What to do with all these Feelings since the Inauguration

A patient asked me an excellent question yesterday. She asked, “What do you recommend people do with their feelings of angst, anxiety, anger, or fear since the inauguration?” I want to address this because I’ve seen several people whose autoimmune diseases have really flared in the last couple of weeks. I suspect that this is due to increased stress levels.

Consciousness feeds off of itself: fear begets fear, anger begets anger, and love begets love; so the first thing we want to do is not contribute to the lower vibrations. But we don’t get there by stuffing our feelings or denying that they are there. I’ll talk about what to do with these feelings in a moment, but first, I want to give some clear and practical advice.

A good response to what is happening in our country, nay, even in the whole world, is to dig deep into your center and ask yourself, “How can I do my best work in the world?” For example, if you are a teacher, your best work might be to teach with the most kindness and personal connection to your students you can muster. For me, that would be to help my patients find their true healing to the best of my ability. Not everyone can be a community organizer or political activist, but everyone has something of value to give to the world. Find your gift and figure out how best to give it.

One reason we’re in the trouble we’re in is because the rich have gotten too rich and now have the power to grab everything for themselves. You vote in elections but you also vote with every dollar you spend. As much as you can, support local economies. Buy from local farmers instead of from General Mills, buy from small shops instead of from Walmart, buy from local artists, listen to local musicians, do whatever you can to spread resources out rather than concentrate them with large international corporations. This will help to create a more diverse, robust community.

As to all those feelings that keep flooding in, first, just let them in. Feel them as fully and you can and practice being kind to yourself that you are having those feelings. Repressing, denying, rationalizing, sugar coating, or trying to change how you are feeling in any way backfires and makes those feelings more persistent. Your feelings are just the result of whatever you become aware of passing through your world view. Your feeling itself is never the problem. If there is a problem at all, it lies in whatever you are aware of, or in how you are looking at it.

If you resist your feelings, or the opposite, wallow in them, you risk contributing to the low vibrations floating around the planet. Just see your truth of however you are feeling, leave it alone, and choose to focus, instead, upon being kind to yourself that you are currently experiencing that particular truth. The kindness will change your feelings. You don’t have to force any changes on yourself.

This approach works because your creative energies flow wherever you focus your attention. Repression and denial are forms of attention. So, you want to free yourself from any of that. And you do that by fully accepting the truth of however you are feeling. Then you make a conscious choice to focus on kindness toward yourself. When you do that, your creative energy flows toward kindness, creating more of it, thus making your life, and the world as a whole, better.

Give this approach to your feelings a try. I bet you’ll be amazed at the results. Together, we can stop this backsliding of human consciousness and get it growing in a higher direction again. Here’s to a better planet moving forward.

If you like these suggestions, please share. Thanks.

Certain of Uncertainty

I’d like to introduce Grace Porter, MA, LCPC, the first guest blogger I’ve had on this site. She received her BA in International Studies with an emphasis on Conflict Resolution from Beloit College and her MA in Counseling Psychology with an emphasis on Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor in the state of Maryland and has a private practice in Annapolis. She has been studying and teaching the Seven Tools of Healing since 2006 and teaches her own Taming the Bear: Taking the Bite out of Stress classes. She is also a certified facilitator of the Amrit Method of Yoga Nidra. And she is my daughter.

 In these uncertain times, it is good to get a refresher on how to use the Seven Tools to be healthy with all the feelings that come up in us.

Certain of Uncertainty

You know that feeling when you are waiting for the test results to come back? That pull from all the different possibilities? Feeling trepidation about what bad news might be waiting for you and that hope that it will be good news. Or maybe even fear that it will be good news because you have become so accustomed to making the best of a bad situation and it feels scary to allow in the good. Or maybe there is some part of you that is not ready to let in the good at all. In that moment of uncertainty all options are possible and it can be hard to remain grounded.

Brandon A. Trean has said, “It is how we embrace the uncertainty in our lives that leads to the great transformations of our souls.” If we are somehow able to make space within ourselves for not knowing and the infinite possibilities that accompany that uncertainty, if we maintain our faith and our centeredness, what marvelous growth can unfold? So we call on patience then, as we wait for clarity. And we practice holding space for ourselves and for others. And we have compassion for what we see and experience. And an ever deepening understanding of what is.

Over the last week or so I have been sitting with a myriad of feelings and what has come up time and time again is uncertainty; and with it questions about how to stay grounded in my truth when the possibilities are swirling around me. As I talk with my friends, family, and clients, I see it arising for them in different ways as well. It feels so visceral everywhere I turn. People’s health, politics, people starting new ventures and being unsure of outcome, people peeping into deeply locked parts of themselves and being unsure of what will come pouring out, and so much more. We know that patterns are clues about work that is waiting to be done, about information that is ready for consciousness.  I know this pattern of uncertainty to be an opportunity for introspection and growth.

There is this sense of waiting during which foreboding and hope are dueling to the death. At times, it feels terrifying, paralyzing. Other moments it feels motivating. Action, any action, seems imperative. Even in the exciting things, waiting in a place of not knowing can seem unbearable.

And yet we are certain of something: in the moment of encounter with these feelings, it is certain that we feel uncertain. And so we feel it. We sit with the reality of this moment as we know it and compassionately accept both it and its implications. We hold both an awareness of the outcome we want and the reality of the moment we are in now.

If we open ourselves to sitting with our uncertainty, we open ourselves up to the potentiality of all possible outcomes and the reality of not knowing. And when we think about it that way, is it any wonder it can feel so overwhelming?? If only we knew, we could prepare ourselves or take action or we could relax and allow the unfolding. Sitting in that place of uncertainty certainly can feel unsettling.

And so we hold our center and compassionately make space for this moment. We trust that somewhere in the midst of all of the mayhem there is a path forward. We can remain calmly alert, aware of outside circumstance and our own inner knowing. We remember The I Ching (Book of Change) says, “Remain steady and allow the world to shape itself.” And when the time comes for action we can be ready.  

At Last! A Tenable Theory about How Consciousness Creates the Mind and Brain

In this blog post, I’m going to indulge myself and totally geek out. I’m excited because I have found a plausible answer to a question I’ve had for years. You see, I have never believed the current neuroscience dogma that the brain is primary and creates everything else by its activity. Neuroscientists believe that neuronal activity in the brain creates mind and consciousness. Yet when I look at their data, so many of their experiments make so much more sense if you think about it the other way around: that consciousness creates mind and brain.

Neuroscientists have yet to figure out how the neuronal activity in your brain creates your mind and I believe they never will because it doesn’t happen that way. For many years I have believed that the thought happened first and somehow created the neuronal activity in the brain that was then able to translate that thought into action by the body. The brain is then just an information relay station, which, by the way, is how it is constructed: much like the old telephone switch boards. But I was really no better off than the neuroscientists because I couldn’t figure out how thoughts created that physical response in the brain. But then Amit Goswami PhD (http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Doctor-Physicist-Explains-Integral/dp/1571746552/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426985231&sr=1-1&keywords=quantum+doctor+amit+goswami) gave me the answer. At least a very plausible one.

It has to do with quantum weirdness. A little background. Quantum mechanics deals with the behavior of matter, energy and information at very small scales, such as the size of atoms and smaller. At these micro scales, the Universe is very different from what we’re used to at our macro scales. For example, matter and energy can act like both a particle and a wave. Particles are discrete little bundles like billiard balls. The can smack into things, like x-rays hitting the silver particles in a piece of film. While waves can diffract and constructively and destructively interfere with each other like the ripples on a pond when you drop two pebbles at the same time a few feet apart, or like when sound waves wobble as you’re tuning your instrument. It is hard for us to imagine how something can be a wave and a particle at the same time.

How physicists resolved this duality is by realizing that what quality the quantum world reveals of itself depends upon what the scientist is looking for. If you set your experiment up to look for particle-like properties, that is what you see. If you set your experiment up to look for wave-like properties, that is what you see. The observer, by exercising conscious choice, determines what the quantum world serves up. This, by the way, is the same way that Spinoza resolved the mind/body duality a couple of hundred years ago. Goswami maintains that quantum mechanics requires the existence of consciousness: the same consciousness that is the missing piece in medicine.

So once the photon is emitted and before it is detected, it exists as a probability function with many possible outcomes. The very act of measuring the photon collapses the probability function down into the one manifest reality that is measured. Once the function collapses, the other possibilities are lost for that particular event. Now what is curious is that even though quantum weirdnesses only show up at very small scales, since the 1930’s observers have noticed an uncanny correlation between the quantum world and the workings of the human psyche. Fritjof Capra talks about this (http://www.amazon.com/Tao-Physics-Exploration-Parallels-Mysticism/dp/1590308352/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427219753&sr=1-1&keywords=the+tao+of+physics.)

So imagine that you, as pure consciousness, exists as a quantum potential function. As each moment of your life’s experience gets “measured” as your conscious experience, that potential function collapses and becomes you in this very moment. And just as the potential function of a photon can collapse as either a particle or a wave, Goswami does a great job explaining how the human potential function collapses simultaneously into several “structures” in time and space. One is your physical body, another is your energy, another your mind, and another is what Gaswami calls the “supramental”. I see this supramental functioning inside you as your Inner Wisdom, your Buddha Nature, your Christ Consciousness, your Anandamayakosha or whatever you want to call it. The potential function that describes you simultaneously creates, when it collapses instant by instant, all the koshas in the Vedic model of a human being.  

So the thought in your mind doesn’t create the electrical activity in your brain any more than the electrical activity in your brain creates your thought. They are both created simultaneously as your potential function collapses into what you experience, or measure, as this present moment. An un-collapsed potential function exists within consciousness and, until it collapses, is outside of time and space. This fits our observations of mind/body/energy interactions where they each seem to be a correlate of the others, changes appearing simultaneously in all three aspects rather than one causing changes in the others. This explains how therapies acting on the energetic can change the body’s biochemistry or therapies acting on the mind can change the body’s biochemistry and vice versa. So this model fits a lot of what I see in my office every day as well as what the ancient Vedic sages observed over thousands of years.

