Category Archives: Mind Body Connection

Expanding your Brain in Real-Time

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“The concept that mind creates matter is not a metaphysical proposition. It’s a biological one….your brain creates matter in the form of neurons and synapses in response to your consciousness.”
(Dawson Church, Mind to Matter, 2018)

Lots of research is coming out now (thanks to imaging machines and brain electromagnetic field readers) that the pathways in our brain are changing in real-time.

What you think and focus on affects the neuron structures in your brain directly, then and there. (Not just when you are asleep at night.) The rewiring is happening live as you focus intently on a task. The longer and deeper that you can focus, the deeper the neuron connections that can form in your brain.

Meditating in a Body Mindfulness Meditation class for one whole hour, and in the presence of other meditators, boosts this effect as everyone’s energy field resonates with each other, strengthening the effect.

This is why I also ask all clients at the end of a therapy session to not talk as they go home, and to lay down if possible when they get home. Most often people feel like doing this anyway. It’s a natural result of going deep. The energy your brain is expending in making neuron changes then and there is tiring. A good tiring.

You cannot feel the actual neutrons forming, there are no feeling receptors in your brain to let you actually feel this, but you feel the after effect in your body. You are tired, don’t want to talk and just want to lay down and often take a nap.

So after every deep body meditation and deep body personal therapy session, your brain has literally changed and the neuron connections in your brain have multiplied.

This is nice to know.

Neuro-Immunologists – a western medicine group, that are finally getting it.

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“It wasn’t considered professionally respectable to investigate connections between the brain – the province of neuroscience – and the immune system – the province of immunology.”
(Edward Bullmore, PhD, The Inflamed Mind – A radical new Approach to Depression, 2018)

I’m fascinated how the immune system and the nervous system interact. How inflammation in the body when the immune system is low can affect and even create mental symptoms like depression. And also going the other way, how negative depressive thinking can weaken the immune system and cause inflammation in the body. The research is finally beginning to show this link.

My personal and client experiences over the years informed me directly that the mind and body affect each other quite strongly. Of course western scientific medicine has denied this for hundreds of years thanks to 17th century Descartes dualist ideas that the mind and body were totally separate.

So it was nice to read from a psychiatrist (Edward Bullmore) that ‘a lot of what I was taught in medical school is wrong’.

Edward is part of a small group of psychiatrists that call themselves neuro-immunologists. He is pioneering a new field of research that links the brain, the body and the immune system. So we can look forward to much better treatments that deal with the mental and physical health issues together, rather than apart as they are currently done within western medicine.

I realised decades ago in my practice that western medicine was way behind in this mind body connection and so I let them go and continued independently, continually researching and applying new techniques that made this mind body link stronger and stronger within me and within my clients.

Making this link stronger is what body mindfulness meditation is all about too. Just by strengthening and feeling into this link in your body, your body automatically begins to heal, and you don’t need to know how it is doing it. It just happens – when you get out of the way.

My personal research and development continues to this day and there are more exciting breakthroughs to come again soon. And again, like thirty years ago, it is going to look completely alternative and ‘bonkers’ to western mainstream medicine, until they catch up again – eventually 🙂

Your Body, Trauma and Confidence

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“Research is also now starting to make clear the long term impact of early childhood trauma on people’s relationship to their own bodies (Price, 2007; Van der Kolk, 2014). Body awareness, body attitude and body satisfaction may all be negatively affected.”
(Benjamin R, Haliburn J, King S, (Ed), Humanising Mental Health Care in Australia, 2019, p253)

How is your relationship with your body? Body Mindfulness work requires you to feel into your body and accept what is there. Some areas are easier to accept than others. Others remain blind spots, numb areas that you have great difficulty accepting and allowing. As you access and delve into your body further, you will begin to learn the landscape that you have created within you. This is very significant because your body is dictating a lot of your health issues, psychological problems and limitations in life.

