Thoughts, mind, and reality - the science behind creating a life you want

How we construct our entire reality from our mind-body

I recently had a funny experience where a series of small things I would think or say would come to immediate fruition. In one instance I made the comment ‘people might just jump out of bushes’ (in a completely unrelated conversation to bushes) and within two seconds right in front of us someone leaped out from the bush we were looking at. Of course we erupted into laughter as it was very odd timing! The next day we were driving home on a country road and I thought ‘I’m going to drive slow there can be lots of kangaroos on the road here’, within the next minute, four kangaroos jumped across the road in front of my car! Though kangaroos are in the bush, never in my five years of living here have four jumped past my car in the space of one minute. The following day it happened again, but this time I made a comment to my partner about how easeful things had felt recently and we hadn’t had any conflict or disagreements come up. Alas, that evening we found ourselves experiencing a situation very differently and it took some time, patience, and gentle communication to really understand each other’s perspective.

It was after we reconciled this conflict that my partner made the comment - ‘can you ask for a million dollars next time? That would be more helpful’. We laughed and I started jokingly doing just that. As I fell asleep these funny little experiences stuck with me. They were rather insignificant but they felt like nature’s little reminders to me of the power of thought.

The nature of the mind.

What I have always loved about the Vedic world view is that it is all inclusive. There’s no part of life that is made to be wrong. Everything has its own natural and spontaneous function. Of course things can become out of balance, meaning they move more and more away from their natural state. It’s the same with the mind or manasa in Sanskrit. So often the mind gets vilified, called the ‘monkey mind’, and seems like this unruly or of control part of us that often comes up with all these ideas and thoughts that don’t make us feel good. We feel beholden to the mind and for some of us our internal world can feel quite dark and unfriendly at times. It’s in these moments we may tend to move towards substances or experiences like food, coffee, sugar, or social media to distract ourselves in an attempt to shift our state by external means.

What we might need to remind ourselves of is the mind is more like a screen in which life plays out. Just like clouds move across the backdrop of the sky, our thoughts will move across the backdrop of our minds. So, why are we often having more unhelpful thoughts than we’d like? And therefore perpetuating the very experiences we don’t want to be having? Why are we creating a reality we don’t want? It has to do with the body and specifically the nervous system…

The state of your nervous system impacts the state of your mind.

The mind and body are inextricably connected, meaning they are always influencing each other. For example, when we worry about an upcoming event or maybe a conversation we need to have and we physically feel nauseous or shaky in the body. Or maybe we have an injury which means we can’t do what we’d like and we feel down about it or possibly angry.

In a culture that doesn’t prioritise nervous system care (and instead is all about pushing, striving, and doing) we have created a state of chronic stress in our body which gives rise to a mind that is overwhelmed, therefore perpetuating a reality for ourselves full of stress and overwhelm. The state of your nervous system will determine your feelings, sensations, thoughts, and behaviours. If we’d like to shift the state of our minds to experience thoughts that are uplifting, evolutionary, abundant, and therefore bringing more of this into our reality, we need to tend to the state of our nervous system. Luckily, if you’re a Vedic meditator this is exactly what you’re doing and it’s why you’ve probably felt happier, lighter, and more positive since meditating. As we start to feel safer (again because of less stress in the nervous system) the world seems brighter and full of possibility.

A change in perception.

What’s changing on a deeper level is our perception. We say ‘consciousness becomes what it sees’. The mind creates a model of our current experience through our five senses and creates meaning. The experience we are having in every moment is a model in the mind and it constructs our entire reality. We now have over 8 billion people in the world - that’s 8 billion different models and 8 billion different realities. If we want to shift our reality we need to shift how we are perceiving reality. Through meditation we re-affirming a new reality and disconfirming an old reality. It becomes a feedback loop: we experience greater happiness, abundance, joy, and possibilities, and therefore we start to see more of this in the world, and therefore we experience more of it and so on. What we are really doing is re-shaping our entire reality, re-modelling the mind, and no longer creating a reality based on stress chemistry but rather on the chemistry of bliss!

What does science have to say about this?

The idea that our perception, state of our nervous system, and the state of our mind are the determining factors of our experience of life is far beyond an idea - it’s backed by incredible research. I always remember this study that Bruce Lipton shared in his book ‘The Biology of Belief’. He explains that our bodies are made of trillion cells, like a community of cells functioning together. We need to replace our cells everyday as they die in a very natural process. We have what’s called stem cells which are all genetically identical and are able to divide and give rise to new cells as old cells die. In this particular study they split stem cells (genetically identical remember) into three different petri dishes and fed the cells each a different culture medium (basically feeding them three different foods). What they found was that one dish formed muscle cells, the 2nd formed bone, and the 3rd formed fat cells. So, if these cells were genetically identical then what controlled the fate of the cells? Their environment! This was the only thing that was different.

In the human body, blood is the environment our cells are in, meaning that the contents of our blood are influencing the cells in our body. What’s controlling the chemistry of our blood? Our nervous system! What controls the state of our nervous system? Our perception! Your brain translates an experience into chemistry in your body so different thoughts and images will release different compositions of endogenous chemicals into your blood. What determines what you see is good or bad, safe or unsafe, is your perception, which is informed by the state of your nervous system! It’s a feedback loop again. When we’re in a state of love or in the presence of someone we love, we release dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, and growth hormone. Our cells grow in this environment giving rise to healthy, balanced, and happy cells. If we perceive a situation to be unsafe or feel afraid we instead release stress hormones like cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline. This helps us to survive but is less healthful chemistry (long-term) that our cells are bathing in.

Tying it all together.

Perception is everything - it’s what influences our entire experience of life. It even affects the chemistry of our blood and therefore the health of our body. It’s absolutely fascinating and means we have the power to create the life we want. Instead of thinking about conflict that hasn’t happened, kangaroos causing havoc, and people jumping out of bushes, I might place my powerful mind on what I’d actually like more of… not less of.

Love Kathleen x

Resources to explore.

Watch Bruce Lipton’s talk on ‘transforming your biology through belief’ 

Listen to Sarah Baldwin explaining ‘how your nervous system creates your entire experience’