I encourage you to use this simple introspective “Space Opening” Body Energy Release/Clearing technique each day, and especially whenever you are having difficulty making any positive change in your life or find yourself self-sabotaging. Whether it is with exercise motivation, eating properly, self-sabotage, laziness, procrastination, sadness, anxiety, low energy and so on. If you don’t feel yourself, you don’t feel energetic, your emotions are out of control…then use this process to step inside and starting looking into your internal world to clear out old energies which may hold you back in life. Then you can begin to work outward from the calmness within your core self to work outward making changes at each layer of yourself until you successfully and consistently cement a positive change into your life.

I have experimented with a number of self-reflective introspective techniques—many of them quite complex. I feel complexity adds an unnecessary burden, as introspection is already hard enough for many people. I have found this technique “effective enough” in my life for most issues, and this simplified approach is designed so it can be a tool you can use any time during the day, even in brief 30 second to 2-minute windows. Feel free to dig deeper into introspection if you wish, but also be mindful of the saying, “A little can go a long way”. Introspection is not something you need to invest a lot of time into, but I highly recommend committing to a regular practice of a little bit each day.

Your body offers many clues to what you need to be doing for yourself, but human beings have created a society filled with endless distractions to suppress those signs emerging from the inner self. Introspection offers you the opportunity to cancel out those distractions and tune back into yourself. Your internal world may or may not be the root cause of the issue you are facing, but any and all change has to start from within yourself first. Then, once you are grounded in yourself, you can start to expand outward on further resolutions from there. In some cases, introspective work may be enough to resolve the problem entirely, but at least it gets you switch on your higher awareness so you can implement an intelligent response, rather than an emotional one.

I call this overall process self-integration, where you actively begin a process of dissolving the static barriers disrupting the ability for all layers of self-identity to operate in unison, so your natural energies can begin to flow freely. Self-integration is learning how to manage the emotional chaos within, lifting the barrier to connection with deeper values and a higher awareness that diminishes habitual survival mode instincts. Self-integration is a reconnection with the original nature of consciousness…unlocking “the real you”. From a place of higher reasoning, emotional stability, and empathy, a person can then step out into the world as a truly productive member and healer of society.

While the technique is simple in practice, understanding how it helps influence change in the body is actually a complicated discussion. I aim to be thorough in this document, but this is just for informational purposes, and is not claimed to be authoritative evidence, just something for you think about. Try it out for you, and you will quickly know if you gain any benefit from it or not. You can always try something else you feel drawn toward as well. If something is helping you, then it is effective, regardless of how or why it works.

What is introspection?

French philosopher Descartes believed introspection helps people to connect with and understand the mind-body relationship. His ideas had a profound influence on subsequent thought in psychology, philosophy, and religion. One of the founding fathers of modern psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, believed introspection was the best method to analyze the content of thoughts. His pioneering research pushed psychology into its own domain of science beyond philosophy. Wundt reiterated how introspection clearly shows emotions come first, and then we have physiological and behavioral consequences as after-effects. Introspection can help open the door to your true feelings and can help lift the burden of unresolved emotional issues poorly influencing your external actions and choices.

Some people may dispute whether introspection is a reliable scientific method because the information can be difficult to replicate, people may reinterpret their internal experiences, or even fail to explain them accurately due to self-bias. Psychology professor Dr. Emily Pronin describes human bias in her research, noting how “Human judgment and decision making is distorted by an array of cognitive, perceptual and motivational biases.” Some of these biases exist subconsciously, meaning they can be undetectable and fixed in place, despite our best efforts. We tend to overestimate and recognize the bias in others, but deny our own bias, resulting in reduced self-awareness. As you become more adept at self-reflecting, you become better at releasing your attachment to self-bias, due to a more developed self-awareness that doesn’t hold onto delusional representations formed by the ego.

In introspection, the mind should act more like an observer to feelings, simply reporting what is there, what you are feeling….without judgement or critical analysis. The type of introspection I believe is most useful for processing emotions is not retrospective, or prone to interpretative error, because it involves actively acknowledging emotions making their existence known in the present moment. While many of the issues we are trying to solve in our lives relate to experiences from our past, our need for introspection is due to their ongoing presence.

Most psychological therapies utilise the power of introspective reflection to help correct unhealthy patterns. With the added component of mindfulness techniques (including vision setting, core value identification, planning, etc…), introspection can help you develop a positive future plan and help effectively deal with any inner self-sabotage, which may prevent you reaching the positive vision you have set for yourself.