Those numb dissociated parts of your body are almost certainly due to a past trauma that you couldn’t assimilate at the time. You had to block off the pain and emotion to survive. That immediately cuts off part of your real self. And if the trauma was really severe and/or prolonged, you begin to live a shadow of your real self, have poorer health and limited abilities.

Past trauma, even if you don’t recall it whatsoever, will be affecting you through your body. If the trauma is deep, you will highly likely be feeling deep shame, disgust or even hatred towards your body, (very true with sexual trauma) which greatly lowers your self esteem. In the past you would have needed lots of motivation to override this lack of confidence and self esteem.

Your poor intellect revving you up to override the deep body based trauma. This as you can probably imagine, is short lived. It can help in moments where you require a boost but is difficult to work with long term if it is not eventually addressed at the body level and released and cleared permanently.

Thus a regular body mindfulness practice is essential as part of your long term mental health, physical health and personal development.

Your Second Brain

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“Your gut has capabilities that surpass all your other organs and even rival your brain. It has its own nervous system, known in scientific literature as the enteric nervous system, or ENS, and often referred to in the media as the ‘second brain’. This second brain is made up of 50-100 million nerve cells, as many as are contained in your spinal cord.”
(Emeran Mayer, MD, The Mind-Gut Connection, 2016)

Doctors have long kept the brain (the nervous system) and the gut (digestive system) completely separate from the maintenance of our overall health. Let alone even consider any connection the two systems might also have.

Medical doctors still mostly see the human body as mechanistic, largely unaffected by our thinking, our emotions, other systems and organs of the body and by us directly (our awareness). This separation of us, our brain and the body is helping to cause far more health problems than is necessary.

Your gut is like a second brain and it is strongly connected to the brain. The brain also remembers every gut feeling you have and uses this information when making decisions, not just about food but about people, work, play and life.

So it makes sense to spend some body mindfulness time regularly connecting to that gut and listening to what it has to say. It will respond in sensations, but rest assured there are also emotions there. (Your gut stores 95% of the serotonin in your body which is used to regulate your mood, anxiety, sleep, appetite, temperature, eating behaviour, sexual behaviour, movements and gastrointestinal motility). Your whole belly area is a powerful and very important brain.

Take time to connect with it in your mindfulness practice. After your brain, (which we spend a lot of awareness on,) the belly brain should always be your next port of call.

Healthy Work – Finding your Sustainable Level

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“According to the World Health Organization, stress is considered a worldwide health epidemic. The American Institute of Stress links stress to the six leading causes of death (heart disease, accidents, cancer, liver disease, lung ailments, and suicide).”
(Joe Burton, Creating Mindful Leaders, 2018)

Working in a high performance, high stress major company, the stress will eventually takes its toll. After 20 years and in their mid 40s managers and staff start to burn out and if unchecked, in the worse case scenario, leads to one of those leading causes of death.

If you survive and don’t die then there are other issues that arise, frequent sickness, anxiety, depression, loss of direction, moodiness, lack of fulfillment, relationship breakdowns, unemployment, financial issues, addictions, family issues, ageing faster, and general poor health. Luckily many companies are now turning to mindfulness meditation to improve mental, physical and emotional wellbeing.

It sounds crazy that this is the state that our work culture is in. What leaders would design a company like that? Rather than push a person for the maximum output, hence into a zone of high prolonged stress levels, why not find the sustainable level of work?

How do you know when you are working at the optimum sustainable level? My gauge for this is to ask the following question…

At the end of the day when I arrive home – am I calm and relaxed?
If the answer is NO, you are overworking, and over time it will take its toll.

If you are self employed or have a decent boss, you are able to adjust your work week to work at a sustainable level. And by sustainable I mean that you can keep doing those hours and activities indefinitely, for years to come and not tire. That’s the beauty of sustainability, it’s repeatable over and over and over again without much wear and tear.

