Post #2: Mind-Body Healing Through Neuroplasticity
Although we often give separate meaning to the mind and body, they function as one unit. The terms mind-body and bodymind demonstrate this interrelationship. In contrast, 17th century philosopher René Descartes theorized on Mind-Body Dualism. Descartes believed that the mind is distinct from the physical body. Even today, Mind-Body Dualism pervades the biomedical model of medicine and creates a chasm in understanding health and disease. In fact, the mind and body are completely intertwined. What happens to the body affects the mind and what happens to the mind affects the body.
Retrain the bodymind
We often ponder, “Can people change?” Modern neuroscience and mind-body techniques reveal, “No doubt.” Neuroplasticity describes how the brain responds to life experiences, and emotional and structural injury, by creating new neural circuits, not just in childhood, but throughout the lifespan. For example, repetitive emotional stress that coincides with repetitive physical movement will condition chronic pain from muscle tension. Fortunately, guided techniques can produce intentional opposing change. You can literally guide the development of the brain’s nerve pathways through the concept of neuroplasticity. While Andrew Huberman, professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine and creator of the Huberman Lab Podcast, promotes neuroplasticity for boosting focus and memory, neuroplastic techniques can also be used for healing debilitating health conditions such as asthma, functional neurologic disorders, and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. Changing your brain starts with a conscious decision and is followed by practicing new habits and beliefs. If you can learn any new skill, you can retrain your brain and nervous system and in turn, the functioning of any body system.
Just as we have muscle memory, we have nervous system memory.
The conscious decision to use the power of neuroplasticity to change your thoughts from ideas of deficiency will stabilize mercurial emotions and transform your bodily reality. Thoughts lead to feelings and vice versa. In his book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, neuroscience researcher and Doctor of Chiropractic Medicine, Joe Dispenza says, “Thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body.” Just as we have muscle memory, we have nervous system memory. “Emotions get memorized into automatic bodily responses,” says Dr. Dispenza. “Problems can’t be resolved by the same consciousness that created them. Fake it until you feel it.” Identify the core traits that you want to see in your best self and begin to imagine yourself employing those traits. For instance, if you notice that fear gets in the way of standing up for yourself at work or at home, contemplate on assertiveness. In the same way, Pain & Symptom Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), reassociates symptomatic body parts or systems with ideas of health and strength. Changing your mind will change your body.
“Fake it until you feel it.” - Dr. Joe Dispenza
In his 1949 book, The Organization of Behavior, Canadian neuropsychologist Donald Hebb developed the theory, “Nerve cells that fire together, wire together.” This axiom is the basis of neuroplasticity. The interplay between thoughts, emotions, and hormones creates nerve pathways of either health or dysfunction. When you practice healing thoughts, those pathways of energy become learned nerve highways that eventually course automatically, taking the place of previous negative automatic responses, such as your inner critic any time something doesn’t go right. As the brain and nervous system are rewired with ideas of strength and vitality, so too are bodily functions. Conditioning the body with ideas of safety, peace, and joy, unlearns pain and neuroplastic symptoms.
Explore unconscious emotions
In a stressful situation, before the conscious frontal lobe of the brain can interpret a situation, the emotional center (amygdala) signals stress hormone release from the hypothalamus. In so doing, the autonomic nervous system responds automatically to create a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn reaction in the body. Ongoing signals from a hyperreactive nervous system form habitual bodily symptoms. [Unlearn Your pain by Dr. Howard Schubiner, 2022] This may translate into chronic skin inflammation in eczema, digestive stand-by in irritable bowel syndrome, or muscle tension in chronic pain. Exploring unconscious emotions via the conscious mind can free up bodily symptoms. Otherwise, you may remain a mostly unconscious host, possessed by your past. “The opposite of repression is ‘breaking open,’” says Elizabeth Lesser in Broken Open. You can’t change your reality if you’re stuck on identification with bodily symptoms or victimization. Luckily, our culture is more open than ever to allowing vulnerability.
Core issues stem from formative experiences in childhood.
Emotional Awareness & Expression Therapy (EAET) can help you identify and process emotions linked with your symptoms, disengaging the automatic danger-signal responses. You may not initially be aware of emotions that led to your symptoms. Focused journaling and meditative exercises help to uncover and reprocess these emotions. Introspect to become aware of your core issues, or “baggage.” Core issues stem from formative experiences in childhood. They might center around being a problem-solver to make up for lack of support, a people-pleaser to quell arguing at home, or never feeling good, smart, or attractive enough as a result of ongoing disparagement. It’s also possible a serious traumatic event triggered strong emotion that was never allowed to become fully conscious. Until emotions linked with stressful experiences are processed, bodily symptoms remain.
