Hello well-being family,
Lovely to be with you again.
I've been taking part in a heart coherence challenge for the past,
Well it must be about 15 days,
It's for the whole month.
Well where are we now?
I'm completely confused about the date.
Anyway it's been about two or three weeks and it's been so fascinating.
So I wanted to do it because I wanted to dive deeper into the heart coherence.
It's one of my favourite meditations.
I think that it has the power to do all kinds of wonderful positive things for us because we connect to ourselves,
To our true self and can,
When we come into coherence between the brain and the heart,
It creates this incredible feeling of strength and positivity.
At least this is my own experience and certainly it's what I've heard from other people.
So I wanted to dive deeply into the various ways that we can use the heart coherence and how people are using it and it's just been absolutely mind-blowing.
So I wanted to talk today a little bit about one of the concepts that we discussed during this challenge and it's this idea,
I think it's just so profound and I want to say immediately that I am by no means an expert on this,
But the work that I've done has given me so much anecdotal evidence and I'm talking about the work that I've done on myself but also with my clients,
Right,
And it's this idea that,
I suppose I'll start at the beginning,
That our thinking creates our reality.
How we think and what we believe creates the reality.
It creates our behaviours,
It creates the reality of what happens to us because we subtly inflict ourselves,
If you like,
On the world so that we're constantly creating the experiences that match how we think the world is and how we think we are in the world.
I hope that makes sense,
I'm not sure that I'm making a lot of sense but anyway hopefully that does make sense.
And so the way that we think influences or predicts our reality and here's the kicker,
95% of what we think is actually not in control of the conscious mind,
Right,
Our conscious mind is just the tip of an iceberg and 95% of our beliefs and thoughts are arising out of the unconscious 95% of our mental processes.
And Freud talked about this,
Freud I suppose was the first person to really talk about the unconscious and Jung and they demonstrated the existence of the unconscious,
At least Jung did,
With some very elegant experiments.
But that 95% of us which is submerged from the conscious mind,
Which expresses itself through dreaming,
Expresses itself through beliefs and ultimately expresses itself through the pattern of our lives,
The way that our lives unfold,
Our relationship to money,
Our relationship to love,
Our relationship to time,
Our relationship to what we,
To ourselves,
To what we think we are capable of,
Really comes from these deep-rooted beliefs in our unconscious.
So that's where we're going to start and what I'm really interested here is that it's,
So it's almost as if we're running programs that are occurring in the background but they're so powerful that they're actually affecting the way our lives turn out.
Isn't,
I find that remarkable and it's certainly been proven with experiments where they've,
We'll talk about the experiments in a little while,
But what I'm interested in is where do those programs come from and obviously partly they come from our own experiences,
Our conditioning,
The conditioning that we've had in our lives.
So this is basically all the experiences that we've had from the time that we were born,
Even from our birth itself.
But those programs also come from our lineage.
So this is the really interesting thing,
That there are epigenetic studies which show that trauma and experiences that have happened at least three generations ago and probably more are encoded in our DNA,
Not in the sequence of the DNA but in the way that the genes are expressed and that that gene expression is passed down through generations.
So they've studied people who were in the Holocaust,
They've studied prisoners of war and looked at the offspring and so the children and the grandchildren and done some very elegant experiments with mice where they exposed them to the scent of cherry blossom and then gave them a little tiny electric shock through their feet.
I know that doesn't sound so great but what they've discovered is that even three generations and with the mice many more generations later there was still a stress response in response to the smell of cherry blossom.
There is still a patterning that has happened further down the line which is attributed to epigenetics.
Which I just find absolutely fascinating because it means that we need to really know where we've come from.
We need to really understand the stories of the people who went before us and often we don't.
Like I don't have a lot of connection with even my grandparents because they all had died by the time my own parents were seven or eight.
So I had no personal contact with my own grandparents and yet we know that three generations previously the experiences that those people had have impacted us.
So the question is how do we work with this because if these programs are so powerful that they're impacting us and and shaping the way that our lives develop then we need to find a powerful way to be able to work with those unconscious programs.
And this is where I come back to the heart coherence because there are many ways to work with the unconscious programming and of course psychotherapy is a wonderful way and I feel that I've freed myself from a lot of the unconscious programming through psychotherapy and also through,
I did a workshop,
A really a three-day workshop.
It was very intense with,
I've forgotten his name,
He wrote a book called It Didn't Start With You which is all about exactly this.
It's all about the inheritance of trauma and the inheritance of usually negative programming I have to say.
When I say programming it's usually negative programming that comes from our ancestral line.
And I did a very intense three-day workshop with about a hundred other people but after I did that workshop I felt so much lighter like something had lifted away from me and he had us really dig deeply into experiences from,
Not experience,
Into our experience,
Our current day experience and who in our past might have actually had those experiences.
Because quite often we are left with experiences that actually aren't ours.
Like and I'll use myself as a good example.
So both my parents were orphaned at an early age.
I grew up with two parents but I grew up feeling like an orphan.
And obviously you can say that that was being modelled for me,
That I was seeing that in my parents' behaviour,
That I was absorbing that energetically from my parents.
But I think there's enough evidence now to know that it's also coming through in the way that the DNA is expressed.
And I find that absolutely fascinating.
And of course we now know that it can go back multiple generations.
So it's very interesting to look back in your own family tree.
And one way that you can do this is to actually draw a tree.
Draw yourself a tree,
The tree of your own life.
This is a lovely coaching exercise and I've kind of gone a bit off-piste with the actual exercise.
But what I'm going to invite you to do is to actually draw a physical tree.
And in the roots what I'd like you to do is to think about where you've come from.
Think about your parents and their lives.
Think about what you know about your grandparents and their lives.
And any other family members,
Great-aunts,
Great-uncles,
Great- great-grandparents.
Is that a thing?
I don't know.
But anyway you know what I'm saying,
The fourth generation back.
And really think about what you know about those people.
Ask if you have any stories,
If others have stories about those people.
And then try to really imagine what life must have been like for them and see whether there's anything in your reality that matches what these people might have been through.
So you can be very elaborate with your roots,
Right?
And then draw the trunk of the tree and the branches,
Which is you,
For the trunk is you and the branches are your life now.
And have a look at those branches.
Do they spread,
You know,
Exuberantly and creatively so that you're expressing yourself in the world?
Or are they looking a little bit stunted that you're keeping yourself from really expressing who you are authentically?
And during the exercise think about how the way you are in the world might be impacted by the stories and the roots that you come from.
And this is the first step really in,
Like you can,
There are further exercises obviously in releasing and letting go of the stories.
And I refer you back to Mark's book It Didn't Start With You because he gives a lot of fantastic tools for how to release the programming and the stories from the past.
And it's very compassionate,
Right?
It's not about being angry about anything or resentful.
It's about being highly compassionate and just handing back trauma which doesn't belong to you back to the generation where it does belong.
And it can have a really powerful effect in liberating you in your life now.
Because your ancestors don't want you to be limited by the things that happen to them.
They want you to flourish.
They want you to be wildly happy.
They want you to be wildly successful.
That's for sure.
So let me know how you get on with this.
It's a beautiful exercise and it can have a really profound effect on the way that you live your life every day and the way that your life unfolds.
See you next time.
