Nurturing Our Well-Being

The Art and Science of Shaping Our Consciousness

BY Gérard Sunnen, MD

FEBRUARY 2024

Abstract

“Well-Being,” is experiencing our consciousness in ways that are intuitively felt to be healthful to our body, meaningful to our sense of self, and respectful of the thrust of our life energies.

States of well-being gather force from the contributions of several energy systems. The energies generated by all our bodily cells connect to our nervous system networks, all eventually nourishing our psyche to create a special entity: Consciousness.

Well-being” is a dimension that can be shaped by meditative arts and that has no outer limits. Indeed, well-being has capacities for endless expansion.

Autogenics, often called “Western Yoga,” is a mind-body practice based on clinical research into deep states of hypnosis. It seeks to harmonize communications between the totality of our bodily cells, our organs, our nervous system and its highest conscious and unconscious dimensions of sentience.

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The enclosed links to articles explore practices dedicated to developing coveted states of mind and body that can be named “Well-Being,” “Bien-Être” in French, or “Bienestar” in Spanish. The concept remains the same in many other cultures. In the enclosed articles, this exploration begins with an appreciation of the nervous system’s role in creating these special states. They show how practices, based on neurological science, can meld with other systems of human health to stimulate our quest for self-expansion.

As an extraordinary evolutionary achievement, our nervous system functions to synchronize our mind with its body, and vice versa. The nervous system’s forte is its rapid communication capacities, allowing for a dynamic dialogue with the totality of our bodily organs, and for its instantaneous responses to sensors constantly translating messages from our milieu. By way of its innate energetic output, our nervous system, in turn, activates all organ functions, fueling their productivity and longevity.

All organs connect to the nervous system and to each other: Intestinal organs, muscles, joints and bones, heart and lungs, pituitary, thyroid, adrenals, pancreas, all our specialized organs are welcome, including our ever more labyrinthine-seeming immune network responsible for our primordial defenses against all manner of invading pathogens. The nervous system rules by bioelectrical impulses and by blood-borne systemic messenger molecules. And, possibly also, according to Eastern medical models, by interacting with parallel life energies, as its delicate tendrils constantly dialogue with each of the trillions-strong living cells that move our unique organism through life.

Aside from harmonizing organ functions, the nervous system connects to another network, one that continues to stymie the reveal of its intrinsic nature. This system is actively engaged in the creation of a still enigmatic phenomenon, namely Conscious Experiencing.

Enter the ancient “Mind-Body Problem”: How can a material brain, made of atoms, poignantly palpable in its weight and rubbery consistency when held in a gloved hand, create an entity that does not seem physical:

Awareness?

Experiencing is vital to existence; without it we would stay idle and perish. It moves us to action. Devoid of the experience of hunger, for example, there would be no impetus to seek food; and so with sex and ensuring the continuity of life, and many other drives, large and small.

If you direct attentional focus on your now-consciousness, noting its shade of mood and emotional coloring, the flow of its thoughts and the streams of sensations from your body, how many separate expressions of your consciousness can you discern? Wait a few minutes, then check once more. Your state of consciousness will have morphed in a short time. Indeed, each moment of consciousness is unique in its instantaneous magical limelight, never quite repeating itself ever in our lifetime, a constant flow of energy propelling us toward higher destinations.

In this landscape of consciousness, to be its keenly sentient observer is an art. It is an even greater art to be not only its observer, but also its executive director.

Our state of consciousness is a bouillon of contributions from the totality of our brain neural networks, whether consciously perceived, or not. Understanding these mechanisms helps us accept the seemingly contradictory aspects of ourselves. We are made of diverse parts, or neurologically-speaking, of co-existing distinct brain networks, all cross-communicating. With its nearly two billion neurons and its more than three hundred identified types of neuronal cells each emitting proprietary electro-chemical signals, the brain possesses hundreds of networks, some much more extensive than others. Huge neuronal ramifications relay vital messages from the visual, auditory, tactile and bodily position senses. Massive are those illuminated by the power of emotions and poignant memories, while other networks are consumed by thinking, creativity, and projecting into the future.

Every network, whether consciously felt or unconsciously perceived, embodies some form of sentience, and therefore, energy. And each has its priority code, if you will, that preferentially allows it entrance into the domain of our running consciousness. We may name that domain our ‘I’ center.’ Presumably, it would not be efficient to be aware of too many things at once. At the same time, even though silent networks may not be felt directly, they continue to contribute, in their own way, to our global perception of sentience. Look, for example at the subconscious subliminal influence springing from the insidious persistence of emotional trauma.

Numerous neural networks, while not present in consciousness, continue to contribute to the experience of consciousness. Seemingly paradoxically, it can be said that unconscious consciousness - which is prone to emerge in dreams – perennially coexists alongside conscious consciousness.

While sentience tends to manifest in rote patterns by the momentum of mind’s habits, it can be modified. This is where one’s role as “sentience director” makes an entrance. The feeling of time passing, for example, may be made to slow down; the experience of muscular force may be boosted; and desired states of mind invited to claim greater prominence in the psyche. Beingness is malleable, much as the work of a sculptor extracting the beauty of a statue from a block of stone. And, like the sun’s rays meeting rain droplets morph into radiant palettes, sentience can display ever more intensity and luminosity. For that, it needs its elemental energy source, the force of consciousness, in unison with directions from our own “I’ center.

