If you’re following a recipe to bake a cake and end up with a cake you don’t particularly like – would you be likely to use that same recipe the next time you baked? Most likely you would scrap the recipe or at least alter it to better suit your desired outcome. Unless you change the recipe you’ll keep getting the same crappy cake!
Usually a thought creates a feeling and that feeling produces an action or a reaction. So we could say we know the recipe to create a particular reaction. If we don’t like the results of our actions or reactions we have to change the recipe. Often, based on past experience, we know how we are going to end up feeling or what we will end up doing if we keep focusing on particular thoughts. Even though we know this, sometimes it seems that we can’t stop ourselves. It just happens – out of habit.
Those things that you do, say or think the most often shape your reality and form your experiences. The force that you habitually feed shapes the person you become. The more often you repeat a behaviour the easier it is to do it because it becomes habitual. We become so accustomed to a particular behaviour that our response becomes almost automatic. In the brain, neurons associated with a certain activity function together and form a neural pathway. Through practice or repeated actions, the connections of these neural pathways become established and stronger. Neuroscientist Donald Hebb coined the phrase, “neurons that fire together wire together” to explain that every experience, thought, feeling, and physical sensation triggers thousands of neurons to form a neural network. With continuous practice and repetition, you are, in essence, rewiring your neural pathways.
Through past experience, you usually know the result that a particular focus or thought will produce. If you want to change the result, you need to “rewire the program” so it doesn’t result in the outcome that it’s been habituated to produce. We perceive our world through the nervous system. All of your senses from sight, sound, smell, taste to feeling involve communication between the brain and the body via your nervous system. What you sense allows you to respond, react, and adapt to life. Some actions or reactions are so hardwired that our body responds before the brain can even interpret the situation. When your body and brain are not communicating optimally it can impact you both in the way you feel and what you do or don’t feel. Improving the communication between the brain and the body allows the brain to become more aware of your actions or reactions. Before you can make any desired change you must first become aware of what you are currently doing.
At BodyMind Wellness Studio we optimize the communication between the brain and the body using light touches at specific vertebral segments to ease tension within the spinal cord. The brain becomes aware of the tension within the joints and muscles and initiates greater movement and deeper breath allowing for a release. Over time the body learns how to develop strategies to self-regulate and remembers how to heal. Releasing tension within the nervous system allows for optimal functioning both mentally and physically. When the body and brain are communicating optimally it makes it easier to adapt when life is calling us to make necessary changes.
“The nervous system controls and coordinates all organs and structure of the human body.” (Gray’s.Anatomy, 29th Ed; page 4)
Copyright Dr. Julie Doobay 2019