The red pillow on my carpet where it all went down.

Monday around 9:30 p.m., if you had walked into my house you would have found me sitting cross-legged on the floor, rocking back and forth, sobbing, heaving, and thrusting out deep, guttural, staccato sounds of agony.

This is not what I typically do on a Monday evening.

But something serendipitous is happening. Not fun, no not fun at all. Not even a little bit. But definitely serendipitous. I have found myself in a moment of my life where I’m faced with an extremely challenging and painful emotional situation. And (finally) the universe has simultaneously presented me with the tools to address it. In fact, not just to address it but to use it and evolve through it. (“The only way out is through.”) The tools have appeared as the work of Michael Brown and his two books The Presence Process, which I spoke of a few days ago, and Alchemy of the Heart (Amazon Affiliate link), as well as his audios from his various seminars via Live365 radio on The Presence Process station, which you can access through his website The Presence Portal.

The essence of Brown’s work is this: Every time you get upset (set up) by a situation in your life, it is simply a trigger, a reflection of unintegrated emotional charges from your childhood. Every time. Without exception.

We spend our entire lives running from our deep pain and hurt. We drink, we eat, we fuck, we pray, we do this, we do that, anything to avoid really, really feeling anything. When an upsetting situation arises in our life, we attempt to fix it by changing our physical circumstance. We switch lovers, we move to a different town, we get a different job. Or we simply believe that the situation that’s upsetting us is the fault of whomever is involved, and we ask ourselves questions like “Why does this always happen to me?” But because we’re not addressing the causal point of our experience – the emotional signature from our childhood that hasn’t been processed and integrated – we just recreate the same circumstances in a “new” place.

Being With the Emotion

So Brown advises the following I’d-rather-stick-needles-under-my-fingernails exercise instead: He says to sit down and simply “be with” the emotion without condition. Do not tell yourself the story about what’s happening and why and who’s to blame. Do not try to suppress or criticize what you are feeling. Just sit your ass down and be with it. Feel the feeling. And in doing so, just as we don’t need to tell our body how to breathe, we don’t need to tell ourselves how to integrate these emotions. By allowing ourselves to have the experience, we’re finally allowing the innate wisdom of our body to do the work. We don’t have to know how. We just need to trust and know that it will integrate. And once it does, we have cleaned up the causal point of this anger, fear, and grief. (At least one of them anyway.)

Which brings us back to my grief-stricken spasms Monday night, sitting on my living room floor. Because what happened was this: Without the story to accompany this feeling, something opened up. As I sat there emoting all over myself, I felt very surely and deeply that what I was crying about did not in fact have a damn thing to do with what I thought I was crying about. I was grieving from a place much older and more expertly hidden. And when it was done, I felt a calm take over. I didn’t feel “good”, but I did feel…at rest.

Dis-ease

But what was really interesting for me was that as I sat there, still and centered in the aftermath, I understood from a place that didn’t involve thought that what I had just released healed a part of what Multiple Sclerosis is in my body. Because I know, as surely as I’ve ever known anything, that my illness was born of that pent up dis-ease. I know that I have just begun – I mean truly begun – the gritty, dirty, ugly, uncomfortable work of becoming exquisitely healthy (and it doesn’t have anything to do with prescription medication). And what I love about this particular model is that Michael Brown is not a guru and he doesn’t claim to have the answers. He has simply communicated a path that works. But the work, and the answers, that’s all us.

When I asked Bruce Lipton how to change my beliefs, this is the answer I was looking for. It’s not as pretty and clean as I would have liked, but it’s powerful, and I know as I’ve ever known anything that I’m on my way, and MS is on it’s way…out.

And as for the extremely challenging emotional situation I’m dealing with right now, I’m going to trust in one of Brown’s favorite statements, which is that we don’t get what we want or need, but we do get what we require. We always get what we require.

Want more inspiration? Read Broke Down or go to the main page to Get Inspired.

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The primary beliefs that we operate our lives by are acquired in our first six years. During that time, our brains are in a hypnogogic, dreamlike state, ideal for downloading massive amounts of information with no filters. In other words, from birth to age six, we’re sponges with feet.

As Dr. Bruce Lipton put it in my interview with him, we’re born like iPods shipped from the factory – our hard drive is empty and we go about recording and storing everything we are exposed to. With no filter for what we’re taking in, we download all of the judgments, likes, dislikes, behavior patterns and beliefs of those around us.

When we grow up, 90 percent of our daily actions and responses come from the reservoir of information we accumulated during these first years of our life. As adults, we primarily operate based on beliefs of our parents, our families, our schools, our culture, our science, our country. What we are capable of and what limits us is based on what other people told us when we were young.

Go to the Doctor!

Here’s the example Dr. Lipton gave in my interview with him:

“A child is growing up in a family and the first six years, every time anyone is sick in the family, what it hears is ‘We have to take so and so to the doctor.’ What is the child recording? The first thing the child is recording is this: That when I am sick, before I get better I must go to the doctor. So if you were able to heal yourself but you got this program, you wouldn’t engage your own self-healing until you did the first step of the program which is what? Go to the doctor.”

