Fire Up Your Brain!. Larry Iverson

work together to create or diminish health.

      If you’ve ever seen a dermatologist, one of the first questions the dermatologist will ask you is, “Have you had much stress in your life lately?”

      What does stress have to do with this? It is a psychological component that can trigger a reaction in the body. So a seed thought is a mental component that can make things pop-out in your physiology. It’s a mental-physical link.

      Attend to Core Beliefs

      Core beliefs are assumptions that you make about your everyday life, about who you are, about the work you do, about the people in your life, etc. These core beliefs come from seed thoughts, and because of the power of the belief, can give rise to new seed thoughts.

      Seed thoughts include attitudes, emotions, your thinking patterns, what you do physiologically. A seed thought is truly an idea that gets planted in your mind and grows into manifestation that affects both your mind and you physiology.

      A seed thought and the associated belief system can be health promoting, or like weeds it can choke out the flowers in the garden and be health disturbing. The mind-body connection is not just about health but is about your overall success and who you are.

      Don’t Be Rash

      Years ago I was doing therapy with a woman to assist her in dealing with the emotions surrounding her divorce.

      Unknown to me, during the divorce process, she had developed a rash on her chest and her back. She saw a dermatologist who had given her a number of different prescription creams. The creams didn’t do any good.

      The doctor asked if she had much stress. She replied, “Yes, I’m going through a divorce.” He said the rash may be resulting from some of the tensions produced through dealing with the divorce, and recommended she talk to me about this in therapy.

      During our next session, she said, “I want to specifically deal with the anger that’s going on around the divorce. I’m furious and have just been trying to ignore it, and it’s not getting any better.”

      When she began to process and overcome her anger, her rash began to diminish. She had stopped using the creams and so it was not the creams that made the difference. The more the anger disappeared, the more the rash disappeared—until it was finally all gone. The mind-body connection of the anger created this heat sensation inside of her physiology that drove this rash.

      When she went back to check in with the dermatologist and he saw the rash going away, he asked her how she was feeling. When she said she felt much better that her anger was diminishing, he said he had seen this happen many times.

      Use Your Mind for Impact

      Often times the mind-body connection can trigger reactions in the physiology.

      Have you ever noticed that if you feel depleted, drained or depressed, that all of a sudden you may catch a cold? It’s because of the mind-body connection.

      Mind-body researcher Dr. Burl Paine said he knows that thoughts activate neurological hormone secretions and stimulate nerve centers throughout the body. Using very sensitive EMG (electromyography) instruments that measure nerve conductivity and muscle tensions, he said he can show that muscles are activated by just imagining movement.

      When you think about moving your hand (even though you don’t move it) they can see that the nerves are actually being triggered. There are tiny currents that are flowing through the nerves, into the muscles of the hands. When you even think about the movement, your brain sends a signal through your body.

      Though we may not even be aware when thoughts are being generated in the brain, it seems clear that once they are released, they get amplified and turned into action.

      Every thought you think influences millions of atoms in the cells in your body. This mind-body connection energy process that this physicist Burl Paine uses in his EMG research shows that the mind-body connection is beyond just a thinking process, it is a physiological neural response that triggers immediate reactions in the body.

      Attitude Is….

      Dr. Norman Cousins, while a professor at UCLA Medical School, came down with a physically debilitating illness called ankylosing spondylitis. This is an extreme form of degenerative arthritis.