In Part 3, I talked about how your Learned Distress renews itself each time you go to sleep – and so, when it comes to Learned Distress, that renewable energy isn’t such a good thing.  It has, in fact, been the mechanism by which life has become harder for you over time.  So now, let’s look at the big breakthrough Mimi had when she considered the Law of Conservation of Energy further.  It is the key to your life feeling better and easier.

Until this point, Mimi thought she was just looking for the source of illness.  She never set out to change anything.  But now, she started to wonder if your brain could turn Learned Distress into non-renewable energy.  Think of burning a log in a fireplace – once you’ve burned it, you can never use the ashes to produce more heat.  What if you could burn off Learned Distress permanently, so your sensory brain could no longer use it to generate negative moments?

Mimi knew from her research that she had an important hurdle to get over: your brain’s natural resistance to change.  As nerve cells in the brain mature, a myelin sheath forms around them, which creates a physiological wall of resistance to change.  And, as your rational brain begins to function around the age of 2 ½, a wall of resistance to change forms around your sense of self.  This wall means that you can’t think your way out of your Learned Distress.

Your brain has good reason for this resistance – it’s protecting your way of surviving, which it customized for you and your surroundings from your sponge-like Sensory Learning process.  Since your rational brain hadn’t begun to function, your sensory brain didn’t have any way of understanding that it had absorbed this feeling that “there’s something wrong with me,” so it’s just holding tightly onto what it believes is keeping you alive and well!

To burn off your Learned Distress, Mimi realized she had to get your rational, thinking brain out of the way – that when the rational is operating, the wall of resistance is up. She carefully considered all the different brain wave activity states, which fall into 3 major categories: wakefulness, sleep, and purposefully-altered states where the brain produces Theta waves (like hypnosis and meditation).  She saw that sleep is the one time when the rational is shut down entirely and that sleep also has a big bonus – it is when your sense of self recharges.  So, all you had to do was tell your brain you want to recharge with your natural well-being, instead of Learned Distress.

That was Mimi’s next hurdle – how can you give your brain this permission for change when you’re asleep?  She created a Sensory Message CD (a tape at first) to do just that.  She recorded a spoken message in the language of your sensory brain – sensory images, or spoken “pictures of feelings,” that tell your brain, “I don’t want this bad feeling anymore; I want to recharge with what feels good.”  For example: “I am a leaf floating down a river.  I get to a place where it’s all clogged and nothing can move.  But then, things begin to move again and I float into this calm pool where I can relax and enjoy this peaceful existence.”  I’ve created a new Sensory Message based on the knowledge I gained from Mimi plus what I’ve learned from 10+ years of guiding others through this process.

This Sensory Message is the catalyst for change, giving your brain permission to burn off layers of Learned Distress permanently (just like burning the log in the fireplace). As this “unlearning” happens, your natural sense of well-being expands to take the place of the burned off Learned Distress.  More and more, well-being becomes the energy your brain uses to generate your moments. Just as you’ve never worked hard to have a bad day, the moments that feel truly good to you just begin to happen automatically.

Sound too good to be true? I certainly thought so the first time I talked to Mimi.  Now, I’ve had more than 10 years to see for myself and through my clients’ experiences that it actually does work that way.

Now that we’ve explored the story of your energy, I’ll start to describe the 6 Sensory Quotient survival patterns that Learned Distress creates.  The whole purpose of Quanta Change is to unlearn your pattern of Learned Distress so that you can enjoy being you in your own unique way. You can find out what your Sensory Quotient pattern is by completing this free test.