You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter
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| this threat be hanging over me?). Constantly focusing on these three things makes us less spiritual, less aware, and less mindful, because it trains us to become more self-absorbed and more focused on our bodies, as well as on other material things (such as what we own, where we live, how much money we have, and soon, in addition to all of the problems we experience in our external world. This focus also trains us to obsess about time—to constantly brace ourselves for the worst-case future scenarios based on our traumatic past experiences—because there’s never enough time and everything always takes too much time. So we could say that just as stress hormones cause the cells of the body to become selfish to ensure that we survive, they endorse our ego to become more selfish, too—and we become materialists defining reality with our senses. We end up feeling separate from any new possibilities, because when we never leave that state of chronic emergency, that me- first mentality that pervades all our thinking strengthens and endures, leading us to become self-indulgent, self-serving, and self-important. Ultimately, the self becomes defined as a body living in the environment and in time. As you have just read and now more fully understand, the reality is that you do indeed have some degree of control over your own genetic engineering—by way of your thoughts, choices, behaviors, experiences, and emotions. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, who had the power she sought all along but didn’t know it, you also possess a power that you may not have previously realized was yours—the keys that can set you free of being chained to the limitations of your own genetic expression. 115 Chapter Five How Thoughts Change the Brain and the Body Now you can understand that whether it’s joyful or stressful, with every thought you think, every emotion you feel, and every event you experience, you’re acting as an epigenetic engineer of your own cells. You control your destiny. So this raises another question If your environment changes and you then program new genes in new ways, is it possible— based on your perceptions and beliefs—to program the gene ahead of the actual environment? Feelings and emotions are normally the end products of experiences, but can you combine a clear intention with an emotion that begins to give the body a sampling of the future experience before it’s been made manifest? When you’re truly focused on an intention for some future outcome, if you can make inner thought more real than the outer environment during the process, the brain won’t know the difference between the two. Then your body, as the unconscious mind, will begin to experience the new future event in the present moment. You’ll signal new genes, in new ways, to prepare for this imagined future event. If you continue to mentally practice enough times this new series of choices, behaviors, and experiences that you desire, reproducing the same new level of mind over and over again, then your brain will begin to physically change—installing new neurological circuitry to begin to think from that new level of mind—to look as if the experience has already happened. You’ll be producing epigenetic variations that lead to real structural and functional changes in the body by thought alone—just as do those who respond to a placebo. Then your brain and body will no longer be living in the same past they’ll be living in the new future that you created in your mind. This is possible through mental rehearsal. This technique is basically closing your eyes and repeatedly imagining performing an action, and mentally reviewing the future you want, all the while reminding yourself of who you no longer want to be (the old self) and who you do want to be. This process involves thinking about your future actions, mentally planning your choices, and focusing your mind on anew experience. Let’s go over this sequence in greater detail so we can more thoroughly understand exactly what’s happening in mental rehearsal and how it works. As you mentally rehearse a destiny or dream about anew outcome, you imagine it over and over again until it becomes familiar to 116 you. The more knowledge and experience you have wired in your brain about the new reality you desire, the more resources you have to create abetter model of it in your mental picturing, and so the greater your intention and expectation areas with the hotel maids. You are “reminding” yourself of what your life will look like and feel like once you get what you want. Now you are putting an intention behind your attention. Then you consciously marry your thoughts and intentions with a heightened state of emotion, such as joy or gratitude. (More on heightened states of emotion is coming up) Once you can embrace that new emotion and you get more excited, you’re bathing your body in the neurochemistry that would be present if that future event were actually happening. It could be suggested that you’re giving your body a taste of the future experience. Your brain and body don’t know the difference between having an actual experience in your life and just thinking about the experience—neurochemically, it’s the same. So your brain and body begin to believe they’re actually living in the new experience in the present moment. By keeping your focus on this future event and not letting any other thoughts distract you, in a matter of moments, you turn down the volume on the neural circuits connected to the old self, which begins to turn off the old genes, and you fire and wire new neural circuits, which initiates the right signals to activate new genes in new ways. Thanks to the neuroplasticity discussed previously, the circuits in your brain begin to reorganize themselves tore ect what you’re mentally rehearsing. And as you keep coupling your new thoughts and mental images with that strong, positive emotion, then your mind and body are working together —and you’re now in anew state of being. At this point, your brain and body are no longer a record of the past; they area map to the future—a future that you’ve created in your mind. Your thoughts have become your experience, and you just became the placebo. Download 5.46 Mb. Share with your friends:
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