“Heal and transform the soul first, than healing and transformation of every aspect of your life will follow!” ~Dr. & Master Zhi Gang Sha~
As you scroll through the first 50 blogs in this website you come to look at and old problem in a new way.
Given the vast size of the Universe all problems are small. Take a look around you someone always has it worse off. A shallow outlook may have gave you cancer and a shallow outlook will make it tougher for you to heal. Don’t be offended by that comment this blog explains what I mean.
So let’s think about it a different way, using something we see and interact with every day… light.
While we imagine light to be instantaneous, photons of light actually take time to travel from one side of the room to the other.
In the time it took you to read this far, a photon of light leaving the Sun has travelled about 10 million kilometres – equivalent to travelling around the Earth 250 times.
Light that leaves our second nearest star, Proxima Centauri, takes just over four years to reach Earth and so we can define it as four light years away.
As such, if you were to look at Proxima Centauri, you would not be seeing the star as it is right now, but how it ‘was’ 4 years ago!
We see all things in the universe as they were in the past, whether they’re on the other side of the room or the other side of the galaxy.
To take this concept further, the nearest large galaxy to us is Andromeda which is so big and close that you can see it in the night sky with your naked eye.
What you’re really seeing is 1,000’s of billions of stars in a configuration similar to our Milky Way. However, all of those stars are about 2.5 million light years away, which means you’re seeing Andromeda as it was 2.5 million years ago.
The whole universe is littered with galaxies just like the Milky Way and Andromeda, and using our most powerful telescopes we can see light from galaxies that has taken more than 13 billion years to reach us!
Since a photon of light left one of these galaxies, life sparked into existence and evolved. Dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Humans THEN appeared, developed tools, art, science and technology, built the Hubble Space Telescope, put it into orbit and finally stopped that poor photon on its 13 billion year journey!
The universe is about 13.8 billion years old, so any light we see has to have been travelling for 13.8 billion years or less – we call this the ‘observable universe’.
However, the distance to the edge of the observable universe is about 46 billion light years because the universe is expanding all of the time.
Though the light might have only travelled for 13.8 billion years, the distance from us to the point it came from is, at present, 46 billion light years!
Never look back on past mistakes or experiences the universe expands and moves forward so don’t roll against the tide… we are hard wired to move ahead with excitement in motion.
One great option is Advanced Integrative Therapy (AIT).
Humans experience an array of emotions each day, and every one of these emotions creates a different feeling within the body. After all, our body does release different chemicals when we experience various things that make us happy, or sad, or angry, and each chemical works to create a different environment within the body.
For example, if your brain releases serotonin, dopamine, or oxytocin, you will feel good and happy. Conversely, if your body releases cortisol because you are stressed, you will have an entirely different feeling as the body kicks into survival mode.
What about when we are thinking negative thoughts all the time? Or how about when we are thinking positive thoughts? What about when we are not emotionally charged to either positive or negative thoughts? Let’s explore how these affect our body and life.
Positive vs. Negative
Is there duality in our world? Perhaps to a degree, but mostly we spend a lot of time defining and judging what is to be considered positive and what is to be considered negative, but in either instance, we’ve placed a value judgment on the experience that wasn’t inherently there. THE STATUS QUO… THAT’S A BIG OLE’ HAVE MERCY!!!
WE WORRY ABOUT WHAT OTHERS THINK OF US WITH OUT GIVING THOUGHT ABOUT WHOM WE REALLY ARE OR WANT OUT OF LIFE!!! 🙁
The brain is a very powerful tool and as we define what something is or should be, we begin to have that result play out in our world. Have you ever noticed, for example, someone driving can get cut off and lose their temper, and suddenly they are in a bad mood, whereas someone else can get cut off while driving and simply apply the brake slightly and move on with their day as if nothing happened? It’s the same experience, yet one sees it as negative while the other doesn’t. So are things innately positive and negative? Or do we define things as positive and negative?
