Extract from ‘Molecules of Emotion’ by Dr Candace Pert

Candace Pert is a neuroscientist whose revolutionary research proved that our thoughts & feelings directly affect our health & well being. The following is a short extract from her groundbreaking book...

“But the most amazing benefits began when I was taught how to meditate. In my quieter mental state, I could experience how events were unfolding quite naturally around me, without my having to make them happen. I also started to become aware of synchronicity, to see connections between events and people happening simultaneously and then to act on this awareness instead of out of the more familiar linear cause and effect model.

When I first began meditating I was besieged by visions of my father lying helpless and dying in his hospital bed…other emotionally charged visions, some from childhood, seemed to percolate up into my conscious awareness as I continued meditating, as if these thoughts and feelings had been packed away in storage somewhere, waiting for me to stop everything, sit quietly and relax with a focused mind long enough for them to arise.

I marvelled at this process and attempted to understand it in terms of physiology. I was especially interested in how meditation’s effects on stress, had an impact on immunity, and what this meant in terms of the brain – body connection I has seen in my laboratory research. With my knowledge of the body wide psychosomatic network, I was beginning to think of disease – related stress in terms of an information overload, a condition in which the mind – body network is so taxed by unprocessed sensory input in the form of suppressed trauma or indigested emotions that it has become bogged down and cannot flow freely, sometimes even working against itself, at cross purposes.

Our new understanding of neuropeptides and receptors has enabled us to see more of what is going on in conditions of stress. When stress prevents the molecules of emotion from flowing freely where needed, the largely autonomic processes that are regulated by peptide flow, such as breathing, blood flow, immunity, digestion, and elimination, collapse down to a few simple feedback loops and upset the normal healing response. Meditation, by allowing long buried thoughts and feelings to surface, is a way of getting the peptides flowing again, returning the body, and the emotions, to health.

I came to think of my first meditation experiences as experiments – experiments in the release of highly charged emotional memories that had been stored somewhere within the psychosomatic network. Since the only lab I had access to at the time was that of my own mind and body, I paid careful attention to those early experiments, and later found that my thoughts about what I was experiencing correlated with research that my colleagues were doing on how trauma and blockage of emotional and physical information can be stored indefinitely at the cellular level.”

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