And this idea of human potential consciousness simultaneously collapsing into these aspects explains yet another observation, that being that what you believe seems to play a very central role in both how you perceive and interpret your world and in what you are able to bring forth and manifest in your life. This central role of beliefs can now be explained if you theorize that what you believe influences how your potential function collapses. Just like whether or not you set up one slot or two slots for the photon to pass through determines whether or not you see particle or wave behavior, your own potential function collapses to be in harmony with, to be congruent with, what you already believe. Your beliefs are like the slots. The beliefs that you hold right now set up the experiment of your life, so to speak, to determine what the next moment of your life “measures” as the experience of your conscious self. So changing your beliefs changes how your potential function collapses and allows it to create different moment by moment experiences for you. The Seven Tools of Healing shows you how to find and change any limiting beliefs you may hold that are creating the things in your life you want to change.

I love it when something so simple can explain so many different things and be internally consistent across so many disciplines at the same time.

The Benefits of Listening

Learning how to listen to your own inner wisdom is the best skill anyone on a healing path can master. Case in point: recently, a patient I’ve been working with for years for her fibromyalgia has been going through a difficult time with insomnia. She falls asleep okay but then wakes up two hours later and cannot go back to sleep. She is very sensitive and often gets paradoxical reactions to both medications and supplements she takes. That means she often experiences the opposite to what the medication is intended to produce. For example, she tried trazedone, which was first developed as an antidepressant but was so sedating that no one could take the antidepressant dose without sleeping all day so we now often use a fraction of the antidepressant dose as a sleep aid. She took one dose and lay awake crying inconsolably all night. Antianxiety medications give her panic attacks and so forth. So we could find no medication or natural supplement that she could both tolerate and that was effective. She was nearing total melt-down after weeks of not sleeping.

For so many of my patients who get paradoxical reactions to medications, it is as if that is their body’s way of saying “Drugs are not your path to healing.” Most of them eventually find that consciousness is their path. My patient has been working hard on her issues with a therapist, making important changes in her life to take good care of herself, eating well, exercising; in other words, doing all the right things but all to no avail. One evening, in desperation, she was looking through her notes just to make sure she hadn’t missed anything when she came across a little yellow sticky note I’d given her at a recent visit. It read, “Cure and curiosity come from the same root word. Get curious about yourself, about your life and what is happening to you.” She told me later that she told herself, “I’m going to get curious about this insomnia. What’s at the root of it? What does it need?” Then she got still and the message “detox” came into her mind.

I would have not thought to recommend detoxing to her because she had already eliminated her reactive foods and her digestion was working pretty well. She sat in a sauna for 30 minutes, went home and slept for 9 hours straight. The next day she sweat for another 30 minutes and slept 8 hours that night. She said that she got the insight that her toxicity was actually her body’s response to her underlying chronic anxiety.

She has continued her listening and recently reported that she sees how she’s been trained from childhood to give her power away. Her inner wisdom has given her recommendations for what to do about that and recently, when her x-husband filed to sue her for increased child custody and child support because she makes more than he does, rather than get all stressed out about it like she would have, she, instead, turned around and filed her own suit against him for the six years of child support that he has not paid her. She is now inventorying her life and changing all the ways that she has been taken advantage of and given her power away. She is sleeping much better. 

Addictions

My definition of addiction is feeling management. Any time you are doing something or thinking something to make yourself feel any differently than you do in that moment, you are practicing your addiction. That addiction can be anything from heroin to television, from Emotional Freedom Technique to affirmations. I like this definition for addiction because it points directly to the treatment: learn to be present with however you are feeling right now.

Learning how to be healthy with your feelings, no matter what they are, is the best treatment for addictions I’ve ever seen. All the rehab programs that are successful teach their participants this skill. And they encourage them to practice this skill until they can use it with even the most powerful feelings. Rehab programs that are not successful generally are teaching their participants other ways, besides drugs or alcohol, to avoid their pain and other feelings. These are nothing more than substitution addiction programs.

Being healthy with your feelings means that you are fully aware that they are there, that you fully accept the truth of them and that you follow them back to their roots, their genesis, their source (see Feelings – Part I and Feelings – Part II for more on that). Signs and symptoms, of which physical and emotional feelings are a subset, are clues that something in your system is out of balance. They are clues we need to follow.

So, let’s say that you and I are working together on a treasure hunt. We find a clue that says “Proceed three blocks east and two blocks north, look for an orange box.” You look at that clue, get out your pencil and start scribbling, “I hate going east. I’m changing that to south. I hate orange so I’m changing that to blue, and instead of a box, I’m going to look for a flag pole.” And off you go with your new clue that is more to your liking. How successful are you going to be in the treasure hunt?

In real life, your feelings are the clues and the treasure is a healthy, fully realized you. We alter our clues all the time, we don’t follow them and then we wonder why we don’t get better.

Your addictions are asking you to be impeccable with your feelings and to find and be your truest self, which is also a Spiritual path. Every addict I’ve ever met has three personality traits in common: they are all very bright, very creative and very sensitive. Put those three traits into the same person, drop them down into this cesspool of human suffering and it’s going to hurt. Addicts are often trying to get out of that pain. Rather than finding other ways to ignore the pain, it is better for the addict to learn how to find the blessings in those three traits, to turn them from being curses.

Here is what I suggest. Engage your intelligence in a challenge. Challenge it to help you find lasting real peace and happiness, not just a momentary escape. Keep challenging yourself, keep searching and stick with it until you figure it out.

Engage your creativity because chances are, you are going to have your own unique path to your peace and happiness. Other people’s journey might give you suggestions or encouragement, but you have to walk your own path in your own way. Again, look inside yourself at least as diligently as you look outside yourself for answers.

With your sensitivity, you can listen quite deeply. You will be able to hear inner information that others have to practice for years to access. Trust what you hear. Follow your heart’s knowing. It will help you navigate fears and limited beliefs and get through. Work with someone who gets addictions on this level.

Tom Green, Patti’s late uncle and a lifer in AA, was fond of saying, “The alcoholic is a Spiritual Seeker.” And how right he was.

Copyright 2013 Steven M. Hall, MD

Previous Posts in this Series: 1.  Healing Implies Change 2.  Emendation 3.  Faith 4.  Awareness 5.  Acceptance 6.  Compassion 7.  Feelings – Part I 8.  Feelings – Part II 9.  Feelings – Example 10.  Feelings and Diet

Feelings and Diet

How to use a healthy relationship with feelings to have a healthy relationship with food

The last three blog posts laid out a fairly simple method for how to be healthy with your feelings and gave an example of how easily we’re lured into feeling management which keeps us blocked from important information in our lives.

Being healthy with your feelings is important in its own right, but you can use that skill to be healthier in other aspects of your life as well. For example, until you develop yourself to the point where you transcend physical influences, how you eat is far and away one of the most important influences upon your health. Studies have shown that a healthy diet can promote healthy pregnancies, prevent heart disease, diabetes, obesity, strokes, Alzheimer’s, cancer and even depression. Health educators have done a pretty good job in our culture. Anyone who wants to know what a good diet is can readily find that information. You probably already have a pretty good idea about how you’re “supposed” to eat, what’s bad for you and what’s good for you.

Yet, how often do you eat that way? And why not? Any time you find yourself eating something that that little nagely voice inside bugs you about, why do you go ahead and eat it anyway? There’s information in all this. In medicine, we’re constantly telling people to change the way they eat but it is the rare person who takes our advice and builds themselves a whole new life with it. Years ago, I got some insight into why that might be the case.

I read an article about two tribes that lived on either side of a river that was a tributary to the Amazon. As neighboring tribes often are, they were enemies of each other. Both tribes had access to essentially the same food in the jungle, yet what was acceptable food for one tribe was taboo for the other. How you ate made you part of your tribe. For hundreds of thousands of years of human development, fitting into your tribe meant survival, being ostracized by your tribe meant death. When we ask someone to change the way they eat, we don’t realize it, but we are really asking them to change tribes. That is no simple request for our non-conscious minds! In addition, you may have other more personal reasons, such as needing to feel safe, etc, to keep you in your less-healthy eating patterns.

So if the way that you are eating is making you sick, or very likely to make you sick sometime in the future, how do you get yourself to change? I see two ways.

The first way is a great way to practice awareness and trusting yourself. When it comes time to eat, take a moment, get centered inside and ask your body what it wants to eat. Get some sense about what that would be. If possible, go eat that. About 30 to 60 minutes after you eat, tune in to how you are feeling now because you ate that. Over time, and with practice, you will get very good at hearing what your body wants as well as discerning whether you are listening to the little devil on one shoulder whispering into one ear or the little angel on the other shoulder whispering into the other ear.

No published list of shoulds knows your moment to moment biochemical needs so this way of eating makes good sense to me. As they practice listening, I’ve seen my patients get very good at detecting imbalances in their digestion that needed addressing, at picking up food reactions, at telling what combinations of foods work for them and what don’t and so forth. Also, being able to tell the difference between your real inner loving guidance and the saboteur is a helpful skill for other areas of your life as well. Knowing how to work well with your feelings greatly facilitates this kind of learning.

The second way to change how you eat is to pick some kind of diet—some kind of regimented way of eating—commit to that and then use your healthy relationship with your feelings to deal with any feelings that come up because of how you are eating. You may have to deal with feelings of deprivation as your diet does not allow you to have something that you love to eat. You may have to deal with feelings at pot-lucks or if you eat out with family and friends. But all sorts of feelings may come up: anger, fear, grief. You may find yourself trying to rationalize yourself out of your commitment. Remember, if you give up lightly on your commitment, it’s not much of a commitment. This is also a good chance to practice will-power and renewing your commitment to yourself one day at a time.

