Breakthrough #3
Awareness Has Magic
We need a breakthrough to manage the body’s energy. If distorted energy is the root of all problems, how can it be brought back to its normal, healthy state? No one has taught us how to move energy. We are left to operate on the physical plane, which is not only too crude but very often beside the point. One reads medical articles, for example, that reduce love to a chemical reaction in the brain. The neural activity of someone in love certainly looks different on an MRI from that of someone who isn’t in love—specific areas light up, and there are changes in the levels of key chemicals like serotonin and dopamine, which are linked to feelings of happiness and well-being.
Yet it’s totally false to say that the brain creates love. Imagine yourself sitting in a car late at night. Beside you is someone you have secretly loved, but you’ve masked your feelings, unable to express what’s in your heart. She (or he) leans over and whispers something in your ear. Whether the words are “I love you” or “I don’t love you” will make all the difference. An MRI machine, if it happened to come along on our date, would detect a completely altered state of your brain depending on whether the words make you feel elated or dejected. Yet it’s obvious that the brain didn’t create these states on its own. The words did. How? They made you aware of something you desperately wanted to know.
In other words, you became aware of whether or not you are loved. Words, when spoken into someone’s ear, vibrate air molecules that in turn vibrate the tympanum, sending a signal to the inner ear and on to the auditory region of the cortex. That chain of events would happen even if the words were in a foreign language, yet unless you understand the language, your awareness won’t change. Awareness is where meaning happens. If you want to change your body, a change in awareness must come first.
Awareness acts like an invisible force, the most powerful one in your body. It moves energy while seeming to do nothing. Here we have the breakthrough we needed, because awareness can turn unhealthy energy into healthy energy entirely on its own. That is its unique magic.
David’s story
There are many mysteries to how awareness works. Let me begin with one that affects everyone’s life, the mystery of seeing. When you see something, you become aware of it, and that alone can be enough to move the body in a completely new direction.
David, who is now in his thirties, was born a twin, but he had a tiny genetic heart defect that his twin lacked. “I was lucky, and my heart was repaired soon after I was born,” he relates. “There was no reason for me to be treated any differently from my brother. But I remember from early on my mother’s anxious looks whenever I tried to do anything she thought was risky. My brother didn’t get those looks, and by the time we were four or five, he was considered the strong one while I was the sensitive one. My family members, on the male side at least, are all outdoor types. If you hunted and fished, you got approving looks. If you stayed indoors and read books, you got indifferent or worried looks.
“There’s a lot more to raising kids than looking at them, of course. My parents did their best to provide equally for us and to love us the same way. I accepted that I was the fragile twin, and as we grew up, it amazed me how wrong my parents had been. My brother didn’t turn out to be a great success. He holds a low-level company job, and since his real passion is hunting and fishing, that’s what he concentrates on. I, who always expected to be on the sidelines, grew up to get scholarships, a much better education, and a teaching job at a good university.
“It took me years to realize that we were both shaped to become what we are. If my mother had accidentally switched us in our cribs one day, I would have been the hunter and fisherman, my brother would have become the scholar. It gives me real pause. What went on during those first three years before I have any memory? My parents looked at me in a certain light, and as a result the raw material of an infant got molded one way instead of another.”
This is one example of seeing, but many others come to mind. We look at those we love entirely differently from people we don’t love. If someone close to us does something wrong, our gaze usually contains sympathy, tolerance, and forgiveness that isn’t directed to someone we don’t love—they may receive accusation, judgment, and hostility instead. Your gaze doesn’t fall passively. It conveys meaning; it makes another person aware of something. In other words, your awareness speaks to theirs, and that is enough to create changes in the brain, leading to changes elsewhere in the body.
There’s no limit to the result. Violence can break out on the streets when one male eyes a female the wrong way—according to the male who thinks she’s his. (In the Southern United States, there was a long period when an innocent glance by a black male could lead to a lynching.) The secret is to create positive effects instead of negative ones. It’s a mistake to believe that you are some kind of radio telescope passively receiving signals from the universe. Seeing is active. You send out energy, and take in energy from others. You can decide to see with love and understanding, acceptance and tolerance. When you do, these qualities exert a force on your surroundings that benefits everything and everyone.