Introspection goes beyond positivity and self empowering mantras. The modern-day portrayals or expectations about having total self-confidence might deny the vulnerability inherent in every human being and their emotional short-falls. People can be very confident outside, but can still be hiding an emotionally fragile or incompetent person on the inside. Confidence without self-care, self-love and self-nurturing, isn’t true confidence in one’s self, just a façade, or a front, people show to the world. This can be damaging to both physical health and mental health in the long-term. Your goal is to look at the long-term, bigger picture in the interventions you make, to be practical when it comes to your limitations as a person, and develop greater self-acceptance.

Introspective thought helps create the discipline of analysing your thoughts and actions to see if they are in alignment with your overall values and vision for yourself. Once you have written down a vision you want to work toward, then periods of introspection are when you can truly hold yourself accountable for your actions. Without a strong vision in place, you won’t have a strong personal framework helping to constrain your actions, and you might continue to repeat old behaviours/patterns that never truly took you where you wanted to go. When your internal world is chaotic, you cannot think clearly, or act clearly. Your goal is to eliminate internal chaos, by bringing in calm/nurturing energy into your internal self, and using this technique regularly is how you can achieve this.

I believe a chaotic internal self inevitably leads to chaotic external behavior and systemic erosion of your health, goals and ambitions. Chaotic inner turmoil drains your energy, makes you anxious, destroys your willpower and desire, and your thinking and judgement becomes distorted. Emotional stability is critical to overall health. The more you can reinforce the process of introspection in your life, the more you develop life improving neural connections throughout your neocortex; the area of your brain related to higher order thinking, empathy, and self-love.

How might introspection work?

Your body is an electromagnetic energy machine. The concept of subtle energy flowing through the body is traditionally predominant in Eastern influenced beliefs, but also all primal human cultures and religions. In the east, Qi, chi, kundalini or prāṇa are terms used to describe subtle life energy flowing through various meridian channels or chakra vortices claimed to line the body. Eastern advocates believe chakras are metaphysical in nature—compromised of energies more subtle than those in the physical plane—so they cannot be detected scientifically. Because of this, science has found no evidence supporting the existence of chakras. However, in 2016 researchers found some evidence of energy meridian lines running through the body. The researchers injected a special staining dye, revealing thin lines emanating from purported acupuncture point sites, which were not present when injected at other non-acupuncture point sites. The researchers called this the Primo Vascular System (a previously unknown system integrating features of the cardiovascular, nervous, immune, and hormonal systems). You can read more about if you Google it.

Bioelectromagnetics is the name for the study of electromagnetic fields produced by living cells and tissues in biological entities. The existence of electric fields existing across cellular membranes has been known for decades, but in 2007 scientists learned cells have powerful internal electric fields far beyond what is accounted for in the conventional theory of ionic channel charge. Observations by chemistry professor Dr. Raoul Kopelman used new technology containing voltage-sensitive nanoparticles allowing the measurement of cellular voltage for the first time. The observations stunned the scientists when they detected electric fields as strong as 15 million volts per meter, five times stronger than a lightning bolt. Kopelman presented his research at the American Society for Cell Biology and commented, “There has been no scepticism as to the measurements…. But we don’t have an interpretation.”

Electromagnetic fields emerging from the body’s cells have long been acknowledged and used in medical applications. The electrocardiogram (ECG)—invented in 1887—records electrical activity from the contractions of muscle cells in the heart. The electroencephalogram (EEG)—invented in 1875—records the electrical activity from various brain regions. These waves are not just confined to the brain, but exist throughout the body via the perineural system, a web of connective tissue surrounding every nerve fibre in the body. The perineural connective tissue cells constitute more than half of the cells in the brain.

The study of electrophysiology began when eighteenth century Italian physicist Luigi Galvani noticed the muscles in a frog’s leg twitched while he was dissecting it on a table he had just used to conduct experiments on static electricity. Galvani coined the term animal electricity but it was renamed to galvanism (the contraction of a muscle stimulated by an electric current) in his honor.

Other forms of bioelectric phenomenon exist in animal life including migratory birds who navigate in part by orienteering to the Earth’s electromagnetic field. Various aquatic animals have bioelectric sensors providing a sense known as electroreception.

