How Our Minds and Bodies Really Are Connected

According to Freud, the mind can be divided into two main parts:

1.   The conscious mind includes everything that we are aware of. This is the aspect of our mental processing that we can think and talk about rationally. A part of this includes our memory, which is not always part of consciousness but can be retrieved easily at any time and brought into our awareness. Freud called this ordinary memory the preconscious.

2.   The unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that outside of our conscious awareness. Most of the contents of the unconscious are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict. According to Freud, the unconscious continues to influence our behavior and experience, even though we are unaware of these underlying influences.

Our conscious mind is only 12% of our brain. Our subconscious mind is the other 88%, the mightier and more powerful of the two.

When we are born we are clean slates.  Our subconscious is clean. We have no beliefs or values. We are only born with the fear of loud noises and the fear of falling. Everything else comes from our environment; how we are treated, what we are exposed to. 

We know that while we are developing in our mother's wombs we absorb everything she hears, eats, drinks and feels.  If our mother is stressed, angry, sad, worried, fearful, guilty, or conflicted, she unintentionally passes these emotions to us. Our conscious minds do not have these memories, but our subconscious mind do, and this affects our bodies.  Our subconscious is felt in our bodies. Our subconscious mind and our body are one and the same.

For example, if our environment as a baby was chaotic, if our parents were alcoholics, or there was fighting, if we were abused emotionally, physically, or sexually, our subconscious minds, even if we are 100 years old, still remembers.  When you were a kid did you feel valued, heard, seen, or important?  As adults, we still have traumas that we must deal with; the loss of a child or loved one, divorce, you name it.

Our conscious minds have only one and a half hours to deal with and then let go of negative emotions, or trauma.  If we do not resolve the trauma or negative emotion within one and one half hours, those emotions/ thought have nowhere to go and they park themselves in our unconscious minds.  This becomes our LIFE SCRIPT and is detrimental to our physical and spiritual health.

So, when our mind does not deal with a negative experience within one and one half hour of experiencing the bad event or emotion, the emotion becomes trapped inside the body and is remembered by the subconscious which effects us throughout our entire lives in many ways.

Here is a terrific analogy: My daughters are dancers.  Recently I overheard my father remark to the Director of their dance studio, after watching them perform the seven dances they had learned at a seven week Dance Intensive this summer, that he was impressed that they could remember so many dances at once.  "How is it possible?" She said that after a while their muscles remember the dances and they do not have to even think about it.  This beautifully illustrates how memories are stored in our bodies. The same is true for people who haven't ridden a bike in many years. My grandmother hadn't ridden a bike since she was a child, but when I was old enough to ride a bike she started again to ride with me. Even though it had been decades since she had ridden a bike, she just did it!
 
 
Many illness, not just fibromyalgia are triggered or made worse by traumas, negative emotions, and stress, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.  It is a widely accepted notion that people who are very angry or stressed are likely to one day have a heart attack or to develop cancer.  

In our culture it has totally acceptable to hang onto negative emotions.  We say things to ourselves to somehow make it ok: "He's just like that" (angry), or as I once was told, "It's been two months since Ingrid (my best friend) was killed in the car accident. Just deal with it already". I was too sad to deal with it or anything and I held onto that sadness and anger and fear for decades. She was killed in 1986.  In my opinion this is not acceptable.  Experts have found that this is what leads our bodies to become closer and closer and closer to disease.  When the mind is not at ease the body goes into DIS-EASE.

How do we treat this in our society?  We are in therapy for years because that only accesses the 12% of our conscious minds and is not able to access the 88% of our subconscious minds where the negative emotions have parked. We also take pills. There's a pill for just about everything. But isn't taking a pill to cope with our anger or sadness the same as mowing a lawn that has weeds to make it better?  The grass (us) may seem okay for a day or a week, but then what happens?  The weeds (negative emotions) keep growing, becoming more and more anchored to the earth (our subconscious minds) and from there it is a downward spiral towards disease. Unless we get the weeds at their ROOTS, we can never get rid of them and we can expect our bodies to become more and more susceptible to illness.