These transformative words, spoken by indigenous medicine women, began my journey within to discover the extraordinary healing capacity of the human body.
When this perspective was introduced to me, I was suffering from a severe chronic pain disorder. I suddenly imagined incorporating this concept into my meditation routine.
I thought, can my body hear me… can I talk to it to gain its cooperation in healing this condition?

The Path to FreedomThat night, after reaching a state of deep calm through meditation, I inwardly engaged my body in a heartfelt conversation, with hope, but having no idea what to expect. After about one hour of this focused communication, something amazing happened.
My tissues began to respond. Connective tissue pulled and stretched apart layers of scar tissue. Nerves fired and my calf muscles began to perform flexion and extension exercises independently of my conscious control.
As this response continued, one of my calf muscles that had become paralyzed by the neuropathic condition — diagnosed as Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy — came back to life as electric-like jolts shot through the area.
My heart pounded as I realized that the path to my freedom from this condition had finally begun.

Guidelines for Dynamic HealingWith a background in acupuncture and Oriental medicine, I knew too well how prevalent chronic pain is in this country and I wondered what the implications of this phenomenon could mean to so many others who were suffering.
As I continued to make progress with my condition, I organized my approach into a system that I could teach to clients and shifted my professional focus to hypnotherapy.
When instructing my clients, I explain that a regular meditation practice is necessary to train the brain to enter alpha and theta brain wave states. While in these states, communication between the conscious mind and the physical body is dramatically enhanced.

I have found that when communicating, there are three key steps to gaining the cooperation of the body:

• Approach your body with genuine compassion, understanding that it is made up of conscious cells who experience emotions.
• Build trust by engaging your body in mental conversations about your desire for the two of you to cooperate and overcome the ailment.
• Allow changes in the conversation by using different thoughts and words that elicit spontaneous elevated emotions.

From my experience, the above guidelines are necessary to achieve dynamic healing responses in the body.

The Force of human IntentionI recently came across a very similar set of factors that were discovered by researcher Cleve Backster, who spent 36 years studying biocommunication in plant, animal and human cells. He referred to these factors as real intent, attunement, and spontaneity.[1]
Backster, formerly an interrogation specialist for the CIA, wrote about the defining moment which led him to his real work in this world, in his book Primary Perception.[2]
This moment occurred one February morning in 1966 when he decided to monitor the Dracaena plant in his lab utilizing polygraph equipment.

He attached the electrodes to a leaf and began to think about ways that he might induce a surge in electrical activity in the plant. In humans this surge in electrical activity is associated with intense emotions.
He suddenly imagined burning the electroded leaf. The same instant this idea entered his mind, the polygraph pen shot to the top of the chart showing an extreme reaction on the part of the plant.
Amazed, he walked to his secretary’s desk to retrieve a set of matches while pondering the possibility that this plant was somehow detecting the force of human intention.

Can Plants become Attuned to their Primary Care Takers?When he returned with the matches, the plant was still showing the same high level reaction which would interfere with tracking additional changes on the chart. Backster decided to “remove the threat” by returning the matches to the desk.
At this point, the chart displayed a downward trend as the plant apparently began to calm down.[3] When Backster attempted to repeat the same results by pretending that he was going to burn the plant, there was no reaction. The plant seemed to sense the difference between real and artificial intent.
He eventually discovered that plants become attuned to their primary care takers, responding to both their positive and negative emotions and to their return after being away for a time.[4] Chart findings also showed that plants prioritize the emotions of their primary care takers over the emotions of others nearby.

Signs of ConsciousnessBackster later expanded his research to include testing human cells for signs of consciousness.
He collected white blood cells from human donors, electroded them in a test tube and then recorded the cells’ reactions as the donors experienced different emotional states. He found that spontaneous emotions were necessary in order to elicit an electrical reaction in the cells.
For instance, if a donor forced herself to feel an emotion, the cells would not respond. However, when she received a distressing phone call from her daughter, the cells reacted significantly.[5]
He noted that distance seemed to be irrelevant in these experiments. For example, a donor left his electroded cells behind in the lab, then kept a detailed log of any stressful emotions experienced on his trip home to another state, such as missing a turn on the freeway, standing in a long line at the airport, and the take-off of his plane.
Later, his logged incidents compared with the chart recording showed strong correlations between the timing of the stressful events and the electrical reactions in his cells. The chart became quiet again when he arrived home and went to sleep.[6]

