Imagination & Emotion: A More Specific Link Within The Mind/Body Connection

Just as we have a stream of thought, likewise we have a stream of feeling.

For each and every thought, our body creates a corresponding feeling or emotion.

We may not always be aware of many of the most subtle feelings we have, but a constant stream of feelings is there nonetheless.

Our imaginations play a large role in this constant creation of feelings within the body. Our perceptions, assumptions, impressions, speculations, anticipations, and many conclusions and intuitions-all are products of the imagination. Thus through our imaginations we are constantly creating more from our available factual information.

On average, we speak about 45,000 words per day to ourselves. We create mind/movies of which we are the writer, director, producer and star. We can get stuck in negative emotional response loops, little skits that we run over and over in variations when we refuse to accept a situation.

When all of this mental activity within the imagination is considered, it appears that we spend a tremendous amount of time each day imagining a big part of our lives, relationships, situations, and environments. These imaginings can be factual or total concoctions born of projections of our own insecurities, fears or lack of understanding. Thus a great part of our suffering comes from our own imaginings.

We are all familiar with the concept that mind and body are one. This has become a scientific fact of life. It takes no great leap of understanding to realize that our faculty of imagination and our emotions are a more specific link within the mind/body connection. This gives us a tremendous insight into emotional freedom, spiritual quickening, tolerance, forgiveness, and the giving and receiving of a higher quality of love. It is a golden gateway through which we can relieve a vast amount of our suffering.

In fact, the loin's share of our personal and world problems can be attributed to our imaginations running amok. As each individual changes their imaginations, we change the world. For example, people can imagine that land is so sacred that they kill other people over the land. Instill within their imagination that the human being is the very most sacred thing on this planet and great changes in human behavior can happen regarding land disputes.

We have been kidding ourselves by believing that we outgrow our imaginations as we leave childhood. We imagine most of what we believe life is. Our life experience is created by our beliefs, imaginations, and emotions-all working together as one system.

We can analyze our beliefs and remove the products of imagination such as superstition, bias, bigotry, and conclusions we have "jumped" to. We can transform our daily negative imaginings to positive and literally create emotional freedom and inner peace from within.

In order to further develop ourselves towards higher levels of inner peace, unconditional love, and compassion it is necessary to begin practicing being kind and loving within our most secret and private imaginations. Anything less creates inner conflict within the mind causing unconditional love and total inner peace to appear to be ideals that are further and further from our reach. Yet, when we give attention to nurturing our imagination and this begins to play a role in our development of unconditional love and inner peace, we discover a deeper connection with our spirituality and God.

Closely monitoring our daily mental routines and eliminating all the little negatives of the day as well as reframing our more pressing problems cleanses the mind and body. We trade in the toxic chemicals of the fight or flight response for the chemicals produced by loving and kind thoughts and imagery, endorphins.

The fight or flight response not only dumps toxic chemicals into the body, it also diverts energy from digestion and healing systems, causes a tensing of muscles, and causes the mind to enter into a change of perception. This change of perception is literally a mind filter. All positive aspects of our environment become irrelevant since they are non threatening. The mind becomes a threat hunter searching for anything wrong, anything negative in the environment. When we look for the negative only, we can find plenty.

We can become caught up in trying to control our situations past a healthy point, many times, as a result of this mental filtering. In proportion to our lack of control wanted or the excessive effort involved in trying to control, we experience stress, a form of the fight or flight response.

Researchers have demonstrated that our cognitive abilities plummet when fight or flight kicks in. On the other hand, we remain clear minded when we avoid the fight or flight response. It doesn't take a genius to realize we make our best choices and decisions when we are clear minded.

Changing the mind/movie in our imaginations or our internal dialogue at the first sign of negative emotion stops the downward spiral of fight or flight and the supportive negative thoughts.

I have developed a technique I call Imagination Control Therapy to make this change quickly and easily so we can avoid the fight or flight response from initiating or turn it around once it begins.

1. At the first sign (or realization) of negative emotion or if you catch yourself creating negative imaginings, STOP! 2. Begin the creation of something good, pure, clean, honest, positive, or divine in your imagination. 3. Choose a response that is kind and loving, a response that is aligned with your highest social and spiritual goals.

When you do this, you are training your mind and body that this is how you are going to respond from this point on. The old ways of responding begin to fade and the new ways of responding become more natural and habitual. The door is open to emotional freedom and inner peace, unconditional love becomes more real, compassion becomes a mindful experience-all through the imagination.

© 2003 William Marts

By William Marts