13/02/2013
Amazing insight and wisdom by Dr John Demartini
How Perceptions Impact Your Physiology
By Dr John Demartini
Many of you will already be aware that there is a connection between your mind and body, and you may wonder exactly how what you perceive actually impacts your physiology. This month I will focus on wellness and illness issues and share some helpful wellness insights. Your perceptions play a pivotal role in your well-being. When you perceive an event to be supportive to your highest values you will tend to open up to it; when you perceive an event to be challenging to your highest values you will tend to close down to it. This has an impact on your metabolism and your physiology which is then turned on or off accordingly depending on these initial interpretations of support or challenge.
If you feel depressed and you think that your daily events aren’t working the way you expected and you don’t feel like the world is supporting your highest values then your metabolic rate will tend to slow down. Your glucose can go down and you may end up with low blood sugar. There are psychological perceptions that correlate with high or low pancreatic function. Example: People with hypoglycemia have low blood sugar. Hypoglycemics tend to minimize themselves to others and can even think that they are wrong and other people are right. A hypoglycemic will often do what you tell them to do. People with diabetes on the other hand, have high blood sugar and they tend to maximize themselves to others and tend to think that they are right. They are not easy to tell what to do and they have their own way of doing things.
The same principle that applies for hypo and hyperglycemia can work the same for hyper and hypo thyroid. Your thyroid gland originates from your tongue embryologically. This is why its function has a direct correlation with your metabolic rate because the tongue deals with chewing, eating, swallowing and speaking. If you feel like you are saying something you wish you hadn’t, your thyroid function tends to go up. If you are not saying something you wish you could, your thyroid function tends to go down. If you are repressing what you want to say, your thyroid function goes down and your metabolic rate drops. If you are saying something you wish you hadn’t said, your thyroid function tends to go up. That is why hypothyroids are often listless, quiet and don’t speak much. They tend to hold in a lot of resentment and they hold in what they really want to say. The hyper-thyroids tend to talk and speak, and are generally more outgoing and extroverted.
These physiological polarities are often a result of imbalanced perceptions. Because if you are minimizing yourself relative to somebody else, and live in fear of losing them, you will tend to repress what you want to say to them and if you are minimizing others relative to yourself you will have less, if any fear of saying what comes to your mind. Have you ever been infatuated with someone and been afraid of rocking the boat in the relationship? That tends to lower your metabolic rate because your thyroid function starts dropping. If all of a sudden you feel like ‘the hell with it’, ‘I don’t really need you’, ‘I don’t have to do it’, ‘I can say what I want to do’ and you say something tactless and basically not worry about it and then go ‘oops I wish I hadn’t said that’, now your thyroid function goes kicking up. You are literally affecting your physiology with your thoughts, if you exaggerate or minimize things; you are automatically changing your physiology, changing the blood sugar levels, changing lipid levels and hormone levels.
If you are feeling passive and you feel that you are safe and secure in your higher values, your female hormones go up. If you have to deal with fight or flight your male hormones go up. If you are aggressive and you feel like you are angry and feel like you are not getting what you want and the world is challenging you, then your male hormones go up. If you are on the passive side, your feminine hormones go up. Your feminine hormones stimulate fat in the body and male hormones stimulate water and muscle levels in the body. So muscle and water tissue goes up with increased male hormones when your higher values are being challenged and fat tissue goes up when all of a sudden your higher values become perceived as being supported. On the one hand your body becomes ‘harder’ and on the other your body becomes ‘softer’. Your hormone imbalances often have a lot to do with your perceptions of the world. If you bring your imbalanced awareness into perfect equilibrium by asking quality questions that reveal to you the hidden part, you can normalize your physiology and your body will do amazing things and return to wellness.
Every time your awareness is imbalanced and you experience polarized emotions, you also go into sympathetic or parasympathetic dominance. Your physiological responses provide you feedback in the form of symptoms at the cellular, genetic or enzymatic level to let you know whenever you have an imbalanced perspective. The many symptoms that you experience in your body are your body’s way of trying to reveal the areas in your life where you have imbalanced perceptions. So disease is not necessarily a ‘bad’ thing. And it is wise to discover the underlying meaning. If you go out and eat a pineapple, cheesecake, steak, hamburger, pizza, a mango, boiled onions, chocolate cake, pickles and then on top of that a big bowl of beans. Would you agree that the next day you would not feel so great? If you went to a medical doctor the next day, you might be told that the symptoms are due to allergies, or stomach viruses, and they might prescribe an anti-histamine, antacid, anti-flatulent etc. And he or she could label all of your symptoms as due to various diseases. But if you were to go to a naturopath or a chiropractor, they might tell you that you have simply pigged out, and your body is trying to give you symptoms as a feedback to let you know to stop pigging out. So the same symptoms could be labelled as illness or they could be labelled as wellness.
What I am proposing is what you may label as illness may actually be wellness. The very thing you think may be causing your illness may simply be your body’s response to misperceptions and the associated mis-actions. These lead to mis-actions; something you do too much or too little or you seek too much or too little. The second you bring your perceptions and actions into equilibrium, it is amazing what your physiology can do to return to wellness.
I define illness as the result of an imbalanced perspective and wellness as one of a balanced perspective. Wellness means wholeness. Illness means halfness. If you see more support than challenge or more challenge than support, you get illness. If you see a synchronicity of support and challenge simultaneously, you get wellness. Your mind, through its value system, filters your sensory reality and motor actions. Every time you go through life and exaggerate and minimize, you are creating physiology labelled as illness. Again, illness is a feedback system to your conscious mind to let you know that you have one or more lopsided perceptions. Your psyche and its misperceptions are creating symptomology and this symptomology is not something that is bad, evil or wrong. It is just your body’s way of letting you know that you are imbalanced in your thoughts. The second you balance your mind, your physiology changes. Your psyche and your soma are working together and are designed to have homeostasis which is a negative feedback system to bring your mind back into equilibrium.
Love and Wisdom,
Dr. John Demartini