Raw Creative Healing AbilityThese experiments were conducted while using equipment that screened out electromagnetic radiation — the usual energies used for information transmission. The cells behaved as if the screens weren’t there, suggesting that this communication is carried by a field still unidentified by conventional science.[7]
Some scientists believe that the further development of quantum physics may help guide us to understand this field that communicates emotional intent between living things.[8] Quantum Entanglement is a process where two particles of matter which have interacted with each other, still behave as if they are connected after being separated by many miles.
When an energetic change is made to the properties (position, momentum and rotational spin) of one of the particles, the properties of the other distant particle will change at the same instant.
​

This scientific phenomenon and the research of Cleve Backster, point to the Eastern concept of oneness — the view that all of nature is interdependent. Ancient cultures understood this interconnection as a living universal energy field that sustains life while guiding the evolution of consciousness throughout the universe.
The meditation techniques involved in my practice bring the mind into attunement with this field. Energy from this field is then focused into a physical healing event through clear intention — delivered by means of a conversation that evokes spontaneous emotions — and attunes the physical body to the conscious mind.
This method which I call Antara (Sanskrit for within), enables one to experience the raw creative healing ability generated by an alliance of the mind and body with this living universal energy field.

Please click HERE for original article by Therese Wade at Uplift Connect 

While you may not remember life as a toddler, you most likely believe that your selfhood then—your essential being—was intrinsically the same as it is today.
Buddhists, though, suggest that this is just an illusion—a philosophy that’s increasingly supported by scientific research.
“Buddhists argue that nothing is constant, everything changes through time, you have a constantly changing stream of consciousness,” Evan Thompson, a philosophy of mind professor at the University of British Columbia, tells Quartz. “And from a neuroscience perspective, the brain and body is constantly in flux. There’s nothing that corresponds to the sense that there’s an unchanging self.”
Neuroscience and Buddhism came to these ideas independently, but some scientific researchers have recently started to reference and draw on the Eastern religion in their work—and have come to accept theories that were first posited by Buddhist monks thousands of years ago.
One neuroscience paper, published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in July, links the Buddhist belief that our self is ever-changing to physical areas of the brain. There’s scientific evidence that “self-processing in the brain is not instantiated in a particular region or network, but rather extends to a broad range of fluctuating neural processes that do not appear to be self specific,” write the authors.
Thompson, whose work includes studies of cognitive science, phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy, says this is not the only area where neuroscience and Buddhism converge. For example, some neuroscientists now believe that cognitive faculties are not fixed but can be trained through meditation. And there may be scientific backing to the Buddhist belief that consciousness extends into deep sleep.

“The standard neuroscience view is that deep sleep is a blackout state where consciousness disappears,” Thompson says. “In Indian philosophy we see some theorists argue that there’s a subtle awareness that continues to be present in dreamless sleep, there’s just a lack of ability to consolidate that in a moment-to-moment way in memory.”

Studies of meditators’ sleep patterns suggest this might indeed be the case. A study published in 2013 found that meditation can affect electro-physical brain patterns during sleep, and the findings suggest there could be capacity to “process information and maintain some level of awareness, even during a state when usually these cognitive functions are greatly impaired,” according to the researchers.
But neither neuroscience nor Buddhism has a definitive answer on exactly how consciousness relates to the brain. And the two fields diverge on certain aspects of the topic. Buddhists believe that there’s some form of consciousness that’s not dependent on the physical body, while neuroscientists (and Thompson), disagree.  But Thompson supports the Buddhists’ view that the self does in fact exist.

​“In neuroscience, you’ll often come across people who say the self is an illusion created by the brain. My view is that the brain and the body work together in the context of our physical environment to create a sense of self. And it’s misguided to say that just because it’s a construction, it’s an illusion.”

​PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR ORIGINAL ARTICLE POST 

With the discovery of mirror neurons, it could be that a new neural network is opening for the contemplation of human interdependency, empathy and the deeper nature of consciousness, through the biological medium of the human brain.
Beyond the empathic function of mirror neurons, there is a hardly-touched area of research. These neurons are about unconditioned awareness. When mirror neurons are empathic to their own awareness, (when the brain becomes aware that it is aware), a whole new brain capacity for meta-perspective opens up in which neuroplasticity (and the brains ability to change, adapt and oversee conditions) could be greatly enhanced.
Does this mental ability to awaken to collective consciousness represent a blind spot in the field of neuroscience?
Mirror Neurons and the Monkey
“The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” Leonardo da Vinci

