How Your Thoughts and Feelings Create Your Destiny
Our thoughts, emotions, memories, attitudes, and beliefs “hardwire” us neurologically, and affix us to a reality construct shaped by our past experiences. When we constantly recycle the same ideas, opinions, and attitudes, we succumb to the vicious thinking-feeling loop and get stuck to the same life circumstances we so desperately want to change. If you often feel you are “trapped inside a matrix”, or that you are reliving the same day over and over again like that weatherman from the movie “Groundhog Day,” then it is time to examine the thoughts and the emotions that you regularly entertain. Perhaps it is you who is creating your own “virtual reality.” A simple shift towards a different emotional and mental makeup can reshape your reality and make you a happier person.
Our amazing brain—understanding neural plasticity
Neuroscience considers the mind as a brain in action, a product of the activation of any neurological brain tissue. Specific levels of mind execute various complex functions — from listening to a song to driving a car. New experiences are neurologically impressed in the brain; they enhance the brain circuitry. Whenever we perform a particular action, specific patterns of neural networks (clusters of neurons that work together) are turned on. When we learn how to perform a new activity (acquire a new skill), we make new connections in the brain. The brain neurons form thousands of synaptic connections which then assemble into complex, three-dimensional neural nets. The more we practice and perform a particular task, the more often these clusters of neurons fire together and are therefore wired together. Eventually, the task becomes an automated one.
The thinking-feeling loop
Every experience creates emotions. The more intense emotionally a certain experience is, the more lasting the impression in the brain. This is the way long-term memories are formed. That is why we can think of emotions as “vocabulary of the body” and “chemical residue of past experiences.” New neural connections in the brain are maintained through memories. This is because every time were members — think about the past event, and feel the way we have felt in the past — the neurons corresponding to that experience fire and wire together, and strengthen the neural pathways.
Our thoughts can seem even “more real” than an authentic experience that happens in the external environment. An anxious thought triggers a biochemical reaction. Namely, the neurotransmitters (chemical messengers that send information between the brain neurons) influence neuropeptides or the “molecules of emotion” (chemical messengers created by the autonomous nervous system (ANS)), which, in turn, signal the hormonal centers (adrenal glands). The hormones of stress are released in our system, causing us to feel, for example, nervous or anxious. In other words, a thought signals the body to feel in a particular way—those feelings match the thoughts.
Negative thoughts neurophysiologically evoke negative feelings, and those negative feelings further trigger more negative thoughts, since the brain monitors the chemical state of the body and responds with matching thoughts. Before you know it, you are trapped in a loop of negativity, and it becomes your state of being. Your brain gets hardwired into this pattern of negative thinking, and your body, not being able to differentiate between an emotion created by an experience that is happening in real-time and the emotion created by thought alone, gets “branded emotionally.” By the age of 35, most people have stopped changing their mental and emotional makeup, thinking, feeling, and acting in an automated way. Staggering 95 percent of who we are is a result of our deeply instilled subconscious programs.
Therefore, following the same routine daily is dangerous. If, when you wake up, you immediately recall your problems and give in to the familiar feelings of worry, fear, sadness, frustration, anger, etc., you reaffirm your past and strengthen your relationship with your past experiences. You put in motion the same vicious cycle of negative thoughts — negative feelings — more negative thoughts — even stronger negative feelings…and this pattern of feeling, thinking, and behavior becomes a habit. Habitual living means switching to autopilot mode and remaining unconscious. Your brain becomes neurologically hardwired, and your body becomes emotionally conditioned to live in the past. When this happens, you no longer give your mind and your body a chance to experience anything new. Your past creates your future, or your future is simply a recycling of your past. A new reality for you becomes almost impossible. Even if something new happens in your life, you tend to treat it as a disturbance—a nuisance—and do your best to either ignore it or eliminate it from your life, thus eliminating any possibility that such an occurrence could trigger a positive change.
Creating a personal electromagnetic signature
Our thoughts and feelings affect the quality of the electromagnetic field that surrounds our bodies. Each thought corresponds to a neural network of electrons that fire together and create electrical charges. The corresponding emotions create magnetic charges. Emotions can be seen as “energy in motion”— the emotional “charge” of a person can easily be “sensed” by others, whether the person radiates with positive or negative frequencies. These electromagnetic charges correspond to your state of being. Through our electromagnetic fields, we constantly exchange energy and information with our environment. Therefore, engaging in repetitive thought-feeling patterns means repeatedly “broadcasting” the same message.
Breaking the negative loop—the power of the present moment and stepping into the quantum field of infinite potential
Trauma can keep a person anchored to the past. Constantly reinforcing the same daily routines, living on autopilot, and remaining stuck in the circle of similar choices and decisions, create an unexciting, predictable future. From the perspective of neuroscience, recycling the same thoughts in your mind means firing and wiring the same neural circuits in the brain, which causes the brain to hardwire into particular patterns.
It is important to understand that the object of your attention is the focus of your energy direction. By always thinking about a particular event that has happened in the past, you are directing all your energy there, and thus you are strengthening that particular thought-feeling loop. This way, you are depriving yourself of the energy necessary to create a new experience in the present moment (and consequently, you diminish the possibility of having a novel and desirable experience in the future).
The more worrisome or troublesome the thoughts that we entertain, the more fragmented or fractured our energy becomes. Our energy is claimed by objects, people, and situations in the material world — our external environment — causing our creative energy to flow away from us. This way we lose our efficiency and ability to create a new reality. In meditation, we learn to take our attention off all those objects and relationships which bind our energy through attachment (emotional addiction). That way we reclaim the pieces of our fragmented energy and become whole again. In that wholeness and integrity, it is possible to create a new future.
By shifting your awareness to the present moment — to the now — you can enter the realm of pure consciousness which is beyond space and time, called the quantum field or unified field. This is a field of intelligence and consciousness that exists beyond space and time. It is a nonphysical and nonmaterial, infinite field filled with frequency or energy. In the quantum field, all possibilities exist. In that unified field, you can then tune (adjust) your energy so that it matches the frequency of a potential that you want to manifest in your life. This vibrational match draws the desired experience into your life.
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~This article is based on the book “Becoming Supernatural — How Common People Are Doing the Uncommon” by Dr. Joe Dispenza. Hay House, Inc., Carlsbad, California, 2017~