This is a big work secret to long term health, success and happiness. Find the level for you that is repeatable, over and over again. The added length of time, gives you the benefit of accomplishment – higher income, more experience, and fulfillment in being able to do the things that need time, without burring yourself out in the process.

I adjusted my number of work client hours years ago when I was seeing too many people in a week and almost burned out and collapsed a number of times. Once I asked the sustainability question my whole practice changed. I now see the exact number that I know I can keep seeing indefinitely for years and decades to come. It has worked beautifully now for about a decade.

Initially you seem to earn less, but the quality of your work goes up because you are not stressed out. So over your work lifetime you actually earn much more and also feel happier in mind and body.

You also get the benefit of having a great buffer that you can draw on when unexpected stressors and traumas hit you. Your body has room to absorb the impact and see it through with less reaction. I had some major ones (totally unjust) hit me like a ton of bricks over the last six years, major assaults, that would have adversely affected many people. But my body had room to absorb the impact and release it over time.

I’ll be talking more about this process in future articles.

When do you ‘hang in there’ and when do you quit?

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“We fail when we get distracted by tasks we don’t have the guts to quit.”
(Seth Godin, The Dip, 2011)

One of the problems with the intellect is that it is very good at giving you reasons to do a lot of things. You can make a case for doing many things and making them all sound important. So what do you choose?

We are in a unique period of history where we have more choices than ever before and more marketing coming at us to convince us to do more. A lot of these choices are in our face literally, with our smart phone.

And not only do we have more marketing thrust at us, but we now have (with social media) more opinions to wade through about what we should be doing. So not only do we have information overload, we also have opinion overload.

This gives rise to decision fatigue. The danger with this is that overly operating from the intellect, we lose the ability to filter what is important and what isn’t.

Enter body mindfulness.

Stopping and focusing on your body is the best antidote to the racing overload of choices, opinions and information that the intellect has to try to sort out. When you take time to stop and go within, a multitude of options drop away and you edge closer to dealing with only the essential, only what’s required, only what’s truly most important. Your intellect cannot do this alone. Your body and your feelings have to be involved. The sifting happens much faster and deeper when you do it through your body.

This doesn’t mean that you will magically get answers every time you stop and focus inward. Sometimes a lot of old clutter has to be addressed, faced and accepted before it drops away, revealing the true core path or option. With that inner certainty, it is then much easier (as Seth Godin says) to quit something that was just leading to a dead end for you. And it is also much easier to hang in through the dip you will experience, the hard slog, the depth necessary to do something really well.

Anger and its link to the risk of Heart Disease (Attack)

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I focused on Cancer in the last post. This week we look at Heart Disease (Heart Attack).

“The connection between attitude and the heart is so reliable that a 30 year study published in 2003 in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that ‘…hostility is one of the most reliable indicators of coronary heart disease risk’.”

(Hamilton, David R, Ph.D, How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body, 2nd Ed updated, 2018)

According to the World Health Organisation (in May 2018) the leading cause of death in the world in 2016 was Heart Disease (Heart Attack), followed by Stroke, accounting for 27% (15.2 million) of all deaths world wide.

Then we have studies like the above quote that strongly link heart attacks to hostility, or as I would word it, the emotion of excess and prolonged anger in your mind and body.

If you would like to self heal yourself through body mindfulness meditation, it is imperative that you also focus on the emotion that sits with the sensations you feel in your body during a practice. Taking the time to feel the emotion, will go a long way to improving your health and immune defense against disease.

By spending quite, deep and prolonged time in a body mindfulness practice you can uncover your hidden frustrations, blame, hates, people you cannot ever forgive, angry judgments and hostilities towards others. Deeper down there will probably be suppressed rage and fury at injustices.

Your intellect can rationalise these old traumas and subdue them, but going deeper (into your body) you can uncover what is still actively firing in you emotionally. If it is anger related, then we have a red flag for a future heart attack.

Express that anger, acknowledge it, get it out, throughout your body, release it and make peace with what you have hated for however long, This will literally bring peace and lightness to your physical heart and lower the risk of ever getting a heart attack.

