Minding your Mindstuff follow up
Follow up talk on the power of thought, Quantum Physics, and Yoga
Start with short meditation – Now … if you have children running around you … it may (or may not!) interfere with this little meditation. If you do have your kiddos running around it is still possible to find the meditative state — in fact it will make you better at it, which will in turn make you better at getting in this state admits what is swirling around you in life.
Spiritual torture? or Spiritual escape!
- Find a comfortable sitting position — don’t let anyone tell you how to sit … other than with good posture. You want to feel comfortable for this.
- Its nice to have your hands in your lap, they can be in jnana mudra, lying palms up on your lap, on your knees or wherever you can allow your shoulders to relax but not droop.
- Tongue on the roof of your mouth (jiva bandha)
- Close your mouth, part your teeth and relax your jaw. SMILE 🙂
- Breathe only through your nose. Slightly flare your nostrils with each inhale.
- Feel the 3 streams of air coming in your nostrils; 2 going down and 1 going up giving a little more O2 to your brain.
- Take your breath a little slower and a little deeper, working toward a 4-5 second inhale and a 4-5 second exhale.
- Allow your abdomen to expand on the inhale and soften inward on the exhale.
- Feel as if your whole body is breathing, from your brain to your toes. Every cell in your body literally takes in O2 and gives of CO2 … mmmm … full body breathing.
- Sit with this for a few moments
Pay attention to how you feel now. Calm.
Are there ways you can have this feeling while you are at work? Or driving? Cooking dinner … shopping …?
You want to pay attention to not get too far from this feeling in your everyday life.
When you feel like this, your heart is more efficient, your breath is deeper and slower, your body heals, repairs, fights disease.
The farther away you get from this feeling, the less your body can repair and take care of itself.
Find ways in your life to operate like this.
And KNOW WHEN YOU SLIP INTO A STRESS RESPONSE.
And remember your tools to slip out of it … your thoughts, your breath, your posture, your bandhas ….
This is what all this yoga is about. Your nervous system, and ultimately your thoughts.
What are you thinking?
This has led me down a path that ended in Quantum Physics …
My spirituality has become today’s science !
What we’ve learned so far?
Where thought goes prana (energy) flows … which gives your thoughts some power. We learned just thinking about an area of your body increases blood, neurons, white blood cells, and lymphatic fluids to the area. This gives you more healing power than you may have thought!
Taking it further, your thoughts effect every cell of your body!
In the book The Biology of Belief by Bruce H. Lipton, Ph.D a cell biologist will forever change how you think about your own thinking. He proves how the biochemical effects of the brain’s functioning effects all the cells of your body by recreating what you are thinking in your body with neurotransmitters and neuropeptides — literally your cells are affected by your thoughts.
Dr. Candace Pert discovered the role neuropeptides play in carrying the emotional chemicals that get released when we feel emotions. These chemicals attach to receptors all over the body blocking the flow of information and hormones in our body. Literally our old traumatic events alter the flow of information in our bodies.
She introduced us to the field of PsychoNeuroImmunology. Through psychoneuroimmunology we learn how our thoughts effect 3 major systems of our body; our nervous system, hormonal systems. and immune system.
Neurotransmitters and neuropeptides both influence our emotional state — neurotransmitters by either making us alert and precautious or relaxed and and carefree. Neuropeptides influence our hormonal balance which greatly effects our moods and how comfortable we are in our body — and vice versa, our moods, emotions, and thoughts effect what neuropeptides get released.
By making a conscious effort to control your thoughts you will have a much better balance in your hormones.
We also know that stress changes how our brain operates — stress, pent up emotions, worrying — these all can block blood flow to parts of the brain; specifically our prefrontal cortex which is the part of our brain we use to make good decisions and judgments.
Instead blood is shifted to our amygdala which is where our stress response is located, when blood in the brain shifts to the amygdala the body wants to think fight or flight — it stimulates that will to personally survive — sometimes at others expenses.
You want to feel this process in your body so you can calm yourself down, and get better blood flow back to your entire brain.
Reduced blood flow to your prefrontal cortex also interferes with our mental clarity and our ability to handle stress, creating a viscous cycle.
Stress = chronic reduced blood flow to your prefrontal cortex = less of an ability to handle stress = compromised decisions and health = chronic stress. YOU CAN BREAK THIS CYCLE.
Minding your mindstuff is a good start — you can learn do it in meditation of course, but you can also just learn to pay attention to your thoughts and shift them to a higher purpose.
- By being conscious with your thoughts you can release the neuropeptides that are blocking the flow of information into your cells and into your brain. And make a conscious effort to be joyful, thankful, appreciative, and aware.
- Breathing and meditation and yoga are some of the most effective ways to release those neuropeptides … and there is another way that is even better …
- Cuddling! (cuddling will release oxytocin into our bloodstream which is the feel good “I am loved” hormone) Cuddling has been shown to also break the stress cycle allowing you to look at your emotions and thoughts and sort them out for better health.
And thanks to the placebo effect we can even use our mind much like a medication. We can heal better when we believe a medicine or herb or doctor will help us do so.
But it even goes beyond thoughts and stress and health of your body — we can use our thoughts to build our skills, talents, vocation, art endeavors or just about anything you want in your life.
Visualizations, placebo effect, and your gut instinct
Imagery has a new found meaning to me. Through this work on Minding your Mindstuff I learned how the images we put in our brain, help our body be or create what we are seeing through the biophotons.
