Change Your Mind – Change Your Brain – Change Your Behavior
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
Ron Eslinger, CRNA, MA, BCH www.Healthyvisions.com
Hypnosis Putting You Imagination to Work Page 183
How can our beliefs change our behaviors?
Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., professor at Wisconsin University and Stanford University Schools of Medicine, pioneered stem cell research in the 1960’s. His research asserts living beings are not machines run by biochemicals and DNA. In his book Biology of Belief, he states “What we now know is that our entire biology is shaped by the intelligence of each of our fifty trillion cells. And the single most important way to influence them is through the energy of our beliefs.”
With this in mind we must explore our own thoughts and how they shape who we are and who we become. What we know from his research is that we were programmed starting five months before we were born by the energy of our parent’s thoughts and our surroundings. The stresses, the happiness, the fears and the worries they had were programmed into us.
We continued to be affected by outside environmental signals until the age of six and continuing to a lesser degree until the age of nine. So in actuality we are today in attitude and personality what we learned before birth and until the age of nine. We were programmed like computers or recorded on like a cassette tape so that we just keep playing the same programs over and over. Unless we change the recording, we cannot change the behavior.
For example, you may have a fear of snakes because one or both of your parents was afraid of snakes. Imagine yourself as a child with a parent playing in the back yard. Now imagine seeing a snake in the grass. Your parent screams “Snake!” The parent grabs your hand and jerks you into the house. You were just taught that snakes are something to be feared. However, when your parent sees the snake and says, “look there is a snake in the yard” and explains that some snakes are harmless and that others are dangerous, perhaps you would have a respect for snakes but not associate them with fear.
The most amazing thing discovered by Dr. Lipton is that any behavior we have acquired in the computer brain or cassette tape of the mind can be re-recorded or “written over.” However, the only way that can be achieved is while someone is in the Alpha or Theta brain-wave frequency, which is actually the frequency we are in all the time until the age of six and Alpha until the age of around nine. Therefore, if we can only record over behaviors in the Alpha or Theta brain wave frequency, how do we do it?
Simple – either by meditating or practicing self-hypnosis. Both involve Alpha and Theta brain wave states. Therefore, if you allow yourself to see new possibilities while in a hypnotic state you begin to change or rewire the brain. When you rewire the brain, the chemicals produced by the brain send new messages to the cells which change the cells response which changes the behavior. The reason most people have trouble making the changes they want is because they live as if today were yesterday. They continue to carry around the baggage from the past. When I teach people how to use self-hypnosis I instruct them to “see yourself, not as you are, but as you want to be…, as if you have already achieved your goal and imagine it in a realistic and believable manner.”
You can make changes in your life by changing your thoughts. Your thoughts change your brain activity. When your brain activity changes, so does your behavior.