If Our Thoughts Can Make Us Sick
Can they make us well?
I was triggered. Again. And I knew where I was headed. I was headed down that spiral hole of hurt, misery, suffering, and nothingness. I’d been there before and I was sick of it.
I was familiar with the feeling. I’d felt it before, a lot of times, and I did not like it. I was triggered by a painful event that happened almost 3 years ago. And for the past three years, my brain relived the memory over and over again.
It was torture. I woke up the next day with aches, pains, and discomfort in my entire body.
The truth of the matter is I was thinking in the past — not because I choose to but because I've been triggered and felt those terrible emotions so many times that my body is getting addicted to the pain even though it's uncomfortable.
The good thing is I recognize the pattern. And I have the power to change it. As I lay in bed thinking and tired of the cycle I found myself in, I knew I needed to learn. To understand why. I don't have to live like this. Nobody has to live like this.
Trauma, Past Experiences, and Memories
I ended up listening to a podcast where neuroscientist Dr. Joe Dispenza talked about the brain, body, thoughts, habits, and memories. He defined habits as a redundant set of automatic unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that is acquired through repetition. He says a habit is when you have done something so many times that the body knows how to do it better than the mind.
From what he said, our bodies can literally get addicted to a certain type of pain because it becomes so familiar and comfortable with those emotions even when it causes us pain.
This podcast was so interesting and got me thinking. There is hope if I am able to train my body and mind to break free from the redundancy of the cycle I am in. Our habits create our thoughts and our thoughts create our reality, which I know to be true.
A lot of us find it really hard to get past trauma in our lives. Dr. Dispenza explains this is because the stronger the emotional reaction we have to some experience in our lives, the higher the emotional quotient — so the more we put our attention to the cause.
He says long-term memories are created from highly emotional experiences and that whenever we have an emotional reaction to something, we think we can't control our emotional reaction. If you allow the emotional reaction to last for hours or days, it becomes our mood which then becomes our temperament.
If you ask me why I am so angry I will say that it's because of an event that happened to me three years and when I keep this same emotional reaction going on for years, it becomes a personality trait.
From what I learned from Dr. Dispenza, learning how to shorten your period of emotional reaction is really where all the work begins. In other words, don't dwell too long in your feelings.
Pain, Stress, and Survival Mode
When something happens to us, we keep recalling the events because our brain keeps telling us to pay attention to what happened in the past because we don't want it happening again. Dr. Dispenza explained that every time we recall this event, it produces a chemical in the brain and body as if the event is occurring in the present moment.
People spend 70% of their life living in stress and in survival mode. We always expect the worst-case scenario based on experiences, and we select the worst possible outcome and meet it with fear.
We can tolerate short term stress but not long-term stress like an annoying roommate living with you and pushing your buttons all day long turning on your stress chemicals. Dr. Dispenza said when those stress chemicals are turned on and you can't turn it off, now you are headed for disease because no organism in nature can live in an emergency mode for an extended period.
So you ask a person, why are you this way? What happened to you and they tell you I am this way because of what happened three years ago. And what that means is that they haven't been able to change since that experience.
Dr. Dispenza said we have the ability to change and reprogram our brains to feel differently, but it is not an easy task. It will require discipline and dedication to wanting to feel better than your current emotional state.
This was a hard thing to believe at first — that we can get addicted to the rush of those painful emotions and we use the problems and conditions in our lives to reaffirm our limitations.
The Role the Body Plays
Dr. Dispenza said that the body is the unconscious mind. The body does not know the difference between the experience that creates the emotion and the emotion we create by thought alone. When the body becomes the mind, the servant becomes the master.
This means that the body can believe that it is living in the same past experience 24/7 and so when those emotions influence certain thoughts, and they do, and those thoughts create the same emotions, and the emotions influence the same thoughts now the person’s entire state of being is in the past.
When you feel fear, you start having anxiety, and the brain checks in with the body and says yea you are pretty anxious so you start thinking more corresponding thoughts that equal the way you feel.
