Understanding and Weeding Your Mind
Esther Apoussidis
Guiding women with a powerful calling to move from stagnation to positive manifestation through energy and abundance alignment coaching | Empowerment & Wellbeing Speaker | Bestseller Writer
One of the first books I read on my personal and spiritual development journey was James Allen's "As A Man Thinketh". This was closely followed by Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich".
Both books had a very profound impact on me. Not sure if you would agree if you've read them. But they made me realise how I came to be who and where I am today - with the successes I've enjoyed as well as the failures I've sadly notched up. My biggest failure was to lose £70K of a personal pension investing in a second coffee shop. And I can most assuredly say, even though my husband would disagree because he's still thinking from the old paradigm, that it wasn't circumstances to blame, but more our energy disposition at the time.
During the early stages of learning about and applying the Energy Alignment Method I quickly understood the power of our thoughts. And that is why during our training we focus on our thoughts initially before we even look at our feelings as vibrations or expressions of our energy.
As energy beings we powerfully create with both thoughts and feelings. And for this reason, we have to work on both: we have to overcome the pandemic stigma of fear-based thoughts and the negative, energy-contracting feelings these will likely conjure and influence our actions and behaviours.
We activate our reality in two ways: through the law of vibration and the law of attraction. The first underpins the other. These are universal, scientific, irrefutable laws of nature. I'll talk in more detail about these laws in a subsequent edition of this newsletter. But let's first talk about our thoughts and the daily practices I recommend you employ to shift you to a more abundant mindset. And again (as in last week's newsletter article) I talk about abundant in its broader context: not just material manifestation, but as an internal reflection of the richness and diversity of who we are energetically.
The Double-Edged Sword of our Thoughts
Our thoughts emit a frequency via our brainwaves. And when they are of a negative bias, they can be detrimental to ourselves and to others. But equally, we change the bias of these thoughts and in so doing bring light, empowerment and grace to our life and to the lives of others we connect with.
You may think that your thoughts are simply conscious formulated projections of what’s going on in your mind, but in fact they have an energy force of their own which can have a double-edged impact.?They can affect our body in ways we’re only just beginning to fully understand and prove through the study of neuroscience.?And thoughts can also project out as brainwaves and connect to others by means of quantum mechanics as explored by Albert Einstein.?
The Mind-Body Connection
Thoughts, different mental states as well as emotions carry vibrations which impact the body on a biochemical and cellular level.?
And why is this??This is because the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems share a common language. A constant dialogue unfolds between the mind and body through messengers, such as hormones and neurotransmitters. In a particular study published in 2003, certain vibrations or energy patterns can affect change in our DNA structure, which in turn affect how our genetic code is translated into proteins which are the building blocks of our body.?
You will know this mind-body connection when you feel butterflies in your stomach before an interview or going on stage to speak.?The thought of doing so generates emotions of anticipation, anxiety, trepidation and even fear which translate into bodily changes.?Candice Pert was a neuroscientist who undertook pioneering research in this field of linking mind and body.?Dr Joseph Murphy wrote a wonderfully inspirational book on the topic called the Power of Your Subconscious Mind, which I can thoroughly recommend.?Many would say that is how Jesus performed his miracles. He had a thorough understanding of how energy works and the power of the mind and beliefs to heal the body. He suggested – as did the late Louise Hay, who was living proof of this – that we have the power of self-healing within us.?
How Our Thoughts Impact Others
Thoughts and feelings form a close relationship.?When we think positive thoughts backed by positive emotions we send out positive vibrations which after a while come back to us. Just like making a ripple in a swimming pool - the ripples bounce into and bounce back from the walls of a pool or from someone else in the swimming-pool.?There’s a boomerang effect.?On the other side of the coin, a negative thought and feeling about someone else will only end up hurting you because we are ALL CONNECTED. ?This is the idea of a connected universe and is summed up in Karma.
A disturbing discovery published in 2013 by Psychology Today is that of the 65,000 thoughts that we have each day a staggering 70 percent of them are negative.?Even people that presume to be positive can be prone to negative thoughts deep-down and on an automated, subconscious level.?
According to Psychology Today, our mental chatter revolves around superiority (comparing ourselves to others and wanting to be better), around love (the modern idea that we need a soul-mate to be whole and complete) and control (the need to be listened to, heard and respected).