But it must be felt IN YOUR BODY not just intellectually in your head, hence why doing a regular body mindfulness practice is so vital to your health.

Expressing Emotions to Heal Disease

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“In our body, cancer cells never arise in the heart or small intestine, because the heart and small intestine are warm, with high blood circulation and high oxygen content…Cancer is the end result of alexithymia – or not expressing feelings or emotions.”

(Kelly A. Turner, Ph.D, Radical Remission – Surviving Cancer Against All Odds, 2014)

Body Mindfulness work is excellent for getting you still and inward enough to heal a lot of issues and diseases. Cancer’s link to emotional suppression is very strong now with many studies and research all pointing to the truth of the above quote.

In your practice when you go within and stay there long enough, the diseased or suppressed parts of your cellular structure begin to reveal themselves to your awareness and consciousness. You begin to bring these cut off parts into the light of the present moment where they can heal. Most times when they reveal themselves, the releases can be somatic, physical, emotional and feeling and even involve small or big movements, depending on what was unfinished in the traumatic event, that shut that part of you off, in the first place.

So as you advance with this work, you have the opportunity to go very deep and heal things that the majority of doctors in western medicine cannot make sense of. It’s a whole other paradigm, a whole other world where you have much more control of your health and wellbeing then you were ever taught was possible.

You are that amazing on the inside and can do (by today’s standards) remarkable things. (I’ve certainly witnessed this with clients often, in my private practice.)

I look forward to the day when this is the new norm.

We are well on our way 🙂

Starting the day Grounded

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In the previous post last week, I presented the five mindful questions to ask of yourself when you wake up in the morning. This week I’ll take one, the first question and expand on it further.

How grounded am I?
That is how well are you earthed to the ground? How solid do your feet feel below you when you get out of bed and start your day?
When your feet first hit the floor/carpet, how solid are they attached to the floor? Can you feel the whole sole of your foot contacting the ground? Take a second, pause and actually feel the sensation of the base of your feet.

There might be gaps were you don’t feel anything. Your feet might also not feel heavy to the floor, but very light and slippery. There may even be some pain or tension.

If your feet are not feeling grounded then chances are your legs and even pelvis may feel this lack of connection and solidity too.

With low groundedness you destabilize easily, so there can be some internal anxiety, with your body trying to find the safety in the ground. Without solid ground below your feet, you can be toppled over much easier, you won’t feel confident in your day and your head will be working hard to keep you safe in the world and that takes a lot of energy. You are likely to tire much more easily or come home after work more exhausted than you should be.

There are exercises you can do to help this of course. More next time.

The Five Checks to do Every Morning

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Starting your day with a body mindfulness connection makes a huge difference to how well your day flows and how productive you are. The core questions to ask, and areas to check each morning are (in order of importance):

How grounded am I?
That is how well are you earthed to the ground. How solid do your feet feel below you when you get out of bed and start your day?

How centered am I?
Do you feel your center of gravity in, or just under, your belly button? Or is the centre of gravity in your head, where a lot of people have it? Which leads to the next question…

How embodied am I?
That is, how fully in your body do you feel? Are you residing in all of it, or just in parts? Are there parts that feel numb or hollow? Are there parts you don’t feel or can’t feel into? Do you feel a disconnect from the neck down? that is, does your head feel separate from your body?

How connected am I to the present moment?
How much of your awareness is operating in reality right now? How much are you aware of your present moment surroundings, without past and future thought forms and memories interfering?

They are probably the top four questions to ask automatically when you wake up each morning, the top four checks. Once they are handled, you can ask the next question…

How connected am I to the Universe?
Once you are in your body, then check how connected your awareness is to the outside world around you. Your sense of connection to the spirit of all people and living things. This plugs your intuition into the flow of the world.

Do all of the above each morning and you are in for a very productive and fulfilling day!