The Mind-Body Connection… More Than You Think
Jun 01, 2016
Communication. What comes to mind? Your mouth and vocal cords directing sounds toward another person with the intent to impart some sort of message? Yes, that’s one form of communication. But perhaps an even more powerful form of communication is the constant chatter between our minds and our bodies. Our minds are always talking to our bodies and our bodies continuously respond to its messages. I promise you experience this every day. Have you ever had “butterflies in your tummy” or met someone who was a “pain in the neck?” Have you ever survived a “broken heart?” These are all well-known adages for the very real mind-body connection phenomenon.
Butterflies in your tummy, that somewhat annoying physical sensation you experience just before or during a foreboding event, is perhaps one of the easiest mind-body conversations to understand. When we think about or experience a stressful event, such as an important job interview, our bodies respond to this anxiety-laden thought or occurrence through a cascade of events. Just the mere thought of the upcoming interview can throw our bodies into fight-or-flight, marked by a release of the stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol. This biochemical release diverts blood and energy away from our stomach and small intestines to our large limbs and muscles, preparing our bodies to flee. The fluttering sensation is simply a physical experience of the restricted blood flow in the stomach area, ultimately instigated by a simple thought. This is why it is so important to manage our thoughts (our minds) before they scream at our bodies to freak out. The more we allow our minds to run amok (and left unattended, they will), the more the body experiences stress, the very root of all disease.
Now, let’s take a deeper look. In the complex book, Power vs. Force, Dr. David Hawkins meticulously demonstrates how our states of consciousness and emotions have immense power over our physical bodies. This is the essence of the mind-body connection. He demonstrated this by creating a 0-1000 calibration scale whereby he used applied kinesiology (or muscle response testing) to determine which “states of consciousness” made our bodies weaker and which yielded a strong physiological response. He called this the Map of Consciousness. He found that the states of guilt and shame came in at the lowest level of the scale, resonating around 20-30. (Note to self: let go of that shame; it actually weakens our bodies!) Conversely, higher states of emotion such as love and joy, ring in at 500 and, in turn, make our bodies strong. Further, he demonstrated that as individuals moved up on the Map of Consciousness scale, not only did their emotional levels improve, but as you might guess, so did their overall physical health and wellbeing, the magic of the “mind-body connection.”
Although Dr. Hawkins’ impactful work on a single individual’s mind-body interplay is profound enough, he went further with his research to establish how one individual’s mind-body connection can affect a much larger audience. This phenomenon has been referred to as “the collective conscious.” He revealed how one person’s ascension up the Map of Consciousness, (whereby this individual is positively affecting his own mental AND physical health), has a direct impact on other’s emotional and physical wellbeing. What makes this piece of work so formidable, is that Dr. Hawkins exhibited a direct route for increasing the energy and physical states of all humanity. If the mind-body health of one individual can literally affect the wellbeing of those around them, do we perhaps have an avenue to “change the world” one person at a time? As we’ve already alluded to, through extensive testing, he discovered that any energies that fall below 200 are destructive and above 200 are productive.
Until the 1980s, humanity hovered below 200 for centuries. Since the 1980’s our collective efforts to positively increase our consciousness have catapulted our species to the above-200 state, maybe for the first time since any of us has been alive. Simply put, as more of us collectively use the positive power of our minds, we are literally affecting the health of our world.
So, next time you feel a flutter of butterflies dancing in your tummy, reach for a high energy thought, make a healthy choice to change your mind, and change the world.
