Body – Control – NeuroSomatic Control
by pre.
Last month we learned about Neuro Somatic Interactions, the way the mind can effect the body. How it can raise and lower stress levels, influence hormones, affect the immune system etc.
This month we’ll be exploring ways to learn to gain greater control your body, and so it’s worth noting that most of your body’s actions are the result of neuro somatic interactions. Even more surely than your brain can send signals to control your immune system, it can send signals which control your muscles.
German poet and philosopher Fredrich Schiller once said “It is the mind itself which builds the body”, and this is true to a massive extent. The mind affects your glandular and endocrine systems, it effects the way you stand, walk, move, your posture and gait. These things all in turn affect your appetite, the way the fat is distributed around your body, which muscles are used often and so are large and strong and which are slack and short and weak.
You grow into the kind of body shape that you expect to grow into, neuro-somatic feedback mechanisms alter your body shape via appetite control, excercise, likely even adjusting your very metabolism rate.
A study done at the University Of Warwick finds that people’s body mass index (BMI) is influenced to some degree by their relative BMI. That is, if you have fat friends you get fatter. If you have thin friends you get thinner. Not because you’re actively dieting to be more like your friends, just because of the small subliminal influences they have on you and the way this subconsciously changes your behaviour.
We’re not trying to say that you can think yourself thin, it’ll take more than visualisation, dreaming and meditation to radically change the shape of your body. However, you can think yourself into a new attitude, a new state of mind, which in turn can affect your behaviour.
For the rest of this month we’ll discuss some ways in which your thoughts and behaviour can build patterns and habits that, over time, will affect your body. Frames of mind and addictions which will increase your control over your body, it’s movement, it’s shape.
Finally, as usual, at the end of the month we’ll present a guided meditation, a lucid dream, which should encourage these predispositions as you sleep, and afterwards, while you’re awake.