Your brain is an organic map writing system.
It is also an ‘association machine’, associating positive and negative places and situations with positive and negative emotional responses in order to move you behaviourally towards and away from those places and situations mapped. Consciously this linking takes place in the Right Neo-Cortex under the watchful eye of the Prefrontal Cortex.
When it comes to completing an emotional cycle the Right Neo-Cortex is also the brain part in which you disassociate these memories and their attached responses through the mental act of focusing coupled with the physical act of feeling.
Usually the overall emotional process operates at just the right intensity for you to be aware of the right directions to take, at what pace and for what duration, without overwhelming you with the powerful energies of the emotional process itself.
Now and again you may experience a life-threatening emergency during which your emotional system forces your mind to shrink to pinpoint focus on the threat. When we can see the benefits of this reaction we usually accept it even though we may still dislike it. If an intense fear reaction prevents you being bitten by a vicious dog, for example, you will find it easier to accept the symptoms of the reaction than if the same response is produced when you approach an empty elevator and don’t understand the unconsciously held triggers as to why.
(Strangely enough, we can even learn to enjoy an unconsciously driven negative experience - which is why we spend time engaged with fictional action and horror stories).
While baseline unconscious reactive settings are genetically programmed into us, such as the automatic urge to withdraw from pain, many more are added by conscious interpretations of new life events. If repeated enough times these new reactions become learned automated responses also managed unconsciously.
Internal Maps
Your brain’s mapping system does not just create maps of the outside world - it also creates maps of your internal world too. These internal maps can be positive or negative and are emotionally attached the same way your maps of the external world are.
When you create negative maps of your own negative internal responses you create a negative self image and start fighting the warning signal system of your own Unconscious. Your Unconscious turns against itself declaring your own thoughts and feelings to be ‘wrong’ or ‘abnormal’.
Your Unconscious is now stuck in the world of denial; suppression; repression and secondary emotional responses. You are in a war against your own intuitive process. Intuition, the means by which we bring together all our Unconscious signals in order to make decisions suitable for who we really are, is shot to pieces in this war. Nothing you do seems right - you’re trying to do everyone else’s ‘right’; you don’t even know what your own ‘right’ is any more.
We become over-sensitised (hyper-vigilant) because our emotional responses are being repeatedly triggered due to our refusal or inability to leave the triggering situation (sometimes because of our belief it’s us that’s the problem) combined with resistance to the emotional response process itself.
Like an organic pressure-cooker we produce an emotionally overcharged Unconscious; a painful battery desperate to discharge yet terrified things will blow-up internally in some way if we do.
In a perfect world our brain would be master controller of our entire body (and beyond) at all times and these crazy-paving paths we dance between our inner and outer worlds would be straight and clear. Trouble is, our Unconscious has several powerful minds, each with the power to override the one in our heads.
Hello, fellow segmented worm!
According to Dr Candace Pert (mentioned in previous posts) our body operates like that of a segmented worm. Control of mind and body - the bodymind - is moved between the segments depending on which segment is sending out the strongest peptide (hormones and neurotransmitters) signals at any one time.
Try not going to the toilet; not eating or drinking; not breathing - you’ll soon get the gist of this idea. On second thoughts, please don’t try any of those things and if you do I’m not responsible for the consequences, OK?
Gut Feelings
I’m not a very good cook. I’ve never to my knowledge created mood-altering meals to order. At the time of writing this I am, however, lucky to be working in a college teaching catering and we have several of the UK’s top chefs supervising our meals. A few years ago the managers decided to combine the student canteen with the college restaurant resulting in award-winning food at canteen prices. Woohoo!
Sometimes when I’ve had a hectic morning’s work I’ll go there intending to have a quick meal before the next ‘emergency’ but the food stops me in my tracks; slows me down and totally changes my mood. There’s also a pub just round the corner serving a chicken, ham and leek pie, with chips and peas, and that meal and that meal alone at that pub has the same affect. I don’t know what they’re putting in these meals, I suspect there’s something in the pastry - but my Unconscious loves them. It feels completely satisfied and energised for five to six hours afterwards.
It comes as no surprise to me then that the unconscious is based mainly around our digestive system and heart, which is why when you’re emotionally negative you’ll feel a lot of tension coming up from just under your sternum.
This is certainly the area for me where I experienced the most painful emotional symptoms during my healing process.
We used to think Seratonin, the chemical that communicates ‘satisfaction’, was only found in the brain as a neurotransmitter but it turns out we have more of this satisfaction-triggering chemical in our digestive system as a hormone then anywhere else in the body - it’s what your stomach produces when you feel full.
The heart is also rich in all the molecules of emotion, including all those neurotransmitters to be found in the brain. They’re not there by accident - your heart operates like a secondary brain to the body.
It doesn’t stop there.
In addition to digestion and circulatory segments you have a reproductive segment; a waste disposal segment and an autonomic brain based in your spine allowing your body to react first and tell your brain about it later. These different parts of you are all capable of taking control of what your brain thinks about at any one time.
The ‘molecules of emotion’ driving you are active in your skin, in your immune system and many other parts of your body.
Your whole body talks. Are you listening to it?
When releasing negative emotions you may ‘suffer’ from heart palpitations, increased blood pressure, sweating, changes in stomach acid balance and yet - strangely enough - releasing in this way leads to an improved immune system (tests show that when a person releases trapped anger, for example, their immune function improves).
The ‘molecules of emotion’ are driving these changes as the vibrational energies they produce allow each of your different bodily segments, and other interweaving parts, to ‘speak’ when you are willing to listen.
If you listen for long enough, letting those segments release, your Prefrontal Cortex eventually becomes the ‘last segment standing’ and you feel like yourself once more.
When deliberately completing a trapped emotional cycle you may find yourself entering a state of shock, of freezing and overwhelm, as the sheer power of the Unconscious hits you. Counsellors refer to this as ‘opening up’ (I don’t recommend you do this without professional support if available although I did do this myself on a daily basis for several years during healing without a counsellor being present).
It may seem you have entered a very strange world, a frightening and abnormal world no-one else ever talks about, but the truth is one of your ‘segments’ is releasing whenever you allow your feelings to flow and this is completely normal.
Flow - not removal - is the thing to focus on. Once the intensity of the initial emotional flooding starts to pass and the vibrational discharge is allowed to die down you can concentrate on deliberately finding and consciously entering any remaining ‘puddles’ ensuring full discharge takes place and, gradually, the information cycle will finally complete.
Regards - Carl
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