The mind is also the body!

We are a system, your brain is the organ of your mind, just like your lungs are the organ for breathing.

Ivalo Kønig Okking

As modern medicine has developed it has become more and more specialised in one area of the body, a joint, stomach, your eyes, a muscle, your brain, blood, heart, liver, bones etc. And amazing people are dedicating an important part of their life to know all there is to know about that one part of the body.

However, we are a system of functions that work together and when there is disharmony a dis-ease somewhere in the body it affects the whole body (when I say body, I include the mind).

This means that we may be treating a symptom that can be a pain in the back (just to mention one thing) but we don’t look at the whole system, so we don’t know if that pain in the back comes from our feet.

This has been on my mind lately and therefore I wanted to create a place for wellness in people by working the whole system. A place where people could come and have a physical workout and a mind workout, to reconnect their system.

When we do a physical workout, it doesn’t only affect your strength and/or our cardiovascular system it also affects the brain. Your brain releases endorphins from the pituitary gland, which blocks the neurotransmitters to pain and in return the production of dopamine is increased, which is a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure.

When we are stressed and exposed to life´s non-negotiable challenges or just everyday frustration we get into a state, which Daniel Goleman called the amygdala high-jack, in his book emotional intelligence (1996)

In short, the amygdala high jack is when the amygdala tricks the rest of the brain into thinking that this is a fight, flight or freeze situation, just as if you are standing in front of a hungry lion. This means that we send our energy to more relevant bodily systems for that situation.

The second major physiological stress is to release cortisol into the blood steam, which influences many functions such as our metabolism and immunological functions.

Knowing this we can become more conscious of what is happening to us and learn how to use our brain to our advantage, just like we work out and use our knowledge to work our muscles and cardiovascular system.

Thanks to Dr Richard Davidson’s research we now have scientific proof of how important it is to our overall health and wellness to be able to stop our mind from wandering.  

And as such I would like to give you a very simple technique from the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn:

“Do not fight against pain; do not fight against irritation or jealousy. Embrace them with great tenderness, as though you were embracing a little baby. Your anger is yourself, and you should not be violent towards it. The same thing goes for all your emotions. You have to go back to yourself to recognize the suffering in you, embrace the suffering and you will get relief”

I do this by using what I know about sub-modalities from NLP, you can read more about them here. Basically, I take deep breaths and exhale, then I pay attention to what I feel, what I see, what I hear, smell and even taste. I then take all of that into my arms and I comfort it like I would an upset child. I do this until I´m calm and I have changed my state so I can clearly think about what my next step will be.

I hope you are as happy as you would like to be and remember it is  free to be kind.

Best wishes

Ivalo

This post was first published on Feb 28 2020