You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

you’re experiencing is merely part of the past. So you just notice it you become aware Ah, my body-mind wants to go to the past. All right. Let’s
settle down and relax back into the present.
Just as your mind will try to distract you, your body may do the same. It may want to get nauseated, create pain, or make that spot in the middle of your back itch, but if that happens, remember that it’s just the body trying to be the mind. So as you master it, you are becoming greater than your body. If you can master it during your meditation each time, then when you walk back into your life, you’re going to be more present, more aware, and more conscious—and less unconscious.
Sooner or later, just as my stallion surrenders tome and follows my commands without letting the mares or anything else distract him, your body will also acquiesce to your mind during your meditation without getting hijacked by any stray thoughts. And when the horse and rider are one, when the mind and body are working together, there’s simply no greater feeling—you’re in anew state of being. It’s incredibly empowering.
Moving into an Altered State
The meditation I’m going to walk you through in the next chapter begins with a technique the Buddhists call open focus. It’s very helpful forgetting into the altered state we’re trying to achieve, because in our normal day-to-day existence, living in survival mode and marinating in stress hormones, we’re naturally very narrow focused. We put all our attention on things and people and problems (focusing on the particle or matter, not on the wave or energy, and we define reality by our senses.
We can call that type of attention object focused.
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With all our attention on the outer world, which in this state appears more real to us than the inner world, our brains pretty much stay in a higher-range beta brainwave state—the most reactive, unstable, and volatile of all the different brainwave patterns. Because we’re on high alert, we aren’t in a position to create, daydream, solve problems, learn new things, or heal. It’s certainly not a state that’s conducive to meditating. The electrical activity in our brains increases, and thanks to the fight-or-flight response, our heart rate and respiration naturally increase. Our bodies can’t spend much, if any, of their resources for growth and optimal health, because they’re always on the defensive,
trying to protect us, just trying to help us make it through the day.
Under these less-than-favorable conditions, our brains tend to compartmentalize, meaning that some regions of the brain begin to work
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separately from the others instead of working together, and some even work in opposition to each other—like stepping on the brake and the gas at the same time. It’s a house divided against itself.
In addition to the parts of the brain not communicating well with each other, the brain no longer communicates with the rest of the body inane cient, orderly manner. Because the brain and the central nervous system control and coordinate all the other systems of our bodies—
keeping our hearts beating and our lungs breathing, digesting food and eliminating waste, controlling our metabolism, regulating the immune system, balancing our hormones, and keeping countless other functions working—we become unbalanced. Our brains send very disorderly messages and disintegrated signals down the spinal cord to the rest of the body. As a result, none of the body’s systems gets a clear message.
Instead, the message is very incoherent.
Picture the immune system responding, I don’t know how to make a white blood cell out of that instruction And then picture the digestive system saying, I can’t tell if I should secrete acid in my stomach first or if
I should secrete it in my small intestine. These orders are pretty mixed up.”
At the same time, the cardiovascular system laments, I can’t tell if my heart should be in rhythm or out of rhythm, because the signal I’m getting is pretty out of rhythm itself. Is there really a lion around the corner again?”
This state of imbalance keeps us out of homeostasis or equilibrium, and it’s easy to see then how it sets us up for disease, producing arrhythmias or high blood pressure (unbalanced cardiovascular system indigestion and acid reflux (unbalanced digestive system and a preponderance of colds, allergies, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, and other conditions
(unbalanced immune function)—to name just a few examples.
That state—with our brainwaves becoming scrambled and filled with static—is what I referred to in the last chapter as a state of incoherence.
There’s no rhythm or order to our brainwaves or to the messages the brain sends the body—it’s total cacophony.
In the open-focus technique, on the other hand, we close our eyes, take our attention off the outer world and its trappings, and instead open our focus to pay attention to the space around us (on the wave instead of the particle. The reason it works is that when we’re sensing this space, we’re not giving our attention to anything material and we’re not thinking. Our brainwave patterns shift to the more restful and creative alpha (and eventually theta as well. In this state, our inner world now becomes more real to us than the outer world, which means we’re in a much better
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position to make the changes we want to make.
Research shows that when we use the open-focus technique properly,
the brain starts to become more organized and more synchronized, with the different compartments working together in a more orderly fashion.
And what syncs together links together. In this level of coherence, the brain can now send more coherent signals throughout the entire nervous system to the rest of the body, and everything starts to move in rhythm,
working together. Instead of cacophony, now our brains and our bodies are playing a beautiful symphony. The end result is that we feel more whole, integrated, and balanced. My colleagues and I saw this type of consistent brain changes in the majority of the students we scanned in our workshops, so we know this technique works.

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