Communication=Connection
Fritjof Capra says “One lesson that nature teaches is that everything in the world is connected to other things.” In The Web of Life, referring to the immune system, he states“The entire system looks much more like a network, more like people talking to each other, than soldiers out looking for an enemy.” Hurray. If we begin to shift our perception that what goes on inside our bodies is constant battle, perhaps that shift will eventually be mirrored in the outside world.
At a practical level, methods such as non-violent communication work with assisting this shift in the outside world. Last week I said I would talk more about down to earth ways in which communication=health. In an interview with Marshall Rosenberg, founder of Nonviolent Communication, he says that it evolved from his attempt to get conscious of what he calls Beloved Divine Energy and how to connect with it. He continues, “To me, the violence in the world comes about when we get alienated or disconnected from this Energy. How do we get connected when we are educated to be disconnected?” He talks about being in a roomful of Bosnians and Serbs: “I remember sitting there in the middle of all this rage and pain and thinking, “Divine Energy, if you can heal all this stuff why are you taking so long, why are you putting these people through this?” And the Energy spoke to me, and it said, “You just do what you can to connect. Bring your energy in. Connect and help the other people connect and let me take care of the rest.”
At so many different we levels we find the theme of connection: connection to ourselves, to each other, and to the cosmos. Connection is communication, and connection at all those levels nourishes and sustains our health. The connection to the Blueprint in SourcePoint facilitates that connection to the cosmos, which in turn strengthens our connection to ourselves, and gives us a different foundation for our connection to others.
I’d like to share an experience I’ve had in healing through communicating with myself. Three years ago I began to experience severe, incapacitating episodes of vertigo, the kind where the room is spinning and rising and falling, every body system is in alarm and literally you can’t move anywhere. I sometimes ended up crawling from place to place, but mostly when it happened I just was immobilized and working with it to let it be, to subside and pass. I was diagnosed with Meniere’s Disease, and I’m not going to tell the whole story here, but it was a major teacher at many different levels. With lots of work and help and healing I’ve been pretty stable for almost a year now. I had a stable year after the initial occurrence, and then a major recurrence, so I’m not getting attached. I know the things I need to do to give myself the greatest opportunities of continued stability, and I do them, and one important ongoing activity is communicating with my body/mind/brain/nervous system.
Meniere’s is theoretically “caused” by excess fluid in the inner (not middle) ear that leaks out and disrupts the body’s balance. Toward the beginning I was being tested for all kinds of balance/vertigo possibilities. The audiologist explained to me that my inner ear was sending a danger signal to my brain, and my brain was reacting with all kinds of alarm messages back to my body. I decided I needed to let my brain know I wasn’t really in danger, that it was just a little extra fluid sloshing around! How to do this? I tried to talk to my brain without any noticeable effect. Then I happened upon a method in Donna Eden’s book “Energy Medicine” that she calls “temporal tapping.” For more details, see this book, p. 333. It involves using the three middle fingers of each hand to tap a message to the brain, behind each ear, along the side of the head from front to back. Negatively worded messages are tapped on the left side, positively worded messages on the right.
So I tried it. When I would begin to feel what I called “blips” in my perception that I knew were the forerunners of vertigo, I would tap the left side of my head repeating to myself, “There is no danger.” Then on the right side I would tap “I am safe.” Almost immediately I would feel a settling, and over time indeed the vertigo episodes became less frequent. I was doing a lot of other things too, including lots of SourcePoint, so who knows, but I believe this was very helpful. I was changing the message. I was communicating something to my body that it experienced as reassuring. And, I was responding to my condition by connecting and communicating with myself, and acknowledging what was going on inside me.
If you have a story about how communication with yourself, others, or the cosmos has lead to healing, I’d love it if you would post a comment and share it here.
© 2010 Donna Thomson and Bob Schrei