The Body/Mind/Spirit Connection

By: Rev. Nicole Vanderhoff, C.Ht, ATP

             We have all experienced the Body-Mind-Spirit connection.  Whenever you have read a recipe or seen an ad for a delicious meal, you may have noticed your mouth begins to water by just thinking about it, by just having imagined the meal in front of you.  And the more we think about it, the more images we make of how it looks, tastes, smells and even feels in our mouths, the more our bodies prepare ourselves to eat by contracting your stomach muscles, by growling and salivating even more.

          So now I want you to imagine a big, juicy, yellow lemon in front of you, cut into four pieces.  Now imagine sucking on this extremely juicy, sour, bitter lemon.  Your mouth waters. The more images you make of it, the more of a response you will get. This is the body-mind connection at work.

           These examples show how our bodies do not discriminate between sensory images in the mind and what we call reality.  Images may not have the same intense impact as what we experience as reality, but they elicit the same essential quality in our body.  Through viewing an electroencephalogram, electrical and chemical activity are seen while utilizing imagery, the same activity seen while taking in reality with our senses. Visualizing a picture activates the visual cortex while imaging sounds activates the auditory cortex. 

            So with these facts in mind, imagining yourself happy and healthy triggers and activates certain electrical and chemical responses in your body.  For example, imagining yourself happy triggers a serotonin release within your body, who needs drugs anymore?!  In the same respect, research has shown that those with a positive attitude heal much faster and with less stress and complications.

Taking an Active Role

            So now its time to take an active role for our body, mind and spirit. 

            In today's world, many people are seeking alternative therapeutic methods.  Understandably so given that people usually spend more time discussing the pros and cons of a car purchase with a salesman than completely going over all their health concerns with a doctor.  When you go to a doctor, their only choices are drugs, which are just a band aid, surgery, or, my favorite, "let's wait and see if it gets worse".  The "bigger picture" is often never addressed.  Doctors work only on a physical level and this leaves your emotional, mental, and spiritual bodies (the various auric field frequencies) still in chaos.  They don't ask you about the stress you've endured lately, the emotional issues going on, or even about your spiritual crisis.  It's out of their domain.  They may just tell you, "I don't see anything wrong.  It's probably just stress", but that doesn't make your issue any better.  That's when you need mind and spirit therapy.  

            Doctor's can do what they can for the physical body, like putting a band-aid over it in the form of pills, but so long as our emotional, mental, and spiritual bodies are still in chaos, its going to go right back into our physical body.  So we need to take this active role in helping our emotional, mental, and spiritual selves so that physically, we can be in a state of well-being.  So this means we may need to reach out for the best that medical science has to offer but we also need to reach within to utilize our own internal resources for healing.  This also means we may need to seek other alternative methods to heal the mental and spiritual energetic body.

            Delving further into the Body-Mind connection, we must realize that our body is made up of many different systems- musculoskeletal, respiratory, gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, nervous, immune, and more- each linked to the other, like a chain.  When there is too much stress on our system, whether it is emotional, physical, mental or spiritual stress, it becomes an overpowering force pulling on both ends of the chain.  Something gives, something has to break.  We all have a weal link, a weak system, which breaks under stress.

            For some of us, it's a break in the immune system causing recurrent colds or allergic reactions.  For others, the nervous system breaks causing depression or migraines.  A break in the gastrointestinal worsens IBS.

            Often we are unaware that these stresses are connected to our physical health.  We all need to become aware of this Body-Mind connection for optimal health.  The current medication and technology to cure us has not been able to solve the level of mystery and individual uniqueness when it comes to health and healing.  That's because we are made up of so much more than our physical body.  So we need to keep this in mind when healing the body.

Healing the Mind

            When we speak of healing the mind, however, we speak of the unseen world.  It is the world of thought, feeling, attitude, belief and imagination.  The Body-Mind spirit connection teaches us that these unseen energies manifest in our physical body, whether we acknowledge these energies or not.  And it still affects our physiology and biochemistry.  We can't discount this energy because we can't see it.  We don't see the individual atoms and molecules we are made up of, or the space in between these atoms.  We don't see that we are 99.99999999% empty space.  We don't see that all matter is 99.9% empty space.  We don't see the mind either but we know it's there. We may not see its energy that affects us, but it does. 

