The Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton [69]
Parental Programming: The Power of the Subconscious Mind
I’d like to tell you about how I—who put myself in the category of those who were not prepared to have children—came to question my ingrained assumptions about parenting. You won’t be surprised to hear that I started my reevaluation in the Caribbean, the place where my shift to the New Biology took root. My reassessment was actually inspired by an unlucky event, a motorcycle accident. I was on my way to present a lecture when I went off a curb at high speed. The bike wound up upside down. Luckily I was wearing a helmet because I sustained a major blow to my head when the bike hit the ground. I was unconscious for half an hour and for a while my students and colleagues thought I was dead. When I came to, I felt as if I had broken every bone in my body.
For the next few days I could hardly walk, and when doing so, I resembled a yelping version of Quasimodo. Every step was a painful reminder that “speed kills.” As I creaked out of the classroom one afternoon, one of my students suggested that it might help if I visited his roommate, a fellow student, who was also a chiropractor. As I explained in the last chapter, I not only had never been to a chiropractor, I had been taught by my allopathic community to shun chiropractors as quacks. But when you’re in that much pain and you’re in an unfamiliar setting, you wind up trying things you would never consider in your cushier moments.
At the chiropractor’s make shift dormitory “office” I was introduced for the first time to kinesiology, popularly known as muscle testing. The chiropractor told me to hold out my arm and resist the downward pressure he applied to it. I had no problem resisting the light force he put on my arm. Then he asked me to hold out my arm and resist him again while I said, “My name is Bruce.” Again, I had no trouble resisting him, but by now I was starting to think that the admonishments of my academic colleagues were right on the mark—“This is nuts!” Then, the chiropractor told me to hold out my arm and resist his pressure while saying earnestly, “My name is Mary.” To my amazement, my arm flopped down, despite my strong resistance. “Now wait a minute,” I said. “I must not have been resisting enough, try that again.” So we did, and this time I concentrated even more forcefully on resisting. Nevertheless, after repeating, “My name is Mary,” my arm sunk like a stone. This student, who was now my teacher, explained that when your conscious mind has a belief that is in conflict with a formerly learned “truth” stored in the subconscious mind, the intellectual conflict expresses itself as a weakening of the body’s muscles.
To my astonishment, I realized that my conscious mind, which I exercised so confidently in academic settings, was not in control when I voiced an opinion that differed from a truth stored in the unconscious mind. My unconscious mind was undoing the best efforts of my conscious mind to hold up my arm when I claimed my name was Mary. I was amazed to discover that there was another “mind,” another force that was co-piloting my life. More shocking was the fact that this hidden mind, the mind I knew little about (except theoretically in psychology) was actually more powerful than my conscious mind, just as Freud had claimed. All in all, my first visit to a chiropractor turned out to be a life-changing experience. I learned that chiropractors could tap into the body’s innate healing power using kinesiology to target spinal misalignments. I was able to saunter