Holistic Psychology; Balance on All Levels PACMES — 3rd Ed. Chapter 3
Finally, a Comprehensive Holistic Theory and General Holistic Experimental Method. Chapter 3 ~ Each soul balances between habits and choice
What if each adult awareness is balanced, like a playground seesaw or teeter-totter, between:
- Responding consciously aware to Life with new behavior, deliberately chosen; or,
- Reacting to Life from a library of old, learned habits and behaviors, available for easy re-play.
Bruce Lipton says from his point of view, a sturdy definition of our psyche is 90% to 95% is habits, behavior conditioned to repeat.
The remaining 5%-10%, that’s you, awareness, reading this now. This remaining 5% to 10% of our psyche is the choices and decisions we make, deliberate acts of choosing, conscious course-corrections.
If a religious-spiritual frame is useful to you, this 5% is the stand-in, the representative for, our immortal-eternal awareness., who stands further back, away and outside of daily 3D life as we experience it day to day.
As awareness, you are Chief Chooser, in a “classroom” learning when to employ the vast majority of your psyche, conditioned to repeat the same learned behaviors over and over — and when to step in and make a new choice, a new expression, create a new possibility.
A little more orientation to the 95% of our psyche: While waking, we have habits on multiple levels of our waking psyche. These taken altogether are our Habit Body. Our Habit Body prefers to do the same things tomorrow it did yesterday. It likes predictability, familiarity, safety and security. Its inertia its comfort zone, is to resist change.
Bruce Lipton: “Habit Mind”
The concept of a Habit Body improves slightly on Bruce Lipton’s ideas about habits. Bruce gets close to “Habit Body” in several places in 2015:
“Is there a way to change subconscious patterns?” https://www.brucelipton.com/blog/there-way-change-subconscious-patterns
Q: Why does our Habit Body retain unworkable habits?
A: Our intellect is tied to our cerebral brain. Our Habit Body is tied to our gut brain. Our gut brain has immense intelligence about our metabolism, immune health, cells; however, its wisdom is at a much lower frequency than conscious waking Self. In this way, our gut and head brains have different intelligences, each operating in separate, distinct frequency zones. This begins a conversation about how our human psyche is multi-logical.
Unworkable habits, once uncovered, can only be redressed by BOTH gut and head brain working together, as a team. Our intellect alone, from the neck-up and our immune-response-self from the neck-down are each alone pretty terrible at making changes to the other system.
Like a small child, our Habit Body requires adult assistance and support to change things down at its level. Sometimes we call this “inner child work.”
Complicating matters, the more our intellect self dissociates from our gut brain, the more each of these two can believe quite different things, have quite different agendas and goals, about the same area of life. “Being of two minds” is a mild form of undesirable dissociation. When our first two selves cooperate, collaborate and work as a team, life goes oh-so-much better.
When we get more serious about uncovering and redressing our unworkable habits, I call this Belief Change Work.
Q: Whats the benefit of changing my beliefs?
A: In holistic healthcare, we’ve known since Since 1955 (Original Psychosomatic Medicine, 1955–1965) how dysfunctional habits, allowed to persist, eventually manifest as physical symptoms and concerns. In PACMES, faulty beliefs are a known category of dysfunctional habits.
Holistic healthcare and Preventive Medicine practitioners often encourage experiments to uncover and re-direct dysfunctional habits so they do NOT persist and eventually manifest as physical symptoms. In this way negative physical outcomes can be avoided. If you interrupt a repeating bad habit, unburden it, establish ‘peace is present’ again, our cells and organs can go back to producing optimal health, as Nature programmed them to do.
Any negativity we allow, create or promote in our psyche and body, our cells have to put up with at the cellular level. This interferes with what cells do best, producing happiness and health.
It’s possible to address unresolved disturbances, in their invisible forms (ACME) before they become physical. This is a good strategy to head off negative physical outcomes; and, reverse unwanted chronic conditions. As awareness, we have ability to identify and interrupt negative patterns as they rehearse their way down towards the dense physical manifestation.
Why wait for a bad habit to generate a physical problem if you can catch it while it’s still mental, emotional or unconscious? This was the promise of Original Psychosomatic Medicine. Each negative stress pattern we catch, address and resolve, before it manifests as physical disturbance, increases our physical health and cellular vitality.
When we resolve an invisible disturbance, before it manifests physically, our physical cells are spared unnecessary stress, wear and tear. The more cell-level stress and impediments we remove, the younger we feel. This is the anti-aging aspect of self-healing and holistic healthcare.
Most people exposed to the logic of this, like it. Where people get stuck is two places:
1) Why People Don’t Heal (Willingness to Heal), and
2) Choosing one method, making time to do practical home experiments to explore what the method can do for them. When benefits turn to diminishing returns, time to find a new method.
Two categories of Trauma-Drama
Its useful to think of trauma in two categories A Red Cross field manual covers physical trauma, the common acute physical emergencies people have. This is the external category of traumas, loss of people, things and body parts.
However, Original Psychosomatic Medicine (1955–1965) taught us 90% of our unresolved disturbances are both invisible and unconscious. By 2012 the literature of naming and identifying invisible disturbances matured; anyone can access it now. The main, indispensable text is Messages from the Body by Michael Lincoln at TalkingHearts.net. Digital version preferred.
To change a habit, talk with your Habit Librarian
All habits are formed thru repetition. How many repetitions? As many as it takes for our subconscious (basic self) to catch the pattern. This can happen over a short or long period of time.
If you admire the golf swing of a professional golfer, it’s not an accident nor made up on the spot. It’s habits consciously, sub- and unconsciously accessed and working together for a specific intended outcome This is one of the beauties of golf, to view masterful inner cooperation in an effective golf swing.
