Hope, Harmony and Respect: Native American Principles for a Balanced and Happy Life

Authored by Jeanne Taylor Hernandez PhD MSPH

This charming book is a manual for self-stabilization that helps readers align their communications and behaviors to be more harmonious, respectful, and forward oriented. Hernandez’s guide is the only book of its kind to align the Native American value system with psychological practice and apply it to modern day life. As professional as it is warm and inviting, it offers concrete methods to not only improve our personal mental health but also to feel better about the effect we have on others. A powerful, indispensable personal resource, Hope, Harmony and Respect is a hands-on guide to making positive changes in our lives-and to being happy while doing it.

Native American biopsychosocial principles shine through many established healthy ways of thinking and through psychological practices such as Neurolinguistic programming (NLP), SR, basic Ericksonian techniques, and also through the teachings of other prominent psychologists such as Csikszentmihalyi and Bateson. All of these approaches strive to align the needs and interests of the mind, body, soul, and environment in individual decision-making. Living such an integrated lifestyle, wherein decisions and behaviors flow from well-practiced attitudes and values based upon compatible core beliefs, our daily lives will become less dramatic and more peaceful. Such a lifestyle, of course, is also going to be inherently flexible and open to new ideas. At high levels of functioning, where our behavior influences the world and other people, a higher level of moral reasoning is required, where the emphasis is on the greater good rather than personal benefit-which, as readers will see, is exactly where the Native American belief system is strongest.

As Jeanne Hernandez writes in her first chapter, the Native Americans’ mindset has always been one of interconnectedness. They viewed the interconnected nature of themselves, their community, and their world to be concentric, emanating out into the universe. This view informed every single aspect of their cultures. Within this view, we cannot help but look at the discussion of life paths, destinies, and life choices in an entirely new light. Despite our western-centric existentialism, the truth is that we are not alone, that we are indeed part of an ecosystem at minimum and, according to Native American beliefs, perhaps part of something far more intrinsic to the world and even universe.

Exploring seventeen generic yet traditional Native American principles and spiritual anchors, Hernandez uses them as a backdrop and source for the book through which she combines explanations, examples, and exercises from her modern psychologist’s toolbox of activities. The results are nothing short of remarkable. The similarities in the approach to life between Native American culture and advanced psychotherapy methods are indeed astonishing and offer a quick, holistic way of improving our lives and our relationships.

Tame Your Chronic Pain: Create Inner Dialogues that Resolve your Suffering

Authored by Jeanne Taylor Hernandez PhD MSPH

Tame you Chronic Pain outlines a program utilizing positive self-hypnotic internal conversations with your body and with pain. The program carefully explains why and how to have such internal dialogues, which help to recognize, understand, and then control or alleviate pain. This reader-friendly guide addresses questions regarding life’s purposes, coping styles, grief, depression, and anger-and so many elements that add to physical pain. Chapter 1 outlines how to improve and enhance coping and addresses the many variables such as anxiety, resiliency, optimism, and self-image that influence both the perception of pain and the effect pain has on life. Chapter 2 describes several aspects of your personal, or core, self, and shows how to differentiate your self from your pain and physical body in order to be objective about pain signals that surface. Chapter 3 discusses the emotional and spiritual components of pain and explores suffering in depth. Chapter 4 discusses neurological, muscular, and emotional feelings, all differentiated from pain; explores the many types of ongoing communications among your body, mind, and spirit; and explains how pain is an emotional event. Chapter 5 shows that memories are constructed from facts, interpretations, and emotions. This is relevant since both expecting pain and recalling pain can be as uncomfortable as pain itself. Chapter 6 describes a light self-hypnotic trance following a particular self-hypnotic approach and explains how to use it. Chapter 7 contains a wide range of phrases to use with your body’s systems, organs, limbs, and types of pain. The phrases really are conversation starters to get you comfortable and practiced in carrying on such conversations. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to carry on internal conversations using your own words, moving into areas of the body where comfort and healing are needed and addressing whatever else is needed to modify the interpretation of the body’s signals as pain.

Tame Your Chronic Pain

Artist/Band: Jeanne Taylor Hernandez

The CD is a transcript of Chapter 6 in the book available through Amazon entitled Tame Your Chronic Pain: Create Inner Dialogues that Resolve you’re Suffering. The reader will listen to the CD before and/or after reading the transcript and its explanatory explanations. With this material, Jeanne T. Hernandez, hypnotherapy expert and author, offers a gift to everyone who suffers from chronic pain. Her many years of research and expertise have resulted in a program that utilizes self-hypnosis to hold positive internal conversations with the body and with the pain. A vital element of this program is understanding how to have these conversations-dialogues that help us to recognize, understand, and then control or alleviate pain. From the psychology of our attitudes about pain to pain management, from understanding the physical self and how memory plays into the pain cycle, Dr. Hernandez leads us through the steps that result in managed pain, or a pain-free life. We learn about stress and those memories related to pain, how to change those memories and break old patterns. This reader-friendly guide enlightens questions regarding life’s purposes, coping with difficulties, working through grief, depression, and anger-and so many elements that result in physical pain. With approximately 50 million people suffering some form of chronic pain, this is a book that will lead many into a more comfortable, and therefore more joyful, life.