Heal the Body

1. Human behavior is complex. There is no such thing as a single cause for any action or illness, while, culturally, our brains are prepared to accept that the answer to "Why?" is "Because." One satisfying answer such as, "Because of feelings", "Because of diet", "Because of carcinogens", "Because of cholesterol" or "Because of pollen" will stop the exploration for other parts of the complexity of the cause. Our process is to focus on feelings, stress and emotion in order to manage them so they will support health and the healing process provided by the management of other aspects of the causal complex such as diet and medical treatment.

2. Feelings stress and emotion are physical changes in the human body, not ethereal and mysterious forces which invade the weak and unhealthy. These physical and physiological changes alter every tissue, organ and system in the body. They are meant to. Some of these changes can produce lesions and malfunctions almost single handedly, such as ulcers and blood pressure diseases, but most ally themselves with other causes of illness and produce their havoc that way, such as those illnesses which are produced when feelings suppress the immune system.

3. It is a basic fact of human life that we train our brains to act for us. Usually we do this unawarely, as when we trained it to walk for us, talk for us and relate for us. We also do it quite awarely, as when we train the brain to operate a complex weapons system to fly it for us. In this "training the brain" approach, we will trick the brain into revealing ways we have trained it to use feelings for illness, and we will awarely train it to use feelings, stress and emotion to support health and the healing process.

Illness exists in a context that supports it. Both wellness and effective treatment exist in a context that support them. These contexts are conventionally referred to as "unconscious" or "subconscious". For us to do our work, they must become "conscious". To support this, we will use the terms "unaware" and "aware" for the liberating effect of their free and volunteer nature. You have only to make the unaware forces in your life aware to begin to change them. Since most of us have been building powerful defenses of our unaware actions all our lives, we will use several methods of tricking our brains into revealing our unaware control patterns, and making them aware before our defenses know about it.

Once our undesirable and controlling patterns become aware we can begin to interfere with them, and to replace them with patterns we design today for our lives today, as today may be different from our childhood, when the old patterns were invented by us.

The human being is a complex system of elements which are integrated in such a way that a small change in one area can affect remote corners of life. Some parts of this complexity are well understood, while other parts are only beginning to be known. Little has been done to describe and explain the effects of one aspect of the human complexity upon the others, and to accomplish the purposes of the DCI Wellness Workshops, much understanding of this little known area must be assumed. Biochemical changes and sympathetic nervous system messages produce changes in the tissues, organs and systems of the body. When these changes are monitored and communicated to the brain we call these complex configurations "feelings". Some of these changes affect health directly, some indirectly and some not at all.

Foods and drugs such as sugar, alcohol and caffeine can alter the tissues, organs and systems creating and altering feelings, and health as well. Diet can have significant effects on feelings and stress, and directly on health. When these complex factors are considered as a whole, human health can better be understood and supported. Wellness can only exist in a context that supports it.

The role of illness in each person's life is an integral part of that person's way of life. The role can be all the way from a "bother" to a central way of social relating. Furthermore, people who like to help others who are sick are in great danger of having learned the flip side as well in their social conditioning. How can you learn the importance of helping others without also learning the pleasures of receiving all that attention and help? Then, with this predilection to illness, the human being quickly and easily learns the feelings states which support or produce it. Thus the impact of feelings, stress and emotion on the individual's body become the primary control mechanism for illness within the context of a way of life.

Wellness and illness are ways of life. They are not isolated, but suspended in the integrated human system of each of us. If I have maintained illness and wish now to sustain wellness, such a change will require change in every area of how I live. That's how the integrated human system works. We are integrated around (or to include) illness, or wellness. It is not enough to want to be well and then go to your doctor. Wellness includes such things as beliefs, values and attitudes, feelings and behavior patterns, and all those external elements such as relationships, jobs, hobbies, social position and group membership. Change requires that all of these be redesigned and altered, sometimes significantly. There, to manage such change, must be the self with its present intent to enjoy the freedom of wellness.

The situation is further complicated by a simple problem with learned causal relations in the brain. Cause is learned late in life, as described in The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy, when Mom takes her child down to the pier to watch the sun dawn and arise over the water. "Do that again", says the child. If in the child dogs become associated with bites and fear, then fear is associated with dogs. At this point "fear causes dogs". Such a person may make dogs of bushes, notice dogs others fail to see, and perceive dogs around the corner. Furthermore, if it is true that dogs can smell fear and that dogs attack the fearful, that person is caught in a self-fulfilling prophecy, and fear of dogs will increase. It is worth noting that most people become afraid of excessive cold and angry about unpleasant sweaty warmth. This makes the cold colder and the heat hotter. If you practice getting angry at the cold or fearful of the heat, you will be more comfortable in both instances. The same is true of illness which is causally linked to feelings. Some researchers have linked depression with cancer, and isn't it ironical that cancer patients are often treated as though contagious, and get few visitors, while heart patients, whose illness has been linked to agitation, get many (agitating?) visitors. Even socially we apparently behave in ways which support the illness rather than recovery.

