Anyone who knows me knows I am passionate about how the mind and body work together. Even after 37 years of working with the body, it never ceases to amaze me how our body is designed to heal itself, if only our mind doesn't get in the way.
What I mean by this is our personal mind thinks it knows best, it has a superiority complex and constantly feels the need to scramble for control. The mind likes to analyse, catastrophise and ruminate, ultimately trying to ‘fix’ the body.
All this busy thinking sends our body danger signals, catapulting it into ‘fight or flight’, a stress response felt in every cell of our body. Just as we convert food into energy, so too do we convert thought into belief, as our thinking becomes metabolised.
Stress is a feeling made of thoughts and thoughts are a collection of words. Words can open a Pandora’s box out of which emerge feelings, perceptions, moods, beliefs and symptoms. The weight of words becomes palpable if we choose to believe them. This weight causes us to feel suffocated; compressing and deforming the very substance of ourselves.
It’s a well-known fact that stress can have a negative effect on the body and mind, especially if we believe the thinking that caused the stress in the first place.
I came across the 3 Principles understanding about 2 years ago and it feels like someone pulled my blindfold off. It offers hope and clarity. Now I can see that we are never broken and have everything we need inside to live a life free of suffering no matter what.
So much of my life has involved an in-depth study to understand how the body works, while I had absolutely no idea how the mind works. Now more than ever, I see that the mind and the body cannot be separated.
Until I came across the 3 Principles, I had a total misunderstanding of how the mind works. I often found myself constantly overthinking, tangled up in thought and missing the quiet voice of wisdom that guides us from within. Walking through life wearing a blindfold, stopped me from understanding how the personal mind works.
Firstly, I believed every thought that popped into my head was true.
Secondly, I innocently believed that life was an outside-in experience. I blamed people, circumstances or situations for how I felt at any moment. I was convinced something outside of me was responsible for how I felt on the inside.
This understanding however has revealed that thoughts are not true and life is an inside-out experience. It feels like, not only has my blindfold been removed but also someone has turned on a huge floodlight to help illuminate my path through life.
I now see that each and every feeling I have comes from my thinking, no exceptions. Feelings of anxiety, guilt, fear, anger, insecurity or sadness all come from my thinking. So too do love, joy peace and contentment. Nobody or nothing can make me feel anything!
It's the weight of such negative thinking taken seriously over time that causes our body to throw out warning signals that we are taking our thinking way too seriously.
So many of our physical symptoms are signals that we are caught up in our thinking, believing that we are at the mercy of our circumstances.
I’m by no means saying that the stream of negative thoughts has stopped, but I more often see them for what they are and choose to leave them alone
It is our thinking that shapes, colours and sets the tone and texture of everything we experience. Our life experience comes from us, it's not happening to us.
You have everything you need, so don't give away your peace of mind to anything you have thought or done. Instead drop into the quiet space, where you get to start over with a fresh new thought. Sit in the very centre of your being, where your essence lives, the space beyond your thinking, where the formless evolves into form.
Comments