He continues:

We begin to acquire in the first six years that when it comes to health, you are not the professional. When it comes to health, the official understanding and belief system is going to be given to you by the doctor. So what that means is when you’re a child, the first thing you learn in your mind is if a doctor says this then it’s true. There’s no question in there as a child that says ‘OK, go to the doctor and then question what the doctor says.’ It just says, ‘No, go to the doctor.’

So the relevance is, then, whatever the doctor says becomes a true belief for you. And if the doctor says something positive that would be the equivalent of a placebo effect and if the doctor says something negative that is the equivalent of the nocebo effect.

Your Beliefs are Your Struggle

The power of the “nocebo” effect doesn’t just happen in our doctor’s offices though. It happens throughout the culture of MS, the culture of Western medicine, and our society at large. In other words, if our culture doesn’t believe it’s possible to heal from MS, if our culture doesn’t believe the individual has the power to heal themselves with methods outside the narrow paradigm of Western medicine, then neither will you, because you’ve downloaded its beliefs. The limiting and negative messages about your illness are effecting your ability to heal. Your struggle – your feelings of helplessness and doubt and fear – are the result of someone else’s beliefs, and they’re not serving you.

Which is great news, because it means that now all we have to do is change our beliefs so that they support our healing. This is where my attention has been lately, and this is what I’ll be discussing in the next few installments of this series.

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If you haven’t yet listened to my interview with Dr. Bruce Lipton, you can do so by signing up here.

We spoke for an hour and a half about his candid views on Multiple Sclerosis, the medical system, and healing. Here’s a little teaser from the interview.

He was explaining how the beliefs we hold today about doctors and illness were for the most part downloaded from our families and our environment before the age of six, and how those beliefs can interfere with our ability to heal ourselves today:

We begin to acquire in the first six years [of childhood] that when it comes to health, you are not the professional. That when it comes to health, the official understanding and belief system is going to be given to you by the doctor. So what that means is when you’re a child, the first thing you learn in your mind is “If the doctor says this, then it’s true.”

There’s no question in there that says, “Go to the doctor and then question what the doctor says.” It just says no, “Go to the doctor.” So the relevance is whatever the doctor says becomes a true belief for you, and if the doctor says something positive that would be the equivalent of a placebo effect and if the doctor says something negative that is the equivalent of the nocebo effect.

Now we’re back to today’s moment. And I say okay, what does a doctor say about MS? Whooh! Well! All of a sudden, first thing is “it’s chronic, it’s genetic, you can’t do anything about it, here’s how it’s gonna unfold…”

Well what does that mean? You have just been printed out a future! And your mind’s going to take that future, from the professional, and manifest that reality. Unless you disconnect from that and offer yourself a different reality.

So how do you offer yourself a different reality? Ah, well, I’m going to leave that for you to discover in the actual interview. If you want to hear it, just enter your name and email in the box to the right with the red arrow. It’s completely free and I guarantee it will rock your world. If you already have access to my interview archive, just go back there and you’ll see the update.

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Isaac Newton

If you’re healthy and those close to you are healthy, you probably don’t think very much about our medical system. Maybe you go for a check-up once a year, maybe you pay a visit to your doctor when you get a really bad cold. But if you’ve been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, or any chronic illness, our health care system is suddenly an intimate partner in your life, a partner that could guide you back to health or keep you sick.

I don’t know about you, but when it comes to my intimate partners, I like to know about their past, what motivates them, what their core values are, and how they got to be the way they are today. I like to know – when they give me advice, feedback, suggestions – what is informing those thoughts, so I know what makes sense for me to listen to, and what should be ignored.

I think many – if not most – people have no idea how our medical system got to be the way it is today. But if you’re challenged by a chronic illness, and you’re counting on your medical care to heal you, you need to know. So today I will offer you a brief history of some of the relevant events that led us here. This history was offered by Bruce Lipton, PhD in his new book Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future (and a Way to Get There from Here), and I’m simply paraphrasing and shortening it here because I believe it’s information you need to have. I’ll be interviewing Lipton, who is the internationally recognized leader in bridging science and spirit, in mid-May. If you want to be notified when that interview becomes available and you want access to listen to it, just enter your name and email in the box with the red arrow to the right of this post.

A Science Tale

Once upon a time, scientist and philosopher Rene Descartes said there was a body and a mind, and that these two unique entities interacted and effected each other. He said this duality was important – that the mind mattered when it came to the body. But then Isaac Newton came along.

Newton showed that he could predict the nature of the universe through physical mechanics alone. He could explain how apples fell and planets moved. According to Newton, everything in the universe was a machine, from a wristwatch to the human body, and you could learn everything there was to learn about it by simply taking it apart and studying the pieces.

Science adapted this notion of Newtonian mechanics and we ditched the concept of the mind altogether. And once we bought into this idea of a material universe and a limited mind, we decided that to understand life, all we needed to do was study the physical elements that comprise it, just like we would a wristwatch. It’s this Newtonian concept, known as reductionism, that led to the focus on anatomy, and then, breaking down the human body even more to cells and tissues, biology, and then, studying the fundamental particles that make up the body in biochemistry.

