Category Archives: George’s Blog

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.

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 🙂

Connecting Deeper and Lowering Suicide Rates

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I was alarmed by the figures of youth suicide reported in the paper in Melbourne today. 3,128 (aged 15-44) died by suicide in a single year. This is almost three times the amount of deaths from car accidents each year. Every day, there are about 8 suicides and 180 attempts. So that means that there are 68,620 suicide attempts each year. That is a lot of pain and angst that people have within them which they do not know how to resolve and heal in a healthy way.

Such pain points to a massive disconnect within themselves and with those around them. This leads to a lot of trapped emotion in the body. If this build up isn’t released in a healthy way, the pain can reach levels where the only way out logically seems to be to kill oneself.

What’s also concerning is that many times, families and work colleagues do not see it coming. So what can you do?
Internally – a mindfulness practice is critical to connect you within yourself to create an outlet for this trapped emotional pain.
Externally – making more meaningful connections with your loved ones is critical. Don’t always assume they are okay just because they are not saying anything. One way to facilitate this is to ask people you care about meaningful questions and ask them often.

I’ll give some examples here but what is important to note is the state you are in when you ask them. You slow down, become mindful, connect within yourself first, and then ask the questions slowly, with a lot of care and then wait, giving the person a lot of time and space to answer. The person must feel safe to go a little deeper than normal. Going deeper requires more time otherwise you’ll just get a shallow response.

Questions:
What’s been on your mind that you think would be difficult to talk about?
What makes you sad about yourself? Sad about the world?
What do you wish you were able to do better, if it were possible?
What makes you angry about yourself? About the world?
When was the last time you got scared or a big fright?
What scares you about yourself? About the world?

No Exaggerated Benefits

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There are many benefits to Mindfulness Meditation and many more with Body Mindfulness. These benefits are described in many mindfulness books. There are critics that think that Mindfulness is treated as a cure-all and that it is given way too many accolades. They think that this is done because Mindfulness is the new fad and the current in-thing and that this will fade eventually revealing the truth that Mindfulness is not all that it is claimed to be.

I find it myself, when I sit down to right these blogs that I can’t help but describe the many benefits over the years that I and my clients have received with Body Mindfulness based work. There is no exaggeration.

Mindfulness helps in so many areas because it is a fundamental shift in the way of living. It changes the fundamental belief that it is the outside world that is the cause of your problems to, it is the inside programs you created for yourself and are consciously and unconsciously choosing to run, that is the cause of your problems.

This is a massive fundamental shift in the way we have been brought up and what we have been taught in school. Through Mindfulness work, you have amazing access to your insides and all your past and present programs. Never before in recorded history has this been taught at the scale that is happening now on the planet.

You are not a victim to your body’s issues, diseases and your minds habits and problems. Almost all health issues can be traced back to an issue in your mind and body that you have access to, and are able to heal.

Of course saying that this is possible and actually doing it requires a lot of practice. But it is worth it. Your health and stress levels will show the difference over time.

The Art of Achieving a Goal

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One of the ways you can use your Mindfulness practice is to focus on a positive goal that you are wanting to accomplish. How you do this is very important. Visualising an outcome helps reprogram your brain and nervous system to make this happen much easier.

But visualising alone is not enough. You need to be out of your thinking mind and in touch with your body to energise the goal. It takes all parts of your body to be aligned and active to achieve a goal. Especially if it is a new one that you haven’t done before.

If it is new and just out of reach (which is what you want) it can be difficult to visualise it clearly enough and that’s normal. So it requires repetition over and over, correcting and adding more detail each time. That detail should be positive, seeing the end result. It should also feel like you have it now in this present moment. To have that real feeling you need to be in that mindful deep state, in your body.

If you are not in that mindfulness alpha/theta state, then the goal is just a fantasy, a pie in the sky dream that has no legs to stand on. If you don’t take the time to repeatedly feel it throughout your body, nothing is likely to happen.

Pockets of Peace

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Finding pockets of peace throughout your day is a very healthy sign and a release valve for the stresses that come at you all day long. A lot of our diseases and issues stem from such stress.

What is stress? The pressure you feel in your mind and body and the pressure your body feels within itself beyond your awareness, that stretches normal calm functioning beyond the normal limits. Mindfulness meditation helps you to create a release valve for this stress, to briefly step out of the environment that is creating the stress and allow your body time to balance and reset.

