When the Servant Becomes the Master

In truth, the body is the servant of the mind. It follows that if the body has become the mind, the servant has become the master. And the former master (the conscious mind) has gone to sleep. The mind might think it’s still in charge, but the body is influencing decisions equal to its memorized emotions. Now, let’s say the mind wants to get back in control. What do you think the body is going to say? Where have you been? Go back to sleep. I’ve got it together here. You don’t have the will, the persistence, or the awareness to do what I have been doing all this time while you were unconsciously following my orders. I even modified my receptor sites over the years in order to serve you better. You thought you were running things, while I have been influencing you all along and urging you to make all of your decisions equal to what feels right and familiar. And when the 5 percent that is conscious is going against 95 percent that is running subconscious automatic programs, the 95 percent is so reflexive that it only takes one stray thought or a single stimulus from the environment to turn on the automatic program again. Then we’re back to same old, same old — thinking the same thoughts, performing the same actions, but expecting something dif erent to happen in our lives. When we try to regain control, this is when the body signals the brain to begin talking us out of our conscious goals. Our internal chatter comes up with a battery of reasons why we should not attempt to do anything out of the ordinary, not break out of the habituated state of being that we’re used to. It will pick up all of our weaknesses, which it knows and fosters, and hurl them at us one by one. We create worst-case scenarios in our minds so that we don’t have to rise above those familiar feelings. Because when we try to break the internal chemical order we have made so second nature, the body goes into chaos. Its internal badgering feels nearly irresistible — and plenty of times, we succumb. Enter into the Subconscious to Change It The subconscious mind only knows what you have programmed it to do. Have you ever been typing along on your laptop, and all of a sudden your computer starts running automatic programs that you have no control over? When you try to use the conscious mind to stop the automatic, subconscious programs stored in your body, it’s like yelling at a computer that’s gone rogue, with several programs running while windows are popping up and showing more than you can handle. Hey! Stop that! The computer isn’t even going to register that. It’s going to keep doing what it does until there is some sort of intervention — until you get into its operating system and change some settings. In this book, you will learn how to get into the subconscious, and reprogram it with a new set of strategies. In effect, you have to unlearn, or unwire, your old thinking and feeling patterns and then relearn, or rewire, your brain with new patterns of thinking and feeling, based on who you want to be instead. When you condition the body with a new mind, the two can no longer work in opposition, but must be in harmony. This is the point of change … of self-creation. Guilty Until Proven Innocent Let’s use a real-life situation to illustrate what happens when we decide to break from some memorized emotional state and change our minds. I think we can all relate to one common state of being: guilt. So I’m going to use that to illustrate in practical terms how this cycle of thinking and feeling works against us. Then we’ll identify some of the efforts the brain-body system is going to make to remain in control and preserve that negative state of being. Imagine that you frequently feel guilty about one thing or another. If something goes wrong in a relationship — a simple miscommunication, someone unreasonably misplacing his or her anger on you, or whatever — you wind up taking the blame and feeling bad. Picture yourself as one of those people who repeatedly say or think, It was my fault. After 20 years of doing this to yourself, you feel guilty and think guilty thoughts automatically. You have created an environment of guilt for yourself. Other factors have contributed to this, but for now, let’s stay with this notion of how your thinking and feeling have created your state of being and your environment. Every time you think a guilty thought, you’ve signaled your body to produce the specific chemicals that make up the feeling of guilt. You’ve done this so often that your cells are swimming in a sea of guilt chemicals. The receptor sites on your cells adapt so that they can better take in and process this particular chemical expression, that of guilt. The enormous amount of guilt bathing the cells begins to feel normal to them, and eventually, what the body perceives as normal starts to be interpreted as pleasurable. It’s like living for years near an airport. You get so used to the noise that you no longer hear it consciously, unless one jet flies lower than usual and the roar of its engines is so much louder that it gets your attention. The same thing happens to your cells. As a result, they literally become desensitized to the chemical feeling of guilt; they will require a stronger, more powerful emotion from you — a higher threshold of stimuli — to turn on the next time. And when that stronger “hit” of guilt chemicals gets the body’s attention, your cells “perk up” at that stimulation, much like that first cup of java feels to a coffee drinker. And when each cell divides at the end of its life and makes a daughter cell, the receptor sites on the outside of the new cell will require a higher threshold of guilt to turn them on. Now the body demands a stronger emotional rush of feeling bad in order to feel alive. You become addicted to guilt by your own doing. When anything goes wrong or is awry in your life, you automatically assume that you’re the guilty party. But that seems normal to you now. You don’t even have to think about feeling guilty — you just are that way. Not only is your mind not conscious of how you express your guilty state by way of the things you say and do, but your body wants to feel its accustomed level of guilt, because that’s what you have trained it to do. You have become unconsciously guilty most of the time — your body has become the mind of guilt. Only when, say, a friend points out that you needn’t have apologized to the store clerk for giving you the wrong change do you realize how pervasive this aspect of your personality has become. Let’s say that this triggers one of