Your Body Is Your Subconscious Mind

I really enjoyed this short, enjoyable and enlightening audiobook exploring the connection between the mind and the body. It’s a collection of recordings from lectures and interviews with Dr. Candace Part. You can access it on Audible.

I was referred to it by @ashtree, and I’m so glad I spent the few hours to listen to it. In that short span of time, I went from never having heard of Dr. Pert, to falling in love with her grace, curiosity and skill as a scientist and teacher, and finally being overwhelmed with sorrow as I discovered she passed away in 2013. How strange it is, the world we live in, where we can meet and miss someone who lived entirely in our past.

These notes were all taken on my phone in brief pauses as I walked through trails full of trees. I have not edited them for conciseness, so interpret them accordingly. Hopefully they can give you a sense of the ideas explored in the audiobook.

Chapter One

• Every cell in the body has receptors that modify our mental state. It’s not just the brain.
• The minimum unit of survival is 2 humans
• Almost every part of the brain is connected to the limbic system. So everything is tied to emotion.
• The brain contains insulin and insulin receptors, not just pancreas. And likewise the gut contains endorphins. We erroneously separated the two.
• All of these receivers and receptors are found everywhere: brain, skin, gut, whole body…
• “We’re much more like flickering flames than hunks of meat.”
• Immune system is constantly changing, adapting alongside the brain too
• The body regulates via molecules every activity we do. When the “mind” is sleeping it optimizes for that. Likewise with sitting and moving. So we may try to do multiple things but the body is trying to align us to do one thing. We can harness that.
• Think of the body-mind as a field, emotions are everywhere in the body triggering at all times.
• A healthy heart rate is chaotic, constantly changing. A flat, steady one actually means you’re close to death.
• If you’re working out, pumping hard can work well. But what if you focused your mental energy on it, allowing your body to align into that action? The molecular realignment will support your efforts.
• Any drug you take needs a receptor to activate. This means your body is receiving it alongside your mind. Any psychological drug affects physiology, and vice versa.
• Some findings that anger provides a “jump start” to the system that can help activate toon of repair. Relevant to my curiosity about the need for anger, counter to the “monk ideology” of just being still and unfazed all the time. (This also speaks to the point about about chaotic vs stable heart.)
• Health tests (eg for cancer) will take a tiny sample in time and extract conclusions based on that. The trouble with this is that we are ever-changing, healing or sickening. A sample cannot capture that.
• Related to learnings from [[Science of Storytelling]], noting how the physical impulses (eg when we touch something hot) activate right away… way before the impulses even reach our brain. Only later do we get process, filter and assign meaning to that event through a story we tell ourselves (“someone else made this too hot!”). “Your brain exists to make up stories about how the body is feeling. That’s why it’s there!”
• On treating cancer
  • Dr. Pert believes data shows most cancer is sourced from factors in our environment. Genetics affects how toxins handle these environments
  • Meditation, affirmation, visualization shown to help with cancer treatment
  • She questions data/effectiveness of current cancer treatments such as chemotherapy
  • Encourages us all to review the data we cite
• Music as therapy — when we consider the “vibrational” nature of these receptors, it is logical that music would impact that state, either through alignment or uplifting etc.

