HOW
WRITING REVEALS THE POWER
OF
YOUR EMOTIONS
TO
SHAPE YOUR ANATOMY
The nervous system is the ultimate
anatomical vehicle
of consciousness, the channel for all
feeling and thinking.
It gathers all sense impressions.
Caroline Myss
Every
thought or feeling you have, every behavior you act out requires a specific
biochemical combination formed in the brain. Your attitude – positive,
negative, or indifferent -- designs and activates your body's neurochemistry. These expressions produce biochemical
reactions that have dynamic manifestations. In other words, belief begets
effect, thought precedes energy, you are what you think.
Biologically
speaking, how does this work? Emotional reactions are produced either by the
central nervous system (brain and spinal cord), peripheral nervous system (the
network of nerves that extends throughout the body), or the autonomic nervous
system (the electro-chemical system the operates primarily on adreneline and is
designed for spontaneous reaction, without cognitive appraisal, to any threat,
real or imaginary).
Anatomy
is the foundation for human relationship.
What
happens in our interior, those connections that maintain the structure of
personhood, eventually happens outside as well.....
Human
relationships are somatic interactions of emotional pulsation and behavioral
form -- inside us, outside us.
Caroline Myss
Feelings and emotions differ. Feelings
are unconditioned, unprogrammed, generalized states, whereas emotions are
conditioned programs of behavior with established neural pathways for action.
Both feelings and emotions follow the rules of water, acting as messengers that
signal behavior. Their fluid ingredients organize and categorize behavior
according to “the flow of thought, the tides of feelings, the waves of
intuition, the ocean depths of feelings, the waxing and waning of images.”
Hormones are, in essence liquid anatomy, a watery form at the root of behavior
in the animal world. Secreted by the brain into the blood stream, they are
“liquid behavior” waiting to crystalize into muscular behavior. They keep the
quick fires of epinephrine burning, the continuing heat of the pituitary, or
the continuing transactions of the brain with the neural transmitters. In this
way, life's emotional experiences create form and shape which, in turn, gives
emotions, thinking, and feeling an avenue for expression and satisfaction or
the opposite, inhibition and pain. “With our shape we interact with the world
and create relationships. As we reach out to others for contact, love intimacy,
cooperation, we may create relationships that serve to reinforce or compensate
for our individual shape.”
How then can writing affect not only
our cognition, but our anatomical form itself? Conscious self expression –
visual, verbal, musical, physical – leads the light of awareness into our
thoughts and alters the neural pathways by which the hormones are directed.
Writing processes, such as RADICAL WRITING, which are concerned only with undirected,
free-flowing expressiveness, restore energetic circulation to aspects of your
neurological makeup that have been impeded by judgment and/or trauma. The
healing key to such writing is the result of the pure acts of observation and
listening. The power these actions generate promotes subconscious shifts which
lead to physical and emotional balance. Such healing requires no external
effort to fix or change anything. In fact, to attempt to fix a situation or to
direct such change is to disrupt the innate subconscious mechanism for
restoration.
Because the human body is a
self-restoring organism at every level of biological organization, from DNA
upward, there is no biological reason for allowing yourself to suffer. Carl
Jung believed that disease begins when a personality’s story is denied.
Similarly, symptoms can be interpreted as the initial notes in a story written
on the body by suppressed responses to life events and surroundings. It is in
the nonjudgmental telling of your stories that healing occurs, and writing in
the way RADICAL WRITING teaches provides just such a mechanism for allowing the
chaos and emotional blood of your life to move through your body as a conscious
messenger rather than belligerent symptom.
Only by rediscovering your story with
the dispassion provided by guided techniques such as RADICAL WRITING can you
honestly retell the story, expose its deeper roots, uncover new meanings, and
create conclusions different from the self-fulfilling prophecies that have been
directing your unconscious script. There is no power greater than the truth.
Its role in healing is fundamental. The courage to know the truth and allow its
telling is the first step in recovering the wholeness that health represents.
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