The past two weeks, I have been in West Palm Beach, Florida freelancing and holding interviews with multiple CBD businesses to film for our new show, #CBDunfiltered. We leave for Los Angeles, California in a couple days. Between editing footage and developing our new website, I went back to writing articles. I sat to begin an article on how our bodies can get addicted to stress hormones, and I had some realizations come into my mind… it has only been about two weeks, and I definitely do not feel like the same person I was before I left on the plane.
Before I left, I was going through a little bit of a slump at home. This happens every so often though, it’s nothing new. And I am sure it’s something anyone can say they’ve experienced in their own way. But I felt numb and at times, I felt hollow. The things I have a passion for, and even the love I reciprocate from family and friends, is present and I know it is present. But the issue is, I cannot feel it. This is also something that I will experience when the CBD product I am reviewing isn’t alleviating my anxiety as I also become very anxious when stress levels rise. And when these types of slumps settle in, I don’t notice it happening right away. This time, however, I felt like I caught it early enough before I let it manifest into something that would have been way worse to deal with. I was wishing I could just run away to a spiritual retreat and be guided back to realignment within myself and the universe.
Stress levels increased before traveling
I woke up a few days before my flight, covered in itchy, tiny red bumps all over my legs, with a bug bite in the center of my left thigh. The bite was swollen and had a perimeter of the red, itchy bumps surrounding the area. It spread and got worse over the next couple days. Seeing how my body was reacting to one little mosquito bite, I knew my stress levels must have been higher than I was aware of, hence the numbness. This was the last thing I needed to happen before flying out to Florida and California. I decided to take charge and work through the numbness. I needed to change something.
I began by wondering what exactly it was that kept me from feeling my true self. One reason was that of how much my spine bothers me. I developed scoliosis in my lower lumbar and lost the cervical curve of my neck over the last couple of years. I see a chiropractor weekly and got back into running and lifting over the last couple of months. But it is still a daily struggle with constant stiffness and fatigue. It keeps me from being completely coordinated and energized to do some of the things I really love doing, like dancing or longboarding.
Another reason I came up with as to why I was feeling detached, was because I felt mentally spacey and cognitively foggy. I had an MRI done on my head a month before this point in time, and the results came back with something I wasn’t expecting to hear. I originally had the MRI to see if there was a growth in my nose causing my septum to deviate. Fortunately, there is nothing really wrong with my nose, but they saw something in my brain. Apparently, a part of my brain is damaged due to demyelination of some of the nerve cells. There are few reasons as to why this would happen to someone who is only 25-years-old, is active and eats generally well. According to my doctor, it could have been from a mini ischemic stroke or even signs of multiple sclerosis. At first, I felt worried about what I just heard. I wanted to pretend I didn’t hear what my doctor said, and instead believe that it is all just from being overstressed.
That’s when I remembered I had Dr. Joe Dispenza’s book, Becoming Supernatural, on my kindle. I bought it after listening to one his talks on YouTube about how you can heal the body by thought alone. He explains how a disease is truly caused by stress and through meditation, humans can reverse the damage by changing their gene expressions. Changing my perception to the idea of my brain being overstressed was essentially true. I immediately decided I was going to read it during my spare time while traveling.
Energy In Motion
Becoming Supernatural has taught me so much over the course of being in Florida, One of the biggest realizations being that emotion is energy in motion. Specifically, “Emotions are the chemical consequences (or feedback) of past experiences.” Your brain is always recording your life as you live and organizes new connections in your brain based on what you experience. Those connections produce chemicals in which we feel when we feel emotions, and those emotions are what create memories. We remember past experiences better when we can associate the emotion felt at that point in time. Emotions are felt either positively or negatively: positive emotions including gratitude, love, divinity, etc and negative emotions including guilt, shame, hate, jealousy, etc. When we begin to think about something that happened in the past, our bodies start producing those same chemicals that were released during that pastime.
So, if a person experiences a traumatic event, “they tend to think neurologically within the circuitry of that experience and tend to feel chemically within the boundaries of the emotions from the event, so their entire state of being–how they think and how they feel–becomes biologically stuck in the past.” The more emotionally ridden the event, the more you feel affected by it. The more you think about it, the more energy you put into keeping your body in the past. If you are constantly stuck in the past mentally, then physically your body will be too. Emotions are energy and just like how they are categorized either as positive or negative, they come with that same charge of energy. Negative energy is felt as stress, weight, heaviness, hopelessness, depression… and if these kinds of emotions stay locked in your neural network of experiences, and you continue to add attention to them, eventually they manifest into other negative outcomes, such as disease and illness. This is due to how stress affects our bodies.
How Stress Affects our Bodies
Chronic stress keeps the fight-or-flight switch in our nervous system stay on, tricking the body into thinking there is a constant threat from the outer environment. This state-of-being makes it more susceptible in a person becoming ill. We essentially become addicted to living in stress to a point where we may not even notice we are stressed, instead you may feel numb (similar to how I was feeling before I left for Florida). Eventually, the stress will manifest into other unwanted things in your outer world. For example, because your body is constantly in stress, it lowers the immunity function of your body, thus making it more susceptible for you to fall ill for become injured.
After learning about emotions and how people become addicted to the hormones of stress, it made a lot of sense in my mind that I needed to reprogram my brain. I realized if your body can get addicted to feeling stress, then it can be addicted to feeling well too. I began to follow guided meditations from Dr. Joe Dispenza, learning how to feel the inner workings of my mind and body. I have meditated off and on in the past, but this time, I felt much more control in wanting to fix myself. I haven’t missed a day of meditation, along with yoga since I’ve been in Florida. And while I am not exactly where I want to be just yet, I have definitely made some improvements within myself. I feel much more confident and comfortable while I am out of my comfort zone vs. feeling anxious. I also notice that my yoga abilities have been steadily improving as well. I am able to keep focus and fall into the flow where I’ll lose track of time before I end my session.
Can CBD Optimize Meditation?
Of course, this also came into question within my mind: would combining the use of CBD, yoga, and meditation help me erupt out of these pits of chronic stress? I would definitely believe so, considering that CBD helps the body maintain a state of homeostasis. I’ve been taking my daily dose, and I definitely believe it has helped pushed me further in finding those true elevated feelings of gratitude and love, out from the grayness and numbness. When I meditated in the past, it was very difficult for me to climb out of overthinking. I would attempt to relax my mind, and immediately thoughts would automatically fill my awareness. Meditating now, I can maintain a sense of calm and stillness, and not feel connected to my past anymore. It comes as a surge of relief that the shackles that stress traps you in can be broken.
I’ve made a lot of progress over the span of two weeks and I don’t intend on ever stopping this routine, now that I can see over the line of negativity within my mind. Now, I can truly sit in the cockpit of my mind and maintain a sense of calm while meditating, so my body can heal itself. My rash is gone and I feel energized, passionate and grateful. I feel much more like my true self vs. the day I left Oregon. I now can see that this does really work and that our bodies are the placebo. I feel confident that if I keep this routine going, I will be able to reverse the brain damage, and eventually piece my spine back together too! Especially with CBD being neuroprotective.
Remember how I was wishing that I wanted to go on a spiritual retreat when I was back in Oregon… it’s as if I got my wish answered while in Florida, but with me guiding myself using CBD, yoga, and meditation. If you are looking to self-heal, I highly recommend using CBD and meditation together as part of your healing regimen. Love and light!
For more information on Dr. Joe Dispenza, his books and workshops, visit his website at www.drjoedispenza.com