responsibility for everyone else’s missteps? After you reflect on your history
of constantly “pleading guilty,” you say to yourself, Today I’m going to stop
blaming myself and making excuses for other people’s bad behavior. I’m
going to change.
Because of your decision, you’re no longer going to think the same
thoughts that produce the same feelings, and vice versa. And if you falter,
you’ve made a deal with yourself that you’re going to stop and remember
your intention. Two hours go by and you feel really good about yourself.
You think, Wow, this is actually working.
Unfortunately, your body’s cells aren’t feeling so good. Over the years,
you’ve trained them to demand more molecules of emotion (guilt, in this
case) in order to fulfill their chemical needs. You had trained your body to
live as a memorized chemical continuity, but now you’re interrupting that,
denying it its chemical needs and going contrary to its subconscious
programs.
The body becomes addicted to guilt or any emotion in the same way that
it would get addicted to drugs.^2 At first you only need a little of the
emotion/drug in order to feel it; then your body becomes desensitized, and
your cells require more and more of it just to feel the same again. Trying to
change your emotional pattern is like going through drug withdrawal.
Once your cells are no longer getting the usual signals from the brain
about feeling guilty, they begin to express concern. Before, the body and the
mind were working together to produce this state of being called guilt; now
you are no longer thinking and feeling, feeling and thinking, in the same
way. Your intention is to produce more positive thoughts, but the body is
still all revved up to produce feelings of guilt based on guilty thoughts.
Think of this as a kind of highly specialized assembly line. Your brain
has programmed the body to expect one part that will fit into this larger
assembly. All of a sudden, you’ve sent it another part that doesn’t fit into
the space where the old “guilty” part once did. An alarm goes off, and the
whole operation comes to a standstill.
Your cells are always spying on what is happening in the brain and the
mind; your body is the best mind reader ever. So they all stop what they are
doing, look up toward the brain, and think: