Chemichal Thoughts



My own sense of Universal Law and the Law of Attraction may be a bit different than the typical new age seeker.  Yet it doesn’t really matter to me which side of the fence another perons’s beliefs fall.  If it makes you happy to stand at an intersection stopping traffic when the light turns red and you BELEIVE you are actually impacting the flow yourself  … who am I to say what is so?  If your actions make you happy … wave on the traffic and take all the delight in it as you possibly can.   Whatever it is that feels like bliss is worth pursuit.

beakers-and-petri-dishesBased only on the observations of my own disordered autonomic nervous system, it seems that thoughts do impact our body chemistry and our experience of the world.  The body, as a science lab full of petri dishes, test tubes and beakers, seems to have in place a highly sophisticated mechanism to generate the exact compound it needs for a particular catalyst to occur.  Some of these changes are easy to trace, like how our pancreas and liver take part in regulating blood sugar.  I saw the dark side of endocrinology last year when I began to experience wicked bouts of hypoglycemia.  During a time when my dysautonomia was in a major POTShole,    I began to have serious bouts of reactive hypoglycemia.  But at the time, I was completely unaware of the spikes and crashes of my insulin levels.  All I could perceive was enormous storms of adrenaline that would come on within an hour after eating.  My body would shake, my heart would race, and the nausea was uncontrollable;  though I was a veteran of panic attacks, these flares where off the Richter scale.  Once I was able to get tests to confirm what was going on, and then charting for myself during the day with a home glucose meter, I could see the invisible spikes and low blood sugar urgencies.

My body on the other hand, had already figured out what was going on — and it had been using adrenaline to free up stores of glucagon in my liver whenever my blood sugar began to drop.  The adrenaline was fueled by thoughts of panic and terror, which assisted the liver in giving up her bounty.  Indeed my body seemed to know which thoughts would produce the best bang for the buck and it was adept at calling upon the dark side of the light chaser’s data banks to fuel its peptide manifest.

This is nothing new.  Women have known this for years around their menstrual cycles.  When the same behavior you were able to overlook last week from your hormone-challenged teenage daughter makes you climb the walls days before menses, we know that our thoughts are intrinsically linked to chemical changes in our womb.  Another example is when we are in pain or have picked up a flu bug, our thoughts and even our dreams seem to take on a different quality of peeked emotion.  For some of us it is anger, or deep sadness over a loss that may have happened 10 years ago.  Why now? You wonder.  What is it about this experience of physical illness that seems to draw upon these particular thoughts and emotions?

From where I stand in inquiry, the body seems to call upon the epic dark side in order to complete a chemical reaction needed to assist in our healing.  When I experience unbidden anger, it often coincides with a throat or sinus infection.  Whatever it is that my body is doing, it appears to know intrinsically how to produce the exact pharmacology it needs for its mission.  I’ve noticed this for some time, especially when the same emotional hue seems to color a particular moment.

Well of course, I can’t know and there may be no added value in knowing because the body and mind are already fixed in a pas de duex that is working exactly as designed.   If this theory is true however, it does provide an opportunity to play a bit with our emotional experience.  Take for instance this morning, as I noticed a tear fall down my cheek as I was weaving on my little handmade potholder loom.  Thoughts of my MIA-MOM were heavy and the story of me not being good enough were dense as the cedar in my loom’s frame.  While my first thought was to go deeper into the story of abandonment, I opted instead to speculate that perhaps my body was creating a chemical reaction to clean some toxin from my system.  After all, my body seems to always know what to throw into the mix to keep me on balance — even if it means racing my heart to 130 bpm as my blood pressure plummets upon standing.  So in this moment, I accepted the notion that the tears seemed to serve a purpose.  The thoughts about my family of origin were merely easy targets to retrieve from the data base in order to produce the necessary catalyst for de-toxing my system.  All speculation of course … but isn’t it fun to play, even if we are just waving on traffic at the intersection?

Now if the theory was true, it shouldn’t matter at all, which thoughts were chosen to play upon the high def screen in our mind’s eye, as long as they had the same bio-chemical fingerprint as the tearful memories that were playing already in the background.  So I considered for a moment … what thought could I choose that would produce the same formula for success in terms of transmutation, but that wouldn’t get so messy with cellular triggers from my past?

Growing up I was a wonderful young thespian, always trying out for the school play or being overly dramatic with my boyfriend.  Being able to conjure up a tear or two was easy to do.  So for this morning’s audition in method acting I selected DEAD KITTENS!  I mean, sure it’s sad, I can certainly spill a few tears to appease my body-mind alchemy but it wouldn’t leave the sting of all those old dysfunctional stories after the body chemistry was re-balanced.

I sat quietly and closed my eyes.  I imagined a most flamboyant soap opera diva, who bared a striking similarity to my own facial facade, and I improvised a script in my mind about poor fluffy who was hit by a UPS truck that was delivering thyroid mediation.  The driver felt awful, as he handed both the package and the dead little body of the not-so-fluffy kitten to the door.

All the while, tears were able to continue to flow freely down my cheeks as I sat in silence.  And just as the imaginary UPS driver drove away … all was clear in my mind and body.  Was there still sadness about my family drama, sure I suppose if I went looking for it.  But there was no need to dredge up the past.  Not now.  It was over.  My body had achieved whatever it was that it wanted and I was free to move on to the next thing.

Were my thoughts actually fueling a beneficial body function?  Who knows?  Sometimes it doesn’t matter by way of conceptual truth, only that in the moment we feel like we are stopping the traffic.

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