All tissues and organs produce biomagnetic fields because all electrical currents generate them. In 1970, physicist David Cohen of MIT helped develop a Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) magnetometer capable of measuring magnetic fields associated with physiological activities occurring within the body. Advances of Cohen’s research led to the invention of the magnetocardiogram (MCG) and the magnetoencephalogram (MEG). New medical technologies, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography, also read electromagnetic activity within the body. Prior to the invention of these machines, the concept of magnetism arising from the human body was deemed too esoteric by scientists because there had been no objective way to measure it.

Scientific research—dating back to 1910—supports the premise the body also produces light as a form of biological communication field. Russian biophysicist Alexander Gurwitsch, along with colleague Ross Harrison, discovered cells operate as a field when patterning for the development of particular organs. Gurwitsch was the first scientist to discover living cells and tissues generate biophotons, a weak biologically active form of electromagnetic radiation in the ultraviolet range. In quantum physics, photons are discrete particles of electromagnetic light energy.

A biophoton—also known as ultraweak photon emissions (UPE)—is simply a photon emitted by a biological system with a visibility 1,000 times lower than the sensitivity of our eye can detect. Biophotons are visible on the electromagnetic spectrum (around 380-780 nm) and are detectable with highly sensitive cameras. During the 1950’s photomultipliers became available to biomedical researchers allowing them to detect photon streams emerging from cells for the first time.

An article published by MIT Technology Review now cites biophotonics as one of the fastest moving and exciting fields in science. Research on rat brains found they are alight with photons produced by neurons. Other research found the spinal cord neurons not only emit light, but conduct it too. More recently, Japanese scientists re-confirmed biophoton existence finding the body emits visible light rising and falling during different times of the day.

Why would our body need to generate light? Some researchers propose it operates as an informational exchange field, the organizing intelligence that cells use to communicate with other. Washington University estimates 100 trillion atoms exist in a human cell, a similar number to the amount of estimated cells in the human body. We still know little about how the body’s community of 100 trillion cells communicate and coordinate with such sophistication.

The emerging view is that are biophotons are not solely cellular metabolic by-products, but our cells and DNA use biophotons to store and communicate information several orders of magnitude faster than what can occur by chemical diffusion. A 2010 study demonstrated cell-to-cell communication by biophotons in plants, bacteria, animal neutrophil granulocytes and kidney cells. Biophotons appear to manage the process of biotic self-organization from the simplest forms of life (bacteria) to complex life such as human beings. It exists in all forms of biology that is animated with life.

In the world of computers, fibre optic cables use light for the fastest and most stable mode of lossless data transmission. Given the human body appears to be the most complex organism in existence, it makes sense that nature would use the most efficient means at its disposal. Biophoton light is low-noise with an extremely stable intensity and a high degree of coherence making it the ideal medium for transmitting information.

One biophysics science paper discusses the example of the astronomical number of cells involved in a typical muscle contraction, something that needs to occur with 100% efficiency, coherence and speed. It proposes that chemical signalling can’t realistically explain how the body performs this task so rapidly.

Cells use a large number of defined signalling pathways to regulate their activity, a complex process involving a long list of at least 20 different signalling pathways. Most pathways activate in response to external stimuli (chemical signals such as neurotransmitters or hormones) transferring information from the cell surface across the membrane using a variety of transducers and amplifiers to internal effector molecules. Conventional theories suggest signalling occur in three distinct methods: direct cell-to-cell contact (juxtacrine signalling); across short distances (paracrine signalling); or large distances (endocrine signalling). Paracrine and endocrine signalling involve cells responding to secreted chemical-based responses. If the only way cells communicate over a larger distance is through chemical induced signalling (the release of neurotransmitters and hormones), this appears to be an inefficient approach.

Two professors Dr. Veljko Veljkovic and Dr. Irena Cosic wondered how molecules were able to recognise their specific targets. They argue it is statistically impossible for the right molecules to find each other in such a crowded environment of the body, but electromagnetism offers the solution. This fits in with accumulating evidence that cells and organisms are liquid crystalline, and send out specific frequencies of electromagnetic waves, which not only enable them to “see” and “hear” each other, but also influence each other at a distance.

Another study conducted in 2011 studied the effects of mitochondrial biophotons and their effect on electrical activity of the brain via microtubules, the internal structural support inside cells. Microtubules appear to work like optical fibre super highways coordinating activities in different parts of the brain. The researchers found significant correlations between the fluctuations in biophoton emission and the strength of neurotransmitter production in the brain.