When it comes time to change and make a different choice so we don't feel the same way, the body says, well you've been doing this for 10 yrs now suddenly you want to stop suffering? You want to stop feeling angry and sad? You don't want to complain and blame others?
Dr. Dispenza said this is because when you decide to change, the body is in the unknown, and being in the unknown is such a scary place because it is uncertain. The body hates being in the unknown so it says I want to return to the familiar territory and the body starts influencing the mind.
It says start tomorrow. Feel what you feel. You are too addicted to this, you've done this too many times and you can never change. This doesn't feel right and when you respond to those thoughts, as if it's true, the same thoughts will lead to the same choices which lead to the same behaviors which create the same experience which produces the same emotion. What a vicious cycle!
The Analytical Mind
When you wake up in the morning and start thinking about your problems which are all connected to people, places, and things and because the brain is a record of the past, the moment you start your day you are already living in the past.
Each one of these memories has an emotion which is the end product of our past experiences. The moment we recall those memories of our problems we all of a sudden feel sad, we feel unhappy and we feel all the pain.
Dr. Dispenza says that how you think and how you feel creates your state of being. A person’s entire state of being when they start their day is in the past. The familiar past can eventually be a predictable future.
So if you believe that thought has something to do with your destiny, and you can’t think greater than how you feel which has become the means of thinking, then you are thinking in the past and will keep creating the same life.
We go through a series of routine behaviors and that becomes a program and we lose our free will to a program. And it is nobody doing this to us but us.
When it comes time to change the redundancy of this cycle, it becomes a subconscious program. Dr. Dispenza went on to say that 95% of who we are by the time we are 30 years is a memorized set of behaviors, emotional reactions, unconscious habits, hard-wired attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions that function like a computer program.
A person might then say with the 5% of their conscious mind, I want to be happy. I want to be healthy. I want to be free but the body is on a different program so how do we begin to make these changes?
He explained that we have to get beyond the analytical mind, which is what separates the conscious mind from the subconscious mind. He said meditation is crucial at this point because it can change our brain waves and slow it down. And when this is done properly, we enter the stage where we can make some very important changes.
Most of us wait for crises, trauma, disease, loss, or some tragedy to decide to change, but why wait? You can learn and change in the stage of pain and suffering or you can learn and change in the state of joy and inspiration.
When It Comes Time to Make A Different Choice
What a vicious cycle. You have to set a strong intention to break it. The hardest part about change is not making the same choice you did the day before. The moment you decide to make a different choice, get ready to feel uncomfortable. It will feel unfamiliar.
What thoughts do you want to fire and rewire in your brain? What behaviors do you want to demonstrate in one day? The act of mentally closing your eyes and rehearsing the action of what you want — if you are truly present — the brain does not know the difference between what you are imagining and what you are experiencing in the 3D world, Dr. Dispenza advised.
He said during visualization, you begin to install neurological hardware in your brain to look like the event has already occurred in your life. Now the brain is no longer living in the past, it is a map to the future and if you keep doing it this way, the hardware becomes a software program, and who knows, you just might start acting and thinking differently.
The hardest part is to teach our body emotionally what the future will feel like ahead of the actual experience. This means you can't wait for success to feel empowered. You can't wait for love to feel happiness. You can't wait for good health to feel healthy.
This, Dr. Dispenza explained, is the old reality of cause and effect. Waiting for something to happen outside of us to change how we feel inside. The moment you start feeling abundant and wealthy, you are generating wealth. The moment you are empowered and feel it, you take a step toward success. The moment we start to feel whole, our healing begins. When you love yourself and all of life, you create an equal. Now you are causing an effect.
This is the difference between living as a victim saying a person did this and that to me to make me feel the way I feel. When you switch that around, you become a creator of your world and then you start saying my thinking and feeling is changing an outcome in my life — and that is a whole new different game and we start believing that we are creators of reality.
