Bruce Lipton Quotes

We can control our lives by controling our perceptions.

Your perspective is always limited by how much you know. Expand your knowledge and you will transform your mind.

If humans were to model the lifestyle displayed by healthy community of cells , our societies and our planet would be more peaceful and vital

What quantum physics teaches us is that everything we thought was physical is not physical.

I was exhilarated by the new realization that I could change the character of my life by changing my beliefs. I was instantly energized because I realized that there was a science-based path that would take me from my job as a perennial “victim” to my new position as “co-creator” of my destiny. (Prologue, xv)

I learned again and again in my life, until you get your own act together, you’re not ready for Big Love. What you’re ready for is one of those codependent relationships where you desperately need a partner.

You know why it’s hard to be happy—it’s because we refuse to LET GO of the things that make us sad.

Humans are more dependent on learning for survival than other species,We have no instincts that automatically find us food and shelter !

Our beliefs control our bodies, our minds, and thus our lives...

Just like a single cell, the character of our lives is determined not by our genes but by our responses to the environmental signals that

The overuse of prescription drugs provides a vacation from personal responsibility.

Human beings are not meant to live alone. There is a fundamental biological imperative that propels you and every organism on this planet to be in a community, to be in relationship with other organisms.

human beings have a great capacity for sticking to false beliefs with great passion and tenacity,

the character of our life is based upon how we perceive it.

Just like a single cell, the character of our lives is determined not by our genes but by our responses to the environmental signals that propel life.

Here is the amazing thing: the caterpillar and the butterfly have the exact same DNA. They are the same organism but are receiving and responding to a different organizing signal.

We are not victims of our genes, but masters of our fates, able to create lives overflowing with peace, happiness, and love.

physicists abandoned their belief in a Newtonian, material universe because they had come to realize that the universe is not made of matter suspended in empty space but energy.

As many conventionally unhappy parents did in the 1950s, my parents stayed together for the sake of the children—they divorced after my youngest brother left home for college. I only wish they had known that modeling their dysfunctional relationship was far more damaging to their children than their separation would have been.

When you find yourself on a vicious cycle, for goodness sakes, stop peddling!” — Swami Beyondananda

No one is fixed until they make the effort to change.

Matter can simultaneously be defined as a solid (particle) and as an immaterial force field (wave).

At the atomic level, matter does not even exist with certainty; it only exists as a tendency to exist.

The Universe is one indivisible, dynamic whole in which energy and matter are so deeply entangled it is impossible to consider them as independent elements.

You may consider yourself an individual, but as a cell biologist, I can tell you that you are in truth a cooperative community of approximately fifty trillion single-celled citizens.

However, I truly believe that only when Spirit and Science are reunited will we be afforded the means to create a better world.

We need to move beyond Darwinian Theory, which stresses the importance of individuals, to one that stresses the importance of the community. British scientist Timothy Lenton provides evidence that evolution is more dependent on the interaction among species than it is on the interaction of individuals within a species. Evolution becomes a matter of the survival of the fittest groups rather than the survival of the fittest individuals. In a 1998 article in Nature, Lenton wrote that rather than focusing on individuals and their role in evolution “we must consider the totality of organisms and their material environment to fully understand which traits come to persist and dominate.” (Lenton

Biological behavior can be controlled by invisible forces, including thought, as well as it can be controlled by physical molecules like penicillin, a fact that provides the scientific underpinning for pharmaceutical-free energy medicine.

Cuando se desarrolla un comportamiento preprogramado, la vigilante mente consciente puede intervenir, detener dicho comportamiento y crear una nueva respuesta.

Signal transduction science recognizes that the fate and behavior of an organism is directly linked to its perception of the environment.

As a nation we should look more carefully at how our fear of future acts of terrorism is undermining our quality of life.

I knew I was going to be a cellular biologist whose research would focus on scrutinizing every nuance of the cell's ultrastructure to gain insights into the secrets of cellular life.