But stay very aware of your feelings. Follow them back to their roots. See where they are coming from. See if those roots are really true from a Spiritual perspective. Be kind to yourself as your stomach digests your backbone.

Copyright 2013 Steven M. Hall, MD

Previous Posts in this Series:
1.  Healing Implies Change
2.  Emendation
3.  Faith
4.  Awareness
5.  Acceptance
6.  Compassion
7.  Feelings – Part I
8.  Feelings – Part II
9.  Feelings – Example

Feelings – Example

We’ve talked about how feelings, both physical and emotional, are messengers bringing you information about what’s going on inside of you. By getting the message from the feeling, we are often in a position to take meaningful, appropriate action to correct any imbalance or problem that the feeling may be “talking” to us about. That imbalance could be a lack of water, food or specific nutrient; it might be we need to get up and move around; it might be that we are harboring a host of limiting beliefs. Physical feelings do not always have physical causes. Emotional feelings do not always have emotional causes. Each feeling needs to be listened to and followed to its roots in a non-judgmental, unconditional, honest way. Any fiddling with the feeling risks blocking you from your truth.

Elizabeth (not her real name) belongs to a fairly active and close-knit group of people who collect and distribute food to house-bound elderly in their community. She is generally self-assured, confident, energetic, out-going and well aware of the messages coming to her from her body. She is very health-conscious: grows most of her own food, eats organically, her lifestyle includes plenty of exercise, she treats naturally when needed, has a spiritual practice, great relationship…stuff like that. Not too long ago, a couple of women in the group decided to take a disliking to her.

They think that she violated an agreement or something and no amount of explaining was able to change their minds. For months, these women would, seemingly out of the blue, bad-mouth her or back-stab her. Nothing she did made the situation any better. Over time, she started experiencing more anxiety and felt like she’d lost her Spiritual center. She was not sleeping as well and had become more hyper-vigilant. She also found it more difficult to listen to her body. She said she knows now how it feels to be bullied. She’s worried that the chronic, smoldering anxiety is planting the seeds of disease in her body and wants to “get back to” her sense of calm and confidence. She’s been meditating more, but it’s not working.

First, what she’s feeling is very common in people who are being attacked, whether the attack is physical, verbal or psychic. One often feels hopeless, trapped, demoralized, anxious and even depressed. She’s not used to feeling this way and now has more compassion and understanding for people who do, but she really wants to get back to how she was feeling before these two women started back-stabbing her.

This is a perfect example of what we do to ourselves with our feelings. We don’t like how we’re feeling now and we want to feel something different. So we often try to make the uncomfortable feelings go away with techniques as simple as ignoring them or as sophisticated as creating entire New Age philosophies to rationalize them. Even intelligent, psychologically adept and spiritually minded people do this. The trouble is, it doesn’t work very well.

We often try to make changes to the outer circumstances in order to change how we’re feeling. If there is anything that you can do to improve the outward situation and you feel called to do it, you definitely should give it your best effort. It was reasonable for Elizabeth to make a couple of attempts to clear up any misunderstanding that may have happened. But once that does not work, what others think, feel or believe, especially about you, is out of your jurisdiction. Unless you’re a whiz at advertising, you might not be able to effect much change in that arena.

Elizabeth was getting very clear about that. We talked about feelings and how to see them as messengers and how to stay with the feeling just as it is. We discussed the difference between thoughts and feelings. One does not need to indulge unsupportive thoughts and it’s okay to note that such thoughts are there and redirect your focus, but you want to really hear what your feelings are trying to say to you before doing anything to make them change or go away.

I spoke with her several weeks later and the anxiety was still there to some degree, but she had realized that she could not change these women so she wasn’t going to taking it so personally. She had concluded that she didn’t need to put any more effort into trying to convince these women of anything and instead was able to focus on the question, “What is the Universe trying to teach me through all this?” She realized that these women’s treatment of her bothered her so much because they were impugning her integrity. Her integrity was important to her and she didn’t like being misunderstood.

She decided that 100% integrity wasn’t enough. She resolved to keep a close eye on herself and live in “1000% integrity.” As she’s been doing this, her anxiety had been slowly abating and she’s feeling her confidence and energy return. She’s also opening back up to information from her body. Instead of seeing the anxiety and sense of disconnect as the problem that needed to be addressed directly, she was able to listen to the deeper themes underpinning the feelings and deal with them. As she did so, the feelings changed. In other words, the messengers didn’t have to keep bringing the same message once that message was dealt with in an appropriate fashion.

So often, when we go through trials in our life, if we work with them in a healthy way, we improve; if we work with them in an unhealthy way, we often get closed down. Whether you feel opened or restricted by the challenges in your life gives you a clue as to how you are working with them.

When we are able to be healthy with our feelings and keep our efforts where we have jurisdiction, we get clearer about who we are and how to make choices congruent with that, we get physical healing as our bodies start working better, we often have more energy and find it easier to “get in the flow.” These are indications that healing has happened.

Be present with your feelings. Remember, no matter how you are feeling in any given moment, you can still be kind to yourself.

Follow these steps to get the messages from your feelings and make the changes that your painful or uncomfortable feelings are asking you to make. You can do this.

Copyright 2013 Steven M. Hall, MD

Previous Posts in this Series: 1.  Healing Implies Change 2.  Emendation 3.  Faith 4.  Awareness 5.  Acceptance 6.  Compassion 7.  Feelings – Part I 8.  Feelings – Part II

Feelings – Part I

So now we have a work-horse to help us make whatever changes we need to in order to heal. The healing we’re talking about is deeper than lifestyle changes. You can know how you are supposed to eat and exercise and participate in family and community and not stress out, but often getting yourself to actually live that way is problematic. Things just seem to get in the way. Ideally, the “doing” in your life springs directly from your “being,” from who you really are. Who you really are is a Divine Being, whole and healthy. Finding out who you really are, underneath all the wounding, conditioning and domestication is what we’re about here. On a foundation of faith in whatever helps us the most, we practice compassionate accepting awareness of what is. This brings us face-to-face with our truth and we can see how our own personal truth aligns with a higher Spiritual truth.

The practice of awareness, acceptance and compassion also form the foundation for a healthy relationship with your feelings. Why is that so important? Because being messed up with your feelings causes you a lot of grief, which is a metaphorical way of saying that it is not an optimal condition. Just think of the amount of human suffering that can be linked to misunderstanding our feelings. Over 20% of Americans are now on an antidepressant. Emotional eating accounts for a lot of obesity and type II diabetes. Addictions complicate millions of people’s lives and break up families. Domestic abuse, child abuse, employee abuse…the list goes on and on. All of these conditions and more can be helped by being healthy with your feelings.

Sometimes, like a panic attack, feelings are so powerful that they pull you completely off your center; you may even spend time in the Emergency Room thinking you’re having a heart attack. Other times, like depression, they are so insidious and grinding that you can start to believe that the only relief is in death. Sometimes your feelings drive your behaviors and you might do things that you later regret. Managing your feelings, especially trying to make them be a certain way, is my definition of addiction.

All of these problems with feelings can be prevented by knowing what feelings are, by knowing how they work inside of you and by understanding how to work effectively with them. That is what I mean when I say “have a healthy relationship with your feelings.”

So, what are feelings from the Integral Medicine perspective? First, let me emphatically state what they are not: feelings are not the problem. No matter how you are feeling, feeling that way is not the problem. So you don’t really need to do anything about the feeling per se. The feeling is caused by something; the feeling is a result of something. The feeling can be thought of as a symptom: a clue to what is really going on. You want to be able to follow the clues back to the real treasure.

A feeling is just a messenger bringing you information, it is not the message.

The message is buried in the feeling and your job is to figure out how to get the feeling to deliver its message so it can go on its merry way. A healthy relationship with feelings does that. Thinking that the feeling is the problem and/or the message is a big confusion for many people, including mental health professionals, in our society. This confusion leads to unhealthy relationships with feelings and ineffective counseling.

Your awareness of who you are, your conscious sense of self, is housed in your conscious mind. The conscious mind processes information by thinking. You become consciously aware of how you are feeling by thinking about the feeling. This is why it is sometimes difficult to distinguish a thought from a feeling.

I see feelings as messengers coming to the conscious mind from the non-conscious mind and from the physical body. Physical and emotional feelings follow the same rules and the same tools can be used to be healthy with them. (Recent research shows that physical and emotional feelings even use some of the same neural circuitry in your brain: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/tech-support/201308/the-science-heartache-6-things-you-need-know.) Your headache is just as much a messenger as is your angst. Both can be listened to; both can help you deepen your understanding of yourself, including what actions to take that are in harmony with who you are and what you need right then.

Some feelings are just reporting the status quo like, “Oh, ya, my foot is touching the floor.” Some are letting you know that an action needs to be taken like, “Oh, ya, my bladder is full, I better get up from this computer soon.” (That is a random example I just made up, this article is not to be construed as autobiographical.) And some feelings are trying to call your attention to aspects of your world view that need examination and perhaps updating like, “Oh, ya, I’m a big imposition on everybody around me.” (Oops, that part is autobiographical.)

Because feelings are just messengers and it is generally considered bad form to chop the head off the messenger just because you don’t like the message that they’re bringing, you can conclude that all feelings are valid. This means that you never have to say to yourself, “I shouldn’t be feeling this way.” The fact is, you are feeling that way. What’s behind it? Where did that feeling come from? What generated it? Those are better questions.

Some feelings you are going to just naturally like, some you will just naturally not like. Learn to treat them all equally. Equanimity toward your feelings is a very helpful skill if you want to be healthy with them.

Physical feelings and emotional feelings are correlates of each other. In other words, every physical feeling has an emotional feeling associated with it and vice versa. Another helpful skill to develop is the ability to listen to both tracks, the physical and emotional, at the same time. Sometimes it’s easy, like when you hit your head on the corner of the cupboard door. Other times take practice.