Sociologist Dr. Kingsley Dennis believes quantum consciousness is how science and spirituality will eventually be reconciled. He thinks the whole body is “in effect, a resonating field – a ubiquitous non-local field.” And that, “It appears that every part of our body is ‘in communication with every other part through a dynamic, tuneable, responsive, liquid crystalline medium that pervades the whole body, from organs and tissues to the interior of every cell.” Fritz-Albert Popp, a theoretical biophysicist who led the charge of biophoton research in the 1970’s, explains biophoton communication is not just confined to communication within the body. He believes wave resonance isn't only being used to communicate inside the body, but between living things as well. He calls it “photon sucking”, when two individuals in close proximity exchange photons.

Popp also felt biophoton transmission could explain telepathy and extrasensory perception (ESP).  Dr. Kingsley Dennis agrees as he states: “Neuroscience, quantum biology, and quantum physics are all now beginning to converge to reveal that our bodies are not only biochemical systems but also a sophisticated resonating quantum system. This helps us to understand how the body can be efficiently coherent, as well as explaining how we feel ‘drawn’ to others, especially when we use such terms as ‘good vibes’; ‘good energies’; and ‘we just seem to click’.”

Neuroscientist Ernesto Bonilla believes emission of biophotons seems to be the mechanism through which direct intention (an ordered flux of photons) produces effects on the body. Intention and focus is simply directed energy. I read that a single biophoton is capable of carrying information up to 4 megabytes of information (equivalent to 800 pages worth of information).

Subsequent research found 75% of biophotonic activity originates from the DNA itself. Massive numbers of photons are trapped within the incredible density of the DNA, a phenomenon known in physics as Bose-Einstein-Condensate (BEC), where photons are literally frozen in time. The great stability of the DNA molecule is due to this stored light.

There is crucial evidence DNA responds to electromagnetic energy through the body. DNA is a coiled ladder of base pair steps within larger supercoils with the capability to receive and transmit energy. In September 2014, an international group of researchers found electric currents transmit through DNA molecules; this discovery suggested DNA could potentially be used as a next generation computer chip. The research aims to precisely assemble electronic circuit boards at resolutions as small as six nanometers to create a DNA based computer for commercial applications.

Furthermore, research from 2011 states DNA acts a fractal antenna when exposed to electromagnetic fields, possessing two structural characteristics of fractal antennas: electronic conduction and self symmetry. A fractal antenna is an antenna that can receive or transmit electromagnetic radiation and uses a self-similar design to maximize its length.

These concepts, give support to how a person’s emotions, thoughts and beliefs are tied to processes affecting cellular response and activation. The idea finds support in the emerging field of epigenetics. In 2005, developmental biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton outlined his theories suggesting outside signals alter DNA expression, not the DNA itself. He lectures and writes on this area he calls, “The Biology of Belief.”

Understanding our Emotions

I strongly believe managing emotions is a developable skill, potentially the most important skill you might ever learn. However, we live in an upside-down world in a lot of ways, where admitting our deficits and working on our emotions can be illogically perceived as weakness by some. Many people find introspection, mindfulness, and other meditative type therapies difficult due to either the abstract nature of the process or the unsettling feelings, which might arise when other distractions in our life are silenced. We may feel powerless to understand emotions especially if we are fearful of losing our sense of full mental control. The mainstream world can often condition us to be too mind-centered. If we don’t know where to go to find our feelings, or to logically understand their presence, how can we ever attempt to resolve them?

I believe you cannot apply logic to the abstract nature of emotions. This is why it is particularly problematic for men—or any person—consumed by their logical thought processes to make any tangible progress. In the external world, our conscious mind attempts to solve problems by understanding the issue and using logic to determine the appropriate solution. However, applying logic and reasoning can fail to work in our inner world, because we often cannot easily identify the source of our emotional discontent.

Emotions exist in our entire bodies – they aren’t just something that just happens in our head. Experientially many of us know how parts of our body seem to have a mind of their own. Why an embedded emotion exists (or remains), might be completely illogical to our conscious mind. If the mind thinks “I have moved on”, but the body says otherwise, how then can you resolve this emotional conflict? Many emotions exist because of past trauma, which the body has repressed from conscious awareness so you could successfully keep moving forward in life, and their lingering presence means there is probably more work left to do.