According to Dr. Bruce Lipton, gene activity can change on a daily basis. If the perception in your mind is reflected in the chemistry of your body, and if your nervous system reads and interprets the environment and then controls the blood’s chemistry, then you can literally change the fate of your cells by altering your thoughts. In fact, Dr. Lipton’s research illustrates that by changing your perception, your mind can alter the activity of your genes and create over thirty thousand variations of products from each gene. He gives more detail by saying that the gene programs are contained within the nucleus of the cell, and you can rewrite those genetic programs through changing your blood chemistry.

Positive thoughts are a biological mandate for a happy, healthy life. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi: Your beliefs become your thoughts Your thoughts become your words Your words become your actions Your actions become your habits Your habits become your values Your values become your destiny

You can live a life of fear or live a life of love.

a cell is a “programmable chip” whose behavior and genetic activity are primarily controlled by environmental signals, not genes.

the mystical. It is the power of all true science.

Suddenly I realized that a cell's life is controlled by the physical and energetic environment and not by its genes. Genes are simply molecular blueprints used in the construction of cells, tissues, and organs. The environment serves as a "contractor" who reads and engages those genetic blueprints and is ultimately responsible for the character of a cell's life. It is a single cell's "awareness" of the environment, not its genes, that sets into motion the mechanisms of life.

school you may have learned the basic components of a cell: the nucleus that contains genetic material, the energy-producing mitochondria, the protective membrane at the outside rim, and the cytoplasm in between.

Eric R. Kandel, a Nobel Prize–winning neuropsychiatrist for his work on memory, shows how our thoughts, even our imaginations, get “under the skin” of our DNA and can turn certain genes on and certain genes off, changing the structure of the neurons in the brain.[1] So as we think and imagine, we change the structure and function of our brains. Even Freud speculated back in the 1800s that thought leads to changes in the brain.[2] In recent years, leading neuroscientists like Marion Diamond, Norman Doidge, Joe Dispenza, Jeffrey Schwartz, Henry Markram, Bruce Lipton, and Allan Jones, to name just a few, have shown how our thoughts have remarkable power to change the brain.[3] Our brain is changing moment by moment as we are thinking. By our thinking and choosing, we are redesigning the landscape of our brain.

Quantum physicists discovered that physical atoms are made up of vortices of energy that are constantly spinning and vibrating; each atom is like a wobbly spinning top that radiates energy. Because each atom has its own specific energy signature (wobble), assemblies of atoms (molecules) collectively radiate their own identifying energy patterns. So every material structure in the universe, including you and me, radiates a unique energy signature. If it were theoretically possible to observe the composition of an actual atom with a microscope, what would we see? Imagine a swirling dust devil cutting across the desert’s floor. Now remove the sand and dirt from the funnel cloud. What you have left is an invisible, tornado-like vortex. A number of infinitesimally small, dust devil–like energy vortices called quarks and photons collectively make up the structure of the atom. From far away, the atom would likely appear as a blurry sphere. As its structure came nearer to focus, the atom would become less clear and less distinct. As the surface of the atom drew near, it would disappear. You would see nothing. In fact, as you focused through the entire structure of the atom, all you would observe is a physical void. The atom has no physical structure—the emperor has no clothes! Remember the atomic models you studied in school, the ones with marbles and ball bearings going around like the solar system? Let’s put that picture beside the “physical” structure of the atom discovered by quantum physicists. No, there has not been a printing mistake; atoms are made out of invisible energy not tangible matter! So in our world, material substance (matter) appears out of thin air. Kind of weird, when you think about it. Here you are holding this physical book in your hands. Yet if you were to focus on the book’s material substance with an atomic microscope, you would see that you are holding nothing. As it turns out, we undergraduate biology majors were right about one thing—the quantum universe is mind-bending. Let’s look more closely at the “now you see it, now you don’t” nature of quantum physics. Matter can simultaneously be defined as a solid (particle) and as an immaterial force field (wave). When scientists study the physical properties of atoms, such as mass and weight, they look and act like physical matter. However, when the same atoms are described in terms of voltage potentials and wavelengths, they exhibit the qualities and properties of energy (waves). (Hackermüller, et al, 2003; Chapman, et al, 1995; Pool 1995) The fact that energy and matter are one and the same is precisely what Einstein recognized when he concluded that E = mc2. Simply stated, this equation reveals that energy (E) = matter (m, mass) multiplied by the speed of light squared (c2). Einstein revealed that we do not live in a universe with discrete, physical objects separated by dead space. The Universe is one indivisible, dynamic whole in which energy and matter are so deeply entangled it is impossible to consider them as independent elements.