Body awareness
Awareness would have no power if the body didn’t respond to it. But think of how massive those responses actually are. If you feel a suspicious lump under the skin, a visit to the doctor will tell you that you are either all right or in danger. If you are in danger, the threat could be mild or severe. Each is a state of awareness (“I’m okay, there’s nothing to worry about,” “I’m in trouble,” “I’m not safe,” “I may not make it”), and each brings a sharply different reaction. Even if we say that the reaction is psychological, such as depression in the face of bad news, there has to be a physical response: altered brain chemistry supports what’s happening in the psyche. In fact, your body is aware of everything. Every cell knows what your brain is thinking, how your moods change, where your deepest beliefs lie. As your awareness changes, your energy changes, and then your body changes. The chain of events moves from the invisible realm to the visible on this path:
AWARENESS → ENERGY → BODY
Simple as this diagram looks, it maps a profound breakthrough, because it explains medical findings that are otherwise mysterious. For example, nobody understands a result from the Helsinki Study, one of the most famous research projects in preventing heart attacks. Middle-aged Finnish men at high risk for heart disease were divided into two groups. One, the casual group, visited their doctors a few times a year and were given general advice about losing weight, exercising, improving their diet, and not smoking (advice they were unlikely to follow, given that they hadn’t in the past). The other group was followed intensively and put on a specialized program to reduce specific heart-attack risks such as high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol.
At the end of the study, the researchers were stunned to see that the casually followed group had not only fewer deaths overall, but fewer deaths from heart attacks. How could that be? A commentator on the study remarked that it might be a health risk to constantly worry about your heart and see that worry reflected by a doctor you visit too often. From the level of awareness, this explanation makes sense. It also makes sense of many diverse findings along the same lines. The fact is that men who confront their psychological problems in their twenties are doing more to prevent early heart attacks than if they reduced their cholesterol. Elderly people who are emotionally resilient have a better chance of living a long, healthy life than do elderly patients who are less resilient but take vitamins and get regular checkups. Such findings are only a mystery if you ignore awareness and energy, the two foundations of the body.
Millions of people don’t make this connection, and they are doomed to fight against their bodies. Think of the whole area of addictions and cravings. To someone who can’t stop gaining weight, it seems that a physical craving is forcing them to overeat. Instead of normal hunger, they feel an urge to eat that goes beyond. But in fact the
physical impulse masks what’s actually going on. The body has gotten stuck in a distorted pattern of behavior that began in awareness.
What happens when you feel a craving? You are torn in two directions: the impulse to resist fights the urge to give in. Let’s say you get up at midnight and pad downstairs to the refrigerator because you crave ice cream. At that moment, as you waver over eating a carton of double chocolate chip royale, you may resist the urge, but you won’t change your habit. Your awareness is warring against itself. Engaging in this conflict, which happens over and over for people who overeat, gives a bad habit its power, because all your energy goes into fighting against yourself with very little going toward a solution. If the solution existed at the level of struggle, one side or the other would prevail. Either the craving would conquer your resistance, or your resistance would conquer the craving, but the result is a seesaw instead.
It’s hard to look past your physical craving, because bad habits always create a groove that the body follows over and over. The craving doesn’t have to be for material things like the sweet taste of ice cream or the energy jolt of cigarettes. You may be in the habit of flying off the handle or fretting over every little thing. Anger and worry feel just as physical as hunger. People who crave power or money describe it as being almost sexual. People who crave winning describe it as a burst of adrenaline-fueled elation. Your body mirrors your desires so skillfully, completely, and silently that tracing the chain of events back to awareness isn’t easy. But we have to do it if we don’t want to be prisoners of our cravings.
We all possess a level of awareness that doesn’t crave anything at all. It stands apart from the struggle over “Do I eat this whole carton of ice cream or don’t I?” When you find yourself at this level of awareness, the energy to eat isn’t activated, and when there’s no energy, the body doesn’t act. Everyday experience validates this—when someone is grieving, for example, the appetite for food vanishes. The same is true in cases of depression or deep worry, or when we’re falling in love. “I can’t think about food at a time like this” is frequently heard at such times, and it’s accurate: your awareness can’t focus on eating, therefore there’s no energy behind it, and your body stops feeling hungry. The problem is that just as energy can get stuck in unhealthy patterns, so can awareness, which is why so-called “emotional eaters” have been conditioned to respond in exactly the opposite of the normal response: they overeat in times of grief, depression, and worry.
Your body needs you to master how awareness works. Your state of mind sets the physical agenda in trillions of cells, and they have no power to overturn the agenda on their own. Here’s what mastery of awareness looks like.
When You Are Fully Aware
You can center yourself at will.
You are familiar with a place of peace and silence inside.
You aren’t divided against yourself by inner conflicts.
You can transcend local disturbances and remain unaffected by them.
You see the world from an expanded perspective.
Your inner world is organized.
This is what it means to rise above cravings. As you start to dip your spoon into the carton of double chocolate chip royale, your body doesn’t instantly find the same old groove and your mind doesn’t start struggling between “Do I, or don’t I?” Instead, other ideas are free to come to mind. “Am I doing this because I’m upset?” “Is this how I really want to handle my situation?” “What has ice cream got to do with getting the stress out of my life?” These are the kinds of ideas that liberate you from any craving. You see what you’re doing, and that gives you space to back away. Seeing is never far away when somebody is truly aware; blindness is never very far away when someone isn’t.