From these studies we learned that our biology is predicated on proteins. Proteins are responsible for our physical makeup and our behavioral characteristics. Proteins, we discovered, are made of amino acids, which are like breaded strings whose sequence is unique for each protein. But how do our bodies know which sequence of amino acids to use to create each protein? Where is the memory in the protein? That’s where DNA comes in.

The Central Dogma

Our DNA is the memory molecule responsible for carrying our hereditary traits. DNA is the physical blueprint, the template that carries the info for building the proteins that comprise us. Francis Crick, who was one of the two scientists who discovered the DNA molecule, described the flow of information in this process and coined it the Central Dogma. He said the information in the DNA (your genes) is transferred to the RNA (which is like a photocopy of your genes) and that RNA is used to code the sequence of amino acids that make up the protein. In other words, information flows only one way – from our genes unfolding into our body.

Why should this matter to you?

Here’s why: The Central Dogma says that information doesn’t go from the protein back to the RNA and then back to the DNA. But proteins make up the body and the body interacts with the environment. So the Central Dogma says information can’t go from the environment through to the protein and then back to our DNA. In other words, our experiences in the world in no way can change our heredity.

Victims of our heredity!

Well if our DNA controls our traits and our lives and we didn’t pick our DNA and there’s nothing we can do to change it, then we’re victims of our heredity!

And it’s here that the prevailing mythology of our current medical system was born. Our traits were programmed at the moment of our conception and the Central Dogma said we can’t change it because information doesn’t flow that way. So we’re victims. And once we bought into the idea that we were victims, we needed to find someone to rescue us. And science was happy to do that. And so they began to create a seemingly endless supply of chemistry and molecules – of drugs – to compensate for our defects. And with this, we suddenly let go of the idea that we had control over our lives and offered ourselves to the medical community to fix what we ourselves couldn’t handle.

Sound familiar?

We thought if we could throw enough money at this, if we could make enough drugs, we could heal ourselves. So we developed a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry and we built a medical system with this victim position at its foundation. But there were a few tragic flaws here. One, we never actually proved the Central Dogma. It was a theory that we were so sure was right we never bothered to test it. And, this is all based on a Newtonian paradigm, a human body that is mechanical and material in nature. What we left out was the mind.

Epigenetics

The new field of epigenetics, which Bruce Lipton is at the forefront of, shows that genes and DNA do not control our biology; that instead DNA is controlled by signals from outside the cell, including the energetic messages emanating from our positive and negative thoughts. Lipton believes that our bodies can be changed as we retrain our thinking, which he talks about in his groundbreaking book The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, & Miracles.

Modern medicine, however, is still locked in a Newtonian belief system. And Big Pharma is certainly not about to hop on board with the notion that energy healing could have some merit when they sell chemicals to survive. But understanding this makes it so that you can use our health care system in the ways that it benefits you while also being aware of how it’s limited, and potentially limiting you and your healing.

When I learned the story of how the current medical system developed I was thrilled, because it supported what I already understood intuitively. The mind matters. Healing does not begin and end with a prescription for a drug. All of us were born into this system – a system that may feel like Truth because it’s the way things have “always” been. But in fact it is just a narrow paradigm of thinking that developed because of a few ideas that pivoted what we collectively believed to be true. And there is good news here. This is a story with a happy ending, because new science and new discoveries are integrating the mind and the body and creating a new awareness that revises the victim position and puts the power and control back in our hands (and our minds).

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I was just re-reading the following excerpt from Bruce Lipton’s The Biology of Belief, in which he speaks to the roots of this issue:

I will never forget a piece of wisdom I received in 1967, on the first day I learned to clone stem cells in graduate school. It took me decades to realize how profound this seemingly simple piece of wisdom was for my work and my life. My professor, mentor and consummate scientist, Irv Konigsberg was one of the first cell biologists to master the art of cloning stem cells. He told me that when the cultured cells you are studying are ailing, you look first to the cell’s environment, not to the cell itself for the cause.

…When I provided a healthy environment for my cells they thrived; when the environment was less than optimal, the cells faltered. When I adjusted the environment, these “sick” cells revitalized.

…Since the dawning of the Age of Genetics, we have been programmed to accept that we are subservient to the power of our genes. The world is filled with people who live in constant fear that, on some unsuspecting day, their genes are going to turn on them. Consider the masses of people who think they are ticking time bombs, they wait for cancer to explode in their lives as it exploded in the life of their mother or brother or sister or aunt or uncle. Millions of others attribute their failing health not to a combination of mental, physical, emotional and spiritual causes, but simply to the inadequacies of their body’s biochemical mechanics. Are your kids unruly? Increasingly the first choice is to medicate these children to correct their “chemical imbalances,” rather than fully grappling with what is going on in their bodies, minds and spirits.

What are you doing to “adjust” your own internal environment so that your cells can function at their best and you can be as healthy as possible?

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