Carl Jung's Wonderful Healing your Mind and Body with your Hands

How Hands can Heal your Mind by Carl Jung
From the YouTube Video "Do This with your Hands and Watch your Body Start Healing Immediately."
Posted by Ikram Baloch 1 month ago. I changed it in many ways and included my own words.

First Exercise Part 1:

• Bring both hands together, palm to palm, right in front of your chest, like a prayer. We are simply going to notice, not pray (but you can pray if you want; added by me).

• Press your palms together firmly and hold that pressure for 10 seconds. Feel the muscles in your arms engage. Feel the warmth building between your palms.

• Now release and turn your attention to the center of each palm. There is a point there, right in the middle, that many healing traditions across centuries considered one of the most significant points of your right hand; press it slowly and firmly into the center of your left palm, hold it there, and breathe. And then switch. While you do this, think only of a moment in your life that you felt completely unseen. Let that memory rise, just slightly, just enough to feel it while your thumb presses into your palm.

Benefit of this Exercise: 

It releases old tension held too long. You may feel nothing, and it is fine. Sometimes it takes repetition, night after night, for the body to trust that it is finally safe to let go. But you might feel a tightness in your throat now. Your body has waited for a long time for a specific question to be answered.

First Exercise Part 2:
Move your attention to the base of the palm, just below the thumbs, in the fleshy part, where your hand meets your wrist. Using the fingers of your opposite hand, begin to massage this area slowly with small circles- not fast, slow, as if you are trying to comfort something, not fix something.

Benefit of this Exercise: 

This method predates modern medicine by thousands of years; it has long been associated with the lungs, breathing with grief, with exhaling things we have been holding on to. Many people carry sorrow in exactly this part of the body without ever knowing it because grief does not always look like crying; sometimes grief looks like tightness, like shallow breathing, like a chest that never quite feels fully open.

First Exercise Part 3:

• As you massage this part, breathe deeply, exhale, and let your shoulders drop even just slightly.

• Let your jaw unclench. You may not have realized that your jaw had been clenched until now. That is how quietly the body holds its burdens. You forget you even carry them; it is this quiet.

• Now move your fingers to the webbing between your thumb and your first finger. Pinch this area gently between the thumb and the finger of your opposite hand.

Benefit of this Exercise: 

This therapeutic point of the hand has been used for generations across cultures that never spoke to one another to relieve the tension that builds in the head and neck. The physical residue of thoughts that will not stop circling. Worries that keep you awake at 3 am,, staring at a ceiling that has no answers for you.

First Exercise Part 4:

• Hold this pinch firmly but not painfully for about 15 seconds, then switch to the other hand and do the same.

• While you hold it, are your thoughts racing? Are they quiet? Most people, when they finally slow down enough to check, discover their mind has been running for hours without their permission, replaying conversations, rehearsing arguments that haven't happened yet. Worrying about outcomes that may never come.

Benefit of this Exercise: 

This point in your hand will not silence your mind completely; nothing can, but it can begin to loosen the grip. It can remind your nervous system that right now, in this exact moment, you are not in danger. No emergency is happening. You are simply sitting, breathing, and pressing one hand with the other hand. That is enough; it has always been enough. We have simply been taught it isn't enough.

Your hands can do much more, more than you thought in your entire life. Something remarkable happens when human beings use their hands with focus and intention over time. The brain itself begins to change shape, not metaphorically, but physically. Studies show that people who use their hands intensively, like musicians who spend years training their fingers, show measurable growth in the brain connected to the hands. The brain reorganizes itself around what the hands do again and again with attention.

This tells us something profound. Your hands are not simply reacting to your brain's instructions; your hands are shaping your brain in return. It is a conversation, not a one-way command. Every time you use your hands with presence, really present, not distracted, not rushing, you are participating in the ongoing construction of your own mind. This is why so many people who struggle with anxiety are told to try new things, like knitting or gardening, or working with clay.

It is not a coincidence, not simply about distraction, because focused hand movements calm the nervous system in a way that only a few other activities can. Precisely because of how deeply wired the hands are into the oldest, calmest part of the brain.

Second Exercise Part 1:
This exercise will shift things more deeply for people:

• Bring your right hand up and place it gently on the left side of your chest, just above your heart.

• Now bring your left hand up and place it on your right shoulder; your arms are crossed gently over your own chest, almost like you are holding yourself. It might make you uncomfortable because you have never physically held yourself like this in your entire life, not once.

Benefit of this Exercise: 

The reason this discomfort exists is that we have been taught early in our lives that comfort is something given to us by other people and that we are not allowed to be the source of our own reassurance, but your nervous system does not know the difference between a hug given by someone else and a hug given by yourself. The chemistry is remarkably similar.

The pressure, the warmth, the containment- your body responds to all of it regardless of where it comes from.

Second Exercise Part 2:
Stay in this position and breathe in slowly for 4, hold for 4, out for 6, slower than the inhale.

• While you hold yourself like this, say something inside your mind. You don’t need to say it aloud, though; you can if you are alone and it feels right.

• Say this: "I am allowed to comfort myself. I do not need to wait for permission."

• Sit with that, let it move through you however it moves. It might feel like nothing at all; that's fine. Not every moment needs to be a breakthrough. But something might be rising for you right now, a tightness in the chest, a sting behind the eyes. If that happens, do not fight it. Don't rush past it to get to the next part of the instructions. Let it happen. The body finally exhaling something it held onto for a very long time, and nothing is more natural, more human than that release.
• We are going to stay here a while longer because 40 minutes is a short time when the work being done is this old, this deep.

