The Mind-Body Connection – Health is a state of Mind!

by Dr Tad James

In the past 5 years, there is exciting news in the field of disease. Old concepts on the nature of consciousness, and on the nature of the body are changing. We have been using many of these concepts in Time Line Therapy™ for some time now, and many of these concepts are new. Let me warn you in advance, that this article may change your viewpoint about your mind and your body. It has a potential to be controversial. This change in the structure of our belief systems is necessary to affect a change in the way we assist people in healing themselves and others.

Some of the more exciting conceptual work on the healing process has been done by a medical doctor in Massachusetts. Deepak Chopra is one of the new breed of health care practitioners who is speaking out, and in a way that will change how we view the mind and the body. Chopra’s credentials are impressive. He is an endocrinologist, and former chief of staff of the New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts. Chopra calls himself a quantum biologist, which means the application of quantum physics to biology. He says that the body is a quantum mechanical device, and that it is subject to the laws of quantum physics and not Newtonian physics. If you aren’t aware of the meaning of these terms yet, please take every means to find out.

In Quantum Healing, 1986, Chopra gave us a new paradigm for how the body handles its own rejuvenation processes. How often does the body renew itself? Older wisdom had it pegged at around seven years. Chopra has revised that estimate downward to roughly one year (approximately 98% totally renewed). Based on the estimates of quantum biology, you have a brand new stomach lining every 4 days, new skin every 30 days, a new liver in 6 weeks, even the skeleton is replaced every three months. These concepts are vital as we structure the metaphors for treatment while we work with our clients in the healing process.

Another of the more important notions of quantum biology is that consciousness is not localized to any one place. Is there any evidence for this?

Neuropeptides: Twenty years ago a group of scientists discovered in the brain, a set of chemicals known as neuropeptides. Neuro because they are found in the brain, and peptides because they are protein like molecules. So every time you have a thought or a feeling, a desire, an instinct, or a drive, each of these affects our nervous system by means of specific messenger molecules called neuropeptides.

There are receptors to these neuropeptides not only in brain cells but also in cells of the immune system. So when the scientists began looking at the various immune system cells that protect us from cancer and infection (t-cells, for example), they found that there were receptors to these same neuropeptides in those cells. In fact, the word neuropeptide became obsolete, because they’re not confined to the brain. They are floating around in the bloodstream and going to all our different organs. Since there are receptors to these neuropeptides in cells in the immune system, then it becomes obvious that, as Chopra says, “The immune system is constantly eavesdropping on our internal dialog.” In NLP we would add the following comment, “The immune system is constantly responding to the pictures, sounds, feelings, smells, tastes, and the internal dialog that we hold in our mind.”

The Unconscious Mind: Since the unconscious mind (also known as the “body mind”) is the controlling intelligence in the body, it is also the connection between the mind and the immune system. One of the major theories of Time Line Therapy™, NLP, and Hypnosis is that the unconscious mind can communicate with any part of the body at any time it so desires, and can, in this way, stimulate the healing process. It seems that there is, in fact, neurological evidence for this idea.

Every thought, every emotion, every desire, every internal representation you have is monitored, overheard, viewed. Your immune system is watching, listening, feeling! It has been shown that grieving people have grieving immune cells. If the grieving goes on for a prolonged period of time, then the immune system has also the self talk of, “Leave me alone, I don’t want to be bothered.” Such people are, according to Chopra, susceptible to cancer and other infectious diseases.
That is why it’s so important to understand that negative emotions which are trapped in the body are not conducive to health, and why we release all of a person’s negative emotions when we do healing processes in Time Line Therapy™ techniques.

The Significant Emotional Experience: Many mental and physical dis-eases are preceded by a significant emotional experience (SEE) of a negative nature which may appear in the person’s recent past, or even further in the past, such as during childhood. If negative, and depending on the intensity, the SEE has the potential to create or be the source of some emotional, mental or even physical dis-ease occurring in the body.

Let’s define some terms so that we are speaking the same language: (I borrow the notion of an SEE from the sociologist Dr. Morris Massey, in the book The People Puzzle.) First event means the very first time that an experience happens, or the root cause of a first event occurring (this is also called root cause). Significant emotional experience is any major, fully associated, highly charged emotional event wherever it occurs. Emotional chain is the process that the unconscious mind uses to connect experiences of a similar nature. (The term used in Time Line Therapy and The Basis of Personality [1988, Tad James, M.S., Ph.D.] is gestalt which means a collection of memories around a certain subject.)

The potential of a negative SEE to create dis-ease is based on the trapped emotions which remain in the memory because they are stored in the body. The work of Dr. Paul Goodwin, a neural physicist at Alaska Pacific University, implies that the trapped emotions in the body have the possibility of creating functional (software, non-physical) boundaries which can impede the flow of nerve information through the neural network pathways.

Testing Memories for Negative Emotions: You can tell if there are still any negative emotions in one of your past memories by going back to that memory, and remembering what happened looking through your own eyes. (Warning: Do not try this with memories which contain trauma or phobia.) If, as you remember the memory, you feel any negative emotions in your body, then there is a negative emotional content to the memory, and there is trapped emotion in your body. The trapped negative emotion, if you feel it, is the basis for dis-ease.

Getting Rid of the Negative Emotions: Now, other than dis-ease, why get rid of negative emotions which are trapped in one’s body? Well, for example, imagine a salesperson, (s)he has a dream, (s)he’s well trained, knows how to sell, and (s)he wants to make more money. But every time (s)he goes to close the sale, fear comes up. That salesperson is not going to do his or her best. Certainly the closing ratio will not be as high as it could be without the fear.
Now imagine that same salesperson without the fear. Which one do you thing will do better? Of course, the second one.
Or in a relationship, perhaps you once got hurt, and so you said, “I’m never going to let that happen to me again.” So every time you get to a certain point in the relationship you begin to feel those old negative feelings, and so you end the relationship. More importantly, each relationship ends in exactly the same way each time. You may not even remember the source of the negative feelings, but at a certain point there they are, and the relationship ends.
Now imagine being without those negative emotions, do you think that it would improve the relationship? Of course.

Obviously, the creation of dis-ease requires more trapped negative emotions than those in the situations we’ve just discussed. However, the process is the same–the unconscious mind represses (to whatever extent it needs to) memories with unresolved negative emotions. It does this for the “sanity” of the conscious mind. Since the unconscious mind does repress the memories with the negative emotions in them, the emotions get stuck in the body and aren’t released.
Time Line Therapy has the potential of releasing the trapped emotion in memories in a very short period of time. In fact, we usually release most of a person’s negative emotions in the Secret of Creating Your Future® Seminars which we give all over the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia. My experience with the now thousands of people of all walks of life is that it is possible to release all of a person’s negative emotions from past memories in as little as five hours. That release of negative emotions has a profound effect on the person.

This happened to one of the students in a recent Secret of “Creating Your Future” Seminar. After the seminar, I learned she had been severely abused as a child and had, for most of her life, been depressed. At times she was also suicidal. She had visited psychologists and psychiatrists on and off for most of her life.
During the seminar, she paid close attention to releasing her major negative emotions, including sadness and depression, the trauma from the abuse and a number of her limiting decisions from the past. Her experience after the weekend was that she was no longer able to access the feelings of depression. In fact, when I saw her two weeks later, she came running up to me and said, “Do you know I haven’t been depressed for the last two weeks, at all? And do you know what else, I seem to be laughing for no reason at all!”