Synchronicity

Living coincidences

When we live our lives, we often disregard the unknown forces that bring us to do certain things or go to certain places. Perhaps at times, we have a rational explanation for that what we do in this moment, or why we have done it, but are we always sure that our reasoning corresponds to reality?

Could it might not be that our way of being makes us do things unconsciously or visit places that are important for our future lives without realizing that, without knowing why we go there or why we do that, besides from the evident reasons. Well, one of such a force, which happens often in our lives, is termed Synchronicity.

what is Synchronicity?

Extract from Wikipedia:

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are causally unrelated occurring together in a supposedly meaningful manner. In order to count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance.

The concept does not question, or compete with, the notion of causal events. Instead, it maintains that just as incidents may be grouped by cause, they may also be grouped by their meaning. Since meaning is a complex mental construction, subject to conscious and subconscious influence, not every correlation in the grouping of events by meaning needs to have an explanation in terms of cause and effect.

C.G. Jung extract from Wikipedia:

His most notable ideas include the concept of psychological archetypes, the collective unconscious and synchronicity. Jung emphasized the importance of balance and harmony. He cautioned that modern people rely too heavily on science and logic and would benefit from integrating spirituality and appreciation of unconscious realms. He considered the process of individuation necessary for a person to become whole. This is a psychological process of integrating the conscious with the unconscious while still maintaining conscious autonomy, Individuation was the central concept of Analytical Psychology.

Cosmic order

The idea of Jung’s synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined as the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships that are not causal in nature.
These relationships can manifest themselves as simultaneous occurrences that are meaningfully related, as ‘cause and the effect’ occur together.
(From several persons, it is postulated a Cosmic ordering that is the belief that individuals can use their desires to “connect with the cosmos” and make those desires become reality, the idea is connected to the New Age movement and other concepts such as the Law of Attraction.)

Soft and hard synchronicities

In the preface of C.G. Jung’s book “Synchronicity” he gave an explanation of how he intended synchronicity:
“We can understand synchronicity in two basic senses, one “soft,” one “hard.” Soft synchronicity is simply making a connection between an event and one’s existence.
The book does not emphasize much with soft synchronicity because soft synchronicity is perfectly straightforward. “If one is acute, sensitive, intelligent, on the lookout for insights into life and the world, including his own life and his own world, one will be dealing with soft synchronicity on a regular basis.
Hard synchronicity on the other hand is another issue entirely. It derives from the work of C.G. Jung. Raising the discussion to patronizing religious and philosophic statures and it contends to the following:
Remarkable coincidences are not necessarily fortuitous, unexpected or accidental. The universe, in fact, may be disposed to stimulate hard synchronicities because the universe has a formal or integrative bent which corresponds to, or “touches,” the human being’s formal or integrative bent.
Not only are psyche and matter are in contact, they are in meaningful contacts, the kind that produces revelations”.

Cosmic phenomena

Jung was never clear about his own religious beliefs. But this unusual idea of synchronicity is easily explained by the Hindu view of reality. In the Hindu view, our individual egos are like islands in a sea:
We look out at the world and each other and think we are separate entities. What we don’t see is that we are connected to each other by means of the ocean floor beneath the waters.
The outer world is called Maya, meaning illusion, and is thought of as ‘God’s dream’ or ‘God’s dance’. That is, God creates it, but it has no reality of its own. Our individual egos they refer to as Jivatman, which means individual souls.
But they, too, are something of an illusion. We are all actually extensions of the one and only Atman, or God, who allows bits of himself to forget his identity, to become apparently separate and independent, to become us. But we never truly are separate. When we die, we wake up and realize who we were from the beginning: God.
When we dream or meditate, we sink into our personal unconsciousness, coming closer and closer to our true selves, the collective unconscious. It is in states like this that we are especially open to “communications” from other egos. Synchronicity makes Jung’s theory one of the rare ones that is not only compatible with para-psychological phenomena, but he in fact tries to explain them.
Your life’s coincidences
Have you never thought on the subject of these questions? Have you never acknowledged that sometimes you go to places or make things that made you meet someone or recognize some important point of your existence that leads you further on your way through life? And do you have never recognized that something has guided you to do so because exactly in that moment of your life were it necessary for you to live this event?

Most frequently, we acknowledge such events only later. After several times when we realize that exactly this or that event or encounter brought us to do certain crucial things in our lives. But it is true that these occurrences where these events were necessary to bring us forward to a new life dimension(s), to new recognitions which were in one or another way important to us.