Cut the Perceptions as Much as Possible
After thinking about it for a moment, you might realize that there are in fact no positive or negative experiences other than what we define as such. Therefore our very perception of an experience or situation has the ultimate power to determine how we will feel when it’s happening and how our bodies will be affected.
While we can always work to move beyond our definitions of each experience and into a state of mind/awareness/consciousness where we simply accept each experience for what it is and use it as a learning tool, we may not be there yet, and so it’s important to understand how certain emotions can affect our health.
“If someone wishes for good health, one must first ask oneself if he is ready to do away with the reasons for his illness.
Only then is it possible to help him.” – Hippocrates
Mind-Body Connection
The connection between your mind and body is powerful, and although it cannot be visually seen, the effects your mind can have on your physical body are profound.
We can have an overall positive mental attitude and deal directly with our internal challenges and in turn create a healthy lifestyle, or we can have an overall negative attitude and avoid dealing with our internal issues — possibly even cloak those issues with affirmations and positivity without actually changing anything — and create an unhealthy lifestyle. Why is this?
Our emotions and experiences are essentially energy and they can be stored in the cellular memory of our bodies. Have you ever experienced something in your life that left an emotional mark or pain in a certain area of your body? Almost as if you can still feel something that may have happened to you? It is likely because in that area of your body you still hold energy released from that experience that has lingered in the body. I came across an interesting chart that explores what various emotions might affect in the body.
Source :http://www.cforcestudio.com/resources/emotional-pain-chart
When you have pain, tightness, or injuries in certain areas, it’s often related to something emotionally you are feeling within yourself. At first glance it may not seem this way because we are usually very out of touch with ourselves and our emotions in this fast-paced world, but it’s often the truth. When I’ve had chronic pain in my back, knees, neck, or shoulders, it wasn’t exercise, physiotherapy, or any other physical treatment that healed it; it was when I dealt with the emotions behind it that it went away.
I know this because I spent the time and money going to physiotherapy and even though I wanted and believed I would get better, something still wasn’t being addressed. The more I addressed the unconscious thought patterns and emotions throughout my body, the more things loosened up and the pain went away.
When you get sick or are feeling a lot of tightness and pain, oftentimes our body is asking us to observe ourselves and find peace once again within ourselves and our environment. It’s all a learning and growing process; we don’t have to judge or fear it.
You Have the Power
David Suzuki wrote in The Sacred Balance that “condensed molecules from breath exhaled from verbal expressions of anger, hatred, and jealousy, contain toxins. Accumulated over 1 hr, these toxins are enough to kill 80 guinea pigs!” Can you now imagine the harm you are doing to your body when you stay within negative emotions or unprocessed emotional experience throughout the body?
Remember, you have the power within you to get through anything life throws at you. Instead of labeling each experience you have as negative or positive, try to see things from a broader viewpoint. Ask yourself, how can this help me to see or learn something?
Can I use this to shift my perception? To clear some emotion within myself?
To recognize something about another and accept it? Whatever it may be, instead of simply reacting, slow things down and observe. You will find you have the tools to process emotions and illness quickly when you see them for what they are and explore why they came to be. If you believe you will get sick all the time, and believe you have pain because it’s all out of your control, you will continue to have it all in an uncontrollable manner. Only until you realize the control you have over much of what we attract within the body will you begin to master.
Not a second of a normal person’s life goes by without having some type of an emotion. Whether it would be happiness or sadness, joy or depression, emotions are a crucial part of our day. But, what we should also know is that our emotions are connected to our overall health.
Depending on the emotion you are feeling in a certain moment, our body releases different chemicals and those chemicals create a different environment within the body itself.
Serotonin, dopamine or oxytocin are released when we experience happiness. On the other hand, when we feel stress our body will release cortisol, a totally different hormone that puts the body in a different state.
But what happens when we think negative all the time? Or when you are a positive person and have happy thoughts all the time? Read on and you’ll see how emotions interact with your body.