Once a craving has dug a deep enough groove, it’s much more difficult to change your habitual response. (We all know what it’s like to take the first bite of a tempting food and blank out until the last bite is gone—the body has taken over completely.) A psychologist would use the word conditioning to describe such a well-worn groove. Old conditioning keeps us from being free, because time and again we fall into patterns that run too deep, while our new behavior, the one we wish we could have, has no groove to follow at all. This state of being trapped in old conditioning creates its own kind of awareness.
When Your Awareness Is Conditioned
You can’t find your center, so impulses pull you this way and that.
You aren’t familiar with a place of peace and silence, so there’s constant restlessness.
Conflicting impulses fight against each other.
Local disturbances disturb and distract you.
You see the world from a contracted perspective.
Your inner world is totally disorganized.
We all know at some level that being conditioned limits our lives and stands between us and fulfillment. Consider how the term “unconditional love” came to be so popular. When people seek unconditional love, they want to transcend love as it usually exists, which is highly conditioned: it’s restless, unreliable, easily distracted and disturbed; at any moment this love can fall prey to jealousy, anger, boredom, betrayal, or simply a whim if a more attractive love object comes along. Yet we have an intuitive sense that love without conditions must exist—traditionally God’s love fulfilled this wish, but now the search is more profane. We want to love a real person unconditionally, and be loved unconditionally in return.
This desire isn’t realistic if you look at human nature under ordinary circumstances. It becomes realistic if awareness can shift out of its old conditioning, however. If you can reach a state of unconditional love for yourself, you will be in a completely new energy state, and you find yourself free to love anew. Awareness has the power to deliver unconditional love, and it does so through the same means as putting an end to a craving for ice cream: you see how to transcend your old, unhealthy conditioning.
Three ways to end conditioning
Once you understand how conditioned you actually are, the desire arises to regain control of your life, because every conditioned habit is like an automatic switch that sets a fixed behavior. What sets these switches in place? Time and repetition. Your body adapts to things you do over and over again. It’s much easier to set an energy pattern than a physical one, and once set, it’s much harder to change.
For instance, if you take up running on a regular basis, you can train an out-of-shape body to run a twenty-six-mile marathon in three to five months. With time and repetition, meaning regular runs of two to ten miles, your body adapts to the agenda you’ve set for it. You’ve deliberately conditioned it. On the day after the marathon, if you stop running, your body will be out of shape within a year, usually within half that time. (One research study found something even more drastic: if college athletes in the peak of fitness are put flat on their backs in a hospital bed and not allowed to get up, within two weeks their muscles lose ten years of training.)
Compare those factors with mental conditioning. A single traumatic event (a severe auto accident, being the victim of a crime, living through a terrorist attack) alters your awareness immediately, much faster than physical conditioning. Once imprinted, the mental trauma keeps repeating itself obsessively—images, thoughts, and feelings roam through your mind involuntarily—and those patterns become difficult to change. The most dramatic example is drug addiction, because the mental component that drives someone to use drugs remains in place even when the body has been cleared of toxic substances.
There are three ways to break down old conditioning: reflection, contemplation, and meditation. Their power increases in that order. We all tend to use those words interchangeably, but they have separate implications.
Reflection—taking a second look at old habits, beliefs, and assumptions.
Contemplation—focusing on a thought or image until it expands as far as it can.
Meditation—finding the level of the mind that isn’t conditioned.
We aren
’t interested—not for the moment, at least—in the spiritual significance of these practices. Our primary concern is whether they are effective in moving stuck energy and changing old conditioning. It turns out that their efficacy is very different, and contrary to what you might expect, the more focused you are about attacking a specific energy pattern, the less likely you are to succeed in getting rid of it.
Reflection involves standing back and taking a look at yourself, as if in a mirror. It’s the same as having second thoughts or reconsidering a past moment in a more settled state. Let’s say you have a sudden impulse (to tell off your boss, walk out on your spouse, ask a beautiful woman for a date), but then reflect on whether it’s really a good idea or not. Reflection calls upon experience; it lends caution to snap judgments. As a way of breaking down old conditioning, reflection works if you can see something in a new light.
Carla, a woman in her early forties, recounted such an experience. “I grew up in the rural South, and although my family were all nice people, they had a set of fixed beliefs that everyone seemed to absorb from the air or the drinking water. My parents didn’t consider themselves prejudiced, yet they had only white friends. They didn’t strike up chats with a waiter or store clerk except white ones. The small talk I grew up around was knee-jerk conservative, and from an early age I chafed at hearing it.
Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul Page 6