The more you work under stressed people or the more stressed people you have in your environment, the more you need to find these pockets of peace throughout the day.

Learning to switch off at will, is a powerful tool to combating the stress that is around you. Prolonged periods of stress are not beneficial to your mind or body. Occasional bursts to achieve a deadline is fine but ongoing, long-term it is lethal.

Learning this important skill to switch off at will throughout the day, even for two minutes, gives you back control of your mind and body. Other types of switching off/release valves can be good too, but switching off the thoughts and feeling into your body are key.

Your Mobile Computer Phone and your Racing Mind

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Body mindfulness is a great antidote to the racing mind and the constant presence of the smart phone. We first called them mobile phones (cell phones), then smart phones, but what they really are now is mobile computers that can take phone calls. A lot of our contact is not done by voice calls as much anymore. So you are carrying around a computer in your pocket which is always-on and always with you, probably 24/7. The intellect loves interacting with this device, and it represents the outward manifestation of the racing over used mind.

When we use this device we go into our head and our body goes on hold. There is little movement in your body and you are probably breathing very little (unless you are dealing with something very emotional or exercising at the time). You cut off your conscious awareness of your body to use this device. If this is overdone, it can create health problems, relationship problems as well as feeling lost in your head.

When your body is divorced from the decisions you make in your head you lose a lot of intelligence, creativity, you add stress to your thinking process, (so it takes longer to see things clearly) and so you lower your ability to make smart decisions.

Staying in constant contact with your body is crucial to better health and better decision making.

The mobile computer works fast, requiring you to think fast to keep up with it. Connecting with your body is slow, forcing you to slow down and take more care of the present moment. But what may seem slow is actually very fast and efficient in the long term and you get there with much less drama, less waste of energy/resources (less dead ends, less of the long way around to get there) and arrive healthier and happier along the right path for you.

If the body is not at peace the mind is not at peace

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If the body is not at peace the mind is not at peace.

Your body has a very big influence on your mind. More than what most people realise. A lot of it is subconscious, below the level of your awareness. With body mindfulness work you can access more of this deeper awareness, bring it into light and help it release.

When you go deeper what often arises is repressed buried emotions, feelings that are unresolved, unfinished. These unfinished feelings are there because you couldn’t deal with them at the time. So your mind labels them out of bounds, they become a no-go zone in your body. This no-go zone creates a stress in your body in its attempt to keep them locked away. Over time if they are not released they turn into physical pain, and longer term, become chronic pain.

So much of our chronic pain in our bodies are actually repressed emotions.

Release the emotion and the physical pain disappears. The majority of the medical community will still not acknowledge this proven fact and it doesn’t matter, as long as you believe it and do the work to access and release.

I’ve seen this happen time and time again in my private practice. And of course I’ve experienced it in myself too, over and over again.

I highly recommend reading Dr John E Sarno’s books. A good one is Healing Back Pain – The Mind Body Connection.

Changing your Deep Subconscious Auto-Pilot Habits

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“Our brain captures the strategies that work to keep us safe, connected and respected as possible in our early life environment, and then puts those behaviors on autopilot.”
(Amanda Blake, Your Body is Your Brain, 2018)

The behaviours you have that are on autopilot are hard to change because they have been buried deep down very efficiently. They are on autopilot so that they can run automatically when needed without thought.

When you need to be safe and connected, you don’t want to have to think it all through. Stopping to think for too long can be the difference between life and death, or connection and no connection with others.

So how do you change something that’s deep and not part of your conscious thinking intellect? You need to turn inward and put the intellect into the back seat for a while. Body Mindfulness work helps you to do this. You scale back the rate of thinking by focusing on your inner body, mostly from the neck down, away from the seat of the intellect. That brings you closer to the automatic patterns that you deemed early on as the best way to live.

I like Amanda Blake’s explanation of the there brains. The lower Cerebellum Brain is geared for safety. The middle Limbic Brain is geared for emotional connection with people and the Cerebrum (top brain intellect) is geared for Respect. This gearing or wiring are strategies that are on autopilot were created long ago, mostly in childhood.

Things change as you grow up and into adulthood. But very often these deeper autopilot patterns do not update. What burned them in place was so strong (probably traumatic) that you decided there is no way you are going to let that affect you in that way again. So that patterns is locked in deep to protect you. To keep you safe. To keep you connected and to keep you respected by people.