Families don’t just shape our lives; they also shape our bodies.
Receptivity is a function of vulnerability, not a function of power.
The word “emotion” derives from a Latin verb meaning “to move” or
“move out”. This is what our emotions
do. They move us in the direction in
which we need to go in life. They direct
us toward health and fulfillment, like love and joy, or they move us away from
the wrong tract, like fear and anger.
If you’re stuck in an emotion, it’s not an emotion anymore. It’s a problem. Being immobilized by any
emotion is unhealthy, because it’s the opposite of what emotion means, which is
to move on or out.
It seems paradoxical, but more of your brain is awake when you’re
asleep than when you are in a conscious state.
When you’re awake, only about 10% of your brain is firing at any given
time. But when you’re asleep, the whole
thing lights up.
As one scientist defined it, intuition is “the process of reaching
accurate conclusions based on inadequate information”.
In life, if you focus on possibilities, they become
probabilities.
The frontal lobe is our grand censor. But when we’re asleep, it’s suppressed.
We have other memories besides those in our brains. Memories and experiences and the emotions
associated with them are also encoded systematically in all the tissues and
organs of our bodies. These memories and
emotions speak to us not via the rational processes of the brain, but by means
of symptoms and disease in our bodily organs.
Even while your dreams are creating various scenarios for you to
pursue, your sleeping body is also trying out various ways to achieve your
heart’s desires. Although most actual
movement is suppressed during sleep, the body’s neurons are still firing, often
in ways that correspond to the content of your dreams. So when you walk up to your dream person in
your dream, the neurons in your legs are actually firing, and laying down a
real neuronal pathway in your brain that you might be able to follow in the
waking future.
When you dream, certain areas of your body can communicate
information to you about the past or the present. They send you emotional information about
what needs to be changed in your life.
Memory, in other words, is the experience of an emotion encoded and
empatterned in our brains and bodies. A
memory that is unusually happy or pleasant, and not particularly stressful, is
usually encoded mostly by way of the hippocampus in the temporal lobe which
helps record verbal memory, or memory that can be talked about. When an experience is painful or
traumatizing, however, the hippocampus is unable to encode it because it’s
suppressed by stress hormones released by the brain and body. That’s when the amygdala, another area in the
temporal lobe, steps in and takes over, encoding the experiences as a nonverbal
memory, or one that can’t be expressed easily in words. The memory is stored in body memory. You may not consciously recollect it, but it
still lives in your brain and the tissues of your body.
We are not responsible for our illnesses, but we must be responsive
to them.
Fear doesn’t just affect your emotional behavior; it also causes
changes in the way your organs behave.
Trauma in the form of experiences such as child abuse, military
combat, man-made or natural disasters, witnessing violence, or even lesser
emotional and mental trauma increases levels of dissociation. This means that certain emotions and memories
are split off; they lie in the body tissue or areas of the brain we can’t talk
about. If not dealt with properly, they
can create disease in the body.
Hearing your intuition really requires little more than simply
paying attention, even to seemingly random, insignificant, irrelevant thoughts,
ideas, sensations, and emotions.
