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Use Your Body to Heal Your Mind

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5/17/12

Use Your Body to Heal Your Mind

Henry Grayson, Ph.D.

Show Description:

Now more than ever, stress is directly related to emotional, physical and behavioral issues. Depression, anxiety, failing health, and a lack of real hope need to be addressed more quickly in order for people to become healthier, higher functioning and happier.

What happens when we do not address our underlying stress?

Chronic stress, including un-cleared traumas, not only increases stress hormones, but has also been shown to accelerate the growth of precancerous cells and tumors, and to lower our body’s resistance to bacteria, viruses, diverse illnesses, as well as anxiety and depression.

While most of us may not have dramatic traumas, we have other insidious, ongoing, painful developmental experiences, and all are significant contributors to our physical and emotional problems, disturbances in our relationships, and work failures. Such encoded information can make images, sounds, words and even certain gestures into a message which produces a reaction as if it was a trauma, even though it is not occurring now.

Trauma also raises the heart rate and disturbs the heart rate coherence, increases perspiration, and shoots up the glucose level in the blood for fight or flight and causes stress hormones to surge. Since these processes take so much energy, the survival brain tells other processes such as digestion, physical growth, and the immune system to shut down or slow down. When you are fighting a “tiger”, it is more important to be able to flee than for your immune system to fight an infection.

When you continually perceive danger that may not be there, or you feel you do not have effective tools for handling the external sources of stress, then you get depressed, continue to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and are more prone to heart disease, intestinal problems, gum disease, diabetes, muscular problems and cancer just to name a few.

For healing, health and happiness, these traumas need to be cleared so that the brain can restore itself to normal. We must remember that only taking medicines will probably not get to this cause of illness, but will only treat the immediate symptom or emergency, sometimes creating other illnesses (side effects) while masking the real problem.

Beliefs That Make Us Sick or Well

From neuropsychology we have learned that the information of the trauma is encoded information in the part of the survival brain called the hypothalamus, which translates information to make us feel endangered and frightened, or to feel safe and secure. It may be encoded in other parts of the body as well. These painful experiences lead us to draw conclusions which gel into a negative belief, growing out of increasingly imbedded information based on what is most dramatic or ongoingly familiar to a person, and is recorded in this part of our limbic system, much like software programming, making us interpret things as safe or unsafe, negative or positive, and react accordingly. This cumulative information can be from repeated negative experiences, leading to negative conclusions about our selves, about others, and about life. The accumulation of positive experiences would lead us to form more positive beliefs about ourselves, about others, how much power we do or don’t have to affect our lives and our health.

Our negative core beliefs, therefore, are the eventual conclusions we drew primarily from the negative and painful experiences, or traumas of childhood. Such beliefs may grow out of unresolved traumas, repeated negative experiences, or even repeated negative thoughts associated with the painful experiences. In this sense, negative core beliefs are simply congealed thought patterns which have grown out of traumas, the information encoded in the deep limbic system for survival, and overall conclusions we have drawn from them.

Our beliefs are also ones we have picked up from our families, communities, religious groups, news media, advertising, and all aspects of the world about us. Hence, many of our barriers to healing and happiness lie in our uncleared traumas, negative beliefs, and repetitive negative thought patterns which are intertwined together, which keep us in disease and not at ease.

http://henrygrayson.com

Guest Bio:

Dr. Henry Grayson is a scientific, spiritual, mindbody psychologist who founded and directed the National Institute for the Psychotherapies in New York City. He is the author of Mindful Loving (in it’s twentieth printing), the best selling Sounds True Audio Series, The New Physics of Love, as well as co-author of three professional books. Dr. Grayson integrates diverse psychotherapies with neuroscience, quantum physics, subtle energies with Eastern and Western spiritual mindfulness. He practices in New York City and Connecticut.

Tags: Emotions, Health/Wellness, Relationships, Transformational