Such synchronicities are more significant for us than we can imagine because they lead us to the necessary and crucial experiences on the way through our lives. The more we are open to such forces, the more we can develop our existence and reach our own spiritual goals of our lives, because we’re living in the flow of our true nature.
However, for perceiving such forces, we have to live in the flow of our true nature and live in the flow universe so we can have the chance to know ourselves. How can we really know ourselves sincerely? Through… meditation.

Self Healing, How The Body Actually Heal Itself

The Power of Self Healing

This article is about healing and I would like to discuss few ideas with you. I am a metaphysical counselor, teacher and healer. I have written this guide for people who are concerned with their health and would like to take an active part in assisting their own healing or in maintaining their health, it doesn’t matter what your disease is, if you chose to work with these ideas your health is sure to improve.

I once heard a definition of health that made a lot of sense to me.” Good health is having no fatigue; having a good appetite; going to sleep and awakening easily; having a good memory; having good humor; having precision in thought and action; and being honest, humble, grateful, and loving. “How healthy are you?

The mental patterns and our behaviors

I don’t heal anyone, the work I do is to help people understand how their own mental patterns are constantly creating their own life experiences; all of them, the good experiences and the so called bad experiences, and also how the same mental patterns are contributing to the ease and dis-ease in their bodies.

Life is an echo. What you send out, Comes Back

We do not want to be ill and yet we need every disease we have, it is the body’s way of telling us that we have a false idea in consciousness. We are being told we are on the wrong track and need to change the way we think.

Every illness is a lesson for us to learn; please do not just complain ‘I want to get rid of this condition.’ It will not create the healing you want nor will you learn the lesson you need to learn. This is not a time for condemnation or for creating more guilt. We are just looking at what needs to be released. This is a time for healing, for making our lives in our bodies whole. I know you have within you all that you need to accomplish this.

The universal Law of Attraction

Once we begin to understand this process, we are able to take conscious control of the changes we wish to make in our lives. This is a very exciting process and becomes one of the most important adventures in our lives. I believe there is a center of wisdom within each one of us and when we are ready to make positive changes in our lives, we attract whatever we need to help us.

The very fact that you have discovered this article means that you are already in the process of healing yourself. Something inside of you has shifted and the healing process has already begun. You might even say that to yourself now “I have already begun the healing process”.

The body like everything in life is a mirror of our inner thoughts and beliefs. The body is always talking to us, if we will only take the time to listen. Every cell responds to every single thought you think and every word you speak. Continuous modes of thinking and speaking produce body behaviors and postures and eases or dis-eases the person who has a permanently scowling face did not produce that by having joyous loving thoughts. Older people’s faces show clearly a lifetime of inner dialog. How will you look when you are elder?

You see it is my belief that it is our birthright to be totally healthy and totally fulfilled in every area of our lives. I want to help you claim this birthright now.

Some of the things I will suggest to you may sound very simplistic; however, these ideas have been tried many times with great success. They really do work, please use these suggestions in addition to the work you may be doing with a doctor or other health professional. It will be helpful to you both.

Take a nice deep breath and if possible allow yourself to be in a comfortable position. Just let these ideas wash over you, only those ideas that are right for you will be accepted by you. It doesn’t matter whether you understand them all or not or if they make sense to you right now.

Is Illness Self-created ?

I believe that all illness is self-created, not that we say I want to have this illness but we create a mental atmosphere where this disease can grow and flourish our internal mental dialog reacts in every cell in the body.

I heard a physician say recently ‘if the surgeon operates on a patient without doing something to help them change the cause of the disease, the all the doctor is doing is prolonging the life of the patient until the patient can create another disease’. You see we need to do more than just treat the symptom. We need to eliminate the cause of the disease, and for that we need to go within ourselves where the process of illness began.

We are responsible for every experience in our lives

It is my belief that we are each 100% responsible for every experience in our lives, the best and the worst. We create our experiences by the thoughts we think and the words we speak. The universe totally supports our inner dialog, our subconscious mind accepts as truth whatever we choose to believe. You can say it either way, they both mean that what I believe about myself and about life becomes true for me. What you choose to think about yourself and about life becomes true for you and we have unlimited choices about what we can think.

When we are very little we learn how to feel about ourselves and about life by the reactions of the adults around us.

It is the way we learn what to think about ourselves and about life. Now if you lived with frightened people or with people who were very unhappy, then you learned a lot of negative things about yourself and about life you may still believe them.

Can we blame our parents?

However this is not to blame our parents, for we are all victims of victims and they could not possibly have taught us anything they did not know. If your mother did not know how to love herself, or your father did not know how to be gentle and kind, then it would be impossible for them to teach you to love yourself or to be gentle and kind. Your parents were doing the best they could with what they had been taught as children.

