DISEASES OF PERCEPTION
Going beyond our ranges
Perception enables experience. It allows awareness to organize information from our senses, facilitates our capacity to give meaning to life and to create beliefs about what we are experiencing. There are many types of perception. There is pure sensory perception, which is like raw data from our senses organs. Then there is self-perception or public perception, which are mental interpretations that we create about ourselves or collective beliefs that we participate with. There are also body perceptions that are not related to our senses organs, but rather to our body systems. One example of this is neuroception, a term coined by Stephen Porges of Polyvagal Theory, which relates to the nervous system’s ability to perceive survival threats and/or safety conditions. Beyond this there is also emotional perception, which is the capacity to perceive your own or other’s emotional states and there is something I call “soulception”, which is the ability to perceive nonphysical & nonlinear dimensions of existence.
While some of our perceptions are conscious, others are not. For example we might be able to perceive sounds in a particular frequency range through our auditory sense organs, but are unable to perceive sounds outside of that range. That doesn’t mean that sounds outside of our auditory range don’t exist, but rather only that we can’t perceive them. What we don’t perceive we don’t consciously experience. However, just because we don’t consciously experience something doesn’t mean it doesn’t effect us. We know that infrasound and ultrasound effect our body tissues even though we can’t hear them, just like we know UV, infrared and microwave frequencies also impact us even though we can’t see them. These “out of perception” influences are impacting us. We experience this as feeling a certain way and not knowing why, or having a symptom show up in our body without understanding its source. Things are occurring both above and below our perceptual ranges and those influences often feel mysterious to us.
When people arrive in this place of mysteriousness, knowing there is impact and not knowing its source, they equate this to a stop sign. This is because they either lack curiosity, or feel limited and powerless, and therefore don’t stretch or seek beyond their current state of awareness. They hope something or someone outside of them has the answer to their mystery. While it might be true that the sense organs connected to our bodies are limited to specific ranges of frequency and perceptibility, what also seems true is that we are capable of perceiving much more than we are currently challenge ourselves to perceive. If we had just even a little bit of curiosity and a spoonful of confidence in our ability to go beyond what we currently know, we would come to see that there is a lot more available for us to perceive. We simply need the courage and belief in ourselves that we are capable of accessing more information and energy than we currently do.
ILLUMINATING THE SUBCONSCIOUS
Energy states
Let’s relate this to disease. First, what is disease? It is a condition or state in the body where the tissues and/or various systems are not working efficiently. Disease indicates a condition of energy poorness, meaning there is not enough energy for homeostasis and self-organization, and thus there is breakdown in structure or function. The way I see it is that disease is an intelligent and adaptive response to keep the body alive in suboptimal energy conditions. While I know the common belief is that the disease is the problem, I see it as an effect of an insufficient supply of energy or information. While some diseases are silent and you don’t know they are there, others are loud and very expressive. The loudness factor typically depends on one of two things. One is how far advanced the breakdown has become. The more advanced, the more likely you are to notice it. The other factor is how aware you are of your body. The more awareness or body perception you have, the more you are able to tune into subtle shifts in function, even before they are detectable with our current medical diagnostics and technologies.
What are diseases of perception?
The phrase diseases of perception points to a perception being at the source of the condition(s) in the body. Often that perception is unknown to us or out of our range of conscious awareness. This means it is somewhere in our subconscious. As I mentioned previously there are all types of perception, some of them are specific to our body systems. Our nervous system perceives, and so do all of the systems, tissues and cells in our body. Nothing is separate from perception. Perception is the information source, and energy states respond to perception. A basic example of this is when you perceive something to be very funny, you feel joy and laughter all throughout your body. Joy is a higher energy state then say depression, which might be the result of perception that something in life isn’t working out for you. This is just a basic example.
When it comes to conditions in the body there might be multiple perceptions at play. There might a neuroception perceiving lack of safety combined with an emotional perception of feeling scared and a cognitive interpretation that something is wrong. This combined information or perception creates an energy state in the body. The tissues and systems of the body have to respond to this information accordingly, and poor energy states will eventually lead to breakdown. Again breakdown or what we call disease is the body’s attempt to stay alive in a poor energy state, but eventually it won’t be able to and the tissues, systems or cells will die because they will no longer have enough energy to survive.
What does this mean for you?
It means that while you do whatever you need to do medically to support your physical condition, you also do a deep dive investigation into the perceptions that are creating the energy states and functioning of your body. Without this you are simply fixing the effects of the cause, but aren’t going to the root of it. There isn’t anyone that will hold you accountable to do this for yourself. Our current systems don’t understand and/or accept these connections, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. It takes energy, determination and focus to investigate that which is currently in your subconscious, but understand that the subconscious is meant to be illuminated. We are the focus and spark of awareness that brings it to light.
You might wonder why do this when it’s “easier” to just find a fix. Most people who have had conditions in their body for a long time know that there aren’t really fixes. There are things that can help sustain function or drugs that can mask symptoms, but often they don’t bring us into a state of greater wholeness. Also I don’t believe that conditions in the body are bad or wrong. I see them as leaning tools. If we just try to get them to go away, but don’t investigate the deeper learning that they are prompting, then we miss their point. They are the unique way that our soul is teaching us about the things which we are having this human experience to learn. While they can be challenging to experience, frustrating and feel unfair at times, when utilized they are also deep teachers that help us wake up our light in this body and on this planet. Rather than creating pathology in your mind in relationship to your body’s expressions, recognize your conditions as gifts of transformation that allow you to be a brighter source of love inside of your human experience.
Dr. Amanda Lalita Love, DC, MSA, L.Ac
Network Spinal Chiropractor & Nervous System Focused Somatic Healer, Boulder, Colorado
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