Quanta Change founder Mimi Herrmann made an important and fundamental distinction about humans – she saw our lives as the product of the behavior of human energy, rather than of human behavior.  She discovered that each moment of our lives is generated automatically by the invisible work of our energy, not by what we do or think.  How did she come to this?

Long before the recent books and movies about applying physics to human energy came out, Mimi became intrigued by the word “quanta.”  As defined by physics, a quanta is a bundle of energy particles (a tree, a flower, a snowflake).  These energy particles’ behavior is governed by the laws of energy.  In her quest to answer the question, “Why do people get sick?” Mimi started wondering specifically how the particles that make up human quanta behave according to the laws of energy.

Through nearly 20 years of independent research, she came to see that 3 laws of energy are particularly important in understanding how our human energy behaves.  Let’s look at the law discovered by the Chaos scientists in the 1970’s and 80’s, which governs how we develop into our unique human selves.

This law states that as energy particles are “bundling up” to become a quanta, these particles are “sensitively dependent upon their initial conditions.”  In other words, they are sponges absorbing the conditions around them; what they absorb creates the quanta’s unique form.

Think of a ice crystal… its initial conditions are the air temperature, moisture content and wind speed of the place in which it forms.  As energy particles that make up the crystal stick together, they “soak up” the unique combination of these conditions, and that is what creates the ice crystal’s unique form.

Through her work with a Ph.D. neurophysiologist, Mimi came to understand that the human brain’s sponge-like period is from the 3rd day after conception until about the age of 2 ½.  During this time, the brain (and actually the whole body) is a “sensory sponge,” absorbing how those people around it feel about being human.  Mimi called this “Sensory Learning.”  So, our initial conditions are the way everyone around us feels; how they feel is how we will feel about being human.

A sponge has no choice in what it absorbs, and neither does this “sensory self.”  The rational brain hasn’t developed yet, so our brains are merely absorbing and feeling, without the ability to filter anything out, or to choose what we absorb.  When someone around us doesn’t feel good, we absorb that feeling…and we store it as a feeling about ourselves: “There is something wrong with ME being just this way.” Mimi called this Learned Distress.

There is no blame associated with Learned Distress. We absorbed it at a time we had no choice in the matter.  Those around us were just doing their best with the Learned Distress they absorbed through no choice of their own… and on back through the generations.

So, what does our brain do with this energy of Learned Distress after the age of 2 ½?  I’ll tell you all about that in my next post.