If you are not defined by the vision of the future, then you are stuck with old memories of the past and you will always be predictable in life. When you see the same people and go to the same places every day and do the same things, it's no longer that your personality is creating your personal reality, your personal reality is affecting and creating your personality, Dr. Dispenza said. The environment is unconsciously controlling the way you think and feel.
Meditation Is the Tool
When you sit your body down, close your eyes, and disconnect from the outer environment — when you see fewer things and there is less stimulation, listening to soft, soothing music with earplugs in, there is less sensory information coming to the brain so you disconnect from the environment.
Dr. Dispenza said you have to sit your body down and command it to obey you, bringing the attention to the present moment. The body might want to go back to its daily activities — to go back to its emotional past — but just bring your attention to the present moment. Where you place your attention is where energy goes.
Whenever you become aware that your thoughts are back in the past and you settle your body down in the present moment, your body might fight you. The body is just looking for that predictable and comfortable emotional state. Command the body — it has to obey its master.
Every time you become aware that you are doing it and your body is craving those emotions and you settle it back down into the present moment, you are telling the body it's no longer the mind and you are the mind. Your will is getting stronger than the program the body is used to and if you can do this over and over and over again, Dr. Dispenza explains that it is like training a stallion. Like training a dog. It obeys!
When the body realizes that it is no longer the mind and finally surrenders, there is a liberation of energy. We free ourselves of the chains of our emotions that keep us living in a painful, familiar past.
Don't Believe Everything You Think
For most of us, when we have a thought, we believe that that's the truth. One of the greatest realizations in my own spiritual journey is that just because I think a thought doesn't mean it's true.
We think 60,000–70,000 thoughts in one day and 90% of those thoughts are the same thoughts like the day before and if you believe thoughts have something to do with your destiny, then your life will not change much because the same thoughts lead to the same choices and the same choices leads to the same behaviors and the same behaviors lead to the same experiences and the same experiences produce the same emotion. Hence the vicious cycle.
The key is to become conscious of this process — to become more aware of how you think, act, and feel throughout your day. The more conscious you become of those unconscious states of mind and body, the less likely you are to go unconscious during the day and negative thoughts cannot slip through your awareness unchecked because through meditation, you know yourself.
When you notice the thoughts, behaviors, and emotions of the old self, you retire that old self as you fire and rewire new thoughts that conditions the body into a new emotional state of being, and if you do that enough times, Dr, Dispenza said it will become familiar to you.
Retire the Old Self And Reinvent a New One
We learn the most about ourselves and others when we are uncomfortable. When we are in an uncomfortable state, a program jumps in and the program jumps in because we do not want to be in the present moment.
Through meditation, we are less likely to react and believe that the thoughts we are thinking are true and this is where the process of change begins. This is where freedom starts and we break free from our past traumas and negative experiences.
We have to unlearn before we relearn. We have to break the habits of the old self to reinvent the new self. We have to un-memorize emotions stored in our bodies and recondition the body to a new mind and a new emotion. We have to deprogram to reprogram. After that is when our healing happens.
Our Thoughts Can Make Us Well
According to science, our hormones of stress can down-regulate genes and create diseases. Human beings due to the size of our brain can turn on stress responses just by thought alone. We think about our problems and we turn on those chemicals associated with that problem.
This means that our thought can make us sick and if it is possible that our thoughts can make us sick, can our thoughts make us well? I found the answer to be yes. Our thoughts can put us in a better state of being.
Final Thoughts
I will do the work to change my emotional state of being. I can't prevent myself from getting triggered by my environment, but I can control my emotional response. I can choose where to put my energy and attention. I can choose thoughts that make me feel good instead of those thoughts that make me angry. And each one of us has the power to reinvent a completely new self.
Now I really want to hear from you. What are your thoughts on this? Do you really believe our thoughts can make us well? Do you have anything to add? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below and thank you so much for reading.
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