The Mindful Body by Noa Belling

Author:Noa Belling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rockpool Publishing

CHAPTER 6

Mindful Body Dreaming

The biggest adventure you can ever take is to

live the life of your dreams.

Oprah Winfrey

Our mental images powerfully shape our bodies and our experience of life, predating our ability to think logically and to be intellectual. Children live in a sea of images with little distinction between what is ‘real’ and what is imagined. As adults we continue to inhabit, and be strongly influenced by, an image-rich internal world with, for example, all of our memories laden with images and associated feelings. These are also the dramas that show up in our dreams in their imagistic, symbolic and emotional ways. Growing our ability to be present and engage with the many moods and faces of our imagination and dreams can be an invaluable life skill for emotional healing and resilience. This chapter is dedicated to using the body as a tangible touchstone for navigating these explorations.

The main focus in this chapter is tackling your fears that can show up as nightmares. Once you acquire skills for working with your nightmares, these skills can be applied to any dreams or images from waking or sleeping life.

Working with images and dreams can help guide your life in inspiring, meaningful directions. The chapter ends by inviting you to visualise and embody a future that feels deeply aligned with your deepest dreaming self.

In these ways you are encouraged to spend time tuning into your imaginary, theta brainwave world. In so doing, you can discover a great source of self-awareness, healing, emotional resilience and inspiration. This is the world of Mindful Body Dreaming.

THE THETA HEALING POWER OF IMAGINATION

As mentioned in the previous chapter, our emotional brain regions are highly ‘neuroplastic’, or emotionally adaptable. In other words, our brains can be guided to change when we know how. We are perhaps wired this way because of the importance of emotional adaptability and learning to survive and thrive as a species in our communities and in our world.

Also, as touched on in the previous chapter, imagination, emotions and memory tend to follow each other. They all resonate in the theta brainwave frequency. Because of this connection, when we work with one of these areas, the others shift too. This is the reason why imagination can give us an effective way for creating desired change in our emotional world and in our memories. Thomas Budzynski, a biofeedback researcher, also points to the connection to learning. He describes the theta-, half-awake, half-asleep brainwave state as a transition zone in which we can absorb new information in an uncritical, non-analytical way. This is because images bypass our thinking brain’s tendency towards assumptions and judgements that can limit our ability to change.

This chapter offers you more opportunities to play in the realm of imagination as a powerful tool for evolving and healing your emotions and memories.

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