I Believe That We Choose Our Parents

I also believe that we choose our parents. Each one of us decides to incarnate upon this planet at particular points in time and space. I believe we do this because we have chosen to come here to learn a particular lesson that will advance us on our spiritual evolutionary pathway. We choose our sex, our color, our country, and then we look around for the particular set of parents who will mirror the pattern we are bringing in to work on in this lifetime.

Often when we grow up we point our fingers accusingly at our parents and whimper ‘you did it to me’. But really we chose them because they were perfect for what we wanted to work on overcoming, as very little children we learn our belief systems and then we move through life creating experiences to match our beliefs, look back in your own life and notice how often you have gone through the same experiences.

The Point of Power Is Always in the Present Moment

Well I believe that you created those experiences over and over, because they mirrored something that you believed was true about yourself. It really doesn’t matter how long we’ve had a problem or how big it is, or how life-threatening it is, the point of power is always in the present moment. This means that what you have experienced during your life and up to this moment, you have created by your own thoughts and beliefs of the past. However, what you are choosing to think and believe and say today right here and right now is creating your future. Your current internal dialog is creating tomorrow, next week, next month, next year etc.

Notice what you are thinking at this moment; do you want this thought to be creating your future? Is it negative or positive? Just notice and be aware. I am NOT trying to create guilt for anyone, nor to make anyone wrong. I am making us aware of what is going on inside of us.

Many of us who create illness and disease are in fact totally out of touch with what is going on in our minds and in our bodies. We only notice our bodies when we become ill or are in pain. If we do not know what is going on inside of us, how can we ever change?

No matter what the problem is, the only thing we are ever dealing with is a thought, and the thought can be changed.

Our brain – part 2 – Enrichment

Developed nations have created a sedentary, inactive society with a deteriorated vascular system and consequent decline in physical and mental health. Nearly half of young people ages 12 to 21, do not participate in vigorous physical activity on a regular basis. Fewer than one-in-four children report getting at least half an hour of any type of daily physical activity and do not attend any school physical education classes. In June 2001, ABC News reported that school children spend 4.8 hours per day on the computer, watching TV, or playing video games. Adults are in the same boat. So perk up your brain with these approaches.

Challenge your brain

When we are young, the world seems filled with curious surprises, wonderful discoveries, and overwhelming challenges. Our brains are taking in limitless bits of information and we are developing lifetime skills. This burst of learning is like the brain Olympics of our human journey. Yet unlike the Olympic athletes who have a limited time to demonstrate their peak performance, the human brain can continue to grow and improve with exercise.
It is important to challenge your brain to learn new and unique tasks, especially processes that you’ve never done before. Examples include dancing, chess, kung fu, yoga, or even playing a musical instrument. Working with modeling clay or play dough is an especially good way for children to grow new connections. It helps develop agility and hand-brain coordination.

Travel

Traveling is another good way to stimulate your brain. It worked for our ancestors, the early Homo sapiens. Their nomadic lifestyle provided a tremendous stimulation for their brains that led to the development of superior tools and survival skills. In comparison, the now-extinct Neanderthal was a species that for thousands of years apparently did not venture too far from their homes. (Maybe they were simply content with their lives – in contrast to the seldom-satisfied Homo sapiens.)
Early humans gained a crucial evolutionary edge from the flexibility and innovation required by their strategic lifestyle, which also led to a more diverse diet that allowed their brains to rapidly evolve.

Flex your brain

Regard your brain as a muscle, and find opportunities to exercise it. “Read, read, read,” says Dr. Amir Soas of Case Western Reserve University Medical School in Cleveland. Do puzzles, play Scrabble, start a new hobby or learn to speak a foreign language. “Anything that stimulates the brain to think.” Also, watch less television, because “your brain goes into neutral,” he said.
Challenging the brain early in life is crucial to building up more “cognitive reserve” to counter brain-damaging disease, according to Dr. David Bennett of Chicago’s Rush University. And, reading-habits prior to age 18 are a key predictor of later cognitive function.
A cognitive psychologist in England found that when elderly people regularly played bingo, it helped minimize their memory loss and strengthened their hand-eye coordination. Bingo seemed to help players of all ages remain mentally sharp.

Grow your brain

Research on the physical results of thinking has shown that just using the brain actually increases the number of dendritic branches that interconnect brain cells. The more we think, the better our brains function – regardless of age. The renowned brain researcher Dr. Marian Diamond says, “The nervous system possesses not just a ‘morning’ of plasticity, but an ‘afternoon’ and an ‘evening’ as well.”
Dr. Diamond found that whether we are young or old, we can continue to learn. The brain can change at any age. A dendrite grows much like a tree, from trunk to branches to twigs, in an array of ever finer complexity.
In fact, older brains may have an advantage. She discovered that more highly developed neurons respond even better to intellectual enrichment than less developed ones do. The greatest increase in dendritic length occurred in the outermost dendritic branches, as a reaction to new information.

