, and discover the profound shifts that await. By integrating these practices, you’ll not only nurture your mind and spirit but also radiate positivity to the world around you.



How Hypnotherapy Can Help Reduce or Eliminate Anxiety

General Health & Wellbeing, Therapies Posted on Thu, September 28, 2023 10:48AM

Anxiety is a common and sometimes overwhelming feeling that many of us face in our daily lives. Whether it’s the stress of work, personal relationships, or life’s uncertainties, anxiety can creep in and disrupt our peace of mind. Fortunately, there’s a powerful tool called hypnotherapy that can help you take control of your anxiety and lead a more balanced life.

Understanding Anxiety:

Before diving into how hypnotherapy can assist with anxiety, let’s grasp what anxiety really is. Anxiety is essentially your body’s natural response to stress, a fight-or-flight mechanism that can help you in dangerous situations. However, when this response becomes chronic, it can lead to a range of physical and mental health issues.

How Does Hypnotherapy Work?

Hypnotherapy is a therapeutic technique that uses guided relaxation and focused attention to access your subconscious mind. Contrary to what you might have seen in movies, hypnotherapy is not about mind control; it’s about helping you gain more control over your own thoughts and behaviours.

Here’s how it can assist in reducing or eliminating anxiety:

1. Identifying Root Causes:

Hypnotherapy helps you delve into your subconscious to identify the root causes of your anxiety. Often, anxiety is linked to past traumas or unresolved issues that you may not even be consciously aware of. By addressing these underlying factors, you can start to heal and reduce anxiety’s grip on you.

2. Rewiring Negative Thought Patterns:

Anxiety often arises from negative thought patterns and beliefs. Hypnotherapy can help reprogram your subconscious mind, replacing those negative thoughts with positive ones. This process is known as cognitive restructuring and can be a powerful tool for combating anxiety.

3. Stress Reduction:

Through deep relaxation and visualization techniques, hypnotherapy can lower your overall stress levels. This reduction in stress is crucial for managing and ultimately reducing anxiety. When your body is in a relaxed state, it’s harder for anxiety to take hold.

4. Building Confidence and Self-Esteem:

Many people with anxiety struggle with self-doubt and low self-esteem. Hypnotherapy can boost your confidence and self-worth by implanting positive affirmations and self-assured beliefs in your subconscious mind.

5. Developing Coping Strategies:

Hypnotherapy equips you with effective coping strategies for managing anxiety. These strategies can include breathing exercises, self-hypnosis techniques, and mental imagery that can be employed in everyday situations when anxiety strikes.

6. Enhanced Mindfulness:

Hypnotherapy encourages mindfulness, which is the practice of staying present in the moment. This can help you detach from anxious thoughts about the future and ruminations about the past. By staying in the now, you can reduce anxiety’s grip on your mind.

7. Progressive Relaxation:

One of the most immediate benefits of hypnotherapy is the deep relaxation it induces. This state of relaxation can serve as a powerful antidote to the physical symptoms of anxiety, such as racing heart and shallow breathing.

In Conclusion:

Hypnotherapy is a versatile and effective tool for reducing or even eliminating anxiety. By accessing your subconscious mind and rewiring negative thought patterns, it can help you regain control over your mental and emotional state. It’s essential to work with a qualified and experienced hypnotherapist who can tailor the sessions to your specific needs.

If you’re tired of letting anxiety rule your life, consider giving hypnotherapy a try. It’s a safe and empowering way to take charge of your mental well-being and embark on a journey towards a more relaxed and anxiety-free existence. Remember, you have the power to transform your mind and overcome anxiety with the right guidance and techniques.

Would you like to find out if hypnotherapy could help you?



Stress and Mental Health

General Health & Wellbeing, Therapies Posted on Tue, October 19, 2021 02:23PM

Would you limp around for hours, days, weeks or even months on end if you broke your leg without going to the doctors or hospital? Most people will say no, that’s ridiculous! and yet that’s what so many people do with their mental health. They limp, suffering often for years without reaching out for help.

Here are some tips to help you with your mental health on Stress Awareness Week:

Busy your body

Use your physical body to help your mental health. Look at your activity and what you’re eating and drinking because all can have a profound effect on your mental health. If you’re not moving enough this will impact negatively. The easiest way to change that is to get up and move but make it something that you enjoy doing so don’t just walk around the block for the sake of it but visit your favourite place and walk around it whether that’s in the countryside on the beach whether it’s visiting a museum or going out somewhere for a dance but something that’s active and something that you enjoy.

 When it comes to eating and drinking, they can have a big impact too we all know that alcohol can make us feel good but that effect is only temporary, and it has a longer term effect of causing low mood and even depression so if you’re drinking most days the chances are it could be impacting on how you’re feeling even if you don’t realise it. So to look after your mental health it could be good to have a few days off or maybe just leave drinking to the weekend if you don’t feel like cutting it out completely.

Nourish yourself

What you eat makes a difference. Just as eating junk food makes you sluggish in your body it also slows the functioning of your mind. A recent study on children and the effects of eating junk food and ready meals it shown that it makes a significant difference and actually appears to cause anxiety and depression in teenagers and early adulthood when children eat a lot of junk food as they’re growing up so we now know that it’s a sad fact.

But it’s changeable. Choosing densely nutritious foods make your body sing, they make it feel alive. Your body will absolutely love when you give it the food that it really needs that contains all the nutrients to create optimum health, and this has an impact on the way that your mind works too.

We know that our mind works on a complex balance of chemicals and what we put into our body creates those chemicals so if we’re putting the wrong things in then we’re going to get the wrong results out. Have a look at how you could clean up your diet.  

So we’ve covered physical and we’ve covered what that can do to help your mental health but now we’ll look at what we can do with our minds to help our minds feel better:

  1. Meditate. Meditation has been proven to have a positive mental health impact. You don’t need to be a super Buddhist person or sit crossed legged, because the average person probably can’t manage that or can’t manage it for long. Just sitting comfortably or lying down for a short while even just five minutes maybe listening to some calming music, maybe using a guided meditation or just having that peaceful time when you focus on whatever is around you rather than the busyness of the day.
  2.  Being kind to others. This can be random acts of kindness or it can be something that you do for somebody that you’re planning (this does not mean that you’ve got to be a pushover it doesn’t mean going over the top), but when we are kind to others it has a reciprocal effect. We feel good for doing it, they feel good for receiving that kindness and the world becomes a better place for everyone.
  3. Being kind to yourself. We’ve talked about kindness to others but remember it is not a selfish thing to do things for you. It is vital for you to have your own time and space to do the things that you love, that you enjoy, so make the space. Make it priority and then just do it and don’t just do it once make it a regular thing so you have some regular me time to do the things you love.

The combination of all the above things can make a massive difference to how you feel in your mind as well as your body.

If you’re struggling- get help. Whether that’s just talking to a friend and letting everything out, whether it’s counselling, psychotherapy, hypnotherapy  or some other kind of therapy…

There’s no point in letting yourself suffer.  Don’t limp round with poor mental health when there is help available. You deserve to feel well <3