Try this exercise. Take a moment, settle yourself and your awareness into yourself. Put your awareness into your left hand. Just make a mental note of whatever sensory information you are getting from your left hand: the position of your fingers, the air temperature, any pain or tension, etc. Now become aware of the emotional tone of your left hand. What emotional feeling comes up as you put your awareness into your left hand. Now, pause for a moment, center yourself and then put your awareness into your right hand. Again, make a mental note of any sensory information you are receiving from your right hand. Then note the emotional feelings that come up as you put your awareness into your right hand. Are they different from those from the left?

When many people start this exercise, they cannot identify the emotional tone in their hands. Keep trying. Your perceptions sharpen with practice. Those who are able to sense the emotional tone in their hands generally see that they are different from each other. And well they should be. Your left hand has had a left-handed experience of your life and your right hand a right-handed experience. Generally one hand is preferred for certain tasks over the other and so forth. Some people are aware enough that they can easily move their awareness from hand to hand and identify the different physical and emotional feelings. Practice listening to yourself until you are in this group. This exercise can be repeated using your knees, feet, ear lobes or whatever.

So far we’ve gone over three perspectives and/or skills that will help you work with your feelings in a healthy way:

• All feelings are valid
• Develop equanimity toward all your feelings (hint: practice awareness, acceptance and compassion for how you are currently feeling about your feelings.)
• Learn to listen simultaneously to both the physical and emotional aspects of your feelings.

Next we’ll go over ways to get to the message that the feeling is carrying and then what to do with the message once you get it.

Copyright 2013 Steven M. Hall, MD

Previous Posts in this Series: 1.  Healing Implies Change 2.  Emendation 3.  Faith 4.  Awareness 5.  Acceptance 6.  Compassion

Compassion

You want to heal. In order to heal, something inside, outside or about you must change…because to continue doing what you’ve been doing and expect to get anything different than what you’ve been getting is just plain crazy. And you’re not crazy…at least not in that way.

So we’re reviewing the steps that I’ve observed in my practice and in my own life that help to bring on healing change. If you’re just joining the conversation, this is the sixth post on the topic, so you may want to go to the archives and start from the beginning (Healing Implies Change).

On a foundation of faith that there are higher, self-evident truths, that the truest frequency in the Universe is love and that you are a part of the Universe and, therefore a part of that love, that you can find your way to a happy, meaningful, satisfying life, you pay attention to your life in order to seek the truth of your illusions. You then surrender the fight, stop deluding yourself, open and fully admit the truth of your life to yourself.

Change can happen at any point along these steps. Sometimes we have to go to the final step to get the shift to happen. So what is the next step? How does your inner loving, intelligent guide recommend you be or relate to whatever belief, memory or circumstance in your life that you just became aware of and accepted?

Over and over again, when one of my patients gets to this point in their session, their guidance says things like, “Just get off your back about that.” Or, “Just be kind to yourself about that.” Or, “See the pain that person is in, just open your heart to them.” Advice like that. I call this step compassion.

No matter what you are experiencing, no matter how much pain you are in, how fatigued you are, how addicted, how abused by others, how abusive you are to others, no matter what, you can be kind to yourself about it. Kindness cures.

In fact, in my thirty-some-odd years of practice, I would have to say that compassion is the only thing I’ve ever seen actually heal somebody.

How could that be? Compassion is the only thing that heals? That’s a pretty bodacious statement. What about all the treatments encompassed by conventional and alternative medicines? Surgeons are fond of the saying, “To cut is to cure.” What about cutting? Doesn’t cutting cure? Bummer, I like to cut. Drugs and supplements do some pretty amazing things. Doesn’t taking drugs and supplements heal you? Some pundits are claiming that lifestyle is the root of all your health problems. What about changing your diet and exercise? What about acupuncture and energy medicine and body work? Lots of people have had amazing healings from all of these things.

All of these things have their place, many might be just what the doctor ordered (literally), but if you looked at all of the possible therapies out there, all the possible supplements to take, all the kinds of energy medicine to try, all the different diets and theories about exercise, which are right for you? Does any practitioner know you well enough to make the best recommendation? Is any practitioner knowledgeable enough about all the options to fully inform you of your choices? Is there enough time in an office visit to even go over them?

You often need to seek your inner guidance to know what outer treatments are right for you. That connection with your deeper guidance often comes when you are in an aware, open-hearted state of consciousness.

What is the difference between supporting your body/mind/energy complex and healing? When it comes to picking a treatment, what is suppressive, what is supportive and what is curative?

Many people I’ve talked to have never explored these questions.

Much of what we do in conventional medicine is suppressive. Take blood pressure, for example. From the machine metaphor, your heart is a pump, your arteries and veins are pipes and the blood is the volume of fluid. If you want to decrease the pressure in the system, you could slow the pump down, make it not pump as hard, drain some fluid out of the system or make the pipes bigger. We have blood pressure medicines for each of these approaches. But your high blood pressure is not the cause of your high blood pressure. Forcing your blood pressure down may help prevent the damage that high blood pressure causes, but does nothing for why your blood pressure is high in the first place. Conventional medicine uses the same approach for high blood sugar and high cholesterol, for too much inflammation, for tumors, for allergies…the list goes on. These treatments are helpful and important and have their right time, place and person. But the mistake conventional medicine makes is stopping there and not digging to the roots.

Some things we do in conventional medicine are also aimed at detecting problems early (Pap smears and mammograms) or preventing future problems (vaccines) but I’m having a hard time right now trying to think of a good example of a conventional medical treatment that is supportive or curative. Perhaps psychoanalysis, but most doctors think of such treatments as supported by soft science at best.

Much, but perhaps not as much, of what we do in alternative medicine is also suppressive; we just use herbs or supplements to do the suppressing. But more treatment approaches are supportive, such as good diets, nutraceuticals, exercise, body work, energy work and such. Many doctors would now consider lifestyle changes as part of conventional medicine, but that is a welcome transition that is still happening and not yet universally adopted, in my observation.

Practitioners generally know their little slice of the therapeutic pie and just hope that the people who choose to see them happen to need what they have to offer. Patients know this and often visit several to dozens of practitioners before they find the one who can help them. Maybe this is the best healthcare delivery system we can devise, but I can’t help wondering if there isn’t a better way for people to get the help they need.

Perhaps it is serendipity, perhaps people are listening to their intuition more than they know, but if people look hard enough, they generally find the supplements, treatments and people who can help them. I believe that “Seek and ye shall find” is one of those universal truths. This searching and all that you learn along the way is part of the emendation that I spoke of earlier.

But I’ve noticed an interesting pattern: people generally find the therapy that works for them at about the same time that they are willing to embrace and respond to whatever symbolic or meaning work their health issues represent for them.

(The danger here is that people often give the credit to the treatment, not to them doing their emotional/symbolic work. If you have had a serious health issue and underwent a treatment that completely resolved it for you, look carefully at your experience and see if you didn’t also learn something important about yourself, free yourself from a limiting belief or find the inner strength to take the reins of your life into your own hands in some way. I bet you’ll see something of the sort also happened inside while the treatment was doing its thing.)

To shift the limiting beliefs, to free yourself from the weight of your own criticism, to value yourself enough to step up and claim your power…in other words, to really become your true authentic self in your life…all of these curative changes often require the application of compassion to pull them off. That is why I say that compassion is the only thing I’ve ever seen actually heal anyone. You can take supplements and exercise until the cows come home (Are these agrarian metaphors even comprehensible these days?) and you won’t heal until you love yourself.

What if there were something you could do to get ready to do your deep inner work sooner rather than later in your search? If you apply these steps to your situation, if you embrace these ideas in your life, I believe that you will get to your answers sooner.

If you think about faith as the foundation, then awareness, acceptance and compassion are the workhorses for change built upon that foundation. Awareness, acceptance and compassion work together as a seamless unit.

I have an affirmation that helps me put this all together:                     I practice compassionate, accepting, awareness of what is.

“What is” is the here and now, the present. This affirmation helps me stay in the present moment with open eyes and an open heart. This has been a very difficult skill for me to learn, especially when I’m at home. I have compassion for anyone who takes on this challenge. But the practice is worth the effort. Like any skill, the more you practice it the better you get at it.

As your compassion grows, you are able to see yourself and others in a new light. You are able to see things you didn’t see before. You are able to make different choices that you didn’t know were open to you before.

This is how your life changes. An important result of healing is that you become more of your true authentic self. I believe we are ultimately divine beings of incredible wisdom and open hearts. If this is true, then the practice of compassion allows you to be more of who you really are. That is another reason why kindness cures.

Faith, awareness, acceptance and compassion are also the components of a healthy relationship with your feelings.

Every aspect of your life is packed with clues that can lead you to your truth, but your feelings, both physical and emotional, arguably offer you some of your best clues. Learning how to follow them to their roots has helped more of my patients than any pill I could prescribe. Next we’ll discuss how to be healthy with your feelings and how to use them to speed your healing.

Copyright 2013 Steven M. Hall, MD

Previous Posts in this Series: 1.  Healing Implies Change 2.  Emendation 3.  Faith 4.  Awareness 5.  Acceptance

Awareness

So we’re talking about how to change, especially how to heal. Healing is more than just getting symptoms to go away. Symptom resolution is an important consequence of healing, and certainly something that we want to accomplish for ourselves, but is not the whole picture. And, surprisingly, there are many stories of people who experienced amazing healing when getting symptoms to go away wasn’t even their focus. (http://ahha.org/articles.asp?Id=55). I highly recommend you read Evy’s story, she’s a nurse-turned-minister who healed herself from a here-to-fore 100% fatal illness and has deep insights into her process.) I’ve been thinking about these concepts for decades and helping people with their healing has been my life’s work. As much as I’d like to have all of the answers, I must admit at this point that I believe that, ultimately, healing is a mystery. I can talk about how a person changes during the healing process or what a person is like after healing has happened, but how that process actually happens and how to get it to happen to you when you want it to…that part seems to be the mystery.