Ésa es la razón de que, cuando di el primer paso para cambiar mi vida, estudiara con detenimiento en qué estaba gastando mi energía mental. Tuve que examinar los resultados de la energía que invertía en mis pensamientos con tanta atención como lo hacía con la que consumía para fortalecer mi cuerpo físico.

The trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry puts its research money into the search for magic bullets in the form of chemicals because pills mean money. If energy healing could be made into tablet form, drug manufacturers would get interested quickly. Instead, they identify deviations in physiology and behavior that vary from some hypothetical norm as unique disorders or dysfunctions, and then they educate the public about the dangers of these menacing disorders. Of course, the over-simplified symptomology used in defining the dysfunctions prevalent in drug company advertisements has viewers convinced they are afflicted by that particular malady. “Do you worry? Worry is a primary symptom of ‘medical condition’ called anxiety disorder. Stop your worry. Tell your doctor you want Addictazac, the new passion-pink drug.

Our perception of what is physical us an illusion. There's nothing physical at all, it's all energy.

You cannot be “guilty” of bad parental behavior if you had no awareness or understanding of the implications of that behavior on your child’s development.

PSYCH-K can change long-standing, limiting beliefs in a matter of minutes.

Michael Mendizza and Joseph Chilton Pearce’s inspiring book Magical Parent-Magical Child

The separation between us and them or between us and Nature that we so vividly experience in our reality is an illusion held in place by our beliefs.

Toda una vida sin amor no cuenta, el amor es el agua de vida, ¡bébela con el alma y el corazón!

The fact is that hundreds of trillions of microbial “invaders,” mostly in our gut, are absolutely necessary for our survival, and there are ten times more of them than cells in the human body. Because the body cannot survive without its microbes (collectively called the “microbiome”), they are the functional equivalent of any of our other vital organ systems. In (belated) recognition of the importance of the microbiome, humans and most other organisms are now properly defined as superorganisms (complex organisms composed of many smaller organisms). (Saey

Already there is a study that shows that when humans digest genetically modified foods, the artificially created genes transfer into and alter the character of the beneficial bacteria in the intestine

over 80 percent of noncoding DNA is involved with regulating the production and assembly of gene-encoded proteins. A major discovery also found that “dark” DNA contains mechanisms by which environmental information can be used to modify the readout of protein-encoding genes. It turns out that dark DNA uses epigenetic mechanisms that enable a human cell with 19,000 gene blueprints to code for over a hundred thousand different protein molecules!

The science of epigenetics has also made it clear that there are two mechanisms by which organisms pass on hereditary information. Those two mechanisms provide a way for scientists to study both the contribution of nature (genes) and the contribution of nurture (epigenetic mechanisms) in human behavior. If you only focus on the blueprints, as scientists have been doing for decades, the influence of the environment is impossible to fathom. (Dennis 2003; Chakravarti and Little 2003)

So one way of looking at our trillion-celled bodies is that they are protein machines, although, as you know, I think we are more than machines! It sounds simple, but it isn’t. For one thing, it takes over 100,000 different types of proteins to run our bodies. Let

Imagine a population of trillions of individuals living under one roof in a state of perpetual happiness. Such a community exists - it is called the healthy human body. Clearly cellular communities work better than human communities - there are no left out, "homeless" cells in our bodies. Unless of course, our cellular communities are in profound disharmony causing some cells to withdraw from cooperating with the community. Cancers essentially represent homeless, jobless cells that are living off the other cells in the community.

Because we are not powerless biochemical machines, popping a pill every time we are mentally or physically out of tune is not the answer. Drugs and surgery are powerful tools when they are not overused, but the notion of simple drug fixes is fundamentally flawed. Every time a drug is introduced into the body to correct function A, it inevitably throws off function B, C, or D. It is not gene-directed hormones and neurotransmitters that control our bodies and our minds; our beliefs control our bodies, our minds, and thus our lives … Oh ye of little belief!

