The Answer is within you, learn to unlock it. That statement has so much more meaning today than ever before in history. “The Answer” can seem to be such a broad statement. A first reaction says it should mean something different for everyone, but does it really? Exciting areas of medical science that have been studying how the mind and body interact are showing that there is a common core underlying emotional weakness. That knowledge is now enhancing the pathways offered through spirituality and psychology for finding “The Answer” within.
Thoughts to Emotions
Everywhere there is evidence of how assaulting the effects of the everyday world are to the human mind, body and spirit. Moment after moment, there is a stream of reactions rushing through people’s brains and bodies. Frustration, fear, anger, or depression and their resulting stress, the eruptions are never ending. Even in sleep, the dreaming brain reshapes the emotions but still affects the body. The answer people are vaguely aware of seeking is that of meaning in life, which they hope will bring a philosophical peace. The real answer that brings that inner peace may be less specific than people expect but it is there deep within them to unlock. Its mysteries are less mysterious than ever before.
The Eruption of Emotion
The frustration, anger and depression many people feel are called negative emotions by psychology. Spirituality decries them as the negative effects of the conscious, everyday world. Science separates itself from value-based words like negative, but it also sees those reactions as getting in the way of people’s positive experience and expression of life.
Science takes negative emotions down to a more basic level and refers to them as physical and chemical reactions that are damaging to the body. The body enables the life force to express itself in the conscious world. Certainly something damaging to the body would be considered negative by either psychology or spirituality, fields dedicated to helping people exist and express themselves with as much health and positive strength as possible. Science, then, is helping to define more specifically the forces of deterioration, both philosophical and physical. Whatever one views as the specific sources of negativity expressed through people’s lives, it is the process or eruption of negative emotion that is the core problem.
Stopping the Eruption
Negative emotions are powerful forces that shape lives. When people who are hurting seek therapy or spiritual counsel, help can begin. But with the new understanding of negative emotions as physical and chemical eruptions that are damaging to the body, it is clear that the healing must be deeper. The tools of the psychotherapist or spiritual counselor, though important for people, are more directly focused on what is triggering those eruptions. Emotional pain is often great. At times it is hard for people to see through the fear or anger, and to stop the body from reacting with stress to those triggers, however well a therapist may work to help in understanding them. And, when people work through one negative emotional trigger, how will they handle the new triggers that emerge every day?
The Drug Model
A major evolution toward more direct management of the eruptions of emotions in the body has been in the area of pharmaceuticals. When people take a medication directed at mood or emotional change they feel differently due to chemicals changing chemicals. Unfortunately, taking drugs is in many ways still a crapshoot. Their dosage is commonly adjusted by asking the patient “how they feel” and by that observational assessment; the dosage of chemicals is altered. Also, outside of clear psychosis, it could be fairly said that average people should resort to drugs only for short-term management of emotional states. And, many who are hurting do not want to turn to drugs.
Neurological Tools
The things that go on between a therapist or spiritual counselor and a client generally involve talking about or counseling about what is happening that is causing distress in a person’s life. At times the professional may employ practices like relaxation therapy, and the spiritual counselor may help the person partly through the use of meditation or a quiet state of prayer. Those ways of using what could be called an “altered mental state” are a beginning of more directly quieting the “eruptions” of emotions in the body. They could be considered neurological tools (affecting the working of the brain and body more directly) as opposed to psychological tools (affecting the content of the mind, thoughts, memories, etc.) Using a computer analogy, neurological tools would more directly affect the hardware of the brain, and psychological tools more directly affect the software of thoughts and memories, what the brain does.
The Ancient Alert
There is a powerful new addition to tools a therapist or counselor can use that have a more direct affect on the hardware of the brain. It is a tool that enhances the effects of using a concentrated state such as relaxation therapy or meditation. The founders of the North American Institute of NEURO-THERAPY, Henry Snyder and Marilyn Michael developed it in the 1980s and called it SUBVERBAL SHIFTING®. For fifteen years they have taught it to therapeutic professionals of all types and to people interested in their own health and well-being.
SUBVERBAL SHIFTING is a way of stimulating within a person a reaction that is described as an Ancient Alert. While a therapist or spiritual counselor guides a person through the experience of a focused or concentrated state of mind, basically quieting conscious, analytical thinking, a very brief sound stimulus is used. The sound stimulus presented to the focused mind causes a fraction of a second shifting of mental states out of the quieted mental state and into a mental state of readiness for survival. It is a healthy way of tricking the hardware of the brain into responding as if the person were needing to react in a survival situation. The brain shifts into automatic, the chemistry of the body begins preparing for possible extreme reactions required. But, because there is no overriding survival response required, the conscious mechanisms shift back in and the person’s brain and body return to a focused, relaxed state.
The After Effect
Explained by its creators in scientific language, it is the after effect of using this process that so dramatically benefits the person. In readying itself for survival, the reactions of the brain and body dissipated the electrical and chemical residue or signature of emotions like guilt, anger, or depression that existed in the body prior to the shift. Like shaking the screen of an Etch-A-Sketch®, the person gets up from the session retaining thoughts of the things that bothered them but without the chemicals of emotion attached to those thoughts.
The Body’s Natural Therapeutic Ability
SUBVERBAL SHIFTING, by triggering the Ancient Alert, dramatically diminishes the intensity and duration of emotions that a person feels. It takes advantage of a natural response of the brain to do what drugs attempt to do, change the electrical and chemical basis of emotions. SUBVERBAL SHIFTING more directly diminishes the eruptions of emotions.
The Answer Within
The discoveries of scientists studying mind body interaction have allowed development of tools like SUBVERBAL SHIFTING. They truly unlock answers within. If people can be helped to benefit from them they can stimulate the desired long-term ability to manage negative emotions without requiring an undesired dependence on medication. Unlocking this inner ability can enhance the traditional help offered by therapists and spiritual counselors. With more ability to directly diminish the eruptions of fear, guilt, frustration, and their accompanying stress, people can blossom emotionally, and spiritually. With clarity of mind and calmness of body they can truly find the philosophical peace they seek.
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SUBVERAL SHIFTING is a registered trademark of the North American Institute of Clinical Therapy
Etch A Sketch is a registered trademark of the The Ohio Art Company.