You Are One With The World (more than you realise!)

In broad terms, there are two aspects to our inner world – our feeling self and our intellectual self. This corresponds to our body and our brain, respectively. We interpret the world through a combination of both. If we see something happening in front of us, our intellectual self will define it and then help us decide what we should do about it, if anything. All the while, however, our emotional self is also absorbing the information. As a result, certain emotions will be evoked. The thoughts produced by our thinking self and the emotions produced by our feeling self then come together – like two bills passed by each branch of Congress – in a conference to help fashion our ultimate reaction.

The problem arises (and this is a problem for a lot of us) when the thinking self believes that it is all there is. We often tend to make decisions and fashion our reaction on the basis of our thoughts, without properly allowing for the input from our feelings. It’s important not to go too far the other way too, but we have to be able to get the balance right, and for many people it is too often the intellectual side that dominates. We work through this in my Sileotherapy online self help program and, what it shows us is that one of the reasons for this is that the intellectual side of our inner world is the one we identify with most. We think this is the “me” inside. But the truth is we are not our thoughts alone.

In reality we have an entire Universe of feeling inside us that we, all too often, are trying to escape from. What is happening here, however, is truly profound, for the feeling element of the human being is a lot more powerful than we can imagine. We are able to sense a lot more reality through it than our intellectual minds.

Somebody else’s pain, for example, can never really be fully appreciated through an intellectual process. As a doctor, I have been taught to look at someone in physical pain, say, and analyse it with my brain to try and work out what the cause may be so that I can arrive at an appropriate course of action to treat it. What doctor’s aren’t taught to do is to actually open their feeling side up to the pain they see before them. This is with good reason, for if they did they would be, in certain situations, rendered useless. The problem is, however, that our feeling side is experiencing it anyway. It is all being absorbed in there and so if we aren’t opening up at all then it will start to ware us down and – in the case of health care professionals – ware us out.

Evidence for this active feeling capacity within us that reacts to things on a visceral level – one beyond intellectual processing – is in a study recently carried out at the University of Birmingham by Dr Stuart Derbyshire. He showed images of people in pain (eg. athletes suffering sports injuries and patients receiving an injection) to over one hundred students. At the same time they underwent a functional MRI – which is a scan that measures levels of activity across different regions of the brain. He discovered that every one of them had increased activity in emotion related centres of the brain. Half of them, however, also had increased activity in the pain related regions of the brain. They also verbally reported that they could feel the pain physically in their own bodies themselves.

In other words evidence like this is showing us that what is going on outside of us is often reflected within as well. We are like mirrors in many respects. The world contains waves of pain (and pleasure, and everything else in between) and we are no more able to shut ourselves off from that than we are able to avoid the sunlight. It’s who we are. We are affected by the environment in which we exist, indeed, we are at one with it a lot more than we realise.

This is one of the truths my Sileotherapy online self help program is designed to help people discover - not just on an intallectual level, but an emotional and holistic one too...