As she poetically describes it: “We began with a nerve cell, which starts in the embryo as just a sort of sphere. It sends its first branch out to overcome ignorance. As it reaches out, it is gathering knowledge and it is becoming creative. Then we become a little more idealistic, generous, and altruistic; but it is our six-sided dendrites which give us wisdom.”

Mental exercise

Contrary to popular myth, we do not lose mass quantities of brains cells as you get older. “There isn’t much difference between a 25-year old brain and a 75-year old brain,” says Dr. Monte S. Buchsbaum, who has scanned a lot of brains as director of the Neuroscience PET Laboratory at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Cognitive decline is not inevitable. When 6,000 older people were given mental tests throughout a ten-year period, almost 70% continued to maintain their brain power as they aged. Certain areas of the brain, however, are more prone to damage and deterioration over time. One is the hippocampus , which transfers new memories to long-term storage elsewhere in the brain. Another vulnerable area is the basal ganglia, which coordinates commands to move muscles. Research indicates that mental exercise can improve these areas and positively affect memory and physical coordination.
Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation discovered that a muscle can be strengthened just by thinking about exercising it.
For 12 weeks (five minutes a day, five days per week) a team of 30 healthy young adults imagined either using the muscle of their little finger or of their elbow flexor. Dr. Vinoth Ranganathan and his team asked the participants to think as strongly as they could about moving the muscle being tested, to make the imaginary movement as real as they could.
Compared to a control group – that did no imaginary exercises and showed no strength gains – the little-finger group increased their pinky muscle strength by 35%. The other group increased elbow strength by 13.4%.

Surround yourself in a stimulating environment

Animal studies show that intellectual enrichment can even compensate for some forms of physical brain damage. For example, a mentally stimulating environment helped protect rats from the potentially damaging effects of lead poisoning.
Neuroscientists at Jefferson Medical College compared groups of rats given lead-laced water for several weeks in two different environments. Rats living in a stimulating environment showed a better ability to learn compared to the animals that were isolated. “Behaviorally, being in an enriched environment seemed to help protect their brains,” says Jay Schneider, Ph.D., professor of pathology, neurology, anatomy and cell biology.
“The magnitude of the protective effect surprised me,” he says. “This might lead to an early educational intervention for at-risk populations.” It suggests a way to diminish the damage that lead does to kids: by manipulating their socio-behavioral environment.

Keep a healthy brain with physical exercise

We all know that physical exercise is good for our general health, but did you know that physical exercise is also good for your brain? If you think you’re going to get smarter sitting in front of your computer or watching television, think again.

Exercise is beneficial for your brain, because it increases blood circulation and the oxygen and glucose that reach your brain. Walking can be especially advantageous as it is not strenuous, so your leg muscles don’t take up extra oxygen and glucose like they do during other forms of exercise. As you walk, you effectively oxygenate your brain. Maybe this is why walking can “clear your head” and helps you to think better.
Ongoing animal studies at The Salk Institute show that running can boost brain cell survival in mice that have a neurodegenerative disease with properties similar to Alzheimer’s.
When these mice are sedentary, “it appears that most newly born brain cells die. We don’t understand that fully, but it probably has something to do with an inability to cope with oxidative stress,” said Carrolee Barlow, a Salk assistant professor and lead author of the study. “Running appears to ‘rescue’ many of these cells that would otherwise die.”
Furthermore, the miles logged correlated directly with the numbers of increased cells, she said. “It’s almost as if they were wearing pedometers, and those that ran more grew more cells.”

Protecting your brain as it ages

Physical exercise has a protective effect on the brain and its mental processes, and may even help prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Based on exercise and health data from nearly 5,000 men and women over 65 years of age, those who exercised were less likely to lose their mental abilities or develop dementia, including Alzheimer’s.
Furthermore, the five-year study at the Laval University in Sainte-Foy, Quebec suggests that the more a person exercises the greater the protective benefits for the brain, particularly in women. Inactive individuals were twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s, compared to those with the highest levels of activity (exercised vigorously at least three times a week). But even light or moderate exercisers cut their risk significantly for Alzheimer’s and mental decline.

Our brain-part 1- A closer look

Our brain is a thinking organ that learns and grows by interacting with the world through perception and action. Mental stimulus improves brain function and actually protects against cognitive decline, as the same with physical exercise.

