Our Immunity is our sense of self. When we feel attacked so does our immunity.
Right now our world is upside down, and everyone is feeling overwhelmed, down, lost, anxious, angry, and confused by the many different voices and facts, on some level. When I voice my counter culture opinion or feelings I’m sometimes met by rigidity, hostility. It feels like heresy. It’s a scary feeling.
So I asked myself, why do i want to voice my opion? Alleviate suffering and prevent dis-ease. What can I do instead?
Educate. The only way. All I want to say is that if you look at the above adjectives of our states, it’s emotional content. Hypervigilence, makes us reactive. This article explains how emotions enhance health or harm.
OUR IMMUNITY IS OUR SENSE OF SELF. WHEN WE FEEL SAFE SO DOES OUR IMMUNITY.
You can decide if you need to move out of the fight and flight, and into a tend and befriend. If only for your health and everyone around you. Only then can we move into an honest, more sustainable world. Environmentally, emotionally, psychologically and physically.
How Emotions Change Our Tissues
Zach Bush MD, physician of internal medicine and endocrinology states emotional toxins are the third contributor to damaging health, after food and environmental toxins. “Emotional toxicity will shorten life and damage our quality of life more rapidly than any other biological process can.”[i]
Have you noticed how our minds are scattered lately? Our feelings have more effect than mainstream medical science acknowledges. According to the HeartMath Institute, the heart actually sends more signals to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. And has significant effect on brain function, influencing emotional processing, higher cognitive faculties such as attention, perception, memory, and problem-solving. Stable pattern of the heart’s input to the brain during positive emotional states facilitates cognitive function and reinforces positive feelings and emotional stability. This means that sustaining positive emotions, not only benefits the entire body, but also profoundly affects how we perceive, think, feel, and perform.[ii]
Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurology and biology, says there’s no real centre for our emotions, it’s an immensely complex circuitry[iii]. Which runs through the entire body. Our molecules of emotion, hormones and neurotransmitters, affect our brain and our brain affects hormones. The effects, visceral, reach far into our tissue development. A two way stream. We have as many hormone receptors in our gut as in the brain. Often called our second brain, because digestive health and receptivity affects our overall physical as well as mental wellbeing.[iv] The dialogue between gut hormone, bile acid and the brain plays an important role in energy homeostasis.[v] And the building blocks for our entire being.
According to Christiane Northrup MD, our beliefs become our biology. Beliefs shape our perception, filtering emotions, initiate thoughts, actions, reactions, responses, physiology and physical matter. Our daily thoughts and emotions, which are accompanied by a multitude of biochemical changes in the body, set up an electromagnetic field around us, and seeing like attracts like, every cell in our body attracts our vibratory equivalent.[vi]
Emotions As Energy & Matter
Quantum physics and Samkhya, see matter and energy, at the subatomic level, as being interchangeable. Expressions of the same manifestations at different frequencies. Energy vibrates and moves, when energy moves at lower and slower vibrations, it’s more solid. Experienced through our senses to hear, touch, see, taste and smell. The more conscious, imbued with awareness, a manifested form, the less condensed, and therefore receptive. The more solid, the less conscious and closed the body or system is.
Just like matter, thoughts thought over and over become solidified. They form neural wiring so solid they eventually think themselves. Manifesting a belief. Moving into the less explored consciousness. Thought without awareness. It becomes subconscious, and if we don’t go and clear it every once in a while, through meditation, contemplation or reflection, or any form of non-doing and just being, it becomes unconscious. The energy becomes so dense it’s an energetic blockage, and turns into a matter.
When we hold a certain vibrational energy pattern long enough, it solidifies. Emotions felt often enough often manifest as issues in our tissues. And physical manifestation of dis-ease is a long way down the track from when we first got off track. It’s a very loud, and often last call, from our soul.
Psychological and emotional factors influence our physical health greatly because our emotions and thoughts are always accompanied by biochemical reactions in our bodies. These reactions are mediated by cell membranes, which are the actual “brains” of each cell. The mind-body continuum can be adequately understood only when we appreciate ourselves as an everchanging energy system that is affected by, and also affects, the energy surrounding it. We don’t end in our skins.[vii]
Beliefs inform biochemicals, biology informs our cells, and cells copy themselves continually, taking on a new structure with each imprint and becomes the new template. This embodied attitude is then passed on as a solid reality, a certainty.