Benefit of this Exercise: 

But something might be rising for you right now, a tightness in the chest, a sting behind the eyes. If that happens, do not fight it. Don’t rush past it to get to the next part of the instructions. Let it happen. This is the body finally exhaling something it held for a long time, and nothing more natural, more human than that release.

People clench their hands when they are afraid. They hide somehow, defensive, not comforting. Fear makes the hands small; it makes them protective in a closed, guarded way. But feeling safe, truly safe, means your hands are open like a child's; the child reaches, wraps their hands, resting them open-palmed without needing to grip or guard anything.

Second Exercise Part 3:

• Open both of your hands, palms facing upward, resting on your knees or on the surface in front of you. Just let them rest there, open, unclenched, asking nothing, defending nothing. This is a strange thing to do if you are not used to it. Most of us unconsciously clench our hands and have clenched them all our lives. Not into fists- nothing so dramatic, but tight, guarded, ready, because somewhere along the way life taught us to be ready for the next difficult thing before it even arrives.

• Sit with your palms open for the next several breaths, in, out, in, out, and notice, honestly, without judging yourself, how unfamiliar this openness feels. How much your hands may want to close again, out of habit, out of years of training your body something you did not consciously choose. It isn't naive; it isn't pretending the world is safer than it is. It is simply choosing this moment to let your body practice what safety feels like so your nervous system remembers this feeling, even if only for a few minutes at a time. And the more you practice this, the more accessible that feeling becomes, even outside of moments like this one.

Reflection about your Hands Exercise: 

Connect your hands to your story, not to your hands. Your history, not just your body. The parts of yourself you carry without always knowing you are carrying them.

Look at your hands again right now, really look. Notice the lines across your palms, the small scars if you have any, the shape of your knuckles, the way your fingers curve when they are relaxed. These hands have touched everything significant that has ever happened to you. They have held the hands of people who are no longer here. They have wiped away tears, your own and maybe someone else's. They have built things, broken things, reached for things. These hands were never afraid to reach for and sometimes reached anyway.

There is an old understanding, one that echoes through nearly every tradition of self-reflection that has ever tried to make sense of the human mind, that we carry within us not just our conscious thoughts, but an entire hidden landscape: patterns, wounds, instincts, and inherited responses we did not choose and often do not even notice. This hidden landscape shapes far more of our behavior than most people are comfortable admitting, and one of the few direct bridges between that hidden landscape and our waking awareness in the body is sensation to touch.

When you press your palm to your chest, when you massage the base of your thumb, when you hold your own face in your own two hands, the way someone once held it when you were small and frightened. A door between the parts of you that think and the parts of you that simply feel, that simply remember, that have been waiting patiently in the dark for you to come back and listen.

Exercise 3:

• Bring both hands up to your face, gently cup your cheeks in your palms. Someone might have done this for you long ago when you were upset, or the way you wish someone had done it but no one ever did.

• Close your eyes if you can, if it is safe to do so.

• Hold your face for a full 30 seconds. It will feel like a long time. That is intentional. So much of your pain lives in the moments we rush past. The moments we don't allow ourselves to sit because sitting inside them feels unbearable, even for a few seconds.

• While you hold your face, breathe slowly and let yourself think of the version of you that needed this most. A version from your childhood perhaps, or a version from a harder chapter of your adult life. A time when things were heavier than they are now, or maybe a time that is happening right now, today, in this moment. You do not need to solve anything. You simply need to hold it the way you are holding your own face right now and let it know it isn’t forgotten or abandoned, that someone finally came back for it. This is difficult work, honestly. This is real, not easy.

Repetition Matters A Lot: 

A single moment like the ones we have practiced together will not undo years of holding it in, guarding, years of carrying things your body was never meant to carry alone. The nervous system doesn’t change permanently in one session; it changes through return, through ritual, through doing the same small deliberate thing again and again until the body finally believes that it is safe to soften.

Repetition has always been used across generations. Daily practice, small motions, repeated with intention, over weeks, months, sometimes over years. The body changes slowly- not instantly. The body changes through consistency. Our society loves instant results, not intensity.

Do one or more of these lessons for 90 minutes. Your hands have patiently been waiting for your entire life to be used this way, and they won’t go anywhere.

The Difference Between Healing and Fixing: 

Fixing means something is broken beyond repair. Something wrong that must be corrected before it is acceptable. Healing implies wholeness that has been buried, obscured, forgotten beneath years of protection. You need to hear this because you may not have heard it in a long time, if ever. You adapted to whatever happened to you. You built the protections you needed to survive whatever your life demanded. These protections were not weaknesses. They were intelligence. They were your body working exactly as it was designed, keeping you safe in difficult circumstances.

But protection that once served you can, over time, become a weight you no longer need to carry in the same way. The clenched jaw that once helped you stay silent through something painful doesn’t need to stay clenched forever; the same applies to guarded hands. Your life may no longer require that same vigilance.

Healing is simply the slow, patient process of asking your body if it is ready to set some of that weight down. Not all at once, not by force, gently, repeatedly, with your own two hands if nothing else is available to you.

A returning, a remembering, a slow, deliberate practice using the most deeply wired part of your physical body to speak to the oldest, quietest parts of your inner world. The parts that do not respond well to logic, to willpower, to simply deciding to feel better. The parts that respond to presence, to touch, to time.

Exercise 4:

• Place both hands over your heart, one on top of the other, just as at the beginning.

• Take one more slow breath in. Hold it and let it out completely.

• Say this silently or out loud: "I am learning to listen to my own body. I am allowed to be gentle with myself. I do not need permission from anyone else to begin.

• Sit for a moment and let it settle.

• Take a breath, gently release your hands, and carry this with you into the rest of your day.

Conclusion of Bodily Wisdom by Carl Jung: 

There is a reason why you clicked the video or read this blog. This says something rare about you.