"Healing comes in waves and maybe today the wave hits the rocks and that's ok, that's ok, darling, you are still healing, you are still healing." Anybody
who has ever tried to actively process traumatic chapters of their lives, either as they happen or from the past, can attest to one thing for sure - that the journey, irrespective of the context, has never been linear. As a matter of fact, weeks and months passing before feeling any palpable change isn't uncommon at all. So when someone says that merely uttering two words has the power to palpably shift your emotional state, it sounds like clickbait. Only it isn't. Not only do the power of these two words come attested from a healer, but are rooted in a scientific experiment studying the brain.
What Are the Magic Words?
Shamanic Ancestral Healer Vani Kabir affirms the words 'I am', as holding the power to alter your emotional state. Now while the power of 'I am' in spiritual terms typically stands rooted in narratives of self-assertion and believing in the power and purpose of your existence, Kabir adds a new layer of interpretation to these words, referring to a widely-known experiment in affect labeling.Matthew Lieberman and his team at UCLA, back in 2007, published a study in which they charted how the amygdala responded to different stimuli. The amygdala is a small, almond-shaped structure deep-seated in the brain and is responsible for processing fear, anxiety and emotional reactions.
What Happened in the Experiment?
Participants were shown emotionally charged images - emotions like fear, anger, anxiety were the key stimuli here - while their brains were scanned using functional MRI. When people simply reacted to the images, the amygdala lit up referencing a strong emotional response. Kabir zooms out here to explain, that while a medical approach to the situation has been to create medicines to control those emotions, from a healer's perspective, the solution to such situations has always been utterly simple - for the subject to just name what they were feeling. As per the directions from those conducting the experiment, saying "I am scared", or "I am anxious" labelled the emotions. And as soon as the emotion was labelled the amygdala activity decreased. In the same instance, areas of the brain such as the prefrontal cortex, which is linked to control and reasoning, showed increased activity.What is the Bridge Here Between Science and Spirituality?
Scientifically speaking, verbalising your feelings almost immediately works in helping your brain come off the ledge. In spiritual terms, this is just the scientific validation of the tradition of self-assertion which is foundational to all adjacent philosophies. That being said, simply naming the feeling is not going to completely expunge you of its effects and impact. But it is a practice rooted in belief, which has a physiological impact on you. As Kabir explains, this is an important lesson in realising that if your brain can identify problems, it can also troubleshoot them, and immediately at that. It's all about driving your state from reaction to regulation, and the latter is the basis of any and all manifestation manuals you have scrolled through, which give mindfulness top priority.Again, 'I am' does not hold the power to medically cure you. But it does make a starting impact in nudging your body and mind in the right direction.
