When genes were first discovered, it was believed that specific genes could determine whether or not we got cancer or other illnesses. This wasn’t good news because it got people thinking that their health was genetically predetermined and that there wasn’t much they could do to change anything. But then epigenetics came along.
The word ‘epi’ means ‘above’, so epigenetics studied what regulated genes and it turned out that what fires specific genes up lies inside our brains–it’s our thoughts!
We all have had firsthand experience of how thoughts affect our health through the phenomenon of placebo. If we take a drug that we think is going to help us, even if it’s just a sugar pill, it will change the chemistry in our bodies and create a 60% chance of better healing.
Of course, it isn’t the placebo that makes the change, it’s the belief in the placebo. Every belief has a certain vibrational signature and if we can learn to create strong beliefs ourselves, we can scrap the use of placebo entirely.
How can we do that? The truth is, we do it all the time by the way we think and imagine things. What’s really quite staggering is the fact that our brains do not distinguish between what’s imagined and what’s real. You only have to imagine your teeth biting into a raw piece of lemon and feel saliva fill your mouth to know the truth of that.
So, if you change the way you think, and imagine things differently, you will conjure up different emotions, which will create different actions, which will create different outcomes. It’s that simple.
The tough part is taking time every day to imagine what you want, even when there’s not the slightest bit of evidence that the outcome you want could actually occur. But you have to imagine what you want in every detail anyway–the sounds, aromas, colours, feelings and make it as real as possible.
I was working with a client a few weeks ago who didn’t like her boss. She said he was controlling among other things. When I asked her if she talked to others about him, she said, “All the time.”
So, the first thing I asked her to do was stop talking about her boss. There was no point in etching this situation more firmly into her ‘reality’ than necessary. Then I asked her if she would visualize herself enjoying some aspect of him for 5 minutes a day. It was hard for her to do this, but she tried and it started to become easier.
Then I asked her to start scanning for situations when he wasn’t trying to control her. At first the things she noticed were small, but more things appeared. Finally, I asked her to start telling him when he did things that weren’t controlling.
“I could never do that!” she said.
But I gave her some language as I often do with clients. I suggested she say, “I really like it when you let me figure things out for myself.”
She started doing that whenever she could. Not long after this, he was in a rush and trying to tell her how to do something and he just shook his head and said, “You figure it out.” He actually used that same language.
Since then, his attempts to control her have become less and less.
So that’s how changing your life works. You change your thoughts, which changes your emotional energetic, which changes what you do and how you do things in the world, which then changes how the world does things with you.
It can feel like magic, but it’s really just the way the world works.