Simple feedback, in which we get anxious about getting anxious, angry about getting angry and fearful about becoming frightened, further intensifies the power of the place of illness in our ways of life. But that's a clue to how to make a wellness way of life more solid and impenetrable. This is a common syndrome in all of human life. When you pay attention to an element of your life that you want to get rid of, you will increase it simply by your attention, and the behavior patterns that the attention stimulates. Even when you turn your attention "away from" something you do not want to show up in your life, that act of "away from illness" is the same as "toward illness". You pay attention to it and stimulate it either way. The elemental rule of how the brain works requires that you pay attention TO something else to produce change.

Some years ago the medical world assumed that the smooth muscles were involuntary, and that the autonomic nervous system which controls them is inaccessible to intervention. We now know that individuals can be taught to control these involuntary function. The culture, and most medical persons who live in it, still tend to react as though the "involuntary" is still involuntary. It is not. The unaware can be made aware, and then the attitudes, beliefs and behavior patterns which control our lives can become accessible and changed as desired. The "involuntary" will change as needed while we dictate the change.

As we grow older the things we do are woven into stronger and stronger configurations of belief, value, attitude and behavior. As we live, the way we do things becomes more solidly reinforced and interconnected with other areas of life and society. Small changes can disrupt remote areas of life, and aspects of life which are desirable and useful. When beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviors hold feelings states which promote or support illness, the changes which you will want to make may disrupt some other life adjustments, even relationships. The skills you will acquire in this workshop will equip you to take apart and reassemble all aspects of your life so that you may design it as you choose, even if that means detaching from those around you who enjoy helping you, and who need you to be ill for them to do that.

Life adjustments which rely upon illness are the "benefits", "secondary gains" or "payoffs" of the illness. There is an endless list of such rewards. Socially, in some settings your illness is the main topic. There is great approval for one who is valiantly struggling against an illness. There is attention and support for a sick person. The sick are rewarded by freedom from work, and sick days. These may be lost when recovery looms on the horizon, with nothing to replace the lost benefits. Many very subtle rewards may be held in the old memories of the individual. I just happen to have my great grandmother's sewing board which, as a child, I was allowed to have while bundled during one or another childhood sickness. It recalls for me my mother's doting kindness during sick times (evidently counterbalanced by my father's "never having had a sick day in his life"). Quantities of ginger ale and soda crackers were consumed on that board. Even if nobody responded similarly today, that memory could stimulate illness without my knowledge, or increase and extend it. The interpersonal meaning of illness and the interpersonal meaning of wellness, as you have experienced them, control much of the health in your life.

This role of secondary gain is increasingly being considered in illness, with some destructive side effects. The patient languishing in disease for the secondary benefits is notorious on hospital wards and greatly rejected. The hypochondriac is thought to have the illness "in his head" (in spite of the visible lesions). Others, pointing out the lesions, say, no, it's "real". Further, efforts such as this Wellness Workshop are said to be "blaming the patient" for his illness. The fact that a sick person has at her fingertips the methods which will greatly assist in recovery does not mean "blame", any more than the fact that I can voluntarily make the hairs on my arm stand up blames you for not being able to. Medical professionals tend to engage in "blame" in their parental professional stances and attitudes, a stance which is now changing.

Illness, like most of the rest of our behavior, is controlled partly by our social conditioning, what we have learned in the past and have integrated into our lives. Even though it may accurately be said that illness is something we DO, it is not something we can stop doing without new methods of redesigning the beliefs, values, attitudes and behavior patterns which form the way of life we are living and which support wellness or illness.

Clearly, the myths and assumptions about feelings demand explanation and replacement with a few simple facts. Feelings are not ethereal mysteries which drift around and light upon the heads of the weak, like women and sissy men. They are physiological events which alter every tissue, organ and system in the body. They do this for a purpose.

Suppose that you had a machine at home and that this machine would show you movies, wash your clothes and drive you to the store. This machine would need to change its configuration for each of these functions. So with the animal body. As an integrated system, it is at one time a machine for eating, then a machine for reproducing, a machine for fighting or a machine for thinking. To accomplish this, the body alters the nature of the tissues, organs and systems. These several integrated configurations are sensed by the brain (in the limbic system), and the changes are experienced as feelings. It is easier to understand when compared with the experience of a musical chord. The signals from the tissues, organs and systems are monitored by the sensory nerves and communicated to the limbic system where the "ethereal" experience is created. As in music, this limbic experience is communicated to other areas of the brain where memories, other feelings and actions are stored and now stimulated.

