The largest nerve in our body is the vagus nerve, which means wandering in Latin. This nerve has multiple branches which diverge from two thick stems rooted in the brainstem and cerebellum that reach to the lowest viscera of your intestines, touching the heart and most other organs along the way. Scientists have found, that feeling elevated emotions such as compassion and empathy arouses this nerve, creating higher levels of coherence between all the organs it touches in the process. In a nutshell; feeling empathy for others can heal you.
It is a scientific fact that fear-based states, if overindulged in, breaks the body down and creates disease. When we live via the hormones of stress, we activate the survival gene and the constant arousal of this gene weakens the immune system, depleting our energy in the process. Elevated emotions such as love, on the other hand, the opposite of fear, which compassion, empathy and gratitude are a byproduct, restores and repairs the body.
Take a look at the map of the energy centres in the spine below. Each chakra is related to a gland in the endocrine system and has an intelligence of its own. Our energy is constantly moving up and down our spine depending on our state of being. For example, when you feel love, compassion and empathy, you’re operating from your centre, which is the heart chakra. When you express that love via your words, then you’ve moved up into the throat chakra, directly linked to the way we communicate with others and Mercury (the planet of communication and perception in Astrology).
Conversely, when you live from the lower three centres, which are the survival centres, you deplete your energy. As a result of your low energy, you’re only going to create more of the same, which means your subconscious programs, habits take you over because you don’t have enough energy to create anything new. To create something new in your life, you need to maintain an elevated state of being. The lowest three energy centres represent fear, survival, our sexual nature (propagation of the species), eating and digestion (which also depletes our energy) and so on.
When people are stressed, they’re more likely to act out of habit. To feel secure from the threats you believe are outside you, then it’s safer to do what feels familiar. This survival mechanism is why change is difficult for most because the moment they embrace the unknown and step out of their comfort zone, their brain allures them to falling back into the familiar.
“Many struggle with their habits because they lack motivation. Even though they say they genuinely want change, they don’t seem to want it enough. I know change can be difficult and even scary at times because to change, one must step outside the comfort zone of their familiar feelings to embrace the unknown. The option of reverting into the same patterns, into the comfort zone is always there, but let me tell you that life truly begins where your comfort zone ends.“
─The Labyrinth: Rewiring the Nodes in the Maze of your Mind
Now that you see how living from the three lower centres depletes your energy let’s discuss how living from your heart centre repairs your body.
Compassion is fundamental to any spiritual outlook on life. Without the steady foundation of empathy and compassion, one is not going to get very far on their journey. In a compassionate state, there’s no room for racism, homophobia, nationalism, segregation. You can’t express kindness for one set of people and shun another because they’re skin is a different colour, or they’re sexually attracted to the same gender. Empathy is an all-encompassing state; it has no object; instead, it is the glue that binds us as one cosmic family, united by consciousness.
“Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.”
– Albert Einstein
When we live from our centre and express our appreciation and compassion through our actions, we trigger the autonomic nervous system (ANS) to begin to restore our body. Dr Joe Dispenza said that feeling gratitude for just ten minutes triggers over 1300 chemicals in the limbic brain that restores and repairs the body. Higher vibrational states also strengthen the immune system. Have you noticed that people who laugh alot, are naturally kind and easy-going rarely get sick?
Forms of bacteria don’t make us sick; they are known as opportunistic bacteria because they wait until the hormones of stress compromise our immune system. We permit them to attack us when we live in fear-based states. If one is living from their centre the majority of the day, however, and the vagus nerve is creating that coherence throughout the heart, the brain and other organs then we’re more likely to be immune to them.
Many in spiritual communities believe they always need protection from something─some spirit, demon, an energy vampire, or what have you. They don’t understand, though, that the belief they need to be protected is a fear-based state of being. If you believe you need protection, then the universe aligns you with forces you in which you require protection. The best form of protection out there is to live from your centre with love at your core. Nothing of a lower vibration can touch you if you’re in an elevated state.
In this day and age, such division exists between nations and continents due to the limiting beliefs in the various religious, political systems and the media reinforcing the division via movies and the news channels. Be a shining light in a very dark world; go beyond the surface differences you perceive with your senses; attune yourself with the aspect of your nature you share with every form of life on this planet and in the entire cosmos; your consciousness.
“Christ taught that we should love our neighbours as ourselves; this is because our neighbour is our self. We are one consciousness, the same spirit occupying different bodies. The separation we perceive with our five senses is strong, but still an illusion fundamentally.”
─The Labyrinth: Rewiring the Nodes in the Maze of your Mind
Lynne McTaggart, author of the book The Power of Eight, is the founder of the intention masterclass group. She connects and trains groups of individuals from around the world in the art of sending their intentions to places where war is predominant and where healing is desperately needed. McTaggart has found, via her intention experiments that the act of sending healing and loving intentions in groups of at least eight people not only heals those targeted by the group, but it has a transformative effect on the senders’ lives as well!
“The outcome of both the groups and the experiments, amazing though they were, paled in comparison to what was happening to the participants. The most powerful effect of group intention, an effect overlooked by virtually every popular book on the subject, was on the intenders themselves.”
– Lynne McTaggart, The Power of Eight
As Lynne and others are finding, the best way to heal yourself is to enter the state of self-forgetfulness and focus on loving others. When you become no-thing, you merge with all that is.
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-Rei Rei
The Future is Now 