The scientific anecdote has it that in the ‘eighties and ‘nineties some Italian neurophysiologists – Rizzolatti, Di Pellegrino, Fadiga, Fogassi, and Gallese at the University of Parma, had the ventral premotor cortex of a macaque monkey hooked up with electrodes to study neurons specialized for the control of hand and mouth actions. Each time the monkey picked up a peanut to eat, his brain would signal: “click, click, click”.
One day, a researcher himself took a peanut and began to eat it, as the monkey watched.  The same sound “click, click, click,” resonated through the monitor, although the monkey hadn’t moved an inch. The monkey’s brain reacted identically on an observed action to when the action was physically done by the monkey herself.
Repeated tests showed that an observed action in another can signal the same brain response as first-hand physical action. The neurons that fired in response to actions taken by someone else’s body have been called Mirror Neurons.  We can easily recognize these theorized mirror neurons at work: each time we clutch our heads in despair when the player misses the penalty; when we’re watching a drama on TV; or in any emotional engagement with situations that are none of our business.  When I was a toddler, my brother cut his leg. My response was to not walk myself for a week. Was this the effect of unshielded mirror neurons hardly restrained by the un-programmed infant brain?
​
“I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology.”
Prof. V.S. Ramachandran

“With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all.” Prof. V.S. Ramachandran.  The new millennium has witnessed an expanding wealth of research around the existence, role and potential of mirror neurons.
The functioning of mirror neurons (or lack of) has been theoretically linked  to autism; they have been described as critical in processes of learning, mimicry, intention, anticipation and even in the evolutionary leap from Neanderthal to today’s splendid example of human.

While scientific dissenters have attempted to puncture the hype, casting doubt on the phenomena, as well as on the task and location of mirror neurons in the brain, research is only now unfolding into the scientific implications of what some neuroscientists, such as Prof. Vilayanur Ramachandran, have indicated could be the neurological missing link in basic skills of empathy. From a nondual perspective, in which consciousness is seen as a unified field rather than a localized affair, the discovery of empathic mirror neurons is inspiring.
Experientially, it’s not surprising that we have brain cells that translate the actions of another body in the same way that they translate the actions of our own physical matrix.

Leaving aside direct ANS input of physical sensation, observation of one’s own body is not so critically different from the observation of another body doing that thing. A line which separates one from the other is mostly formed by thought identification. A vast amount of sensory input is in itself collective. For example, a sudden clap of thunder will resonate through all bodies in the area simultaneously. When it rains, we all hear the sound and we all get wet. The separation between one physical body and another is more conceptual than physical.

Yet for the freedom to interchangeably experience your own stuff with the stuff of the “other”, a third position or overview is needed. Logically, this would seem to be the consciousness (that which chooses to identify or not) which is the backdrop to all experience and which is claimed to exist independently of the contents of experience. This consciousness gives freedom of form, and a freedom of choice over which neurological pathway to follow.

The unconditioned consciousness that witnesses the movement of physical, mental and emotional form is understood in nonduality as fundamental to perceptive reality. This conscious ‘witness’ is not memory dependant, and as experience can only occur in the present moment, it is also not time dependant. What mirror neurons introduce is the additional possibility that the access points of consciousness are also not dependent on space or spatial conditions.

“A physical peanut for one, is an experiential peanut for all.”
​
Inter-being
It is clear that in the empathic movement between my peanut and the professor’s peanut, the idea of a definable, separate self has broken down. A physical peanut for one, can be an experiential peanut for all.
Yet sensory experience is not limited to physical acts, it is also how we experience emotional stress, pain or relief. This physical resonance of non-physical sensation also resonates through mirror neurons – perhaps to a refinement that we can hardly capture. This is happening biologically of itself, to be blocked only by the active neglect or repression of mirror neuron activity.

In their quality of empathy, mirror neurons would seem to be receptive – a receptivity that can be obscured by rejecting thought patterns – but which is nevertheless the same natural tendency found in a monkey.
Such repression through conditioned thought control (it’s not ‘my’ happiness, it’s ‘his’) can be viewed at the root of jealousy, competition, suffering and war. Allowance and cultivation of mirror neurons and resulting neuroplasticity could lead to greater freedom, togetherness and a realistic flow of interdependence that could provide a utopian model for any community or society. Yet like any biological ability, mirror neurons need to be used in order for them to multiply.

Who am I again?
When we really move into the perceptive experience of being alive, it can become clear that our whole interpersonal sensory reality is composed of our perceptions of others and the environment.
We see the facial responses, struggles, egos and accidents of others from many perspectives, whereas we are physically unable to see ourselves in such living totality.
The closest we get in visual input about our own physical objectivity is through photographs, video recordings and mirrors on the wall. But a vast amount of sensory data and perspective is excluded from these forms. Our experience of our own self is entirely entangled with and dependent on the feedback we get from others. In a way, we exist as a personality, only in the sum total of reflections in the interpersonal field.  Mirror neurons invite us to realize that our reality was never separable from the whole.