The human brain is constantly adapting and rewiring itself. Even in old age, the brain can still grow new neurons. Severe mental decline is usually caused by disease, whereas most age-related losses in memory or motor skills simply result from inactivity and a lack of mental exercise and stimulation. Simply put: use it or lose it.

In the beginning

Commencing in the womb and throughout life this immense network continues to expand, adapt, and learn. The primary need for a nervous system was to coordinate movement, so an organism could go find food, instead of waiting for the food to come to it. Jellyfish and sea anemone were the first animals to create nerve cells, they had a great advantage over the sponges that waited brainlessly for food to arrive. After millions of generations of trail and error, nervous systems evolved some remarkable ways of going out to eat. But behind all the numerous forms of life today, the primary directive remains. Movement is in fact a good measure of aging. Inflexibility signals weakness, sickness or death, while a flexible body and fluid mind are the characteristics of youth.
Before birth, the brain creates neurons and the brain cells that communicate with each other at the rate of 15 million firings per hour. When the baby is born, about 100 billion neurons were in position to organize themselves in response to the new environment, no matter the culture, climate, language, or lifestyle.

During infancy, billions of these remarkable cells intertwined into the extensive networks that integrated the nervous system. By the time a person reaches four or five years old, fundamental cerebral architecture will be complete. Until the age of early teens, it is considered the window of opportunity, as this is the time where the brain absorbs the most. Easily to learn language and writing, math and music, as well as the coordinated movements used in sports and dance. But, at any age we can and should continue to build our brain and expand our mind.

Neural network

Throughout life, neural networks reorganize and reinforce themselves in response to new stimuli and learning experiences. This body-mind interaction is what stimulates brain cells to grow and connect with each other in complex ways. They do so by extending branches of intricate nerve fibers called dendrites (from the Latin word for “tree”). These are the antennas through which neurons receive communication from each other.
A healthy, well-functioning neuron can be directly linked to tens of thousands of other neurons, creating a totality of more than a hundred trillion connections, each capable of performing 200 calculations per second. This is the structural basis of your brain’s memory capacity and thinking ability.

Neuroscientists believe that learning and memory involve changes at the neuron-to-neuron synapses. Such changes are called long-term potentiation (LTP), making it easier for connected neurons to communicate with each other and therefore to form memories. LTP involves patterns of synaptic strengthening and weakening that can last for weeks. Because receptor aggregation may contribute to LTP and scattering may be a factor to the reverse scenario, such as long-term depression. The discovery that receptors can scurry in and out of synapses strengthens the synaptic hypothesis of learning.

A study by neuroscientists at Brown University provided further evidence that learning uses long-term potentiation LTP to produce changes in the synaptic connections between brain cells that are necessary to acquire and store new information. When the researchers taught rats a new motor skill, scientists found that the animals’ brains had also changed. The strength of synapses between neurons in the motor cortex of their brains had increased through a process consistent with the use of LTP. Previously, “the link between LTP, synaptic modification and learning was tentative,” said senior author John Donoghue, professor of neuroscience. “This latest study provides strong evidence that learning itself engages LTP in the cerebral cortex as a way to strengthen synaptic connections.”

Mind and body relationship

Brain chemistry reveals a crucial unity of mind and body. Neurons not only contact other neurons, they also connect with skeletal muscles, at a specialized structure called the neuromuscular junction. There the brain uses acetylcholine where its primary chemical neurotransmitter for memory and attention is to communicate with muscles. Another of the brain’s key chemical messengers, dopamine, helps regulate fine motor movement.

The role of these neurotransmitters in regulating movement underscores the close relation between body and mind, muscle and memory. In fact, many masseuses find that deep massage can trigger the release and awareness of powerful, long-held emotional memories.

When acetylcholine is released at a neuromuscular junction, it crosses the tiny space (synapse) that separates the nerve from the muscle. It then binds to acetylcholine receptor molecules on the muscle fiber’s surface. This initiates a chain of events that lead to muscle contraction.

Scientists have shown that muscle fiber contains a scaffold made of special proteins that hold these acetylcholine receptors in place. Research led by Jeff W. Lichtman, M.D., Ph.D., at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, indicates that a loss of nerve signals due to inactivity actually separates this scaffold and causes a loss of acetylcholine receptors. When the muscle becomes active again, however, the scaffold tightens its grip and grasps any receptors that come by.
“So muscle activity is a cue to keep a synapse stable, and synaptic inactivity is a cue to disassemble a synapse,” says Lichtman, a professor of neurobiology. “So if you lose activity, you lose receptors. But if you regain activity, you get those receptors back.”