The physiological aspects of feelings are so universally known that common language uses physiological phrases for feelings experiences. "I can't stomach that", "Love is blind", "A blind rage", "hot" and "red" with anger, "blanched with fear", "A hair raising experience" and so on. These are accurate descriptions of how the body changes for different purposes, which then will be experienced by the brain as a "feeling". It is these different changes in the tissues, organs and systems in the body that support or single handedly create illness or wellness. These physiological changes are easily observed through the polygraph, which measures changes in skin temperatures, blood pressure, breathing rate and sweating. And the "lie detector" also confronts us with another very difficult fact about these physiological changes and the resulting feelings. Human beings are as different as snowflakes in how they produce, experience and react to feelings.

If you place a hundred human beings in a large stew pot and then pour in stress, there will be a hundred different reactions. This well known fact about the variability of feelings has led behavioral scientists to reject feelings as useful in helping people manage their lives. The other aspect of this fact is equally disrupting to therapists and psychologists. If you dip one human being into the stew pot of stress, you will discover that that human being responds in nearly the same way every time. Thus the lie detector operator begins work by exploring and establishing a "base line" for the person who is being tested.

Feelings are learned responses, and each individual learns them his or her own way. This fact means that there is really no such thing as psychology. There is only your psychology and my psychology. Feelings, learned differently by each of us, control our thoughts and behavior. There is only one expert in your feelings, in your psychology, and that expert is you. This is a double problem, one for you and one for the health professional. You have been lead to expect that the medical professional knows more about you than you do, and like the auto mechanic, that is true to a point. About the core of your life experiences, your feelings, and about how these support either wellness or illness, you are the only expert.

This is the crux of the matter. Feelings are the central managers of your life. They are physical. They are predictable and lawful. They determine your own personal psychology, your well-being or ill-being, and they are entirely your responsibility. Only you are the expert. Only you can learn how to set aright the learned responses which are designed to replicate your own family of origin and your society of origin, whether you want that to happen or not. Only you can block this destiny. Only you can design a way of life that fits your present intent.

And, finally, what exactly are feelings, stress and emotion? Feelings are the physiological events as "felt" or sensed. Stress is undifferentiated intense feelings, either "good" or "bad". As Selye has said, "eustress" and "distress", both alter your clarity, as in "blind rage" or "love is blind" (the brain is an organ of the body, altered by feelings). Emotion is the physiological change of the body as detected as a feeling and then demanding action (motion), as in "I was so angry I had to hit him".

You will learn how to make the necessary changes for your own life and your own wellness.

What we have learned is indelible. It will reliably be there when it is needed. That fact is not contradicted by the times we "try to remember" and can't. It is there. The recall process may be hampered, as it is when we try to recall this person's name and can't, and then suddenly recall it when we remember a mutual friend or an activity we shared. People who drive experience strange recall. You learn to operate your new car and then, in a sudden reaction, you use your old car response. Or, years after, you sit in the seat of a Bug and then can recall how to shift the gears. Maybe you are the pilot of a DC-9 in Denver, November of 1987. Since you have a thousand hours on a 727 and only 44 hours on a DC-9 it is not surprising that amid the confusion and anger of the de-icing and your problems with the control tower, you take off with perfect responses for a 727. You stall at forty feet, and you and twenty seven passengers are now dead. Or, perhaps your body just decides it's time for some of the "joys of sickness", so you end up in an illness.

Training the brain for change is distinctly different from learning something new. The pilot learned how to fly the DC-9 perfectly. What he didn't do (and nobody tells them they need to) is to unlearn the old 727 behavior. You can learn the delights of wellness, but the beliefs, values, attitudes and behavior patterns which form the sick way of life are still there to play again. You will learn how to interrupt the beliefs, values, attitudes and behavior patterns which support illness. Then you will learn to associate those blocks into the behavior patterns until they automatically stop the illness patterns and lead directly to the wellness patterns. For example, you will "wish you didn't have to work today" and suddenly recall the freedom to be able to do so, and the possibility of taking a well day. That sudden recall will be what you put there in this Wellness Workshop. It is the "other half" of training the brain. You will insert the interrupter with visions of wellness so that each time the old behavior runs it will automatically interrupt itself and lead back to your new patterns of wellness. Less than that will not train your brain for wellness.

Training the brain to support wellness is a skillful integration of methods to block the illness inclinations and support and extend the wellness inclinations, constantly identifying and learning new things which take you where you want to go.

As we move into this paradigm for training the brain we are assuming and using two different aspects of that organ. There is an aspect which perfectly replicates what it has learned in the past, often unawarely, automatically. There is another aspect which shows present intent and chooses and invents, which we are relying upon to create new behavior patterns which will be unfriendly to illness and supportive of wellness. It is worth noticing that these two aspects of the brain are often in conflict inside the individual. An understanding of where these two aspects came from will help in managing them.