Awareness of Awareness
“Beauty is truth’s smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror.” Rabindranath Tagore Photo: Wikicommons
This non-physical, empathic ability of mirror neurons to fire in response to the perception of “others”, also gives us the ability to empathize with ourselves as if we were also “other”.
Because of mirror neurons, we (the subject) are also able to reflect on our own identity, emotional patterns, instinctive drives (the objects of inner perception). We are able to have empathy for another form, but also for and our own ‘inner’ form. We are able to self reflect, to become self conscious and even to be conscious that we are conscious.
What happens when a mirror neuron sparks empathy for its own empathy? What happens when the mirror neuron’s awareness turns to the other mirror neurons, and the brain becomes aware that it is aware? What is then reflected?
The brain is still alive, firing reflections but now it is reflecting its own capacity for reflection, like a tunnel of mirrors into infinity. On a cellular level, we are becoming aware that we are aware, in increasing degrees of refinement and liberation from normal perceptive constraints. Could this be a neurophysiological explanation for the phenomena of spiritual awakening?   

Where Binary Brain Surrenders
“The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.” ― Eckhart Tolle

Now, we have no choice but to take ourselves as the laboratory monkey. In the experience of awareness of awareness, (the tunnelling of mirror neurons into infinity), the wiring of the brain seems to flip into another dimension beyond habitual neural pathways. This expansion could be a result of a new superconductivity between left brain and right brain.

The effect is a feeling of power, freedom and benevolence. The sense of separation from life falls away. There is an expansion of existential impressions of eternity and infinity – of ‘being’ unconditioned by time and space. The programmed mind defaults to a deep, connected sense of ‘is-ness’, unconditional to circumstances (pleasure, pain, past, future).

In the acceleration and collapse of the tension between subject and object, seen already in the monkey salivating over the professor’s ice-cream, a more evolved layer of mind begins to fire up.
This kind of mind is less identified yet more ingenious. It moves beyond the ‘either-or’, binary equations of subject-object and into the “and-and” formulas that reflect life more truthfully: (also the professor and also the monkey eat peanuts). In developing the ability to relax into paradox, many possibilities, and many feelings, there is an increasing surrender in responsivity to environmental stimuli in any moment.
The more our nervous system learns to recognize these mental perspectives beyond the limitation of time and space as safe and benevolent, the more it relaxes into them and new, more expansive areas of the brain begin to thrive.

Neurons multiply according to how often they are fired. If we don’t use them, we lose them. The more we walk a particular path through the forest of the mind, the more likely we are to walk it, and the easier the walking becomes. This is the nature of education and training. We learn through resonating with the “other”, then we do it ourselves (as we have already walked that path with our role model), and then we do it easily and without drama. What at first could have spritzed adrenalin into the system can later signal easiness and home-coming.
​
The more often we walk new pathways of the brain, the more easily the pathways open. The more we practise mindfulness, self-reflection and empathy, the more mirror neurons we have at our disposal, and the easier it becomes to disentangle and to access this deeper existential layer of being beyond conflict. Through tending the garden of our minds, we find more freedom in form, which is mastery in form.

“It is extraordinary how near we are to our deeper being. It’s just a thought away.”
Ram Dass – Polishing the Mirror One Evolution

“It is paradoxical that the more we know, the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations.” Nikola Tesla

When we move to subtler frequencies of brain, such as the perspective of timeless, unattached consciousness, or the resonance of unbounded being, these mirror neurons and the effects of them are firing our brains, but also, through empathy, through all the brains in the vicinity.
Could this be a neurological reflection of what has been called the transmission of enlightenment from teacher to student?

Is this why meditation in a cave in Lhasa makes a difference even if it is far from the madding crowd?
If what is true of a peanut is also true of enlightened minds, then the liberation of our own perception from the limitations of habitual reactions and thought programs would have an immediate physiological impact on everyone around us – generations forward and backward – without us moving a muscle of saying a word.
Empathy is embodied, instinctive and unconscious. All we need to do is allow it. This means relaxing into the spaces beyond thoughts, relaxing into the formless, infinite screen that precedes imagination, and becoming mentally at ease in co-existing dimensions beyond duality, unconditioned by the parameters of time and space.