So here is the bad news and the good news. The story of human life on Earth is yet to be determined. If there is to be an Act V, it will depend on whether we humans are willing to make changes in our individual and collective beliefs and behaviors and whether we are able to make these changes in time.

The team discovered that immune functions in poorer kids had more active inflammatory genes and, simultaneously, expressed more sluggishness in gene networks that control the inflammation response than well-to-do children. The health histories of the poor kids also showed more asthma attacks and other health problems.

In addition to those published by Elisabeth Targ, a large number of scientific reports have also assessed the power of prayer. Medical doctor Larry Dossey, author of Healing Words and Prayer Is Good Medicine, reviewed more than 60 scientific studies that provide evidence of prayer having a measurable impact on healing.

Nevertheless, the drugging of America continues—one Mayo Clinic study concluded that nearly seven out of ten Americans are taking prescription drugs, and a whopping 20 percent take five or more! (Zhong, et al, 2013) This includes millions of courses of antibiotics that have spawned life-threatening, drug-resistant microbes.

in The Biology of Belief (and more). I’ll explain why it is not your hormones, your neurochemicals, your genes, or your less-than-ideal upbringing that prevents you from creating the relationships you say you want. Your beliefs are preventing you from experiencing those elusive, loving relationships. Change your beliefs, change your relationships.

Perhaps if more people realized that coupling in higher organisms is fundamentally about bonding, not only about the drive to reproduce, there would be less prejudice against homosexuality. In fact, homosexuality is natural and common in the animal kingdom. In a 2009 review of the scientific literature, University of California at Riverside biologists Nathan W. Bailey and Marlene Zuk, who advocate more study about the evolutionary impetus for homosexual behavior, state, “The variety and ubiquity of same-sex sexual behavior in animals is impressive; many thousands of instances of same-sex courtship, pair bonding and copulation have been observed in a wide range of species, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, mollusks, and nematodes.

In Molecules of Emotion, Pert revealed how her study of information-processing receptors on nerve cell membranes led her to discover that the same “neural” receptors were present on most, if not all, of the body’s cells. Her elegant experiments established that the “mind” was not focused in the head but was distributed via signal molecules to the whole body. As importantly, her work emphasized that emotions were not only derived through a feedback of the body’s environmental information. Through self-consciousness, the mind can use the brain to generate “molecules of emotion” and override the system. While proper use of consciousness can bring health to an ailing body, inappropriate unconscious control of emotions can easily make a healthy body diseased,

Dossey states that prayer is not something we do—it is what we are. Gregg Braden derived a similar conclusion. While in the Himalayas, Braden asked a Buddhist abbot to explain the intention of monks chanting for 14 to 16 hours a day. Specifically, he asked, “When we see your prayers, what are you doing?” The monk replied, “You’ve never seen our prayers, because a prayer cannot be seen. What you’ve seen is what we do to create the feeling in our bodies. Feeling is the prayer!”12

Recent studies funded by Britain’s Natural Environment Research Council provide support for those concerns. (Thomas, et al, 2004; Stevens, et al, 2004) While there have been five mass extinctions in the history of our planet, they are all presumed to have been caused by extraterrestrial events, such as a comet smashing to earth. One of the new studies concludes that the “natural world is experiencing the sixth, major extinction event in its history.” (Lovell 2004) This time though, the cause of the extinction is not extraterrestrial. According to one of the study’s authors, Jeremy Thomas, “As far as we can tell this one is caused by one animal organism—man.

Child psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley learned the same thing when they recorded hundreds of hours of interactions between children and adults in forty-two families from across a wide socioeconomic spectrum and assessed the children’s development from nine months to three years. Children in well-to-do families, whose parents were typically college-educated professionals, heard an average of 2,153 words an hour spoken to them. In contrast, the children of low-income families heard an average only 616 words per hour. By their third birthday, the children in well-to-do families heard 30 million more words than economically deprived children and the amount of conversation parents had with their infants was directly proportional to IQ test scores assessed at three years of age and the performance in school of these children at ages nine and ten. (Hart and Risley 2003) The exciting part is that Hart and Risley’s research has spawned conscious parenting initiatives thanks to technology in the form of LENA (Language Environment Analysis) devices. LENA devices work like pedometers except they keep track of words rather than steps. The Thirty Million Words Initiative in Chicago is making LENA devices available to parents so they can track the numbers of words they expose their children to. After six weeks, researchers in Chicago found a 32 percent increase in the number of words the children heard. Says Dr. Dana Suskind, Director of the Thirty Million Words Initiative: “Every parent has the ability to grow their children’s brain and impact their future.” (Suskind 2013)