            So when healing the mind, faster and greater results are seen when using hypnosis to achieve your desired goals.  We only use 12% of our mind.  The other 88% is the unseen and unknown subconscious.  Hypnosis aligns your 12% conscious wants and desires to your subconscious behaviors and reactions so that our minds work for us, not against us.  Then we have 100% of our mind behind our efforts. 

            Healing on a spiritual level can be many things.  It can be anything which closes the gap between who we are and who we aspire to be, in terms of a greater purpose in life.  It could also be anything which closes the gap between our sense of inner aloneness and some sense of a connection to something greater than ourselves, this unity.

            When we transcend this inner aloneness and realize our connection to God, we realize that our connection with infinity, with everything.  We realize everything is connected and infinite.  God, when you get down to the truth and core of every religion, is all knowing, all loving, the infinite.  God is everything.  The common denominator in the universe is atoms, energy.  So for the entire universe to be made up of energy, God is energy.  We are made in the image of God.  We are energetic beings.  This is our connection to everything, to God.  So when healing the b/m, spiritually must be at the core of healing b/c the core is the energy that mobilizes our body. 

             Realizing our connection to everything, in and of itself will bring us deep love and inner peace.  Having our mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual bodies aligned and in harmony keeps us in optimal health and brings us a sense of well being and happiness.  Healing is a ceaseless process, but it brings us these feelings of wholeness and a profound connection to all that is.  And when we realize our connection to God and the connection within, we can realize our fullest potential. 

Achieving Your Fullest Potential

             You see it in your minds eye, you think, feel and act as if you already have it, feeling the gratitude for having achieved it.  You would have then just engaged your mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual bodies in creating your fullest potential.  I dare you to try it.

            So I keep mentioning your mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual bodies.  Bodies, referring to our energetic body.  Everything has a frequency, a vibration.  This includes the way your emotions vibrate from your body, your minds own frequency, the frequency of the dense atoms that make up your physical body and the vibration of your higher self, your spiritual body.  These frequencies that surround us are referred to as our aura.

           Connecting and healing our body, mind and spirit leads us to greatness and allows us to cast away our doubts in ourselves, knowing that you can achieve your fullest potential so long as you continue to focus and vibrate your whole being, your mental, emotional, physical, and spirituals bodies on your desire.  That is when we can live at our fullest potential.

           There are so many ways in which one can connect their body, mind, and spirit.  I use crystals, imagery and crystal bowls for energetic and chakra clearing and balancing.  Crystals are used to amplify, store, and split energy.  When using crystals with your chakras, the crystal are able to amplify your energy vortex to open and balance them if needed.  Crystals are able to split all the frequencies of light into 7 main vibrating colors; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.  Each vibration of the color corresponds to the same vibration of a chakra.  There are 7 colors to match the 7 main chakras.  The root chakra, the slowest vibrating main chakra, is related to the earthly, material issues.  This chakra corresponds to the slowest vibrating color, red.  The crystals balance the frequency of the chakra that corresponds to one of the 7 main color vibrations.  Crystals aren't the only way to balance chakras.  Your images in your mind remember can work in the same way as reality however like I mentioned earlier, it may not have the same intense impact.  I use both, along with other techniques for a powerful healing.

            Now let's imagine, for a moment, an acorn trying to make sense of itself, by describing itself.  It may say, "I'm about an inch long, flat on one side, pointed on the other, brown in color, hard to the touch, etc., etc."  But this description fails to capture the true essence of the acorn.  It's important to realize the acorn cannot make sense of itself without knowing about the oak tree, it's potential, and without knowing that deep within itself, there is a mechanism waiting to unfold which knows exactly how to become that fullness of expression of the oak tree.  When this acorn is given as much nourishment and sunlight as it can get, then it is able to grow into its fullest potential.  Now the questioned remains, are you willing to give yourself all the nourishment you need to achieve your fullest potential?