The storage of emotions in compartmentalised areas of the body finds evidence in the concept of somatic memory. Babette Rothschild—a somatic psychotherapist and specialist in the treatment of trauma and PTSD—explains in her book, The Body Remembers, how the locality of emotional storage is proposed to exist within genetic or cellular memory. Emerging advancements in genetic science support the probability of cellular somatic memory. Changes in the chromatin structure in genetic material (proteins involved in packaging DNA, such as histones,) can occur without a change in the DNA sequence itself. These are called epigenetic changes as cells respond to signals from our environment and evolve their structure based on outside signals.

The Darwinian theory of evolution stakes its premise on something akin to somatic memory. Evolutionary theory explains how DNA adapts and evolves a species, based on an organism’s responses to its environment. For successful adaptation, evolution would need to consider emotion because it is a clear and direct indicator of an organism’s response to threats in its environment. Therefore, recording the emotional response becomes imperative to survival adaptations. Storing emotional memory in the DNA’s chromatin structure makes logical sense from an evolutionary perspective since this record is directly adjacent to the DNA. Those animals who were better equipped at survival then delivered offspring with gene codings geared more toward intelligent survival instinct.

Emotion is what leads to creating instinctive responses, which is why people who repress their emotions, are still acting on them….albeit unconsciously. This kind of adaptation appears in humans and was discovered in descendants of Holocaust survivors who have been found to have permanently altered stress hormone levels compared with other Jewish adults of the same age. The researchers believe this happens because epigenetic changes biologically prepared offspring for an environment similar to the one experienced by the parents.

While somatic memory can remain for a very long-time, it is not necessarily a permanent affliction; the only requirement is some form of focused intervention. What we want to do is not react on our emotions unconsciously, but consciously acknowledge their presence and work with them.

Somatic experiencing is one modality promoting the importance of self-regulation following traumatic experience; developed by Peter Levine from his extensive research on the stress responses of wild animals. Animals, once safe from a threat, automatically discharge the trauma with gentle trembling, shaking, deep breaths, sweating, and other behaviors helping to reset their autonomic nervous systems. However, human beings typically disrupt the natural mechanism of discharge due to cultural conditioning and lack of understanding. If someone we care about is trembling, one cultural norm is to try and shift them away from experiencing their emotional trauma state, but this could be an inappropriate response to successful processing the trauma.

The same methods used by animals of total immersion in the emotional pain may be the most appropriate response allowing for full experience of the emotional event and the start of the healing process. When trauma is unprocessed and suppressed, residual activation within the sympathetic branch of the nervous system narrows our thoughts into a constant state of readiness and reactivity, with an ongoing sense, “something bad can happen at any moment.” This takes our mind away from higher brain functioning, into a lower “reptilian “ brain “fight or flight” type of mindset. We can survive by reducing our overall capacity as a human being, but it is not healthy in the long run.

Going Beyond Meditation

Speaking of reducing capacity as human being…the world’s most popular form of introspection is meditation, which often involves complete stillness and attempts to silence acknowledgment of any internal experience. These kinds of meditations have their place in terms of spiritual pursuits, but in certain situations, people use meditation as a method of escapism, and may even try to reject their unique self (dissolution of the ego) as they seek total release and absorption in nothingness. Silencing internal experience does not always help you solve your problems, but it can help you ground yourself in your reality and open the door for healing.

Meditation can definitely help resolve inner emotions on some level, but it seems to fare better with quietening mental chatter (rumination), lowering overall stress/anxiety levels, and healing/activating various components in our neurology (especially the pre-frontal cortex), which are damaged through various methods of self-sabotage. For this reason, meditation—on its own—does have profound healing potential and is worth doing on a regular basis.

Introspection is not solely meditation and for enhanced personal development, I don’t want you to silence what is going on inside. I believe meditation is useful to help switch you over into an introspective mindset in the opening 5-10 minutes of relaxation, but then I want you to do something extra for more direct emotional processing., but to focus and acknowledge on what is there.

I find the added component of mindfulness to be a more direct, efficient, and integrated process to expand connection with all layers of identity and to work directly with the specific emotions and constrained energies within the body. Mindfulness is a state of mind that is not necessarily an attempt to feel better, but to become “better at feeling.” Thus, it involves being conscious of what is occurring in your internal world, rather than trying to detach or ignore a feeling. Just like meditation, there are no expectations on results or outcomes, just observation.