The human brain evolved in two different directions simultaneously. One aspect came to be the most flexible and adaptable information processor on the planet. It is variable enough so that the human being can adapt for life in space, deep under the ocean, under intense heat and frigid cold. The other aspect developed for the purpose of preserving and extending its family and society of origin. The first is aware and flexible, the other is unaware and automatic. The first relates to the present, the second to the past. The first is capable of a very small flow of information processing, the second of a massive flow of information management.

As a result, the automatic function operates and acts on behalf of the individual rapidly and unawarely, regardless of what the individual might have chosen. The aware function stands by, usually being helpless to do anything contrary to the powerful actions being managed by the automatic. Furthermore, levels, types and sources of stress have considerable bearing on how effectively the aware function can intervene in the behavior which we would "rather not do". The purpose of the Wellness Workshop is to demonstrate and teach how to interrupt the automatic behavior patterns which are not doing what the individual would choose, and how to create new and equally powerful automatic behaviors which will support wellness.

In order to accomplish this, we at Designed Change Institute create and reinforce a new behavior pattern, an "Aware Function" built right into the Automatic Function. The result is a "sort of" aware function which has, as one of its chief elements, a big arrow which points directly towards the real Aware Function. There are many advantages to this, the chief being that it can resist powerful levels of stress and still function and represent my present intent (always "present" at the time when I created this behavior pattern), and it can process huge amounts of information for me.

Bringing all this information together, the Wellness Workshop will use a greatly enhanced Aware Function to disable automatic behavior patterns which no longer represent our intent, such as illness patterns. The Aware Function will also proceed to choose and build new wellness behavior patterns.

Autogenic training is a self-hypnotic process in which you turn all your aware attention within, to your Aware Function. This requires both the ability to relax and hold a significant amount of serenity for a time, and the ability to visualize some place that you love to be alone, such as a shore, mountain or woods. Then you will repeat silently again and again your first name and the experience of you touching something in your special place, a rock, tree, water or sand. You will notice some things around you and notice yourself in the place, and then some of the characteristics about those things, such as the coolness of the sand, the roughness of the bark or the smoothness of the rock, and also of yourself, your breath, skin, size and shape. You will notice some characteristics about yourself which you appreciate, and you will add one of them to your repetitive statement of name and what you touch. You will end up with three self appreciations and then return to the room, still repeating your name, what you touch and the three appreciations. Then you will write down the experience and the appreciations in a few different places. This will gradually build and reinforce a solid sense of self and make it immediately available when it is needed.

Through many other exercises you will build this base from which your wellness work will be chosen and completed.

Self Confidence has been identified as an important basis for healthy life. These methods will build it solidly for you. Be careful of overconfidence and unrealistic confidence. These usually come from a lack of confidence which is compensated for by over assessment of the self. The "macho male stance" is a good example. Since the need to compensate is absent from the Special Place exercises, you can rely on what you observe there. While most self appraisal focuses on unpleasant characteristics, these exercises are designed to only identify the assets and to reinforce their existence. The defects of character can well be left for later, partly because most of those we will observe will be found to be characteristics of childhood behavior patterns invented or copied by us as children for very specific purposes which no longer exist. That, of course, does not stop these mindless behavior patterns from running, and it does not free us of the responsibility for ending them. They do, however, turn out to be expressions of your own assets which have great value, such as determination to have your way, wise actions to avoid harm, inventive methods of competing, thoughtful ways to become inconspicuous. In the workshop you will be led to notice and reinforce how you are determined, wise, inventive and thoughtful. These discoveries from what you thought were personal liabilities (sometimes perfectly awful behavior patterns) will become beneficial to forming your base from which you will create wellness.

As you do your self appreciation work you will discover that your awareness and your clear and present intent will increase. Your experience of its extremely narrow channel will stimulate you to make much more economical use of your Aware Function. It will be from here that you will slowly, deliberately and accurately build behavior patterns for your new and chosen way of life, including wellness. What you will gain in this work will be greatly increased quality of life. The more you are realistically able to take aboard as your responsibility (fault??) the more you will be able to change. You will learn to place carefully contrived monkey wrenches in the behavior patterns that plague you. You will scan and search for the feelings and stress which may be causally connected with your illness. You will artfully build associations among elements of your new way of life and those feelings which will support your recovery and health. You will create the optimal personal stance for recovery and the best attitudes for the life you are choosing.

Think of a newborn infant suddenly placed within its family and society. Imagine the assets that child will be using to invent how to walk, how to talk and how to relate. As you move forward in this wellness work, you are doing likewise with those same assets and more. You have the disadvantage of having a myriad of behavior patterns woven into a way of life which you created as a child for a situation which no longer exists, and the advantage of knowing what you are doing and of being able to select your new way of life with clarity and present intent.