Detox and Retrain Emotional Memory Response

Ever since I can remember, anxiety and frustration had been my constant companion. It felt like a shadow, always in the background of my happiest moments.

I knew that I was ‘pretending to be normal’.
For decades I searched for relief.

And then, when the student was ready, I stumbled upon a piece of information that changed everything for me - the science of personality change.

We know that science cannot fully explain how the brain stores memory.

I'd like to use the example of the brain scans that study how we learn juggling. In much the same way that we learn juggling by using our frontal cortex, and then after we've learned it it's the subconscious neocortex that takes care of the act of juggling, so too is our memory and our emotions stored in different parts of our nervous system.

Our Emotions Are Stored In Our Body

Our emotional habits are a part of our intellectual thinking of our troubles, which will fire the fight or flight reflex… but it's deeper than that. This becomes a habit in our subconscious parts of our brain just like juggling does. And the emotions communicate with our body from thought into electrical impulses.

Those electrical impulses also create neuropeptides which are physical chemicals representing our emotions. More than that, we have a hormonal response from other nervous plexus systems in our bodies; our heart center has its own plexus of neurons that also have their own memory, the solar plexus is another gathering of neurons that has its own memory.

More Than One Memory Storage Area

Each of these memory centers has their own hormones neuropeptides electrical impulses for controlling and regulating and communicating with all of the body's organs and different parts of the body.

So as we are overcoming stress from any source - the basis that we need to address has to do with the core memories that are not part of our cerebral cortex.

That is, we need to re-train our solar plexus and our heart center at the same time.

Re-training these primitive emotional centers of our body is a process of detoxing and reimagining better feeling thoughts while our body levels are least toxic and while our brain activity is most cohesive.

The breathing in the yoga class will help us detox chemicals of emotion. The physical action of the yoga class helps us stimulate blood flow to allow detoxification of these emotional chemicals from all of the far reaches of our body.

At the end of the yoga class when our blood toxic levels are lowest of all of these emotional chemicals, we can use our cerebral cortex to visualize the events and rehearse the emotions that we want to have as a habit.

Practicing A New Mindfulness

With intentional thinking or with guided meditations, we can stimulate those emotional centers to produce those neuropeptides and chemicals of that positive feeling emotion right at the end of class.

We can imagine these chemicals into being by using our cerebral cortex to visualize and intentionally feel the gratitude in the satisfaction of future events that we want to have.

Yoga and Meditation Alter Our Emotional Memory Response

Through the process of using breath and a guided yoga class to detox emotional memories from the past, and through the process of using a guided meditation to write a different story into our emotional centers, over time we sequentially overcome and let go of the past while building a stronger belief in the possible futures that are to come.

Much More Than Changing Your Words

This changes the belief system within our primitive body centers and not just from the words we are saying.

With intention, the better feeling emotional state becomes our habit. Not just in thinking and in the brainwave patterns we are monitoring, but in the most basic autonomic nervous response.

From our solar plexus, from our heart center, from our spinal column, from our muscle groups, from our breathing in a slow coordinated way throughout the moments of our day, and not just while we are at the yoga class.