The added benefit of mindfulness introspection is a scientifically verifiable approach to healing the human body through all its layers, but most important is how it heals your brain. Researchers have discovered the brain repairs itself during periods of introspection, with most healing occurring in the gray matter of the frontal lobes, the areas of the brain weakened and destroyed by self-sabotaging actions like addiction. In our quest to overcome self-sabotage, mindfulness introspection actively repairs the parts of the brain needed for doing just that.

One study of people undertaking an eight-week course of mindfulness, found through MRI scans a reduction in size of the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with your fear response. One article elucidates, “As the amygdala shrinks, the pre-frontal cortex – associated with higher order brain functions such as awareness, concentration and decision-making – becomes thicker.” Greater functional connectivity between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex improves attention, concentration, and the ability for higher brain regions to down-regulate lower-order brain activity. All our bad habits arise from lower-order “primal” reptilian brain activity, which actively seeks to suppress any feelings of fear or pain etc… The “Fight or Flight” cycle, which originates from this brain region, is focused mostly on survival at any cost, rather than any intelligent or healthy logic or reasoning.

Healing and Restructuring the Brain

Restructuring the brain is possible, and like all skills, introspective brain repair takes practice and patience. When we learn any new skill, we develop extra gray matter. This process is called neural restructuring. Studies on athletes’ brains—who train specialized movements repeatedly—demonstrate robust neural adaptations as they become an expert at their skill. Well-trained athletes emit stronger brainwaves when performing their skills, revealing a restful brain state compared with untrained people whom attempt the same skill. As we become efficient with any skill, the brain requires fewer neurons to complete a task, than it did in the early stages of learning.

A good example of neural adaptation is typing on a keyboard. Cognitive psychologists found skilled typists could only identify about half of the positions of letter keys on the standard QWERTY keyboard. When typing, they rely on muscle memory association without direct conscious awareness of where the letters are located. As one psychologist explains, “It's a fascinating paradox that although typing may seem cerebral, skilled typists do not rely on executive functions to type.” In this situation, when you first learn to type, you use higher faculties of the brain, but responsibility for oversight of the skill eventually drops into lower brain regions better suited for handling rapid autonomic response. The skill then becomes second nature and a more automatic response.

Emotions do dictate some of your autonomic functioning. Many people report they act on emotional impulses before they can think about what they are doing. This is the psychological mechanism behind “lashing out” and then having subsequent remorse. Introspection is the mechanism through which you begin to retrain the higher faculties of the brain to subsequently reprogram your autonomic “lower brain” responses with positive habit conditioning. The goal is to ensure you don’t become an emotionally destructive person but an emotionally constructive one, where your automatic decision making is integrated with all facets of identity, including—most importantly—your values and positive habits. You want to develop strong neural connections relating to healthy emotional processing rather than strong neural connections related to self-sabotage (bad habits).

Consistency with healthy habits combined with regular introspective practice, will “switch on” the neurology that takes you on a positive direction in life with increasing momentum. This means, it will become harder and harder to return to old ways, as those old neural pathways relating to old habits, become dormant and eventually fade away.

The Power of Focus in Emotional Resolution

Understanding how the human body works can be a mystery. For whatever reason, the body appears to require the acknowledgement of emotions as the extra step to successfully let emotions go. It actually makes sense to me, because once you take the time to process an emotion and understand its presence with your higher awareness, then you will take better steps to avoid what caused it in the future. This is how evolutionary biology works; the smartest forms of life survive because they learn from their mistakes and are flexible to adapt to their environment.

The power of focus regarding internal experience is potentially the key to unlocking past and present issues relating to our emotional disturbances. The Einstein Principle (a scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler), encourages us to look for the simplest solution. If emotions lock into the body—because we cannot process them immediately (so we can deal with trauma or threat), then the simplest solution should involve releasing the locked emotion by returning our focus during a later period when we are feeling safe. Focus does not have to mean we logically understand everything about the emotion, but simple acknowledgement and awareness of its existence.

It is important to understand you don’t need to exactly understand why an emotion is there, just that it IS there. When the body knows the mind has finally paid attention, it then might communicate the reason behind the emotion once you are ready to hear the message. For example, an episodic memory might pop into our mind during or after the process of introspection, or you might have an intuitive feeling about what it was, or you might have a dream later that night. The idea is to not overthink things, simply get out of the way of what the body wants to do and allow the possibility for any message to come through or not.

I find introspection helps expand sensitivity and intuition. It is also possible to put words and names to emotions when you can learn to discern differences in them. It is a skill worth learning, but it is not entirely necessary.