Without practiced golf swing habits, a golfer coming to crunch time on the 18th hole of the final round and a million dollar first place prize, would be overcome by emotions and an adrenaline rush causing him to shank a drive. He or she wants swinging the club correctly to be as natural and confident as walking.
Our unwanted habits didn’t develop over-night. They have been rehearsed for years. How? Waking-conscious self allows-promotes-or creates sub-optimal responses to situations.
Our most stubborn habits — good and bad — have been repeated so many times, our UNconscious has learned and retained the pattern. In the absence of healthy Self leadership, our Habit Body plays back the most relevant old pattern. We notice this especially when people or specific environmental “triggers” “push our buttons.”
Q: How do I get rid of an unwanted habit?
A: Moderating, reducing or extinguishing an unwanted habit requires healthy Self leadership to institute new healthy choices. Your Habit Body can learn a new habit — only if the new pattern you wish it to follow is repeated a sufficient number of times.
Everyone on their own path pf personal growth is in the business of waking up to old habit patterns needing updating or deletion. What’s one more workable response you wish to train your Habit Body into?
Because all habits are learned thru repetition, in Slow-motion Forgiveness, we count the old repetitions being forgiven and released. If we have an unwanted habit, we can assume with confidence, multiple repetitions occurred in the past. Multiple repetitions created the habit; forgiving each repetition supports our Habit Body releasing the old and adopting a new pattern.
If conscious waking Self requests it, Our Habit Librarian is usually willing to release an old unworkable habit. However, with only the intelligence of a three year old, it gets overwhelmed easily. That’s why we delete old occurrences of the unwanted habit, counting them out, one by one, if necessary.
Find full discussion of Slow-motion Forgiveness here: Forgive from Your Soul, Slow-Motion Forgiveness, the Missing Manual, Forgiveness 101 How-to Book (New Directions In Brain Balance) (Volume 4) — eBook: https://www.amazon.com/Forgive-Slow-Motion-Self-Forgiveness-Missing-Manual-ebook/dp/B00CRRT3V6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1520534570&sr=8-1&keywords=Forgive+from+Your+Soul+dickson&dpID=514m3qZ8MUL&preST=_SY445_QL70_&dpSrc=srch
Issues and illnesses also formed thru repetition
As all our habits are formed thru repetition, and all our issues and illness are habits; this means, all our issues and illnesses are formed thru repetition.
Q: W-h-a-t??? Me? I’m not doing anything to get this illness I have!
A: Not consciously. It’s your Sub- and unconscious repetitions which create your chronic condition. Almost 100% of our illnesses come from negativity learned and playing endlessly, over and over, like a cracked vinyl record, in our subconscious and unconscious
This is why becoming familiar with both your head-brain and your gut-brain are such a big part of Holistic Psychology 2.0. When subconscious habits (Theta) are repeated often enuf, our unconscious (Delta) will learn and sustain the habit too. This is how our issues and illnesses begin.
Habit Body in grid form
A crucial concept in Holistic Psychology, our Habit can be imagined as a grid:
Dg-Habit Body grid
We have habits in each of these boxes. Some are working for us. Some are working against our deepest, innermost values, goals and projects. We are all tasked with waking up to our habits, on deeper and deeper levels; then, to address and upgrade those no longer working for us.
Before habits, only instincts, tropisms
Plants have tropisms. Insects and animals have only instincts to guide them.
Q: Aren’t these more simply habits at a lower frequency level?
A: Yes. When plants grow leaf after leaf after leaf, we can call this a “plant habit.” This supports us looking at our own habitual behaviors more objectively.
After Habits comes critical thinking
Our Habit Body is very conditioned and patterned. In contrast, our critical thinking is much more free (only conditioned by mental and mythological habits). Humans, with an awake awareness and free choice are naturally less dependent on tropisms and instincts. Awake awareness naturally matures into healthy decision-making — tho — some people are taking longer than others to get there.
Instead of hard-wired, immutable tropisms and instincts, humans have firmware. We call them “habits.” Like firmware, our Habit Body is somewhat inaccessible. You have to know where and how to connect with your own Habit Body. where it is and how to get in there (honesty and humility), you can change your habits.
Q: Occupying 95% of my waking psyche, doesn’t my Habit Body have an overwhelming advantage over my 5% awareness of free choice?
A: Learning how awareness and free choice are more powerful than pre-programmed habits, memories and behaviors, is perhaps the biggest lesson possible to learn in the human experience.
Yes, when exercised and actualized, your 5% awareness of free choice CAN balance the 95% of your psyche which is pre-programmed habits, memories and behaviors.
Q: Why wasn’t I taught this in school, in college?
A: Because our education system is based on the mono-mind myth, Dick Schwartz:
We were all raised in what Ill call the mono-mind belief — the idea you have only one mind [the left brain, survival-mad hemisphere] out of which all your different thoughts, emotions, impulses and urges emanate. This was the paradigm I believed in too until I kept encountering clients who taught me otherwise ~ pg 21 Dick Schwartz No Bad Parts (2022)
When you think about it, as co-creators of more healthy choices each day, we are each tasked and challenged to balance our life between:
- pre-programmed habits on each level PACME, and choice,
- an Inner and Outer Game of Life,
- our Three Selves, and
- Three Sciences we use everyday.
All these topics are addressed in this text.
Q: Why does this sound so radical?
A: It sounds radical only in contrast with this mono-mind belief: life is 100% about collecting and gathering information; including, collecting and gathering material wealth and physical security.
We balance in favor of whole-brainedness, the endgame of Holistic Psychology.
After, later and above, for those interested, we explore Goethean Spiritual Psychology. Both Psychosynthesis and Anthroposophy have laid down some useful templates here, beyond the scope of this book mostly.
