Your Identity
Welcome back everyone! As we get started this week, I’m going to ask each of you a quick diagnostic question: does the current biggest issue of your life fall into any of the following categories?
- Negative emotions.
- Negative thought patterns.
- Negative conscious beliefs.
- Actions and behaviors.
- The physiology of your body.
I’m guessing at least one of the above probably gets an emphatic “yes” from most of you, if not all of you. And fair’s fair, it’s a pretty comprehensive breakdown of possible life issues. You could go to any library or bookstore and find dozens—even hundreds of books on each of these subjects. But where I disagree with most of them is in accepting any of these five as the identity of your issue. Even worse, that notion tends to keep people locked in a vicious cycle, often for years or decades. All because of what I believe to be a misunderstanding about the true source of these problems.
If I asked you to define yourself, you would not respond by telling me about your heart-rate and blood pressure, naming the bones of your body, or counting off teeth and fillings on your fingers. As adults, we understand that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Western medicine, in particular, has long worked on the basis of discrete classification of illnesses, but when you ask a doctor where the illness comes from in the first place, why one person gets cancer while another does not, the honest answer has always been: “we don’t know.”
That fact is starting to shift, a number of years ago, some truly groundbreaking research was done, indicating that the source of illness and disease is what they called “cellular memories,” which really just means memories. It seems that we are moving inexorably toward the conclusion that illness and disease are caused by disturbances at the energetic level.
Naturally then, our next question is, “what causes the disturbances? Why does one person’s energy get disturbed and cause them to develop a disease while someone else’s doesn’t?” For a scientific answer, we will probably have to make do with, “I don’t know” for at least a while longer.
But I believe I do have a practical answer: the spiritual begets the physical, and at the deepest level, these sorts of disturbances always come from the spiritual. Here I speak frankly as a man of faith—but there is no need to leave behind science either. Consider that what we now call the unconscious mind was called “the heart” by many ancient manuscripts, whose wisdom stands strong today, despite the fact that their authors knew nothing of modern neurology. In another twenty or thirty years, we may indeed have a much firmer grasp than we do now of why a person’s energy behaves in the way that it does. Perhaps we will even discover forces working in us which are as yet unnamed by science. But wisdom does not become foolishness simply because names change and causes become better known. One does not need to understand the complexities of barometric pressure to know which way the wind is blowing.
And I am incredibly excited about what new insights the future may bring. But in the meantime, we ought to use every tool available to us, and always remember that circumstantial problems are not our identity.
Have a blessed, wonderful day!
Dr. Alex Loyd