Nevertheless I’d like to end this chapter on a positive note about how research into how humans acquire language is leading to better informed, conscious parents. Though there has been a cultural misunderstanding that a baby’s brain is not developed enough to learn and comprehend language, nothing could be further from the truth. The acquisition of language plays a fundamental role in exercising an infant’s brain and shaping its organization, neural connectivity, and intelligence. Research on the fetal brain’s ability to acquire and download environmental experiences in the womb reveal that the nervous system’s sensory input mechanisms, such as hearing, develop long before the system’s motor outputs—in this case, coordinated muscular control needed for speech. Consequently, the brain’s potential to learn and understand language is not dependent on the infant’s ability to speak.

You need more than just "positive thinking" to harness control of your body and your life. It is important for our health and well-being to shift our mind's energy toward positive, life generating thoughts and eliminate ever-present, energy-draining and debilitating negative thoughts. But, and I mean that in the biggest sense of "BUT", the mere thinking of positive thoughts will not necessarily have any impact on our lives at all! In fact, sometimes people who "flunk" positive thinking become more debilitated because now they think their situation is hopeless - they believe they have exhausted all mind and body remedies. What those positive-thinking dropouts haven't understood is that the seemingly "separate" subdivisions of the mind, the conscious and the subconscious, are interdependent. The conscious or spirit - is the creative mind. It can see into the future, review the past, or disconnect from the present moment as it solves problems in our head. In its creative capacity, the conscious mind holds our wishes, desires, and aspirations for our lives. It is the mind that conjures up our "positive thoughts". In contrast, the subconscious mind is primarily a repository of stimulus-response tapes derived from instincts and learned experiences. The subconscious mind is fundamentally habitual; it will play the same behavioral responses to life's signals over and over again, much to our chagrin. How many times have you found yourself going ballistic over something trivial like an open toothpaste tube? You have been trained since childhood to carefully replace the cap. When you find the tube with its cap left off, your "buttons are pushed" and you automatically fly into rage. You've just experienced the simple stimulus-response of a behavior program stored in the subconscious mind.

Of course there is no doubt that some diseases, like Huntington’s chorea, beta thalassemia, and cystic fibrosis, can be blamed entirely on one faulty gene. But single-gene

Bruce Lipton (The Biology of Belief),

EL BOICOT DEL MIEDO «La pura verdad es que cuando estás asustado te vuelves más tonto. Los profesores lo ven todos los días con los estudiantes a los que no se les dan bien los exámenes. La ansiedad que provocan los exámenes paraliza a los alumnos que, con manos temblorosas, marcan las respuestas equivocadas porque, a causa del pánico, no pueden acceder a la información almacenada en el cerebro que tan cuidadosamente han ido adquiriendo durante el semestre.» Doctor Bruce H. Lipton

But despite attempts to convince the public that milk is milk, be it human breast milk, cow’s milk, or formula, nothing could be further from the truth. Artificial formulas do not contain the powerful energy resources or immune protection found in mother’s milk. In fact, a nutritional imbalance in synthetic formula feeding is associated with deaths from diarrhea in infants in both developing and developed countries. (Victora, et al, 1989)

Biologist Bruce Lipton has been spreading the gospel about the role of epigenetics for years and calls its influence “the new biology.

It is not gene-directed hormones and neurotransmitters that control our bodies and our minds; our beliefs control our bodies and our minds, and thus our lives . . . Oh ye of little belief!

Es obvio que los seres humanos poseen una gran capacidad para aferrarse a las falsas creencias con fanatismo y tenacidad, y los científicos racionalistas no son ninguna excepción.

No matter how you cut it, biological science is based to some degree on humanizing the subject matter.

igual que en las células aisladas, el carácter de nuestra existencia se ve determinado no por nuestros genes, sino por nuestra respuesta a las señales ambientales que impulsan la vida.