There are things we can do to set the stage or bait the trap, so to speak, but whether or not healing steps onto the stage or into the trap does not seem to be up to us. At the same time, I also believe that healing is always possible…for anyone…at any moment. And you can heal your whole life and still die. Dying is not an “F” on your Spiritual report card. After all, how many of us are getting out of here alive?

More importantly, what did your soul come here to experience? How can you live from your soul’s guidance? What is stopping you? Does your soul make mistakes?

Most of us seem to have a smoke screen, house of mirrors, game of hide-and-seek or some other perception blocking or altering process going on between our conscious knowing and our souls’ knowing. The process of healing seems to clear that path. The process of healing seems to open a line of communication between a person’s conscious mind and their deep inner source of love and knowing. They then have that loving and knowing to inform their thoughts, words and choices.

Imagine having that resource to help you live your life. You do, it is inside of you already. It does not have to be created: it just has to be contacted. Which is not as hard as you think: whether you know it or not, it is already talking to you all day (and night) long. To strengthen your connection to your soul, all you have to do is pay attention to your life.

You do that through awareness. After Faith, Awareness is the second step in bringing on changes that heal. For some reason, it is easier for us to work on an issue if we know it is there. And then if we ever want to be free of a particular malady, block or problem, we must work with the truth of it. Remember, the adage is not “you shall know your fantasy and your fantasy shall set you free”. Which is too bad: fantasies are so much easier. If you want to heal, use your power of awareness to become aware of your own truth, your own raw, naked, unadulterated truth. How are you feeling? What are you thinking? What do you believe? What is underneath the patterns in your life? What motivates your behavior? Have you made some assumptions you’re not aware of? What do you have control over in your life? Keep peeling back the layers to get to the root of your truth. Once you get there, how does your truth look to you from your soul’s perspective?

Awareness gets better with practice. Become aware of your surroundings and the people in your life but just as importantly, become aware of your inner workings, of your world view. How does your current world view compare to higher Spiritual truths? We all have our own rack of lenses in our psyche through which we are peering out at the world. These lenses determine how our life looks to us, how we experience what happens to us. In psychology, we refer to these lenses as your “structure of interpretation”. We each have our own unique structure of interpretation made up of many things such as all of the conclusions we’ve ever drawn from our past experiences, cultural influences, family patterns, genetics and such.

At the same time, there is a higher truth. Wherever your own structure of interpretation does not line up or resonate with the higher truth, symptoms will develop. The purpose of the symptom is to get you to explore your structure of interpretation and get it aligned with higher truth. I see this in my patients as they heal. The more a person’s own structure of interpretation resembles higher truth, the healthier they get.

Pay attention to your symptoms. Doggedly follow them back to their roots and open to the truth that is to be found there. View your present personal truth through Spirit eyes. Often, that is all that is required to get your old limiting beliefs to shift into alignment with higher truths. Be kind to yourself in the process, you deserve that.

Recently I’ve been working with a young woman whose primary problem is a tight knot in her left trapezius (upper shoulder and neck area). It keeps pulling her neck and ribs out and her left shoulder up and feels like a continuous Charlie-horse in her neck. She’s seen chiropractors and physiatrists who can get the knot to go away temporarily but it keeps coming back if she does anything at all physical. She had a very difficult childhood and has survived by using her prodigious left-brain intellect. The first few cranial sessions we did, whenever I asked her to listen to her body, she could feel the physical pain, spasm and twisting but when I asked her what emotions were associated with the pain, she drew a blank. All the while I was getting the sense from her body that she was just about ready to explode in frustration.

Physical feelings and emotional feelings are just correlates of each other. Every physical feeling has an associated emotion and every emotion has a physical representation in your body. If you cannot get information on both the physical and emotional tract, something in you is blocked. Use your awareness to find the block. (We’ll go over what to do about the block once you find it in later posts.) During her third or fourth treatment (I like to give people a chance to make their own discoveries before I get more directive and interventional) we discussed the possibility of a block and she was able to admit her frustration.

Then she was silent for a moment and said “My outlook on life has gotten really negative over the past five years.” She could see that chronic job stress and how she’d been treated by her team had caused the change. She was able to see how the negative attitude was affecting her. She had been aiming that negativity at herself as well. With more careful listening, she heard that the knot wanted her to start treating herself with honor and respect. This is one of those higher Spiritual truths: no matter how anyone else treats you, whether your parents, friends or co-workers, you are always worthy of honor and respect. No one else on the planet gets to define your self-worth. That’s between you and your Soul.

As so often happens in people’s lives, several issues are coming to a head for her at once. She’s working on a career change, moving and selling her condo, dealing with a lemon car to name a few. She is going to use this intense time in her life to re-awaken her positive attitude and practice honoring and respecting herself and letting that spread out like ripples through her life. She is making gains in her awareness. She’s learning to listen to her body not just on the physical level but also on the emotional and meaning levels as well. Instead of just being in pain, she’s getting meaningful information that she is using to improve her health as well as her work and personal life. At the end of that session, her neck and shoulder were completely relaxed and she knows that if the spasm returns, she can listen to it again.

So the steps we’ve covered so far to invite healing change into your life are:

1. Have faith that healing is possible, that you can find good solutions to your problems, that there is a good resolution to your suffering. You can do this.
2. Pay attention to your life and to yourself living your life. Trust what you see. Trust what you know. Get in touch with your wise, loving inner guidance. It will help you know how to have a healthy relationship with yourself and others. It will help you know what supplements, treatments and such are best for you. It knows what you ought to eat, how much and when. It knows how much and what kind of exercise to do. It knows what career is right for you. Listen and trust. Use your intelligence to figure out how to be happy.

There are more steps to the process that we’ll cover in the next couple of posts. Practice, practice, practice.

Copyright 2013 Steven M. Hall, MD

Faith

You can heal. No question. You can always improve your circumstances. And when you can’t, you can decrease how much you are suffering because of your circumstances. And you can always learn more about who you are and how best to live true to yourself. Each and every moment of your life offers you that opportunity. If you have no proof in your life of the truth of what I’m saying, have faith. Faith is the first step in any process of change. You must at least have faith that change is possible. “If you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you’re right.” Henry Ford said that and he was arguably pretty good at manifesting his vision. One (of the many) quirky aspect(s) of faith is that faith requires no empirical data to support it. This means that you are free to have faith in whatever. What could you have faith in that would help you with healing whatever you are facing in your life? Take a moment and write down 4-5 suggestions for yourself. The stronger your faith, the better it works. Faith at the level of certainty is nearly unstoppable.

Faith gets stronger with practice. You practice strengthening your faith by focusing on whatever you are having faith in and imagining it filling your whole body with strength and certainty. Feel the strength in your body. If whatever you are having faith in is also in alignment with higher truth, all the better. What are some higher truths you can align yourself with to help with your healing?

• You deserve to be here in this life, drawing breath, taking up space
• You are lovable
• You are forgivable
• You are worthy of happiness
• You have something valuable to contribute to those around you, perhaps to the whole world
• You can find and be your true authentic self
• You have a loving heart
• You are smart in your own way
• Write down a few more that feel true and germane for you

Higher truths are the kind of truths that can be held to be self-evident. Pick a few and practice strengthening your faith in them, just for the heck of it. See how it feels. Let me know what you like to have faith in that works for you.

Learning what to have faith in and then strengthening your faith is an important part of learning how to heal. You can do this. I have faith in you.

Copyright 2013 Steven M. Hall, MD

Emendation

“To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one's family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one's own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.” –Buddha As a young man, Spinoza asked himself: “how does one prepare the mind to receive Spirit?” He wrote a paper called “The Emendation of the Mind” to explore that question. He worked on that paper most of his life and rumor has it he never completed it to his satisfaction. I think he got stuck on the question: “how do we know that what we know is the truth?” That’s a tough question and philosophers of science still cannot satisfactorily answer it. But that’s not what I want to talk about this blog.

If one asks the question: “how does one prepare one’s self to receive healing?” a similar emendation process is often required. “Emendation” means to correct, often by editing. I’ve noticed in my patients that they often go through a process of getting their own deeply held beliefs aligned with higher truths as they heal. This is kind of a circular process. As their beliefs move closer and closer to higher truths, they suffer less and their bodies heal more and as they heal more they are more able to get their beliefs aligned with higher truths. You can do this, too.

Certain knowledge, skills and ways of looking at the world can really help you open to receive the healing that you’re looking for, the healing that your experiences hold for you.

AN is now in her late forties. I started seeing her about ten years ago because she wanted to try to clear her Hepatitis C by natural means. She had just had a liver biopsy that showed stage 4 (very advanced) cirrhosis or scarring of the liver, a known complication of prolonged hepatitis C infection. She didn’t feel comfortable with Interferon after all she’d read about it, especially since the strain of virus that she had, combined with her advanced stage of cirrhosis, gave her only a 25% chance of clearing the virus. During our initial visit, I was a bit surprised to find that she worked as a mail carrier for the Post Office. As she had a certain specific sense about her, I was sure she worked in the Healing professions in some way. But she didn’t. She did practice Yoga and meditation and had made major changes in her lifestyle already. She ate organically and very few processed foods. She exercised regularly and was fairly happy and at peace in her life. She had an optimistic view of life and felt sure that she could heal from her Hep C.

We did all the usual Functional Medicine things of removing any allergens, making sure her hormones were balanced and that her digestive system was working well. We discussed ways of boosting her immune function with supplements and herbs and we started a series of CranioSacral Therapy (CST) sessions with the intention of exploring what the experience of having Hep C meant in the bigger picture of her life. During her treatment, she was able to get to a place of genuine forgiveness in her life. But even with that, nothing we did made any difference to her viral load, the number of virus particles in her blood. She saw other practitioners who also tried what they had to offer, again with no improvement. Within a few years she started to show signs of worsening cirrhosis.