The Treadmill of our Mind
The next question I’m going to answer is “why are we always stuck in repetitive thought patterns that don’t serve us?”?The negative treadmill that most people are so keen to escape from.
领英推荐
Our brain is made up of two parts (please note this is not a physical separation of the brain into two parts or lobes). However, these parts co-exist nonetheless.?Our brain has a rational, logical, conscious mind as well as a limbic (that’s emotional), instinctive, habitual subconscious mind. The conscious brain is the tip of the iceberg above the waterline and the subconscious makes up 95-97% of the rest below the waterline.
It is this divide that makes change so challenging.?The subconscious mind is our ancient or gorilla brain. It performs two functions: safety and efficiency. It initially protected us from sabre-toothed tigers and evolved to make sure it triggered instinctual, automatic responses to keep us from harm.?This ancient subconscious brain also wants to conserve energy.?So rather than learn from scratch new habits for every single thought, emotion and action, the brain resorts to familiar behaviours that can be implemented with very little energy.?It looks to past experiences to find that familiarity and to find congruence between the now and then.
Perpetuating the same thoughts and the automaticity that follows is why we keep getting stuck and getting the same results over and over again.?Our subconscious brain always wants to bring us back to familiar and safe territory. Change is a threat to the brain’s survival.?No matter therefore how much your planning, logical conscious mind desires to implement change, such as lose weight or start a new exercise regime, the ancient, subconscious mind will keep working against you to keep you in your old conditioned mind, behaviour and habits.?That’s why we struggle to keep our new year’s resolutions.
This discord or incongruence between both parts of the brain is called neural dissonance and has a draining effect on our energy.?When they are constantly at war with each other, they undermine our ability to succeed at anything.?It’s like having one foot on the brake and one foot on the accelerator.?So sometimes it’s just easier to give in to the gorilla brain and not put up an exhausting fight.
Neuroplasticity
Before the 1960s we were told we were hardwired at birth and that by the end of our childhood our brain was pretty much a done-deal.?With the advent of neuroplasticity we now have the understanding that we can rewire our brain, both the conscious and sub-conscious minds, and at any age through building new, stronger and better neural networks and communications by creating more neurons or grey matter, making stronger connections through the nerve synapses and building more myelin, the protective fatty sheath around nerves that enhances the function of our nerves. Many neuroscience techniques have evolved that work on this neuroplasticity theory. These include Hypnotherapy, Neurolinguistic Programming or NLP, Innercises and more recently the Energy Alignment Method.
The Energy Alignment Method or EAM works on a wholistic level: using the power of the mind, heart and hara. The hara for those unfamiliar with the term is an energy centre located below and beneath the belly button, centred around the sacral chakra but extending into the groin and legs. It is the centre for assimilation, creation, manifesting and the primal energy of force and drive.?EAM works on expanding the energy of these three and bringing them into flow and alignment.?Bringing them into flow is a 5-step process of identifying energy resistances, in other words where and how we are stuck in life, releasing these with a transforming mantra and aligning or affirming to the opposite, highest flow of energy.
Practical Steps to Weeding and Rewiring Our Minds
By mastering your subconscious - your deepest programming and habits - you can get back in the driving seat. You can start choosing to think, feel and experience healthy thoughts, feelings, habits and behaviours.
Don't forget our mind and body are inextricably connected through the molecules of emotion and how they affect our cell receptors. So improving our state of mind, especially by working on the subconscious element, will have the ripple effect not just externally, but internally. We will feel better about ourselves and elevate our energetic frequency and these will prompt more empowered and life-affirming behaviours and actions.
How do we reset our subconscious mind?
What Can you Expect from Coaching with Me
I work powerfully with energy and energy alignment. It's all about working from the inside-out and not on strategies that work solely on trying to force a change on the outside before doing the inner alignment piece. Doing the latter, will always engender feelings of struggle and strife, will create more resistance in your life and lead to burnout or illness. Doing the former, will always make sure you create your reality from the fullest, most powerful version of you, and one that will lead to harmony, balance and success with flow and ease.
Here's some of what you can expect when working with me:
If you enjoyed reading this, then please share with others and create that ripple effect in the world of awareness and empowerment. And please do continue to subscribe to this newsletter to receive the next week's article. I will delve more fully into the feeling aspect of our energy and how to harness the infinite power and emotional intelligence of our beautiful heart.
You can send me a DM if you have any questions or you can book a call with me to find out about the ways in which I can help you fulfil your life's ambitions.