Maintaining your Reiki honeymoon period
I heard a really interesting interview the other day with Bruce Lipton, who is a renowned scientists and leader in bridging science and spirit. I found this interview really interesting and thought it would be good to give you the gist of the contents.
Firstly, as short background note. Dr Lipton began his scientific career as a cell biologist. He worked at the Department of Anatomy at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine. His research on muscular dystrophy, studies employing cloned human stem cells, focused on the molecular mechanisms controlling cell behaviour. So he is eminently qualified to explain these complex issues to us, and does so in words that we can easily comprehend.
During his research, he put one single stem cell – this is like an embryonic cell – into a Petri dish. Every 10 hours the cell would divide, and after two weeks he had thousands of cells in the Petri dish. All the cells were genetically identical because they came from the same parent. He then took the cells from the Petri dish and put them into three separate dishes, and in each dish he provided a different culture environment in which the cells were living. In one dish the cells formed muscle, in a second dish the cells formed bone, and in a third dish the cells formed fat cells.
There is a profoundly important consequence of this research for us, and it concerns the issue of what controls life. Scientists used to think that genes controlled life, but in this experiment all the cells were identical, so the cells were not responding to the genes, but to the environment. It was the environment and the cells’ interaction that lead to the selection and activation of the genes within the cells. This holds true whether we are dealing with a cell in a Petri dish or one of the fifty trillion cells in our own bodies. We are essentially skin covered Petri dishes with a culture medium called blood, and the composition of that culture medium affects the state of our cells, as demonstrated by the stem cell experiments.
This leads us to another most important question: what controls the chemistry of our blood, which in turn controls our genetics and our behaviour? The surprising answer is our perceptions of life.
There are two parts to our mind: the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. They are two different pieces of equipment, they don’t work in the same way, they don’t communicate in the way that we thought they did.
The conscious mind is the creative mind, connected to your spirit, your source, your personal identity. The subconscious mind is more like a tape or video recorder that records life experiences and then when you push the button it plays them back. It is habit, automatic, you don’t have to think about it. We use the phrase that someone ‘pushes our buttons’, and when that happens all this behaviour unfolds that surprises you – and that is because the subconscious contains all these habits. Your wishes, your desires, what you want in life are in your conscious, creative mind; your subconscious mind just has downloaded programmes. The fundamental programmes that are in the subconscious mind are not ours – we get them from our parents, our family, our community, and they occur in the first six years of our life, before our consciousness is fully engaged. The fundamental programmes in the subconscious are transmitted from family to family, generation to generation, and unconsciously from parent to child. So we have conscious creative, and we have subconscious habit.
Here is the problem: science has recognised that only 5% of our life comes from our conscious creative mind, 95% of our life is from our habit mind – and those programmes are not even ours! So I am not creating what I want, but what I have been programmed to create. Most of these fundamental programmes are disempowering, limiting, or even self-sabotaging. We expend a lot of effort in our lives in outgrowing these programmes, but they are called subconscious for a reason – they occur without us seeing them. We move through our life day by day with our conscious mind out in front telling us ‘yes, this is what I want in my life, this is what I want to create: health, happiness, romance, these are things that I want and I am creating them’. Then we find out from neuroscience that we are only using that mind 5% of the time, 95% of the time we am operating from the invisible programmes that were put into the subconscious.
Here is a scenario to illustrate the point. You have a friend, you know his behaviour very well, and you happen to know your friend’s parents. At some point you begin to recognise that your friend shares some of the exact same behaviours that their parent expresses, so you tell him, ‘Hey, Bill, you know you are just like your Dad’. And then you back away from Bill, because Bill will go ballistic and say ‘How can you compare me to my Dad?’ Bill is the only person who doesn’t see that he behaves like his Dad, everyone else sees that. Bill is doing automatic subconscious programmes that he downloaded from his father. When he plays the programmes, because they are subconscious, he doesn’t see them; basically, whatever behaviour programmes he inherited from his father, that behaviour is running Bill’s life, whether he sees it or not.
We are all Bill. Every one of us is operating from subconscious programmes that are invisible to us. And here is the problem, if our behaviours are invisible to us and as we move forward in the world and struggle to achieve our goals, we have the belief that the universe is against us, we always have to work so hard and are not getting what we want. And that is what we believe, because we believe that we are trying to move in the direction our conscious mind wishes. Now we find out we are only moving in that direction 5% of the time, 95% of the time our subconscious mind is running the show, but we don’t see it, and as a result we shoot ourselves in the foot, we sabotage ourselves and we blame the outside world.
If we understand the nature of this, and we programme our subconscious beliefs to be in alignment and in harmony with what we want, that would mean that unconsciously – when you aren’t paying attention – you would still be moving towards where you wanted to go … but we have all been limited by the programming that we got in the first 6 years of our life.
You remember the honeymoon effect – you felt exuberantly healthy and had lots of energy – that was not an accident, we created that honeymoon effect. We are only conscious of our lives 5% of the time because our subconscious mind is always moving around, thinking about the future, thinking about the past, solving problems in our head; when our minds are not paying attention that’s when the subconscious mind runs the show. It turns out that during the honeymoon phase it is so wonderful to be alive that your conscious mind doesn’t wander, in the honeymoon period you are running your life strictly from your conscious mind. Your conscious mind has your wishes and desires, and when you are running your mind wholly from your conscious mind (what the Buddhists call being mindful) you are creating your life according to your wishes. The moment your conscious mind begins to wander, you start running your mind from the invisible subconscious programmes from inherited patterns.
During the honeymoon period you are creating the wonderful life you want – the honeymoon ends when life gets so busy that your conscious mind doesn’t stay focused in the present moment anymore and starts to wander. The moment your mind starts to wander you play the invisible programmes … and those behaviours are not like the ones in your conscious mind. That is when your vision of heaven on earth starts to stall and misfire. However, we did it once and so we can do it again. If you understand how you create it, you can understand how you can keep it.
What the experiments with Petri dishes and the understanding of the conscious and unconscious mind reveals to us helps us to understand how we can maintain the wonderful feeling we have after our Reiki class, when everything seems possible – attaining health and happiness as Usui sensei promised.
Dr Lipton has shown us that the way we see life causes our nervous system to release chemistry into our brain – neuropeptides, hormones, growth factors, etc. This chemistry derived from the brain is added to the culture medium of our body called blood, which in turn controls the fate of our cells. It is a very simple reality that as you change your mind, as you change your beliefs, you change your biology. Deciding for yourself what principles you wish to live by, and how you wish to respond to situations … living in alignment with your conscious mind.
No longer shall we see ourselves as victims of heredity, receiving genes we didn’t select, receiving genes we cannot change, and believing that these genes control our life … for the new science reveals that we are totally masters of our biology and thus of our state of mind. The way we see life, the way we respond to life, changes our biology and our behaviour and also affects the way we live in this world. We learned how in the Reiki class, so let us choose to create our future in Reiki honeymoon mode, in conscious alignment with our desire to create a healthy and happy life for ourselves and a tranquil state of mind.
See how powerful you really are in controlling your fate … and watch how the effects ripple out to affect the fate of the world in which we live!
For more information about Bruce Lipton and his work see:
Comments are currently closed.