But over those years, she had learned a great deal about how to take really good care of herself, both physically and emotionally. She had also come to peace with the idea of trying Interferon, and the treatment regimen had evolved to also include Ribavirin, an anti-viral medicine that improved the success rate. So she told herself that she was willing to give the Interferon + Ribavirin a try under one condition: she was determined to take such good care of herself that she would be able to tolerate the entire treatment regimen and not have to stop it for side-effects or take sick time off of work. She got very clear about her goals, about getting healthy, about healing the cirrhosis, about clearing the virus, about tolerating the medications and helping them do their job. She stayed very focused. Not only did she clear the virus over the next year, she didn’t get sick from the treatment and her last liver biopsy showed no sign of cirrhosis.

She still works as a mail carrier but has also learned Accutonics, where she treats people by stimulating acupuncture points with tuning forks of specific frequency, and she’s studied Craniosacral Therapy and Gin Shin Jyutsu. The years of work she did leading up to the Interferon treatment was clearly her own emendation process. She started out wanting treatments to clear the virus and ended up learning how to get very clear and focused and take exquisitely good care of herself on multiple levels simultaneously. She also found a way to feed and express that “healer” side of herself that I sensed on our first visit. So often, when a person heals themselves from a chronic illness, their life afterward is very different from their life when they got sick. I see this pattern over and over.

She knows the Interferon + Ribavirin helped her body clear the virus, but it didn’t help her heal her cirrhosis. She credits being very clear in her goals and staying focused on them with the bulk of her success. By listening to and trusting her own deep knowing, she was able to put together a treatment regimen that worked for her.

There are thousands of similar stories. The self-help literature is full of advice on how to set goals, focus, visualize, say affirmations, think positively and similar tactics. How do these practices translate into changes in your body or changes in your life? How do thoughts become things? And what is getting in the way when these tactics don’t seem to be working?

I’ve searched high and low for the answers to these questions. I’ve listened to some of the best teachers of our day, I’ve looked at most of the major world traditions and I’ve watched my patients carefully as they’ve travelled their respective healing paths…and I’ve looked inside myself.

I believe that the personal process of seeking and finding your own answers to these questions is more important for your healing than copying something someone else found that worked for them. No doubt in your search you’re going to hear lots of other people’s healing stories. What worked for them is helpful information to take into consideration, but which approaches you use for yourself should be selected by your deep conviction, your deep inner guidance, your gut sense of knowing what is right for you rather than by what anyone else says.

When it comes to healing yourself, your journey is just as important as your destination. How best, then, to walk your healing journey? I suggest you practice the Seven Tools of Healing.

I will put up a blog post for each of the Seven Tools. There is also a brief summary of them on my website: www.stevenmhallmd.com.

Copyright 2013 Steven M. Hall, MD

Healing Implies Change

Healing implies change. If you are at a place in your life where you are suffering for whatever reason and you grow to a place in your life where that suffering has been alleviated, something has changed. That something might be how you eat, maybe you identified and eliminated a reactive food; that something might be the way you act, maybe you started a good exercise or yoga routine; that something might be better boundaries or finding just the right career or releasing yourself from limiting beliefs that formed when you were younger. When you look at people who have healed something in their life, generally something has changed. So if you want to get better at healing, ask yourself, “How do I change?” This is not a trivial question. Most of the ways that we as a society have developed to help ourselves change only work for a small percentage of people. The five year success rate for diets, any diet, runs around five percent. Before AA, the sobriety success rate for alcohol recovery programs was also around five percent. AA tripled that to a whopping 15%. That means that even AA doesn’t work for 85% of people who try it. The process of change is so unpredictable that many experts have concluded that it just doesn’t happen: people don’t change. Pedophiles, sex offenders, rage-a-holics, drug addicts, narcissists, and people with borderline personality disorder are among the people experts have given up on.

Yet look at how much effort we all put into trying to change: the education system, diets, gyms, the whole self-help industry, medicine, psychology, most religions. Most of us have aspects of ourselves that we want desperately to change and we buy into the lottery mentality when proponents of any particular approach hold up someone in their five percent as a stellar example of what their technique can do for you.

One might do a little math and figure that we only need 20 different diets or 20 different kinds of psychotherapy and everyone could be served. But it doesn’t work that way. Whether or not you change has much more to do with you than with whatever technique you use. Gendlin¹ showed that back in the ‘70s.  So it turns out that about five percent of the population is good at changing and the rest aren’t. Yet we continue to develop newer and fancier techniques and the 95% continue to flock to them with renewed hope and open wallets each time. What do the good changers know that the rest don’t? How can you insure that you’re one of the five percent?

I’ve focused my career on these questions and I have some answers that I think will help you in your quest to change and heal. In this blog, we’ll explore these and similar questions and their answers.

1. Focusing Eugene T. Gendlin, PhD, Bantam New Age Books, NY, NY. 1978.

Copyright 2013 Steven M. Hall, MD

A Brief Introduction to Integral Medicine: Part Three

Last week I began to explain the five aspects of the philosophical underpinnings of Integral Medicine:

1. The Integral Worldview
2. Broad science
3. An expanded model of a human being
4. A definition of health
5. The education metaphor

We got through the first three aspects in Integral Medicine: Part Two. Today I’ll discuss the fourth and fifth aspects.

A Definition of Health

In science, we usually define our terms. Science needs a precise language with which scientists can communicate with each other and the public. If healthcare were to be truly scientific, we’d need a definition of health and the healing process.

In fact, searching for just such a definition has defined the direction of my professional life.

Ever since the sixth grade, when I started wanting to be doctor, I’ve carried this image in my mind that doctors help improve people’s lives. When I was a resident and seeing my own patients in clinic, I was already bumping into the limitations of applying what I’d been taught to help my patients. I didn’t even know at the time what I was expecting to see in my patients’ lives, I just knew I wasn’t seeing it. I was asking myself why it is that people even go to the doctor. There are lots of reasons, but ultimately, I thought they were coming in to heal their lives.

“Heal their lives.” What did that mean? It was then that I was struck with a lightning bolt. There I was, in my seventh year of training in a discipline that prided itself on being scientific, yet no one to that point had defined healing or health. We all just talked like we knew what it was. But upon closer observation, doctors usually only use the word “healing” with respect to fractures or incisions. Not to people’s lives. They might cure an illness or treat a condition, but that’s about as far as it goes.

Why is that? Does it reveal an unspoken belief that healing can’t happen? That healing is too complicated, too capricious, too mysterious? Has the medical profession resigned itself to treating symptoms, thinking that root causes are somehow unfathomable or unreachable? I can’t speak for others, but I do have a difficult time understanding how a physician can really listen carefully to their patients, strive to truly help them and remain conventional at the same time, unless you see yourself as a technician, like a surgeon. (Although I’ve met some surgeons who are surprisingly good at working with their patients on very deep levels.)

Anyway, I thought the whole situation ludicrous, so I started on a search for the definition of healing. Seven years later I started to appreciate why the medical profession had left that question alone.

I started my search with Webster’s, whose definition is actually fairly good, the World Health Organization, the AMA, the American Holistic Medical Association (AHMA) and such. Each had attempted to define healing but relied on words such as “balance” and “harmony”: words which themselves needed defining. I needed a practical, boots-on-the-ground definition I could take into an exam room and actually do with a patient. The AHMA, for example, defined health as a state of balance and harmony with the Cosmos. Now go do that with a patient.

I thought perhaps other systems of healing might have some better answers. I looked into nutrition, herbs, Homeopathy, lay midwifery, Naturopathy, Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, Native American Shamanism, Buddhism, Chiropractic and some other forms of bodywork. I found they all have pieces to the puzzle that can be brought to the Integral Worldview, but none had what I was looking for.

About this time, I’d integrated much of what I had learned into my Family Practice, in what today would be called an Integrative practice, and I noticed that sometimes one of my patients would heal a bit. Even though I didn’t have a rigorous definition of it, curiously, we can recognize it when we see it. Perhaps that is why we can get by to some degree without defining. I reasoned thusly: “If a symptom is a clue that healing needs to happen, then the resolution of the symptom is a clue the healing has happened (assuming one has not just used a suppressive therapy), it is not the healing itself.”

So I started looking at my patients who healed to see what else, besides the resolution of their condition, had changed in them. What I saw was that they had learned something. And that something usually related to the understanding they had of themselves.

I wondered if that learning was the healing.

So I asked, “What if I define the process of healing as the process of us finding out who we really are and then acting in ways that are consistent with that?”

So far, that definition has been holding up pretty well. Ultimately, healing is mysterious and we cannot hope to control all aspects of it. But I think we doctors, as a profession, could do a much better job helping you use your health experiences to deepen your understanding of yourself.

For example, if you look again at Figure 5 below from Part Two, beliefs have creative influence over the body, mind, energy, how we behave in society and in how society and the environment influence us. Therefore, symptoms or imbalances in any of those horizontal aspects are clues to the underlying beliefs. Once limiting beliefs change, an entirely different experience in the body, mind, energy, etc. can be created.

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Each illness you experience has consciousness behind it. You can work with the physical, mental, emotional, social and such aspects of the illness and make some impact. But you can also work with the consciousness of it and make deep and lasting change in the illness.

These approaches are not mutually exclusive. But working with the horizontal aspects of the illness is generally supportive while working with the consciousness behind the illness is curative. Using Integral Medicine, we can work effectively with all aspects of you depicted in Figure 5 above.

Over many years of searching, I’ve developed good, practical ways to work with people on all of these levels at once. And I can teach other practitioners how to do that.

The Education Metaphor

You can generally tell a lot about the underlying assumptions and world view of a discipline by the metaphors it employs.