Beliefs & Body
Beliefs, mindsets and associated emotions pave the way for breakthroughs, or breakdowns. And seeing this isn’t a one way stream, we can use our biology to affect our beliefs.
This is what Yoga does so seamlessly, using the body, breath and movement to initiate change and transformation in body, mind and psyche. Mind with matter and matter with mind. Not over, under, nor around. Through. Not fighting with some infantile imaginary of an ‘enemy’. Once we own our enemies as shadows of self rejected and projected, emotions, mind and psyche become tools. Empowering, lifelong companions. We embody our emotions and move toward real evolution. We stop reacting and being rigid in our opinions.
An exchange between inner and outer worlds creates this shift in ebb and flow of energy within us. Every sensation within your body is just an expression of these two, body and mind, matter and spirit, meeting. Surrendering to the emotions as they arise, releases the tides and allows us to harness our energy and return to our true nature, biorhythms and being.
Express your voice from the full conviction we’re all at heart good, healthy and whole beings. Our fullest manifestation is love, power and beauty. Letting ourselves be, live, breathe, enjoy, relate, communicate, create, nourish and rest with more passion, enthusiasm and deliberation without constraint. And daring to ask and explore how we, each of us, can bring this profound way of living into day to day life?
We regulate, guide and transform our emotions by understanding the messages of emotions. We can retrain our brain, beliefs and biology to become the creators of our experience.[viii]
3 Steps to Calm Emotions & Mind
The tend and befriend, also known as the rest and digest activation of our autonomic nervous system calms us down. It gets us out of our heads and into our bodies. It makes us feel safe. Held. Secure, trusting, calm and grounded. It’s us going into parasympathetic activation. It’s our social pathway of the Vagus nerve coming online. The vagus nerve travels from the carnium to the reprductive system and is 80% afferent, meaning it brings information from our senses to the brain most of the time. When we move our body and this long nerve, we’re sending our brain, nerves and endocrine system the message we’re safe, held and ok.
Notice I said social pathway. Being social makes us seek connection. Just having a conversation with a friend, loved one, or eating a delicious warm meal in welcoming company heals. Being together, joking and tending to each others needs activates our rest and digest system.
Social distancing, or is it physical distancing?… we have less access to this pathway. Setting us up for distress and hypervigilance. Simple Yoga practices activate our tend and befriend pathway by stimulating parasympathetic response.
Three simple practices move us out of hypervigilence and into tend and befriend.
- Doing spinal flexion and extension, cat cow, or just lying on your back doing pelvic tilts will get us in our body and out of our minds. It stimulates the entire vagus nerve and that inturn activates rest, digest, tend and befriend.
- Extending our voice with a long sound. Either a long vowel such as AAaaaaa, OOoooo or UUuuuu, or singing something healing like Enya, Ajeet Kuar, Patti Smith, chanting or prayer.
- Extending the out breath. Breathing in for 3 seconds and out for 6. Just 10 rounds will work.
Once we’re in this state we communicate, relate and honestly, really heal and feel all that’s going on. Both inside us and around us.
All the hard stuff and the goodness most of us seek. We all know there’s something more going on. It’s just not clear what and why. But we’ve got to stay connected, honest and immune by having real conversations, with questions, with the ambivilance and ambiguity of the uncertainty.
Please feel free and welcome to write me back, leave a comment and tell me how you’re feeling.
Much love,
Shira
[i] Zach Bush interview by Fran Drescher at https://vimeo.com/409457528
[ii] HeartMath Institute -https://www.heartmath.org/science/
[iii] Robert Sapolsky, – Behave, (2017), Penguin Random House
[iv] https://www.austinhormonedoctor.com/connection-mental-health-hormones/
[v] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47348954_Gut_hormones_and_the_brain
[vi] Christiane Northrup, M.D., – Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, (2010), Bantam Books
[vii] Christiane Northrup, M.D., – Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, (2010), Bantam Books
[viii] Lisa Feldman Barrett – You aren’t at the Mercy of Your Emotions-Your Brian creates them, Ted Talk
