Tag: BioEnergetics

If I Knew Then, What I Know Now…

Posted on by Martha ORegan

Do you ever wish you could have a “do over” of experiences in your past? As it turns out, you can — it is called imagination.  The brain records everything in present time and doesn’t know the difference between what we perceive and what is imagined — they both create neural pathways that affect our health, behaviors, relationships and even our surroundings.

We can go back to any experience recorded from our past, even decades ago, that at the time we judged as “bad” or “wrong” and imagine or re-create it with a perspective of “good” or a lesson learned and it will actually create a new network in the brain, completely altering our physiology in that milli-blip of time. We don’t change the facts, only the energy in which it is stored. Remember when we used to transfer files on our computer and the little file would dance across the screen?  Well, think about moving the story from one file to the next: from the fear file to the gratitude file just by choosing to. The trick is keeping it in the positive file.  Every time we pull it out and express it from the victim perspective, we dump it right back in affecting our life all over again.

At the risk of being repetitive, remember that everything in all of creation is energy including every thought, feeling, word and deed. Simply put, positive energy is expansive and alive with frequency while negative energy is contractive and sluggish in frequency.  Every experience is neutral until you decide which charge to attach to it — positive or negative — and that perception immediately translates into your physical body as either one of survival (contractive) or ease (expansive). As an example, 20 people can witness the same car accident: Five of them put the event in their fear file as it could’ve been them; five will walk away in gratitude that it wasn’t them; five will walk away worried about the victims; and five will just be ticked off that they are late for work. Same experience, different perspectives, with each one being correct for each person.

Every experience we have ever had — including everything we have ever seen, heard, touched, tasted or smelled — gets filed in our mental hard drive (aka the brain) based on the perspective that we deemed appropriate in the moment, even the ones that belonged to the “big people” who were in our lives during our early years. These files set up a neural pathway or network that is instantly retrieved for future use, whether it be for learning, becoming proficient in a hobby or sport, determining the best course of action in a project, or just basic survival. These pathways also have an energy attached that will emit into our physical body or surroundings. Those experiences that we perceived as negative, with either great intensity or long duration, can set up a message into the body that over time can become a symptom, habit or behavior that we wish we didn’t have. So, an experience that created immense fear for a short time can get us just as stuck in the mental hard drive as long-term worry.  Both can set up a mental loop that can lead to such things as tight muscles, high blood pressure, self-sabotage or procrastination.

Think about an experience that you wish had never happened and tune into how it feels in the body.  Notice how fast you were able to retrieve that stored memory? Think about the gazillion stored memories that we judged as negative in our lifetime that are controlling our physiology 24/7. Eewwwhhh — not interested in that.

So, knowing what we know now about the brain, we can go back to an experience and, without changing the facts, see the lesson or look at it again through the lens of forgiveness, gratitude, love, peace or joy, creating a brand new neural pathway in the brain, allowing for more appropriate physiology. Aahh, that feels better already.

Live Awake … Have Fun.

Awaken to the BEST in YOU!

Posted on by Martha ORegan

Wake up, wake up, wake up I say!  Apparently, as a small child, this was how I nudged people in my family to get them to stir, but my mouth couldn’t form the “w” well so it sounded more like “ake up.” Don’t you just love those family stories about experiences that you can’t even recall and haven’t a clue whether they are true or not? Either way, they have landed in the legacy file that we carry with us throughout life only to pull out from time to time, sometimes when we least expect it, like right now as I write about awakening.

So, are you awake? If not, what will it take to nudge you?  And, if yes, then how awake are you? I believe each one of us goes through many stages of wakefulness in our life experience, often dancing back and forth through those phases based on our perspective of what is happening at that particular time.

There are times we feel like we just woke up from a long, hard slumber and it takes a while to get our bearings on where we are and how we got here. Often, our surroundings don’t feel familiar and we have a difficult time focusing. Maybe we feel a little stiff and sluggish as we begin moving our body in an attempt to get clarity of the moment. As we proceed, we feel like we are still in a dream or, at times, a nightmare and spend the rest of the day wishing we could go back to sleep where we don’t have to think or be what we don’t authentically feel is real. This state of wakefulness can last a day for some or weeks, months, years or decades for others.

The next stage usually begins when something really big happens in our life, like an illness, a tragedy, a job loss, divorce or financial failure, but awakening usually doesn’t happen right away.  At first, as we seek help from family, friends, counselors, sermons or books, we will begin getting information on how to deal with our particular problem and through that begin to see a glimmer of hope and trust that life doesn’t have to be so hard and that healing can occur. Then, we begin feeling our own nudges within to learn more, prompting a desire to take action, resulting in an awakening to our personal power to create change in our lives. Maybe we begin by fueling our body with better nutrition or moving our body in ways we never knew we could move or begin hanging around with more joyful people. Whatever the catalyst, there comes a time where we begin to look at that really big thing that happened as a gift that prompted the next phase of our growth and evolution as a human being and we feel alive again.

Once truly awake, we notice that we move through our day with a little more ease and focus, we find we are more grateful for the simple things in life, enjoy learning new things or taking on new activities. We generally feel better than we thought we could just a short time ago.

Then, as life will happen, we often find ourselves getting distracted and falling away from those things that helped us to feel better or we just feel “stuck” and have a hard time remembering how good we felt just a short time ago and suddenly we are back in our slumber again as the cycle repeats.  But the good news is that it usually won’t take another huge life event to create the wake-up call, but rather the ability to sense and follow the nudges more clearly and quickly to get back on track with what we know helps us to feel better.  Life is so much more fun when we are awake, so wake up, wake up, wake up, I say!  Live Awake … Have Fun!