Conventional medicine uses two dominant metaphors: the war metaphor and the machine metaphor. In the war metaphor, the illness is the enemy to be fought and either vanquished or you become a victim of it. We develop new drugs in our armamentarium against cancer, for example. Your body is the battle ground, often trampled and scarred and even destroyed during the battle. The doctors delusionally think they are the Generals in the battle, but actually they are just the foot soldiers. The CEO’s of the large medical corporations such as the drug and insurance companies are the real Generals. The soldiers just do as they are told or they are dishonorably discharged.

Very early in my search for a definition of healing I observed that healing is not about war. No one actually wins a war. There are always casualties on both sides. One cannot heal if they are at war with themselves and one has a very difficult time (not impossible) healing if they are at war with others or the environment.

One of my first jobs when a new patient starts seeing me is helping them stop the war that they are having with themselves.

The machine metaphor likens your body to a machine. Your heart is a pump, your brain a computer, your joints are hinges, your lungs bellows and so forth. But, as the Vedic model points out, we are more than machines. Our bodies have consciousness, intelligence, wisdom and loving compassion. We do not just have to order our bodies around. We can develop a more collegial relationship with it: listening, dialoguing, working things out.

Natural medicines of several types often use a garden metaphor for health and the body. You prepare the soil, plant seeds, pull the weeds, avoid toxins, nurture and support and Nature does the rest. This metaphor is much gentler than the war metaphor but a garden is still a controlled, human-ego created environment. It does not have the same Spirit and sustainability as does deep wilderness. Many of the greatest teachers in human history gained their critical insights while in wilderness. Is that just a coincidence? If you listen to the stories of people who have experienced spontaneous remissions from cancer or HIV, for example, many of their critical insights happened when they were with Nature. What is that about?

Integral Medicine uses what I call “The Education Metaphor.” If healing is the process of us finding out who we truly are and then living in a way that is congruent with who we are, that is a learning process. Seeing all of life as a chance to learn helps that process.

In the Education Metaphor, the “student” is you…your conscious sense of who you are. By definition in psychology, this is your ego: whatever comes to mind when you say the word “I” to yourself. The teacher, then, is pure consciousness, your Atman, God, your Higher Self, whatever concept of your deeper wisdom that works for you. The classroom is all of creation, the curriculum is all of your experiences, both conscious and non-conscious, and the learning objective is answering the question: “Who am I?”

This is and has been the perennial question in mythology, literature and the arts.

In ancient Greece, the famous seer the Oracle of Delphi used to hang out in the temple of Apollo. On a column leading to the door of the temple there was a plaque with an inscription on it that explained everything you needed to know in order to accurately interpret what the Oracle told you. It said, “Know Thyself.” Some of the best Greek tragedies that survive today are about what happened to people who mis-interpreted what the Oracle told them because they did not know themselves well enough.

As your education proceeds, who you think you are (your ego) gradually starts to look more and more like who you really are (your deep wisdom) until they become indistinguishable. Spiritual traditions have a name for this: enlightenment.

So you don’t want to kill your ego (as some misdirected people talk about), that’s pretty stupid and uncompassionate. Good teachers don’t generally kill their students during their education. But if the student learns well, they can grow up to be teachers in their own right.

From this perspective, your health challenges can be viewed as stepping stones on your path to deeper understanding of yourself, on your path to enlightenment. Suppressive therapies and other therapies that just treat symptoms – that just shut the body up-bind and gag the teacher and throw her in the closet. This generally impedes the progress of the class. Most of what conventional and alternative medicines do today actually slows down your learning, in reality prolonging your suffering.

How do you think your inner teacher feels about you? Is s/he going to give up on you if you don’t learn the lesson the first time? That’s not been my observation. Lessons not learned in one relationship show up in the next. Lessons not learned in one health crisis show up in the next, usually with louder volume.

The converse is also often true: once you learn a lesson, the teacher doesn’t have to keep presenting it to you over and over, you can move on to the next lesson. (The lessons seem to keep coming as long as we’re breathing.)

No matter what is happening to us, potentially we can learn from it. Therefore, I believe healing is always possible.

We want our bodies to work well, our minds to be sharp, our energy to be abundant, our relationships to be loving and supportive and our environment to be non-toxic, but we are bound by the laws of physics in this: I’ve not yet witnessed someone grow back an amputated leg, for example. But healing in a higher sense is always possible. I like to always leave the door open for miracles, but it may be true that while there is always a possible relief to suffering, there may not always be relief of pain. But I don’t know this for a fact yet.

Keep Searching

Remember, healing has very little if anything to do with the functioning of your body, the workings of your mind, the robustness of your energy and such. But before you start thinking that I’m a therapeutic nihilist, remember that we barely have an inkling of who we really are and how powerful we are as divine beings. The creativity that we have potential access to is limitless. In fact, it is only limited by our own imagination, and much more is possible along the lines of physical, mental and energetic balancing than we yet understand.

For these reasons, never give up.

Keep searching for answers to your questions, to solutions to your health problems. Search outside yourself in the world around you for therapies, treatments, supplements and such that are helpful.

But also search inside yourself for the opinion of your own wisdom. How does it want you to be with yourself, with your problems and challenges? What is the consciousness creating your illness and is that the only consciousness you have access to? What are the beliefs that are allowing that illness-consciousness to flow into your life and are they really true? If need be, find a practitioner, friend or some other person who can help you explore questions like these.

Copyright 2012 Steven M. Hall, MD

A Brief Introduction to Integral Medicine: Part Two

In this post, I’ll start to explain the five aspects of the philosophical underpinnings of Integral Medicine:

1. The Integral Worldview
2. Broad science
3. An expanded model of a human being
4. A definition of health
5. The education metaphor

The Integral World View

The Integral Worldview is based upon Ken Wilber’s work. He observed that our era is the first in Human history where we can have access to all the different world traditions at the same time. Not just all the branches of science and psychology but also religions, languages, music, art and literature. Each world tradition has its own view of the Truth. He asked, “What if we took literally everything that all the various cultures have to tell us about human potential – about spiritual growth, psychological growth, social growth – and put it all on the table? What if we attempted to find the critically essential keys to human growth, based on the sum total of human knowledge now open to us? What if we attempted, based upon extensive cross-cultural study, to use all of the world’s great traditions to create a composite map, a comprehensive map, an all-inclusive or integral map that included the best elements from all of them?” (The Integral Vision, page 16). Mr. Wilbur is also founder of the Integral Institute.

Without going into too much detail, he found that one could construct such a map with just five (relatively) simple elements: quadrants, lines, levels, states and types. Figure 1 shows some details of the four quadrants.

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The right upper quadrant is the objective aspects of the singular or individual. The left upper quadrant is the subjective or inner experience of the singular or individual. The right lower quadrant is the objective or exterior of the collective and the left lower quadrant houses the inner or subjective aspects of the collective.

For example, if you wanted to know the chemical composition of wheat, that would be in the right upper quadrant (RUQ). If you wanted to know how much wheat Canada produced in a year, that would be in the right lower quadrant (RLQ). If you wanted to know what it felt like to be a Canadian, that would be in the left lower quadrant (LLQ) and if you wanted to know the beliefs, aspirations, personal and spiritual growth any particular Canadian, that would be left upper quadrant (LUQ).

Pick any experience you have and look at it closely. You’ll see that influences from all four quadrants are active in it all the time. This reminder is one strength of the Integral World View. It is very easy for us to hone in on the influences of one particular quadrant in any given experience and ignore the others.

Figure 2 shows that though most philosophers don’t ignore the other quadrants, they tend to emphasize one enough to be associated with it.

IM_Figure 2_450

Real deep healing requires us to take all influences into account. How your insurance company treats you (RLQ) throughout the course of your illness and recovery has an impact on your health, just as surely as does the medicine or surgery (RUQ) you experience. Your inner strength and fortitude (LUQ) along with your social support systems (LLQ) play enormous roles in the path your healing takes.

Broad Science

The Integral World view leads directly to the development of a broad science. Most of what we think of as science in our culture confines itself to the RUQ.  The science upon which Conventional Medicine is based is primarily RUQ. But science is taking place in the other quadrants as well. Sociology, archeology, geography, systems theory, psychological studies on individuals and groups, the list goes on. Science is the best methodology we have so far for knowing things. There is no logical reason that the scientific method could not be applied to the knowing in each quadrant.

But there is another concept that needs to be taken into account. Not only can we study Nature from the perspectives of all four quadrants, there are also three ways, for lack of a better descriptor, that Humans can know something.

We can know things objectively. I can measure your blood chemistries, your EEG, your EKG, I can CT your entire body. I can collect all kinds of objective information about you. (You ought to see the kind of information Target collects on you when you shop there…information they use to refine their marketing efforts toward you. (That is why they call their store “Target”: because you have one on your back as soon as you walk in the door.)) But all this kind of information only gives me one side of who you are. To learn all this about you, I don’t even have to talk to you. This is a monological way of knowing things. I can study the right two quadrants with monological science.

We can also know things subjectively. I can ask you questions and find out what you believe, what inspires you, what’s holding you back, etc. To learn this side of you, I have to have a conversation with you, a dialog. This is a dialogical way of knowing things. I can study the left two quadrants this way.

Then it turns out that if we just stew about something, if we pick something and contemplate it deeply, we can know things about it – often deep or fundamental things, like true natures and stuff like that. This is a very common way of knowing, taught in many Spiritual traditions around the world. This kind of knowing is transcendental, it transcends the other two, so is often called translogical. I can use transcendental knowing to learn about all four quadrants and the consciousness underlying them.

Broad science is based upon the idea that one can use the scientific method to find the valid ideas and concepts revealed by all three ways of knowing, not just the monological. Many monological RUQ scientists have difficulty accepting the validity claims of the other three quadrants (Figure 3).

IM_Figure 3_450

The broad science of Integral Medicine accepts these validity claims, when they are adequately met.

