Feeding Frenzy
I discovered today that the Monterey Bay Aquarium has two live feeding web casts each day! I so enjoyed watching the scuba diver in underwater kelp cam feeding the garibaldi by hand as my daughter sat by my side. We haven’t been out to a zoo in more years than she can remember and it was great fun sharing the show with her in this virtual field trip. My own father use to take me to the New York Aquarium every year as I was growing up. The cellular memories go very deep and I could feel all of the happy hormones flowing through my body system as my daughter and I watched the underwater show.
Soon my teenage son was shuffling through the door, and soon after there were barbs about missing assignments, poor test grades and a phone call from the English teacher. In an instant the happy hormones were flushed away by a storm of caustic compounds flowing through my veins. Once in the throes of a chemical squall it seems that everything is fodder to feed the machine. And so the story goes.
That night, I woke at 2:00 a.m. and found myself stumbling to the loo whilst engaged in a mental soliloquy about my prodigal son. As I returned to my covers and curled up against my hairless dog, I realized that I had been far away in contemplation purgatory. Upon shining the light on the wayward cerebral noise, I began to feel my body sink and relax into the pillows. Moments later I was once again deep in mental drama, this time I was conjuring up thoughts of my Mother and recycling bits of conversations that never did take place. ‘Ok.‘ I thought to myself, ‘Your Mother is not here. Come back to bed.‘
No more than sixty seconds sped by before another thought pattern was recognized by the witnessing presence. Why are you thinking about this? The enquiry came unbidden. Its just what minds DO. I thought to myself. But on this occasion, there seemed to be something under the surface that wanted to be seen. I rested in the stillness of the wee morning hour until the investigation moved on its own impetus.
Though each story line had different characters and slightly altered scripts, each seemed to have the same chemical fingerprint. ‘Why would my thoughts each carry this same payload?‘ I wondered. Then I recalled a lecture I once heard by molecular biologist Candice Pert. She told us that our cells had receptors to specific peptides. And the more we experienced a peptide in our body, the more receptors our cells began to have to these specific chemical chains.
In a flash the metaphor “That guy makes my blood boil!” took on a literal instance and I could feel the peptides of anger and outrage being gobbled up by my cells. It was a clear case of cell level addiction to a particular peptide. The brain in compliance with the cellular demand generated thoughts that would produce the specific amino acids. My brain/body system was creating and feeding off of the negative emotions.
In that realization, in the middle of the night, I was awake … and could easily in the peace of a still mind fall sound asleep.
