What we’re conditioned to believe about ourselves, and what we’re programmed to think other people think about us, affects our performance, including how successful we are.
The quantum model, which states that all possibilities exist in this present moment, is your key to using the placebo effect for healing, because it gives you permission to choose a new future for yourself and actually observe it into reality.
Since the neuroscientific definition of mind is the brain in action, you repeatedly reproduce the same level of mind by “re-minding” yourself who you think you are in reference to the outer world.
The brain thinks, but the heart knows.
Your personality is made up of how you think, act, and feel. It is your state of being. Therefore, your same thoughts, actions, and feelings will keep you enslaved to the same past personal reality. However, when you as a personality embrace new thoughts, actions, and feelings, you will inevitably create a new personal reality in your future.
When you think from your past memories, you can only create past experiences.
Where you place your attention is where you place your energy. Once you fix your attention or your awareness or your mind on possibility, you place your energy there as well. As a result, you’re affecting matter with your attention or observation. The placebo effect is not fantasy, then; it’s quantum reality. Energy.
Meditation takes us from survival to creation; from separation to connection; from imbalance to balance; from emergency mode to growth-and-repair mode; and from the limiting emotions of fear, anger, and sadness to the expansive emotions of joy, freedom, and love.
If we cannot think beyond how we emotionally feel, then we are living according to what the environment dictates to our body. Rather than truly thinking, innovating, and creating, we merely fire the synaptic memories in other areas of our brain from our genetic or personal past; we instigate the same repetitive chemical reactions that have us living in survival mode.
So your thoughts drive your feelings, and your feelings drive your thoughts, and eventually this loop hardwires your brain into the same patterns, which conditions your body into the past. And because emotions are a record of past experiences, if you can’t think greater than how you feel, this thinking-feeling loop keeps you anchored to your past and creates a constant state of being. This is how the body becomes the mind – or in time, how your thoughts run you and your feelings own you.
You must become conscious of the unconscious behaviors you’ve been choosing to demonstrate that have led to the same experiences, and then you must make new choices, take new actions, and create new experiences.
Because of the size of our enormous forebrain, the privilege of being a human being is that we can make thought more real than anything else – and that’s how the placebo works. To see how the process unfolds, it’s vital to examine and review three key elements: conditioning, expectation, and meaning. As you’ll see, these three concepts all seem to work together in orchestrating the placebo response.
If a species is subject to repetitive external environmental stimuli over the course of several generations, in time that species will adapt to those stimuli. The genetics of that species will change to support a new internal state, one that will help the species survive that external stimuli for generations to come. This is called survival of the species. It is a linear, slow process for most species.
If you’re putting the bulk of your energy toward some issue in your external environment, there will be little left for your body’s internal environment.
And if we’re living the same life every day by doing the same things at the same time, seeing the same people at the same place, and creating the same experiences from yesterday, then we’re enslaved to having our outer worlds influence our inner worlds. It’s our environment that is controlling how we think, act, and feel. We’re victims of our personal realities, because our personal realities are creating our personalities – and it’s become an unconscious process.
For instance, when a lion was chasing your ancestors, the stress response was doing what it was designed to do – protect them from their outer environment. That’s adaptive. But if, for days on end, you fret about your promotion, overfocus on your presentation to upper management, or worry about your mother being in the hospital, these situations create the same chemicals as though you were being chased by a lion.
Change Your Mind, Change Your Life.
We don’t need to win the race, the lottery, or the promotion before we experience the emotions of those events. Remember, we can create an emotion by thought alone. We can experience joy or gratitude ahead of the environment to such an extent that the body begins to believe that it is already “in” that event. As a result, we can signal our genes to make new proteins to change our bodies to be ahead of the present environment.
Change is a powerful word and it is completely feasible, if you choose it.
My goal is to educate you about the effects of stress on the body, creating a level of self-awareness that causes you to stop and ask yourself, Is anyone or anything really worth it? So.