A Proposed Model of a Human Being

As was already mentioned in Part One, Science needs to work with models of Nature, since Nature itself is currently too complex to study all at once. Since you are the “system of study” for the science underpinning medicine, we need a good model of you with which to work. The conventional medical model says that you are a skin-bag of biochemical reactions. For example, serious research is currently going on trying to figure out how the chemistry of your brain generates consciousness. I have not found this model robust enough to be of much help when working with real people having real problems in real life. Of all the models of a human being I’ve looked at over the years, I’ve found the Vedic model to be the most helpful, so far. (Figure 4.)

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The Vedic model says that a human is composed of six aspects, six irreducible perspectives, so to speak, that the ancient sages saw as arranged like sheaths over sheaths, like the Russian nesting dolls. The outer most aspect is the physical body, with all of its biochemistry. Under this is energy they called Prana. It is the energy that allows the true self to be animated in the physical world. The next layer is the mind. (Note that in this model the brain would be part of the body, while the mind is its own separate and distinct perspective.) The mind processes the information from the physical senses and makes conscious sense out of it. It also is able to control the energy and the body. The next sheath is wisdom or intellect. I see it functioning in people as the collections of beliefs they’ve drawn during their lifetime that functions as their world view.

These outer four sheaths make sense to us in the West because if we were to make a robot, it would have these four aspects: it would have a body, a battery pack or power source of some kind, it would have a computer to process the information the robot detected and tell it what to do, and it would have software programmed into the computer. But, and this may come as a surprise to some followers of Conventional medicine, as humans we are more than robots. We have two more deeper aspects.

The fifth aspect is called “bliss.” This is not just feeling good, but is pure being, the inner peace that is not disturbed by any shenanigans in the body, mind, energy or beliefs. I see this aspect functioning in people as their inner observer. But it is not just any old cold scientific observer. It is wise, kind, understanding and deeply loving. The closest I’ve seen the West come to the concept of this is the Transcendentalists of the mid and late 19th century: Emerson, Thoreau and those guys. But I’ve found that learning how to touch into and communicate with this aspect of themselves is vital for my patients’ healing.

The deepest and sixth aspect of us is pure undifferentiated consciousness. This is that part of us that is outside the laws of physics. It was never born and will never die. People touch into this in Samadhi during deep meditation.

Just like all four quadrants are influencing every moment at all times, all six aspects of you are operating at the same time. Pragmatically, I see most of them operating like different arms of a mobile or, in more technical terms, correlates of each other. If you walk up to a mobile and bump one part of it, the whole mobile moves. Thus, if I add chemicals to your body and change the physical, that change will have analogous changes in your energy and in your mind. If I stick you appropriately with acupuncture needles and change your energy, that will initiate changes in your body and mind. If we do some cognitive behavioral therapy and change your mind, that will trigger changes in your biochemistry and energy. This explains the mind-body connection, which is a misnomer, actually. To be connected they must first be separated. They are not separated, they are really just different sides of the same coin, different ways to observe who we really are, which, as Spinoza describes it, is a divine mystery.

We are obviously also influenced by society and the environment. So the model of a human being that helps me deal with all four quadrants and the complexity of cause and effect with respect to disease looks like Figure 5.

IM_Figure 5_500

Pure Consciousness: There is only one. It is outside the laws of physics and has causative influence on the physical. In the Vedic cosmology, this is called Brahman or Purusha. Our deepest inner core of it is often referred to as Atman. I think of it as pure potential. In quantum mechanics, infinity keeps popping up in the math of it and is always needing to be adjusted out so the equations make physical sense. Pure consciousness is the infinite. I think of pure consciousness as the “nothingness” (more rightly thought of as the “everythingness”) out of which the strings appear and into which they disappear in String Theory. In the Judeo-Christian cosmology, pure consciousness could be thought of as God transcendent.

The Inner Observer functions like pure consciousness’ right-hand man within the laws of physics. It has many of the same qualities Spirit has: wise, kind, loving, compassionate, understanding, forgiving. Imagine if we could continuously view ourselves and feel towards ourselves in these ways as we go through our lives.

Beliefs are next in line and not on the horizontal line because they are so fundamental to what we are able to create and how we experience the aspects of us that are on the horizontal line. It’s as if pure consciousness, also pure creativity, since consciousness creates the material, is like a pure white light shining in our cores. The inner observer surrounds that white light and fully transmits it, like clear glass. The next layer, our beliefs, functions like a layer of black plastic, opaque to the flow of creativity. Our beliefs are like pin-holes in the plastic, only letting through that light that is consistent with it. Like Henry Ford said, if we believe we can, we can, if we believe we can’t we’re right. Perhaps you’ve also heard the saying, “If you want to know what a person believes, just look at their life.” Changing your beliefs can totally change your biochemistry, your energy, what you think about, how people treat you and the choices you make in your life.

The items along the horizontal line are self-explanatory and function like the arms of the mobile.

I like this model because it explains so many observations. It says that conscious is primary. This is why we can have intuition, spontaneous creativity and volition. It explains why we can go inside and find wisdom. We can, but we don’t need to learn about wisdom by reading about it. It explains why we can know something intellectually yet it doesn’t change our biochemistry. We need to know it on a deeper level, the level of changing non-consciously held beliefs, to effect a physical change. It explains why basic human nature, underneath the wounding and confusion of life, is loving and kind. It explains a lot of other things as well, like Spiritual healing and the physical effects of meditation, too many things to go into here.

Broad science can then be used to flesh out the details of how these components interact and influence each other. This would give us a much deeper understanding of healing and how to responsibly use other modalities than just drugs and surgery. We would deepen our understanding and appropriate use of group therapy, community, meditation, exercise, body work, energy work, prayer and such.

If Medicine adopted a model such as this and used broad science to deepen our understanding of all of its facets, we would have a medicine that could make good use of all the data of human experience. It would be able to see you and treat you as a Whole Human Being. It would be Integral Medicine.

I’ll discuss a definition of health in Part Three.

Copyright 2012 Steven M. Hall, MD

Children and Consciousness

I’d like to get back for a moment to the topic of the very first blog post: how do we raise our consciousness? The best advice I’ve seen was up on the wall behind the counter of the pro shop of a small community golf course in northern Idaho. It said, “Want to improve your game? Then go back and start playing when you were much younger.” This might not give us much hope for ourselves, but it hints at what we ought to offer our children. But before we get into this much more, we need to figure out what we’re even talking about when we say “consciousness”.

Neuroscience, which doggedly holds onto the belief that the brain is primary and that activity in the brain determines everything else, including generating consciousness, has a difficult time defining it. One prominent scientist says that consciousness is what goes away when you are asleep and comes back when you wake up. This, obviously, is a very shallow, most superficial view of consciousness. It is consciousness with a small c, the distinction between being awake or being asleep. As if you don’t have any experiences when you are asleep.

Another Way to Think of Consciousness

The consciousness I’m referring to could be thought of as a property of the Universe, just as matter, or more properly, mass and energy are properties of the Universe. Mass and energy are just two sides of the same coin, interchangeable through the famous equation E=mc² where m is the mass and c is the speed of light. Consciousness could be thought of as information, a third property of the Universe. There is no simple equation relating information to mass and energy that I know of, but physicists have recently started with a few basic tenets of information theory and from there, derived the mathematics of quantum mechanics (http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.6451v3). I think this feat hints at the primacy of consciousness over matter/energy.

More properly, more than information, consciousness, as I conceive of it, is the source of matter, energy and information. Pure consciousness is the infinite potential out of which come the little strings of String Theory. Information tells the subatomic particles how to structure themselves into matter/energy (our word even says it: in formation) then the structure of the matter/energy stores that information. The Universe is conscious, otherwise consciousness wouldn’t exist. The Universe is intelligent, otherwise intelligence wouldn’t exist. The Universe stores information holographically, otherwise holograms wouldn’t exist.

So the consciousness is there for us to tap into. We are each experiencing and expressing, through how we think and live our lives, a unique combination of properties of the one and indivisible consciousness. We could just as easily be experiencing and expressing other properties of consciousness. Anything any one of us has ever thought or experienced is potential for all of us.

What determines which aspects of consciousness we express? Is it genetic? Is it cultural? Is it how we are parented? How we are educated? The language we speak? Is it karma, destiny or “past lives”? The answer is “yes”.

Consciousness and Beliefs

All of our experiences, awake and asleep, conscious and unconscious, literal and symbolic, lead to the formation of beliefs. What we believe determines which aspects of greater consciousness we can access and express. When children are raised to believe that they can do whatever they put their mind to, they often can. When children are raised to feel stupid and worthless, they often find huge roadblocks in their way no matter which way they turn.

Henry Ford said, “If you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you’re right.” “I’ll believe it when I see it” is not really how people function. “I’ll see it when I believe it” is much more accurate. People have known this sort of thing for ages, yet deciding what beliefs to instill in our children, and how best to do that, has been problematic. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2790748/pdf/hde0052-0211.pdf)

Teaching our Children

Many different theories about parenting and education exist. The old adage “when there are lots of ways to get the same job done, that generally means none of them works very well” definitely applies to parenting and education. The problem lies in the fact that when you say something to another person, you never really know what they hear, how they take it and what conclusion they draw from it.

“If you give a man a fish, you feed him for an afternoon. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” If you give a child a belief, they may be stuck with it for the rest of their life, locking them into a set way of seeing and being.

If you teach a child how to know themselves, how to see for themselves what they believe, and teach them the tools to be able to change their own beliefs, you make them adaptable for the rest of their lives.

So, instead of trying to instill a certain set of beliefs in our children, which smacks of brain-washing, no matter the end intended, why not teach our children how to find out what they believe, check their beliefs with the higher truth and correct or align their beliefs with higher truth? Imagine, if we all had that skill, we would be very adept at learning the real and deeper lessons ensconced in our life experiences. Then our life experiences will just naturally take us down the path to self-knowing…which is also healing…which is also enlightenment.

P.S. You don’t have to go back to childhood to learn how to change your beliefs for yourself. It’s never too late.

Copyright 2012 Steven M. Hall, MD