Positive thoughts vs. Negative thoughts
Sure we can be neutral sometimes towards certain things, but most of the time our brain will judge and define what is positive and what negative. The brain is a powerful tool, as it defines something to be positive or negative we’ll get a different reaction in our activity.
For example, if while driving you get cut off by another car, some will get pissed off and immediately change their mood to negative even if it was positive the whole time before, while some will just hit that brake a little bit and continue like nothing happened. So it seems that things are not always positive or negative by definition, but it is we that define them as such.
Change your way of seeing things as much as possible
Most of the time, there are no positive or negative things just by definition, but it is you that find them to be one way or the other. So, you are the one defining how a situation affects you and therefore how your body will react to it. We can always work our definition on certain situations, and while we do not have such self-control yet, maybe after knowing how our emotions affect our health, we can work to improve that self-control.
“If someone wishes for good health, one must first ask oneself if he is ready to do away with the reasons for his illness. Only then is it possible to help him.” ~ Hippocrates
The connection between our body and our mind
Even though not seen visually, the connection between our mind and our body is huge. While positive thinking and inner calmness can lead to a healthy life style and self esteem, destructive thinking and unresolved issues will surely lead to an unhealthy and unfulfilling life.
Our emotions are our body’s essential energy and they can also be stored in our cellular memory. You can probably still feel pain from something that left an emotional mark from when you were in a situation when you felt overwhelmed with stress. That area of your body is likely to store the energy released from the type of experience you had.
There is likely a connection between stress and illness. Theories of the stress–illness link suggest that both acute and chronic stress can cause illness, and several studies found such a link. According to these theories, both kinds of stress can lead to changes in behavior and in physiology. Behavioral changes can be smoking and eating habits and physical activity. Physiological changes can be changes in sympathetic activation or hypothalamic pituitary adrenocorticoid activation, and immunological function. However, there is much variability in the link between stress and illness.
Stress can make the individual more susceptible to physical illnesses like the common cold. Stressful events, such as job changes, may result in insomnia, impaired sleeping, and health complaints. Research indicates the type of stressor (whether it’s acute or chronic) and individual characteristics such as age and physical well-being before the onset of the stressor can combine to determine the effect of stress on an individual. An individual’s personality characteristics (such as level of neuroticism), genetics, and childhood experiences with major stressors and traumas may also dictate their response to stressors.
Chronic stress and a lack of coping resources available or used by an individual can often lead to the development of psychological issues such as depression and anxiety (see below for further information). This is particularly true regarding chronic stressors. These are stressors that may not be as intense as an acute stressor like a natural disaster or a major accident, but they persist over longer periods of time. These types of stressors tend to have a more negative impact on health because they are sustained and thus require the body’s physiological response to occur daily.
This depletes the body’s energy more quickly and usually occurs over long periods of time, especially when these microstressors cannot be avoided (i.e.- stress of living in a dangerous neighborhood). See allostatic load for further discussion of the biological process by which chronic stress may affect the body. For example, studies have found that caregivers, particularly those of dementia patients, have higher levels of depression and slightly worse physical health than non-caregivers.
Studies have also shown that perceived chronic stress and the hostility associated with Type A personalities are often associated with much higher risks of cardiovascular disease. This occurs because of the compromised immune system as well as the high levels of arousal in the sympathetic nervous system that occur as part of the body’s physiological response to stressful events.
However, it is possible for individuals to exhibit hardiness—a term referring to the ability to be both chronically stressed and healthy. Many psychologists are currently interested in studying the factors that allow hardy individuals to cope with stress and evade most health and illness problems associated with high levels of stress.
Stress can be associated with psychological disorders such as delusions, general anxiety disorder, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. However, it is important to note that everyone experiences some level of stress, and diagnosis of stress disorders can only be performed by a licensed practitioner.
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It has long been believed that negative affective states, such as feelings of anxiety and depression, could influence the pathogenesis of physical disease, which in turn, have direct effects on biological process that could result in increased risk of disease in the end. However, recent studies done by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and other places have shown this to be untrue, it isn’t stress itself that causes the increased risk of illness or death, it is actually the perception that stress is harmful.
