It is so important to learn about all four bodies within us, the mental body, emotional body, the spiritual body as well as the physical body. Each of these plays a different role in our experience. Two people can have the same thought and have very different emotions tied to that thought. Two people can hear a word and very different sensations arise within them.
When we start to separate out our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and meaning, our world becomes a lot safer. I mean it. When we begin to understand ourselves the world is more predictable and stable. Too much of our unconscious mind is spent preparing for another shoe to drop or preventing being “found out”. The work of this life is as much about learning to receive and hold the greatness of who we are as it is to learn to give it to others.
One of the ways we do this is to examine the thoughts that rule our lives - both good and bad. Many times the negative thoughts are not our own but beliefs in someone else’s thoughts that we have agreed to.
"All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions." ~ Leonardo da Vinci
Once we examine these thoughts, the beliefs, or perceptions as da Vinci calls them they can be shifted to more supportive ones. AND, when we examine our good thoughts, they can expand and grow.
I have noticed that one of the thoughts disintegrating humanity today is the “us and them” mentality (see how it is a mental body issue?) I have a unique perspective on these kinds of things. One of the traumas in my life was, as a child - the extra prize at the end of a family of 7 - my parents put me in the middle of their feelings of scarcity towards one another.
A few sentences will never do justice to how this trauma painted my world negatively. But, it did give me empathy for other’s hurts. It provided me something to overcome, and it helped me develop a superpower of being able to see two sides of things. So, I hope to share that superpower here - with the “us and them” since I am used to being in the middle.
On the “us” side, we have beliefs, ways of doing things, likes, and dislikes - all based on our negative and positive thoughts about issues and how things work and impact us.
We tend to live and interact with people who share those thoughts. This is exactly the same formula used for the “them” side of things.
Remember how I said before that we put a lot of energy into preparing for the other shoe to drop? When opposing ideas hit us, it feels like a real-life threat. It can feel like a 100-pound shoe just dropped on our toe. We don’t like it. It becomes really easy in this state to create a narrative that supports our way of things and denounces another’s way. If we don’t stop and notice when this happens then we help create the systematic ways we function as a people.
Understanding systematic vs organized is important here. This is a really important piece my superpower picks up on.
When we are accused - racism, exclusion, mistreatment, being wrong - we see it from the perspective of being on purpose or organized, and we reject the idea. We can't or don't give thought to how it could be a systematic problem meaning there is not a specific stop and start to the issue even though it exists. We feel our powerlessness because we weren’t in on any decision to create it. No one really created it or decided it.
Racism is a big one here. As a white woman, I have never been taught to hate or have a bias against anyone of another race and yet, my brothers and sisters of different shades are telling me over and over their stories of pain and suffering and the statistics agree.
My reaction might be based on knowing it was not created from an organized perspective, so I dismiss it when actually the problem is systematic. It’s not the big things. It is often the very small unnoticed things.
When we are the accusers, it is more common to believe things are happening to us in an organized deliberate way. We may believe the "others" desire to hurt us and want us to feel bad. We feel like it has a beginning and therefore we want it to end.
The fight between systematic vs organized impacts our thinking in big ways. We create beliefs from this thinking.
What is the fix? The movie and true story, A Beautiful Mind’s main character John Nash, said,
“The only thing greater than the power of the mind is the courage of the heart.”
The fix is empathy, for ourselves first then freely given to others. We cannot give to others what we don't hold within ourselves.
I am trained in Heart-Centered Therapy and its theory is that the heart has a wisdom we can tap into. In a session, we can literally ask the energy of the heart for answers to our why and when our thoughts and beliefs were formed. It is an amazing process. Like my dear friend and co-owner of The Wholeness Network Robin Johnson also known as The Heart Whisperer teaches, “the heart can only see through the eyes of compassion”. I agree.
This heart space is the center of the spiritual body and sees things from a higher perspective. And, it’s worth repeating, the compassion is held first for yourself and then able and willing to hold space for another.
When we ask ourselves questions and reflect about why we do the things we do and why we feel the way we feel, we understand our thinking. Our thoughts do create our lives and so it is important to go deeper into their origins. All four bodies aid in this but the mental body with its access to logic combined with expansive creativity can be a really useful tool in reassessing things with different perspectives and many possibilities. But, first, it needs healing.
Did you know that trauma, both traumatic things that happened and trauma of the things that didn’t happen, change the way the brain develops? Our brain is plastic and can be healed but until we get on the path to healing our mental body is working with less ability to support us.
I want to share a healing exercise with you today. This experience will guide you in finding that moment in time when a false belief was created and what it cost you when it did.