Estamos viviendo una época apasionante, ya que la ciencia está a punto de desintegrar los viejos mitos y de reescribir una creencia básica de la civilización humana.

Cells, tissues, and organs do not question information sent by the nervous system. Rather, they respond with equal fervor to accurate life-affirming perceptions and to self-destructive misperceptions. Consequently, the nature of our perceptions greatly influences the fate of our lives.

We now live in an era known as the Anthropocene, which emphasizes that human activities are causing massive changes to our natural world at an unprecedented rate. Not one location on our planet, from the southern tip of Antarctica to the heights of Mt. Everest, has remained untouched by human influence. For example, fossil fuel burning has left an imprint on our immediate environment while the thin veil of the Earth’s atmosphere carries it to all portions of the globe. This reminds us of the following: (1) that we are all connected; (2) that we all leave an imprint; and (3) that the Earth that sustains us is finite. Today’s global crises are warnings that we must stop exploiting the abundance and vitality of our living home and begin to reconnect and honor the planet as many traditional societies have done for eons.

Geneticists experienced a comparable shock when, contrary to their expectations of over 120,000 genes, they found that the entire human genome consists of approximately 25,000 genes. (Pennisi 2003a and 2003b; Pearson 2003; Goodman 2003) More than eighty percent of the presumed and required DNA does not exist! The missing genes are proving to be more troublesome than the missing eighteen minutes of the Nixon tapes. The one-gene, one-protein concept was a fundamental tenet of genetic determinism. Now that the Human Genome Project has toppled the one-gene for one-protein concept, our current theories of how life works have to be scrapped. No longer is it possible to believe that genetic engineers can, with relative ease, fix all our biological dilemmas. There are simply not enough genes to account for the complexity of human life or of human disease.

True” scientists consider anthropomorphism to be something of a mortal sin and ostracize scientists who knowingly employ it in their work.

Tanto para los padres adoptivos como para los que no lo son, el mensaje está claro: los genes de tus hijos reflejan sólo su potencial, no su destino.

La capacidad de la mente consciente de obviar la programación del subconsciente es la base del libre albedrío.

However, as pursuit of happiness morphed into pursuit of material, all of the promises became compromised. So what went wrong? How did this happen?

When, for example, I added inflammatory chemicals to the tissue culture, the cells rapidly became the equivalent of macrophages, the scavengers of the immune system. What was also exciting to me was that the cells transformed even when I destroyed their DNA with gamma rays. These endothelial cells were

We’re back to where we started in this chapter, the environment. In my own work in the laboratory, I saw over and over the impact a changed environment had on the cells I was studying. But it was only at the end of my research career, at Stanford, that the message fully sank in. I saw that endothelial cells, which are the blood vessel-lining cells I was studying, changed their structure and function depending on their environment. When,

El mayor obstáculo para conseguir el éxito en aquello que soñamos son las limitaciones programadas en el subconsciente. Estas limitaciones no sólo influyen en nuestro comportamiento, sino que también pueden jugar un papel fundamental en nuestra salud y nuestra fisiología. Como hemos visto antes, la mente juega un papel muy importante en el control de los sistemas biológicos que nos mantienen con vida.

Matter is not objectively real. Matter is composed of atoms, and atoms are almost entirely empty space. I recall reading once that if the White House were an atomic nucleus, its closest orbiting electron could be as far away as Denver, and there would be literally nothing between them. At one time physicists believed that at least those subatomic particles were solid, but the more closely they studied them, the more physicists realized that subatomic particles are more empty space circumscribed by tinier orbiting particles which themselves are empty space. It begins to look as if the tiniest particles of all are just vortices of energy. Bruce Lipton, quantum biologist and author of The Biology of Belief (2005), tells us that if you could put a subatomic camera inside an atom, there would be nothing for it to photograph because matter is just whirling energy. Nothing is solid. Everything is waves. Of course, observation appears to force each wave to become whatever the observer seeks – either a particle of matter or a wave of energy – but since the tiniest particles are just energy vortices,

Genetic evolutionists warn that if we fail to apply the lessons of our shared genetic destiny, which should be teaching us the importance of cooperation among all species, we threaten human existence.

