Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: Chapter 10,
The induction meditation as described by Dr. Joe Dispenza has various goals
to learn to become present
to move out of the analytical mind
and to access our subconscious, located in the cerebellum
When we meditate on the space around us, by sensing, feeling, and noticing, the space or IT, the nothingness, we activate and contact also the hindbrain/the cerebellum. Now we have better access to our subconscious thoughts, emotions, and habits of our Old Self, in the cerebellum. Mostly, the cerebellum is seen as the seat of moving control. Proprioceptive receptors in our joints, muscles, and tendons signal to the cerebellum. We usually don’t notice anything because the majority of these movement commands are carried out unconsciously. We owe it to this “deep sensitivity” also known as proprioception that we can move at all.
The cerebellum drives your car and modulates the emotional processes in your body. Every day we correct our head position thousands of times, change the tension in the back muscles, and briefly put more strain on one leg than the other. Also driving the car, a bike, inline skating, typing on a keyboard, walking on the stairs, and so much more are controlled by the cerebellum. If we had to consciously control these innumerable functions and positions, we would probably hardly have time to think about anything else. The flood of proprioceptive information is simply too powerful – and is therefore largely relegated to the unconscious, located in the cerebellum.
There is another important function of the cerebellum, protected under our skull in the back. Data, presented in a study from 2017 points out that, the cerebellum is strongly connected to structures that are involved in unconscious and conscious emotional processes. For example, the reticular system (arousal), the hypothalamus (autonomic function and emotional expression), and the limbic structures (emotional experience and expression). The central autonomic brain stem and cerebellum also control the sympathetic and parasympathetic axes of the autonomic nervous system. This system activates the body to support our emotional behavior. We know that the brain-body produces in milliseconds a biochemical reaction based on our emotions. These findings are not surprising. The cerebellum belongs also to a widespread network, including the amygdala–prefrontal network. This circuitry determines external triggers and how to react coherently. As evidenced in this study, the cerebellum participates in modulating the unconscious and conscious levels of emotional processing…our unconscious feelings than thoughts and habits.