Use the Two-Minute Rule

As you make introspection a consistent habit, dropping into this state can happen rapidly, you can do a check-in waiting in line, on a bus or train, or even taking a brief 30-60 second pause while working at your desk. It is easy to make excuses and find distractions, but use the two-minute rule to your advantage. There is little excuse to avoid doing something for two-minutes. So, don’t feel like introspection has to be some grand event you need to schedule well in advance. Just drop into introspection whenever you get a chance for a few minutes to yourself. Greater healing becomes possible when you bring all the parts of yourself back together into a whole self, like fitting puzzle pieces together. A puzzle is built one small piece at a time, picked up and pushed into place, repeated 1000 times. The single puzzle piece doesn’t look like much, but when you step back and look at 1000 pieces put together, it reveals a beautiful picture.

Adding Nature into the Mix

You can—of course—introspect anywhere at any time if you so desire. In my experience, spending time in nature helps to open the door to introspection in a healthy and positive way. Nature forces you to become more present-minded, helping you to take a time-out from rumination or worry about the past or future. The calmness and relaxation nature can offer can help you build a better perspective about what is meaningful and important. This is why nature is so powerful in nurturing positive personality changes and helping to improve many mental health conditions caused by inability to address the troubles lingering in the emotional self.

I encourage you to take a walk to the park, introspect on a park bench and let yourself open to the process of self-healing. I like to stop and do a little bit of introspection during longer hikes or runs in the mountains. Many people just focus on the activity they are doing in nature, but I also like to take a time-out when I’ve put in the effort to make it out into a beautiful, peaceful location.

TECHNIQUE STEPS

Step one: Breathing Meditation

The entry to any introspective process is aided by releasing the strangle hold your mind has over your full-body awareness. The goal is to quiet the mind and listen to what the body wants to communicate. You will do this by sitting down, closing your eyes and focusing on your breathing.

Typically, all introspective mindfulness and meditation practices start with connecting to the breath, breathing in through the nose into the lower abdomen, and out through the mouth. This process slows the sympathetic nervous system, heartbeat, and the intensity of brain activity.

As you do this, acknowledge any thoughts that emerge while in this breathing state, grant them permission to exist, but then let them float away by redirecting your focus away from your thoughts to your breathing. Don’t worry or feel stressed if thoughts keep popping into your mind. It will happen…just whenever you notice yourself starting to get lost in thought, simply redirect your focus to your breathing.

Even this simple practice can be challenging at first, but can improve with regular practice. Sometimes this practice of breathing is enough to help calm a person and resolve some of the emotional turmoil or stress/anxiety in the body.

Simple breathing meditation helps to raise your stress tolerance threshold. Over time, I have noticed I react less to stressors in my life that would previously trigger me. When I don’t use this technique for a while, I find myself more prone to stress.

The idea of this first step is about training yourself to bring calmness into your self, and to feel at ease with yourself. I use the word “training” because it is a trainable skill. If you wanted to run a marathon, you don’t just get out there on the first day and start running massive distances. You build up your ability to do it over time in smaller chunks of effort. Introspection can be difficult at first, but I urge you to stick with it. Start small, maybe just try the deep breathing for 1-2 minutes, then work up to 5 minutes. Once you can sit still for 10 minutes breathing, then progress to the body scan technique. Be patient and let the body do what it wants to do. Don’t try to force anything to happen.

Step two: “The Body Scan” Acknowledgement of a feeling, sensation, emotion.

Step two is where you begin to introduce mindfulness and use your innate consciousness to scan your body, while acting as an observer to any feelings, emotions and bodily sensations your body might be experiencing. Start by exploring various regions in the body (such as the arms, legs, torso, throat or head) looking for signs of discomfort, tension, emotional energy, anxiety or stress. Scan your body for anything which doesn’t feel peaceful, calm and relaxed. Underlying emotions will reveal themselves as some form of tension, pressure, constriction, unsettledness – basically anything the opposite of calmness and relaxation.

Once you find something, the process is to simply note the existence of whatever feeling, sensation or emotion is present. You don’t necessarily need to understand why it is there, or what to do about, just that it is there.

Move your entire focus onto this location in your body using your “mind’s eye”. Now tell that area in your body to “relax”, “to let go”, “that it’s ok”, “that it’s loved”. Often, I simply repeat the word relax, over and over again. You might have a preference for something else, there is no right away, just use your intuition.