those moments of enlightenment — an epiphany — and you think, She’s right. Why do I apologize all the time? Why do I take responsibility for everyone else’s missteps? After you reflect on your history of constantly “pleading guilty,” you say to yourself, Today I’m going to stop blaming myself and making excuses for other people’s bad behavior. I’m going to change. Because of your decision, you’re no longer going to think the same thoughts that produce the same feelings, and vice versa. And if you falter, you’ve made a deal with yourself that you’re going to stop and remember your intention. Two hours go by and you feel really good about yourself. You think, Wow, this is actually working. Unfortunately, your body’s cells aren’t feeling so good. Over the years, you’ve trained them to demand more molecules of emotion (guilt, in this case) in order to fulfill their chemical needs. You had trained your body to live as a memorized chemical continuity, but now you’re interrupting that, denying it its chemical needs and going contrary to its subconscious programs. The body becomes addicted to guilt or any emotion in the same way that it would get addicted to drugs. 2 At first you only need a little of the emotion/drug in order to feel it; then your body becomes desensitized, and your cells require more and more of it just to feel the same again. Trying to change your emotional pattern is like going through drug withdrawal. Once your cells are no longer getting the usual signals from the brain about feeling guilty, they begin to express concern. Before, the body and the mind were working together to produce this state of being called guilt; now you are no longer thinking and feeling, feeling and thinking, in the same way. Your intention is to produce more positive thoughts, but the body is still all revved up to produce feelings of guilt based on guilty thoughts. Think of this as a kind of highly specialized assembly line. Your brain has programmed the body to expect one part that will fit into this larger assembly. All of a sudden, you’ve sent it another part that doesn’t fit into the space where the old “guilty” part once did. An alarm goes off, and the whole operation comes to a standstill. Your cells are always spying on what is happening in the brain and the mind; your body is the best mind reader ever. So they all stop what they are doing, look up toward the brain, and think: What are you doing up there? You insisted on being guilty, and we loyally followed your commands for years! We subconsciously memorized a program of guilt from your repetitive thoughts and feelings. We changed our receptor sites to reflect your mind — modified our chemistry so that you could automatically feel guilty. We have maintained your internal chemical order, independent of any external circumstances in your life. We are so used to the same chemical order that your new state of being feels uncomfortable, unfamiliar. We want the familiar, the predictable, and what feels natural. All of a sudden you’re going to change? We can’t have that! So the cells huddle up and say: Let’s send a protest message to the brain. But we have to be sneaky, because we want her to think that she’s actually responsible for these thoughts. We don’t want her to know they came from us. So now the cells send a message marked URGENT right up the spinal cord to the surface of the thinking brain. I call that the “fast track,” because the message goes straight up the central nervous system in a matter of seconds. At the same time this is happening, the chemistry of the body — the chemistry of guilt — is now at a lower level, because you’re not thinking and feeling the same way. But this drop does not go unnoticed. A thermostat in the brain called the hypothalamus also sends out an alarm that says: Chemical values are going down. We’ve got to make more! So the hypothalamus signals the thinking brain to revert back to its old habitual ways. This is the “slow track,” because it takes longer for the chemicals to circulate through the bloodstream. The body wants you to return to your memorized chemical self, so it influences you to think in familiar, routine ways. These “fast track” and “slow track” cellular responses occur simultaneously. And the next thing you know, you start to hear the chatter of thoughts like these in your head: You’re too tired today. You can start tomorrow. Tomorrow’s a better day. Really, you can do it later. And my favorite: This doesn’t feel right. If that doesn’t work, a second sneak attack occurs. The body-mind wants to be in control again, so it starts picking on you a bit: It’s okay for you to feel a little bad right now. It’s your father’s fault. Don’t you feel bad about what you did in your past? In fact, let’s take a look at your past so we can remember why you are this way. Look at you — you’re a mess, a loser. You’re pathetic and weak. Your life is a failure. You’ll never change. You’re too much like your mother. Why don’t you just quit. As you continue this “awfulizing,” the body is tempting the mind to return to the state it has unconsciously memorized. On a rational level, that is absurd. But obviously, on some level it feels good to feel bad. The moment we listen to those subvocalizations, believe those thoughts, and respond by feeling the same familiar feelings, mental amnesia sets in and we forget our original aim. The funny thing is that we actually begin to believe what the body is telling the brain to say to us. We immerse ourselves back into that automatic program and return to being our old self. Most of us can relate to this little scenario. It’s no different from any habit we’ve tried to break. Whether we’re addicted to cigarettes, chocolate, alcohol, shopping, gambling, or biting our nails, the moment we cease the habitual action, chaos rages between the body and the mind. The thoughts we embrace are intimately identified with the feelings of what it would be like to experience the indulgence. When we give in to the cravings, we will keep producing the same outcomes in our lives, because the mind and body are in opposition. Our thoughts and feelings are working against each other, and if the body has become the mind, we will always fall prey to how we feel. As long as we use familiar feelings as a barometer, as feedback on our efforts to change, we’ll always talk ourselves out of greatness. We will never be able to think greater than our internal environment. We will never be able to see a world of possible outcomes other than the negative ones from our past. Our thoughts and feelings have that much power over us.