Do you find yourself losing concentration during certain times of the day? Perhaps it comes as a sudden touch of fatigue, or a subtle mental fuzziness. All of a sudden, you feel droopy. Your eyes may tear. You can't stop yawning, or you sigh. Maybe you find yourself staring out the window, your mind faraway from the tasks at hand. If somebody speaks to you, you find yourself startled by the sound of his voice. Or you don't understand what was said the first time and ask the speaker to repeat himself.
These are signs that your body is entering an ultradian rest response. If you observe yourself carefully during the day, you will find that this pattern recurs approximately every hour and a half. Noticing this pattern can help you tap into your intuition during the times when your physiology is naturally attuned to it.
During those periods when you lose concentration or get tired, the four main regulatory systems that link mind and body realign. These four physiological systems are:
1. The autonomic nervous system that regulates most of your body's important functions.
2. The endocrine system that regulates production of your pituitary, thalamus, hypothalamus, and thyroid hormones, among others.
3. The immune system.
4. The system of information substance chemicals (neuropeptides) in your brain.
Your drowsiness and loss of attention are telling you that these important changes are taking place. These feelings of distraction occur in part because of a shift in cerebral lateralization, that is, the right hemisphere of your neocortex becomes dominant during the ultradian rest response. The parasympathetic nervous system becomes activated, too, producing changes in moods and feelings.
This is a time when you are more likely to say "Aha!" or get a rare, sudden insight into yourself.
According to Ernest Rossi, author of The Psychobiology of Mind/Body Healing, "during the ultradian rest response, your body goes into an intuitive mode. You are more receptive to impressions from your unconscious."
If you try to ignore these signals by pretending that they do not exist, you may find yourself feeling irritable, uncomfortable, and depressed. If, however, you recognize and accept your body's messages, you can use the ultradian rest period for relaxing, creative intuitive work.
This is the best time to take a break rather than forcing yourself to push through the fatigue. You can think of it as your intuition break, time to take a deep breath, close your eyes, and allow impressions from your intuitive right hemisphere to flow through your mind. If you are working on a project and would like help from your intuition, this is the time to ask for it. It is also a good time to meditate or work with some of the techniques in this book.
As you become more aware of the physiology of intuition, you will find that your body's natural rhythms can help you ease into an intuitive state. You can meditate productively at any time during the day, but by recognizing the onset of your ultradian rest response, you can enhance your results by spending time in silence while your body does its neurophysiological work. By meditation, we mean spending some quiet time with yourself, perhaps as little as ten minutes a day. Along with meditation, an ultradian rest period is an optimum time to do visualization, self-healing, or any other technique that makes you more conscious of information from your uncosncious mind.
Not only will you be more receptive to your intuition during this period, but the inner work will flow without any effort on your part. Says Rossi, "This is the time when it's easiest to access our own intuition, your own internal imagery. Thoughts are most likely to be closer to the unconscious. This is a time when the unconscious wants all the energy it can get. If you train yourself to just watch and observe and not intrude, you're going to fall into what is called reverie or hypnagogic state, what I call its more naturally intuitive state."
The ultradian response is a time when all the mind-body communication systems are most fluid, most flexible, and also most vulnerable to being damaged if we interfere with them too much. If we let the ultradian response have all the energy, it can most efficiently do all the healing it needs to. Rossi observes, "Most forms of healing, including shamanism and the holistic forms of healing are rituals for helping you to get into this ultradian response because it's so easy to entrain." ... read more ...