As you do this, imagine the “opening of space” or unlocking of energy in this area of the body. See in your mind’s eye the dissipation of the constricted energy, see it dissolving, evaporating and leaving your body. Bring in peaceful energies to this space (on the in breath), maybe love, calmness, stillness. Sometimes, I might even try to identify something more about it. Does it have a color? A shape? A texture? Is it stationary, pulsing or moving? I then imagine the feeling of it diminishing, lessening its intensity and dissolving away (on the out breath).

Quite often during this process, I might feel some jumpiness or surges of energy in my body, or even brief moments of heightened emotion or anxiety that I allow to come and go. I believe these types of signals are the body autonomically processing the emotion and letting the energy discharge. I feel better every time I try this technique.

Bear in mind that processing an emotion may not be a one-time thing. Human beings are emotional beings. It may take days, weeks or months of introspection to fully resolve…maybe never for really painful trauma. This is a technique you will need to use for life, because no matter how much you can clear in one day, as you progress in life, you will always have more emotions to deal with. The goal is to not think of this technique as eliminating emotions from your life, but learning how to process them safely and effectively whenever they build up and impact on your life detrimentally.

Step Three: Introspective Thought

Each step in this technique builds upon the previous ones. Sometimes you might only do step one, most of the time I do both step’s one and two. However, occasionally, I also do step three if I have more time. Step three is where you sit quietly and use the calmness and connection with your inner “true self” to think deeply. This is the time for re-evaluating whether your current thoughts and actions are in alignment with your personal values. It could be used as a time for setting or re-evaluating those values. You could use the time to visualise your future, to define a personal vision, set some goals, or to think what steps are needed to achieve certain goals.

You can also use this as a step for letting go of the past. For example, you might have a deep regret that is still troubling you, holding you back from moving forward. You could focus on those thoughts, then feel the feelings that arise. You could then go back to step two to do a body scan and “open space” on those painful feelings. Let this feeling “let go” and dissipate, then use step three to put a positive plan in place for how you are going to deal with this moving forward.

You can also use it when you find yourself with the urge to act on a bad habit and self-sabotage, or even when you’ve given into self-sebotage and realised it was not a good decision. You can enter into this technique and work through this internally. Use step three to explore what might have triggered the self-sabotage, maybe it was pain or anxiety you were avoiding. Find the pain or anxiety in your body with step two and “open space” to release the energy.

Your best thinking will always occur when you have spent some time calming down your mind and body and getting grounded in yourself. Use it to your advantage.

Step Four: Connecting with Your True “Original” Self

This technique comes from the work of my friend and colleague Theresa Talea. You can read more about it in the third edition of her book: “Eternal Humans and the Finite Gods”. This is a technique aimed at encouraging a greater connection between the layers of yourself.

Background: Start this technique from a genuine place in yourself that knows you are good, beautiful, worthy, or another positive statement that makes you feel secure, peaceful, loving, and trusting in yourself. Stay completely positive (without any fear or power level). This is the foundational energy of this technique that will provide the courage and connection to reach your true self.

Technique: Become comfortable in your own skin. Sense your physical body’s skin as your boundary to keep you within yourself when connecting to your core essence. Bring your visionary mind downward between chakras 3 and 4 at the base of the central sternum above the xiphoid process, away from any chakra interference. With the pure, trusting, and “knowing” energy that is your entire focus, draw this point deeper inward and expect that you meet your true, original self that knows eternal energy. You can stay there for a while to feel its fullness as you. If you have a higher self, this is where you interface and feel the mutual flow of good energy. It might feel more pronounced than if it only came from your inner template. The objective of this technique is to feel naturally connected and completely at home in yourself.

You may receive physical validation from your higher self and/or core to your third and fourth chakras giving a quick burst of tangible joy as an actual energetic leap from your core to show your alignment. This energy effortlessly spreads throughout your body in a united, self-aware state.

Post-technique: Recall the interdimensional process by vision and/or feeling of meeting your complete, original self. Expand that energy in your trusting declarations about you and your intuitive sense, and your true self may increasingly provide that energetic leap of confirmation that overflows from your core connection into the surrounding third and fourth chakras. By keeping the natural energy flow between you and your original self, awareness is revealed for more self-integration.

Furthermore, you may optionally wish to draw in the energy of the Blue Flame, which can be used to protect yourself from untoward entities and energies. If you are not comfortable in doing so, please read Theresa’s book and visit her website: www.rediscoverypress.com so you can learn more about her techniques and the purpose of using this flame.