Through visualizations you can perform better; when we visualize ourselves doing our performance — whatever that may be from our job to a sport to something artistic you improve at it.
These biophotons in our brain that paint the pictures we are seeing are quantum molecules — they are photons in our body that emit light — they help our body’s systems and cells communicate faster and further increasing our vitality.
Biophotons like all quantum molecules can be either a particle or a wave — so matter or energy. Meaning your visualizations can effect matter — your body … and they can effect energy — your dreams and visions and make them a reality.
Do you want to use the power of your mind just to heal your body? Or how about using the power of your mind to heal your body and create what you want in life?
Quantum physics
I picked up a few more tidbits on quantum physics, particularly on the matter vs. the wave.
Dr. Joe Dispenza a researcher who offers workshops and lectures on quantum physics among other topics, talks about connecting to the wave instead of the particle plane in our life.
Particle is matter. Things … cars computers, houses, clothes,
Wave is energy. Thoughts, feelings, blood flow, dreams, infinite possibilities.
Blood is the particle, blood flow is the wave. Blood just sitting in a vessel does nothing – blood flowing does literally unimaginable amounts of work in our body.
When we meditate I’m told, we connect with the wave. How can we live in the wave?
While we can be successful in the particle plane — building our wealth to build our material goods — this takes time — in the wave it all happens instantly.
Other places we connect with the wave? Maybe brain waves and heart waves can give us a glimpse of the wave plane?
Brain waves and being in the wave~
On the quantum physics level – energy effecting matter, let’s talk about how our thoughts or brain waves effect our body cells and molecules. This is energy changing matter.
Its the energy that making those molecules behave (in our body) as they do!
To go beyond where we are now — being able to help direct energy to a certain point inside our body — to something outside of your body you want to create. How does your energy flow outside of your body? It’s the difference between the particle and the wave.
We understand in the particle zone how work and effort can change one particle at a time to eventually effect the whole — in the flow or wave zone all particles change instantly and effortlessly.
How do we operate in the wave ~ ?
One of the ways you are in ‘the wave’ is when you are in the ‘flow zone’.
You know that Zone where you’re creative, having fun whether its with work or a a hobby and time slips right by — it’s doable for you but slightly challenging, engaging, interesting, fun … Somehow you can be very productive in this zone and accomplish more than usual.
What sounds like this to you?
You can get a feel for the wave when you are in the zone because your work feels effortless and time is not a factor.
And I do want to get into brain waves a little more — especially if they help us ‘connect with the wave’ and build the life we want and that’s meaningful and productive.
Anyone else have any ideas of who we can operate in the wave?
Brain waves may help us get that.
There are brain waves associated with being in the “zone” and we can replicate these brain waves with a little effort and practice making whatever we are doing more effective and productive.
Different brain waves are associated with different functions in the body. When our brain waves are slower we have more of a tendency to rebuild through lengthening telomeres, increased stem cell activity, among other functions.
When we are in the zone working our brain waves actually slow down to about the same as that of meditation — the alpha brain wave.
Whereas the beta brain wave is a faster brain wave and is the brain wave we are in when we are working and doing busy ness in our days. In the active beta brain wave we don’t do much rebuilding, we do more thinking. It is our consciousness that we live out of most of our days.
Let’s learn about brain waves and the importance of having coherence in our brain.
We learned about coherence between our heart and brain from the work of HeartMath – how we come into coherence between our breath, thoughts, and heart beat – when we do this our heart waves smooth out. Here is a reminder of what we learned from HeartMath:
- When under stress our heart rhythm (using heart monitors) is erratic and disordered — these erratic signals travel on the neurons from the heart to the brain limiting our ability to think clearly, remember, learn, reason, and make effective decisions.
- In contrast the more ordered and stable patterns of the heart’s input to the brain has the opposite effect – it facilities higher cognitive functioning that not only benefits the entire body but also profoundly affects how we perceive, think, feel, perform.
Brain Wave Coherence (from EEGs)
We want to smooth our our brain waves too and have coherence between the portions of our brain.
Brain waves speed up or slow down depending on what we are doing and thinking — both our physical and mental activities can effect our brain waves.
- As we become more calm and slow down our thinking brain waves slow down too.
- As we become more active in thinking they speed up.
This is a start of how I’m trying to figure out how to operate my life in the wave instead of the particle. And this led me a little more into brain waves — that blog is here.
Can yoga help us connect to the wave? It does slow down our brain waves, so yes it is possible, but not if you are just doing asana — or lamenting over what your body used to do in yoga. It is so freeing in your yoga practice to not worry about what you used to do or what you “should” be able to do. You’re not going to connect with the wave if that is how you go through your practice.
Yoga needs to have an internal contemplation to be yoga. This is a start — yoga just as asana isn’t all that yoga has to offer us.
Inner Contemplation – watching our thoughts and feelings
Contemplation is defined as an inner seeing or inner vision with a spiritual component — or even a mystical awareness. If you are stressing, you are consumed by the stress and unable to get to this inner contemplation.
Inner contemplation, watching your thoughts and feelings. Pay attention to what you are thinking (building) as you go through practice. How can you direct your thoughts to be on a higher plane?
To continue to grow in your yoga practice its time to get off the asana plane and get on to working with the higher levels of living yoga has to offer us.
Asana has served its purpose, lets not get stuck in it.
Pay attention to your thoughts and what your are feeding and building with your thoughts.
Time to change how you think about your thinking.