Chapter Two

• The combination of Quantum Mechanics and Biology — essence of this idea is broadening out to see how the whole body composed the mind, not just the head. It’s a holistic view, a systems view.
• Molecules of Emotion
  • Finding all of these Endorphins and others that contribute to emotion, not just in brain, but all over body was a big reveal
  • The old model of “brain controlling body” doesn’t quite fit anymore
  • But also, these molecules are very basic. They exists in all animals. This suggests animals experience emotion too!
• Frontal cortex. It’s what makes humans unique. Hard to articulate but provides a form of “free will”
  • “If there’s a part of the brain that has God in it, the frontal cortex would be it.”
  • Long term meditators see increased activity in frontal cortex. The “direction” / “will” ability allows you to better direct your attention.
  • Unproven: It’s as though your meditation focus can consciously send more blood flow to certain parts of the body
• Brains role might be to simply stop information from coming up.
  • When meditating, we don’t want to process and analyze every thought that comes up
• Impulse filtering by synapses
  • Vision goes through 7 synapses before going into consciousness
    • related to [[Science of Storytelling]] learnings about the filtering of reality into stories
    • we only “see” what we want to see to fuel the story
  • “Smell” only goes through one synapse before reaching consciousness, that’s why memories seem to have stronger emotional activation
• Meditation uses energy to keep the thoughts away, which uses up some “emotional charge”. This is calming, like how physical exercise can be calming via exertion. In this sense meditation is not really “relaxing” but rather “working hard to defy impulses”, and tiring yourself out as a result, which calms you.
• Sometimes we are sitting awake, but actually processing things actively in parts of our bodies (eg spinal chord). This might be why we feel pain and sensations in our body from stressful events that we ruminate over.
  • Meditation however seems to definitely activate frontal cortex, taking “control”
• Information is not material, it’s spiritual. We haven’t quite understood exactly what is happening once information leaves the material realm. (hmmm. need to contemplate this more…)
• Our gut is run by molecules of emotion. Endorphins cause relaxation or stimulation — digestion, constipation, etc.
• Based on emotion our whole body adjusts accordingly, it is a great unifier
• “Information Realm” the field of information and ideas that impacts us, after they leave our body/mind, which we don’t quite yet have terminology for… we interact with it every day and it affects us but we don’t fully understand how
• Implications: How can we apply these to improve our life?
  • Theoretically we have the power through state of mind to more powerfully affect our own bodies… even more than drugs (because they both affect the body through molecules and receptors)
  • We don’t really know how mind-body processes can heal the body relative to existing methods… needs further study
  • Somewhere between total emotional catharsis and total emotional censorship lies a path for balance and fruitful life
• On “positive emotions” — forcing positive thoughts / emotions may not be doing what we think. Anger can be helpful (within reason) to unlock, release fluids, kickstart and unblock us. Have to get in touch with our true feelings, stop wasting energy creating “fake emotions” and composing masks
  • “Over-catharsis” can become an addiction
  • Instead can we bring both the anger and the relief at the same time, learning to embrace the multitudes
• What is spirituality?
  • The great unknown. The diff between something dead and something alive.
  • It’s happening everywhere, there is a thirst for it, as its been increasingly removed from culture
  • Increasingly, Dr. Pert rejects the Godless, soulless world that scientists are supposed to believe in. She is, as she notes most scientists do in their later years, drifting towards the mystical.

Chapter Three

• “New Age Guilt” — people worrying they are “thinking the wrong thoughts” / negative energy. This is misleading and harmful, causes of illness have a lot to do with environment
  • That said, says Dr. Pert, a lot of our health has to do with “emotional integrity” — allowing real authentic emotions to come out
• What is the true cause of disease?
  • Our hubris in assuming drugs work perfectly
  • Environmental pollution
    • So many links between pollution of water and cancer
    • Many are still not proven, but consider how long it took to “prove” smoking causes lung cancer. We cannot rely entirely on studies
• What would Dr. Pert prioritize in studies?
  • Analyze pollutants impacts on molecular level
  • Look at plastics effects on receptors
  • Funny thing: FDA approval blocks drugs, but many substances, cleaning supplies etc affect us every day with no restrictions
• How can we, as an individual, manage disease / our health? 3 things:
  • What you eat
    • Food affects mood much more than we realize, we affects emotion, and the body…
  • How you move
    • Exercising
    • Breath work
    • Taking walks every day
    • Release pent up stored emotional stress
    • “We don’t move like we used to naturally”, so we have to create more opportunities to move
  • How you think
    • What we believe affects our reality, our consciousness
    • We’re each responsible for our own health, don’t rely entirely on others — we can listen to our body
• We live in a time of too much information. How do we deal?
  • We’re stuck with 30,000 year old bodies and thrown into a high pace environment
  • Try to live as “natural” of a life as possible. Get into nature every single day
• Intuitive insight
  • Funny thing is you don’t have to do anything… it just happens
  • Intuition is that you “know it’s true”, and you use verification techniques to “manifest” the idea you believe so strongly
• Stop ignoring your body, get into the movement
  • “A few mins of a chiropractor may unlock what a year of therapy couldn’t” …hmmmm…
  • And vice versa, the mind can change the body… fluidity affected my mental state allows us to change and heal our bodies using our state of consciousness
• The mind-body network can be visualized as a web, but the corners are liquid… like a soup that shifts, constantly drifting and morphing
• “The brain is a bag of hormones”
  • When we map brain chemicals, we see receptors not just in the brain, but throughout the body
  • 98% of communication happens in long distance via synapses, sent throughout the body
• We are connected to nature, we may try to disconnect but we cannot. It is the reality we must embrace
• “The divine” is an energy all around us. like information, it’s something we don’t quite yet understand
  • We’re starting to glimpse it and sense it with our body-mind
  • It’s the unifying stuff that is holding us together… one day we will be able to observe it and understand it like an energy field