atoms are made out of invisible energy, not tangible matter! So

they had come to realize that the concept of matter is an illusion, for they now recognized that everything in the Universe is made out of energy. Quantum

perfect hereditary molecule. Each DNA strand is normally intertwined with a second

correlation and causation. It’s one thing to be linked to a disease; it’s quite another to cause a disease, which implies a directing, controlling action. If I show you my keys and say that a particular key “controls” my car, you at first might think that makes sense because you know you need that key to turn on the ignition. But does the key actually “control” the car? If it did, you couldn’t leave the key in the car alone because it might just borrow your car for a joy ride when you are not paying attention. In truth, the key is “correlated” with the control of the car; the person who turns the key actually controls the car. Specific genes are correlated with an organism’s behavior and characteristics. But these genes are not activated until something triggers them.

I didn’t believe in God, though I confess that on occasion I entertained the notion of a God who ruled with an extremely honed perverse sense of humor.

epigenetics, a booming field of biology that is unraveling the mysteries of how the environment influences the behavior of cells without changing the genetic code.

We are made in the image of God, and we need to put Spirit back into the equation when we want to improve our physical and our mental health.

so many of us are leading limited lives not because we have to but because we think we have to.

As described by the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a form of empirically based psychological intervention that focuses on mindfulness. Mindfulness is the state of focusing on the present to remove oneself from feeling consumed by the emotion experienced in the moment. To properly observe yourself, begin by noticing where in your body you experience emotion. For example, think about a time when you felt really sad. You may have felt despair in your chest, or a sense of hollowness in your stomach. If you were angry, you may have felt a burning sensation in your arms. This occurs within everyone, in different variations. A study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University traced emotional responses in the brain to different activity signatures in the body through a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. If someone recalled a painful or traumatic memory, the prefrontal cortex and neocortex became less active, and their “reptilian brain” was activated. The former areas of the brain are responsible for conscious thought, spatial reasoning, and higher functions such as sensory perception. The latter is responsible for fight-or-flight responses. This means that the bodily responses caused by your emotions provide an opportunity for you to be mindful of them. Your emotions create sensations in your body that reflect your mind. Dr. Bruce Lipton, a developmental biologist who studies gene expression in relation to environmental factors, released a study on epigenetics that sheds light on this matter. It revealed that an individual’s body cannot heal when it is in its sympathetic state. The sympathetic nervous system, informally known as the fight-or-flight state, is triggered by certain emotional responses. This means that when we are consumed by emotion, an effective solution cannot be found until we shift our mind into reflecting on our emotions.

As described by the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a form of empirically based psychological intervention that focuses on mindfulness. Mindfulness is the state of focusing on the present to remove oneself from feeling consumed by the emotion experienced in the moment. To properly observe yourself, begin by noticing where in your body you experience emotion. For example, think about a time when you felt really sad. You may have felt despair in your chest, or a sense of hollowness in your stomach. If you were angry, you may have felt a burning sensation in your arms. This occurs within everyone, in different variations. A study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University traced emotional responses in the brain to different activity signatures in the body through a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. If someone recalled a painful or traumatic memory, the prefrontal cortex and neocortex became less active, and their “reptilian brain” was activated. The former areas of the brain are responsible for conscious thought, spatial reasoning, and higher functions such as sensory perception. The latter is responsible for fight-or-flight responses. This means that the bodily responses caused by your emotions provide an opportunity for you to be mindful of them. Your emotions create sensations in your body that reflect your mind. Dr. Bruce Lipton, a developmental biologist who studies gene expression in relation to environmental factors, released a study on epigenetics that sheds light on this matter. It revealed that an individual’s body cannot heal when it is in its sympathetic state. The sympathetic nervous system, informally known as the fight-or-flight state, is triggered by certain emotional responses. This means that when we are consumed by emotion, an effective solution cannot be found until we shift our mind into reflecting on our emotions. Let’s take a moment and test this theory together. Try to focus on what you’re feeling and where, and this will ground you in the present moment. By focusing on how you are responding, you essentially remove yourself from being consumed by your emotions in that moment. This brings you back into your sensory perception and moves the response in your brain back into the cortex and neocortex. This transition helps bring you back into a more logical state where emotions are not controlling your reactions.