Once I got these, my yoga room was complete.
Love my yoga frog.
Lesson #7
Mind/Body
Here is one thing I want to point out to everyone about mind/body/stress…..The longer you keep trying and thinking about it; the easier it seems to change. Changing the way you think almost seems impossible at first. I think the key for me was to keep revisiting it over and over. I watch The Secret about monthly. I read parts of books about the mind/body connection a lot. Kevin and I also do things to refresh our minds when it is needed. We stop each other in moments of stress or distress and make each other list 5 things we are grateful for. Now, at night, we list 5 good things about ourselves from the day.
Another thing that worked for me is to write about mind/body or write about how you feel and how you would like to feel. Another movie that is about the mind body connection (like The Secret), is called “What the Bleep do we Know”. It is bad acting like The Secret, but the message is good. You get done watching it and you want to think more positively. It’s all about the law of attraction. Like attracts like. Don’t you want to attract positive people?
Lastly, the best thing that helps you change the way you think is to have some quiet reflection time. You have to become comfortable in your own company with your own thoughts. If you are not comfortable by yourself, you probably need the quiet reflection time more than others. Anyway, my whole point to all of this is that I thought changing the way I thought was impossible, but I am experiencing the miracle first hand. I have been working at this for about a year and it is amazing how much happier and positive I am. I really didn’t need my mind working against me while I had so many physical things to work on already.
Psychoinnumerology – This is the study of how unexpressed, unfelt, unconscious feelings kept within the body eventually take their toll on the very system in which they are enclosed.
It is an established fact that emotions change the body-chemistry
The body and the mind is a single unified system.
Long term emotional depression “depresses” the immune system.
More remarkably, tears of joy actually differ chemically from the same person’s tears of sorrow.
Our ability to separate ourselves from our feelings is the uniquely-human survival-adaptation to an overwhelming world... Separating ourselves from feelings is a protective mechanism that enables us to cope with pain.
Unhealthy choices of separation can lead to illness. Our body has unlimited memory storage in its very tissue. The unfelt past is ever-present – locked in the very tissue of the body.
Just as important as what you eat is “what is eating you”
Our feelings that are in our body tissue can unleash forces of healing by normalizing hormone levels, reducing stress on various parts of the body, and providing a sense of resolution for the system.
Chinese Medicine and Mind/Body
Whenever you have one you have two. You always have an opposite. The whole idea of Chinese medicine is knowing how to balance the opposites. Dis-ease is an imbalance.
Long breath translates into long life. It is said that people who breathe longer (slower) live longer. The quality of your life is measured in the quality of your breathing.
When stress enters the body we interpret it and it moves our emotions and the shallow breathing starts. When we breathe shallow our chi (life energy as the Chinese describe it) doesn’t circulate throughout our body. When this happens it affects al of our systems (circulatory, lymphatic, immune, etc...) When our systems begin to shut down disease will start to grow in our body. Stress makes our body tighten and wherever the weakest part of your body is the stress will find a way to show itself. (The weakest part of my body was my breast because I had a genetic weakness in my breast cells.)
Posture – Good posture not only changes how people view you (when you stand with good posture you look more confident, happy and full of life) but it also improves the chi and lets your body function properly. Then, you have your mind attend to your body (simply pay attention to your body). Most people separate our bodies and minds. Basically pay attention to your body, and mentally smile at our organs and our organs will smile back.
Very Interesting Studies about Mind/Body
Are you all with me that the mind and body are connected? Do you believe that the state of our mind will in fact affect the state of our physical bodies? Here are two studies that were referenced at Hippocrates. I also read about them in books. I am not taking the time to site them since this is just my website and very informal. You can believe me or not.
One research study had a bunch of college students were injected with a substance that they were allergic to. Every Saturday they were checked and they had bumps that were an allergic reaction. They did this same thing every week for months and months. Then, one day they were injected with pure water (which no one is allergic to), but they thought they were being injected with the stuff they were allergic to. Every student had the same red bumps showing an allergic reaction to simply water.
The second study was with three groups of athletes. One group did nothing before their event (I don’t remember what the event was) One group physically trained for their event. The third group would sit for an hour every day and mentally go trough their event imagining what it will be like when they win their event. Guess what group did the best at the event. Yep, the group who mentally trained.
Last study is talked about in the movie The Secret. Athletes would get hooked up to all sorts of monitors and they would sit and imagine running a race or whatever they do. The monitors showed that the same nerve impulses in their muscles would fire while they were sitting there imagining running the race that are the same ones that fire when they physically ran the race. So I think you should all believe that the mind does in fact affect the physical body.
Interesting Tidbit
Here is an interesting little tidbit about the mind. When we are in familiar territory 20% of our rods and cones are actually working. When we do something new and are in unfamiliar territory all our rods and cones are working. So, if we expose ourselves to new experiences all the time our brain will be a lot sharper (and we will have more exciting lives) I think our impulses try to get us to do this to exercise our minds, but built up expectations make us do the usual. Ever get impulses to do something but your mind always seems to talk us out of it. You might not even notice that it happened. I try to act out every impulse I get now. I find I meet a lot more people. Rather than stand silently in a stranger’s presence I now strike up conversation. It’s a lot more fun.
Something to think about
“You are what you dream. EVERYTHING you dream is you” Do you ever wake up in the morning and wonder “Why in the world did I dream that?” Everything in our dreams comes from our subconscious. It is all part of you and what you think so the fact that you are dreaming it says something about you. After really understanding this, I realized that I am one messed up individual with a very messed up subconscious. Simply put, I’m crazy and I didn’t even know it.
All collective entities function as an integrated unit. The mind is an important element of health. This non-physical part of the self must be trained to function positively rather than wallowing in self-indulgently-destructive mental meanderings. Although we might be rigidly-obeying all of the rules on the physical level for optimum health – that effort might not be sufficient enough. An unhealthy mind can sabotage even the most scientifically-correct nutritional program. Your mind can impede on the positive results you expect to have on an improved diet. You can’t be doing all the right things but be thinking all the wrong things and still expect a positive outcome. Your thinking must be channeled into positive and beneficial directions. No more stinking thinking. By allowing negative thoughts to roam unchecked in your consciousness, you are disrupting the beneficial results from a sound health regimen. Research has shown that emotional turmoil, depression, grief, remorse, resentment, and other negative mental conditions severely restrict the regenerative capacity of your body.
The most important weapon in life is the POWER OF CHOICE. We can choose what we think about. We choose what we do with our time. We choose how we feel on a daily basis. We choose how we spend our precious time. Lets start making the choices our true mind is screaming for us to make.
I’m off to Houston tomorrow. I am choosing to not stress about traveling and instead I am excited to see my friend Paul again and maybe have another movie night at his place. I am also choosing to be excited to stop in and see my old oncologist at MD Anderson (my favorite oncologist at MD Anderson who I no longer see, and haven’t seen since June last year). I also am choosing to be excited and up for the challenge to stick to the diet while traveling. Wheatgrass shots at Jamba Juice at the Charlotte airport. : )
Lots of love to everyone
Shannon
No comments:
Post a Comment