The Mind-Body Cure. Bal Pawa
our conscious mind is the objective perspective of the mind that identifies information, compares and analyzes it with known information, and decides what to do.
Psychiatrists are medical doctors trained to deal with mental illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorders, and they are able to prescribe medications as well as psychotherapy. They generally consider impairments in the biochemistry or anatomy of the brain as the reason for mental illness. They agree that psychosocial aspects of childhood, genetics, and experienced trauma play a role in people’s behavior. Many studies show that psychosis and bipolar disorders are brain disorders that result from an imbalance of chemicals in the brain and manifest as aberrations in thought, mood, cognition, and behavior.2 Psychiatrists treat disorders of the mind with both behavior psychotherapy and medications. Although they seem to distinguish between mind and brain, they see the mind as a complex matrix of many factors that come into play, including biochemical or anatomical problems of the brain.
Mind dualists such as psychologists and psychiatrists view the subconscious mind as the backdrop against which we carry out all our conscious functions of memory, communication, learning, and applying information. It influences our entire life in ways we don’t always comprehend. We make choices, judgments, and decisions unaware that our subconscious mind is in control of our habits and automatic behaviors. The world’s most well-known and most controversial psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, used an iceberg to illustrate this idea. He said we experience or “see” only the uppermost 10 percent of an iceberg rising above the water’s surface. This part of the iceberg is our conscious mind. The remaining 90 percent of the iceberg, the subconscious, lies beneath the waves and is imperceptible.3 While the conscious mind might assume it’s directing the iceberg, in reality the waves and currents acting on our subconscious are the true navigators.
Finally, spiritual scholars claim the mind is our soul—a moral and emotional guiding force that examines universal truths—and belongs to the conscious spiritual realm. Those who have learned to align with this way of thinking feel a profound and conscious connection to a higher power. They remain dualists because they find it difficult or impossible to accept that brain function alone can explain consciousness. That is, they maintain that even after all the specialized cells of the brain have fired, all the associated chemical messages have been sent and received, and we have performed complex tasks, something is missing. Spiritual scholars maintain that a universal or cosmic consciousness controls these effects and not just biology, physics, and chemistry.
Delving into the complex field of mind science is an evolving process and we may never agree on one definition. As a physician, I have seen the powerful effect of thoughts and beliefs on behavior, choices, and health outcomes. I recognize that connecting our mind to our body is vitally important if we want to make changes in our biology. As a patient, I can say that a “mind shift” had to occur for me to make a mental leap from an illness to a wellness mindset, and it began with changing my thoughts, beliefs, inner dialogue, and behavior.
For now, the mystery of the mind continues to elude us. New technology and advanced diagnostics have made it possible to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines to measure emotions as millions of nerve impulses being transmitted and received by cells throughout the body. This specialized neuroimaging allows us to see areas in the brain light up when thought alone directs blood flow there. By looking at patterns across hundreds of images, scientists can diagnose emotions of the brain. We can tell when someone is angry, focused on a task, in love, or depressed. This technology will be useful in diagnosing mental illnesses and thought patterns associated with physical disease. Soon enough we will also be able to measure visceral body functions such as blood flow to the gut by examining conscious thought. As we see these connections between our thoughts and their physical manifestations in the body, we are getting closer to understanding how we might use the mind to change or mediate these impulses.
The Multidimensional Mind
One of the best explanations of the mind, in my opinion, comes from comparing research done by psychologists with the experience of spiritual scholars who realize that the mind is not a single physical construct but a multidimensional “mental body.” This mind definition comprises four dimensions: intelligence, practical knowledge, body memory, and consciousness.
Intelligence refers to our concrete memory and knowledge. This is similar to reading a manual about how to drive a car without actually driving the car. It is knowledge without practical experience. The second dimension refers to mind as our practical knowledge, how we apply our intelligence. This is like when you finally get in a car and drive. The experience is very different from just reading about it, which is why many people pass the written driving exam but fail the practical driving test. So it is with the mind. Many people have read books about mind-body medicine and they recognize there is a connection, but they have not yet experienced it or been able to apply the knowledge because they haven’t mastered the techniques or applied them to their health.
The third dimension is body memory, which incorporates the belief that every cell in our body has a mind. We have traditionally confined the “mind” to our head and brain, but the work of cell biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton shows that all cells hold memory and can respond to their environment.4 For example, our cells change their behavior and genetic characteristics depending on whether our thoughts are negative or positive. His research reveals that we should view cell membranes rather than the DNA in the cell as “mini” brains. We also know that certain cells carry memory of a skill or a trauma. For example, placing the fingers of a pianist with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia on a keyboard can elicit a physical response by the finger muscles allowing them to play music. Similarly, a muscle that was once injured can go into spasm just by thinking about the events that precipitated the injury. The fourth dimension, consciousness, is untarnished by memory, conditioning, or bias. This is the pure form of innate intelligence, our ability to function with conscience, universal truths, and divine knowledge that take the mind into a spiritual dimension that many call the soul.
If we consider the mind from this multidimensional perspective, we see that the mind lives nowhere. Rather, it exists everywhere, lives throughout our body, and is fundamental to our unique individual experiences. Perhaps as more sophisticated tools for mind mapping become available, we will find better ways to quantify or understand the human mind. Until then, I think it’s best to have an open view of what we think of as the human mind. My opinion is that our mind is a field of potential energy that may be connected to a universal field of consciousness, but I don’t expect others to hold the same view. For the purposes of this book, it is enough to consider that our mind is separate from our brain and that it has the ability to influence the brain, both consciously and subconsciously.
UNDERSTANDING MINDSET
We have examined the mind and its various dimensions. We understand that the brain is constantly generating thoughts and random observations that are fleeting. A mindset is a specific lens or frame of mind that orients us to a particular set of associations and expectations; it is our unique view of the world.5 It runs our body “automatically,” as if on autopilot. Our mindset can be influenced by our conscious mind, our subconscious mind, or a combination of the two. As we’ve seen, psychologists believe that our subconscious mind forms the backdrop to most of our thinking. Our experiences with things and people in our early life and the emotions and meaning we associate with those experiences are stored in our subconscious and form the basis of our mindset. To change your mind in an instant is easy, but to change your mindset requires more work and this is the premise of creating health.
Some of us naturally gloss over the negative and see everything through rose-colored glasses, whereas some of us store and amplify negative experiences. For example, adverse childhood experiences often negatively influence our mindset.6 While it intrigues me whether optimism and pessimism are inherited traits or acquired, our subconsciously stored memories cause us to view life experiences with a pre-set lens. This subconscious program contains paths of least resistance, familiar outcomes, and often fear-based behaviors. And while this automatic mechanism can help us operate efficiently for repetitive tasks, allowing our subconscious pathways to run