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For example, when humans are under chronic stress, permanent changes in their physiological, emotional, and behavioral responses are most likely to occur. Such changes could lead to disease. Chronic stress results from stressful events that persist over a relatively long period of time, such as caring for a spouse with dementia, or results from brief focal events that continue to be experienced as overwhelmingly long after they are over, such as experiencing a sexual assault.
Experiments show that when healthy human individuals are exposed to acute laboratory stressors, they show an adaptive enhancement of some markers of natural immunity but a general suppression of functions of specific immunity. By comparison, when healthy human individuals are exposed to real-life chronic stress, this stress is associated with a biphasic immune response where partial suppression of cellular and humoral function coincides with low-grade, nonspecific inflammation.
Even though psychological stress is often connected with illness or disease, most healthy individuals can still remain disease-free after confronting chronic stressful events. Also, people who do not believe that stress will affect their health do not have an increased risk of illness, disease, or death. This suggests that there are individual differences in vulnerability to the potential pathogenic effects of stress; individual differences in vulnerability arise due to both genetic and psychological factors. In addition, the age at which the stress is experienced can dictate its effect on health. Research suggests chronic stress at a young age can have lifelong impacts on the biological, psychological, and behavioral responses to stress later in life.
Neutral stressors
Stress is a non-specific response. It is neutral, and what varies is the degree of response. It is all about the context of the individual and how they perceive the situation. Selye defined stress as “the nonspecific (that is, common) result of any demand upon the body, be the effect mental or somatic.” This includes the medical definition of stress as a physical demand and the colloquial definition of stress as a psychological demand.
Daily hassles/microstressors
This category includes daily annoyances and minor hassles. Examples include: making decisions, meeting deadlines at work or school, traffic jams, encounters with irritating personalities, etc. Often, this type of stressor includes conflicts with other people. Daily stressors, however, are different for each individual, as not everyone perceives a certain event as stressful. For example, most people find public speaking to be stressful, nevertheless, a seasoned politician most likely will not.
There are three major psychological types of conflicts that can cause stress.
- The approach-approach conflict occurs when a person is choosing between two equally attractive options, i.e. whether to go see a movie or to go see a concert.
- The avoidance-avoidance conflict, where a person has to choose between two equally unattractive options, for example, to take out a second loan with unappealing terms to pay off the mortgage or to face foreclosure on one’s house.
- The approach-avoidance conflict. This occurs when a person is forced to choose whether or not to partake in something that has both attractive and unattractive traits—such as whether or not to attend an expensive college (meaning taking out loans now, but also meaning a quality education and employment after graduation).
Travel-related stress results from three main categories: lost time, surprises (an unforeseen event such as lost or delayed baggage) and routine breakers (inability to maintain daily habits). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_stress
I know a Facebook friend that changed her place in the universe moving from Kansas to the Canadian Border in UpState Washington and her health issues “pain” & “stress” disappeared 🙂
Rumi Yoga is not about changing anyone’s style or belief system, but rather deepening one’s own faith so that you may see the beauty in others while keeping your own beliefs intact. The object of emotional Fitness is not to change anyone, but rather strengthen the emotional muscles in your own self so as to manage the unavoidable changes that are awaiting each of us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSf40o5YRUE
Often, when you feel some pain, stiffness or injuries, it is often related to some emotion within. At first it doesn’t seem this way cause we live in a fact paced world, and we often leave our emotions aside. When I had chronic pain in my back and neck, it wasn’t from any exercise or any physical injuries. I spent time and money on physical therapies and nothing happened, something was not addressed. It was the emotions involved behind it. Later, when I addressed the unconscious thoughts and emotions I’ve beed experiencing, the pain started going away.
Often in that way, the body asks us to pay attention to our mental state and find peace with ourselves. It’s still a learning process for people and it is early to judge, but we need to get involved on the subject.
Preview David Suzuki’s The Brain: Our universe within –
I Would Like to Thank 
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