Continue to “prune” nerve pathways
After having completed the deeper landscaping of brain-retraining and emotional work, continue to prune away weeds that threaten your wellness. Such experiences may involve meditation, mindfulness, flow states, awe, and gratitude. Each experience can take you beyond time, the self, and external circumstances.
Meditation allows for rest of mind and body and conscious awareness of ingrained thoughts and feelings. Like a cleansing shower, meditation reconditions your bodymind with peace. Meditation has been shown to decrease inflammation and improve diabetes, hypertension, fibromyalgia, and mental health [Jamil, et al, 2023].
Sit comfortably, with eyes closed, without interruption for 10-20 minutes at least once a day.
As your thoughts settle, your brain waves become more coherent, sending messages of calm to the body.
Mindfulness gives moment-to-moment meaning. Practice being mindfully present in all that you do. Allow food to be more than just fuel, and every moment to be more than just a means to an end. Small steps may help you begin such a process of mindfulness:
· Avoid clock checking.
· Don’t multitask.
· Protect your time as sacred; don’t shortchange time for one thing in exchange for another.
· Incorporate rest into your daily routine, even if breaks aren’t already built in.
· Take at least 1-2 days each week for deeper rest and rejuvenation.
· Consider your senses during your activities. For example, while washing dishes, reflect on the scent and sheen of the soap, sensation of its lather on your skin, weight of the dishes in your hand, and sound of utensils clanking.
Flow states allow connection to joy or peace, when fully invested in one engaging activity for its own reward. Such activity takes you beyond yourself, where time becomes irrelevant. Flow often involves a creative process, but flow can be experienced in almost any activity, even work, as long as judgement or time-pressure doesn’t get in the way. In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi states that, “It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.” Integrate play or creative flow into life through:
Music
Art
Writing
Recreation
Awe results from a variety of experiences that connect us to something larger and not fully comprehensible.
· Seek novel experiences, even the trivial. Avoid habituation. Be curious.
· Live vicariously through the perspective of animals or children.
· Spend time in nature or at least outdoors each day. Take note of worldly cycles. Relish in the seasonal and monthly rhythms of the Earth, which may allow you to be more in tune with the rhythms of the body.
Gratitude practice allows you to relinquish control. While there’s no end to what a person lacks, there’s no end to what he has either. Ways to integrate gratitude into life:
· Write for 5-10 minutes in a daily gratitude journal.
· Take a silent moment of gratitude regularly, such as before eating, getting out of bed, or going to sleep.
Good luck with your ongoing journey of neuroplastic healing and maintenance.
The soundtrack to your healing journey: “My Mind and Me” by Selena Gomez; lyrics below.
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Wanna hear a part to my story? I tried to hide in the glory
And sweep it under the table, so you would never know
Sometimes I feel like an accident, people look when they′re passin' and
Never check on the passenger, they just want the free show
Yeah, I′m constantly tryna fight somethin' that my eyes can't see
My mind and me, we don′t get along sometimes
And it gets hard to breathe, but I wouldn′t change my life
And all of the crashin' and burnin′ and breakin', I know now
If somebody sees me like this, then they won′t feel alone now
My mind and me
It's hard to talk and feel heard when you always feel like a burden
Don′t wanna add to concern, I know they already got
But if I pull back the curtain, then maybe someone who's hurtin'
Will be a little more certain, they′re not the only one lost
Yeah, I′m constantly tryna fight somethin' that my eyes can′t see
My mind and me, we don't get along sometimes
And it gets hard to breathe, but I wouldn′t change my life
And all of the crashin' and burnin′ and breakin', I know now
If somebody sees me like this, then they won't feel alone now
My mind and me (ah, ah, ah)
My mind and me (ah, ah, ah)
My mind and me (ah, ah, ah)
My mind and me (ah, ah, ah)
Oh, it′s only my mind and me
My mind and me
Rachel Hollander skating along Arkansas River Trail, Little Rock, May 5, 2025. When I used to have chronic pain and heart palpitations, skating would relieve them. I continue to skate, maintaining those mind-body pathways of joy.