Mental tools are needed for painting states of consciousness. Essential in this toolbox is the mind’s capacity to extract a solitary element from the wide field of consciousness, maintaining it in focus to concentrate its “consciousness energies.” In time, this process recruits increasing numbers of neural networks, which, by pooling their energies heighten the glow of sentience. Enter the meditative arts. The practice of amplifying awareness develops many cognitive capabilities, including the gift of fully connecting to the intensity of our present moments.

The direction of our meditative destination may select entrance into our nervous system and all its tributaries.

Connecting our psyche to our body’s organs via our neurological system creates internal harmony, yielding fluidity and opening vistas to high well-being. Meditative destinations may also be dispatched to other, clearly psychic realms, aiming to connect to and release latent emerging life forces that increasingly seek expression in our mental ecology.

Several meditative arts borrow from these principles. In beginning Autogenics, often called “Western Yoga,” for example, we gain entrance into our nervous system by first directing attentional focus into the feeling space of one or both arms. Meditative entry into our sensory-motor nerves eventually leads to connections to our visceral nervous system, the somatic repository of our emotions. Tummo meditation, a Tibetan discipline, similarly promotes profound connection and harmonious equilibrium of the nervous system by activating pathways having to do with the creation of internal “psychic” heat.

Emotions are loaded with sentience. Along with thoughts, all contain a common element, energy. For lack of better appellations, and since most energies floating about in our universe are of unknown nature, we can simply see them as part of the spectrum of “life forces.”

Positive emotions are intuitively named for the inspiration they provide and for the sense of existential meaning they offer. Among them, joy, empathy, love in its varied forms, inspiration, serenity, pride, hope, clarity, devotion, gratitude, creative thrust and spiritual epiphanies. Positive emotions push us forward in our unfolding human evolution.

While it may seem simplistic to classify emotions as either positive or negative (with many grey zones in between), the concept mostly holds up to clinical experience. Negative emotions belong to our survivalist human journey, going back millions of years. Fear, worry, anger and rage, guilt, pride, shame, envy, jealousy and so many others, in raw form or mixed, have shaped our earliest social comportments, so that earth’s nascent hominids could prosper. These “negative” emotions all had dedicated functions of their own, otherwise nature would not have created them. In raw form and coming from ancient brain templates, however, these emotions work against us in our world today. Psychotherapy has traditionally dealt with “negative” emotions because they create the most psychic pain.

Here, however, we are concerned with expanding the intensity and reach of energized positive emotions, giving special attention to ones that embody notions of greater individual meaning. It is important to note that the enhancement of positive emotions, by whatever means, naturally engages the regression of negative emotions.

Recommended, in the quest for greater well-being, is that, regardless of prior experience, Autogenics be practiced until reaching some degree of proficiency. Autogenics is a discipline derived from clinical research that began over a century ago in Europe. Intrigued by the therapeutic effects of deep, even profound hypnosis, researchers at that time, sought to replicate similar experiences in subjects in their usual states of consciousness, without the use of hypnosis.

Autogenics was born.

Autogenics’ first aim is to invite a dynamic entente between the body, its nervous system, and its overseer, the psyche. Once this harmony is satisfied, graceful connections and synchronicities are easily made with other yoga systems, some bodily-oriented, like Hatha Yoga, and others that include the “mental yogas,” such as Raja Yoga, and Kriya Yoga.

May the concepts and practices herewith presented bring you ever greater fulfilment in your self-expansion!

And may the metamorphosis of your state of consciousness lead to expanded states of your Well-Being!

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The following articles seek to kindle appreciation for the connections binding nervous system function to organ health, and to states of consciousness with special emphasis on the experience of well-being.

Beginning consciousness training with Autogenics is recommended because it is based on clinical research andvast cumulated data dating back over a century. Autogenics, as a starter method, teaches entering one’s nervous system network and its connected bodily organs, to achieve not only higher awareness of our somatic world, but also to activate its good functioning. Described in the first article below is a practical introduction to this discipline.

Autogenic Training and Yoga. Yoga Magazine (London), June 2021, Issue 218

https://www.drsunnen.com/yoga-magazine-jun-2021

Tummo Yoga: The Clinical Benefits of Psychic Heat – Yoga Magazine (London), July 2021

https://www.drsunnen.com/yoga-magazine-jul-2021

Human Energy: The Search for Our Vital Elixir

Yoga Magazine (London), September 2022, Issue 233

https://yogamagazine.com/human-energy/

The Neurology of Meditation: Implications for Meditative Therapies.

http://www.triroc.com/sunnen/topics/meditationtherapies.htm

Experiencing ‘Pure Consciousness:’ A Catalyst in Psychotherapy?

http://www.triroc.com/sunnen/topics/experiencepureconsciousness.htm

Can the Mind Talk to the Heart?