Lemon Makes Happy
November 13th, 2009 § 1 Comment
There is an exercise that will help you change the way you think. It’s about lemons and how they make you happy or thin or whatever you would like to change about your life. I found this exercise on numerous sites and blogs. This is eight of them. Enjoy!
1.
Introductory exercise
Close your eyes for a moment and think of a lemon. Take a couple of deep breaths and relax as you allow the image of a lemon to appear in your mind’s eye. Imagine holding the lemon and feeling its texture, both bumpy and smooth. Use an imaginary magnifying glass to examine its subtleties and colors, even the way light glistens on its surface. Notice the fragrance. Take a knife and cut it open. Taste it if you like, touching it with the tip of your tongue. Is the lemon juicy? What does it smell like? What does it taste like? Most people will quickly discover that as they become involved with the image, using all of their senses intensely to notice the look, smell, sound, feel, and taste of the lemon, the more engaged the body becomes, and wow, that’s a juicy lemon — sweet, sour, and tart! Feel your saliva flowing as your gums and tongue react to the mere idea of a lemon that isn’t even there. This is the mind–bodymind and body can become a basis of self-discovery. connection at work, and such interactions between
2.
You are in a garden somewhere, with a lemon tree, a table and a knife. Relax and breathe in the fresh country air. See through your own eyes as you walk over to the lemon tree. You pick the biggest lemon you can find.
Bring the lemon back to the table, and then use the knife to cut it into quarters. Take one of the quarters, and bring it up to your nose. Smell the tangy smell.
Now, take the biggest bite you possibly can out of the lemon. Chew it and taste the lemon juice in your mouth. Squeeze your eyes shut tight. Feel the edges of your mouth sting slightly from the acid. Do the same with the rest of the lemon.
3.
Body-Mind-Connection Test:
Read the next paragraph slowly and let your mind create the experience in your imagination.
With your eyes open, think about a lemon. Imagine that this lemon is large, with a waxy yellow pitted skin. It is shiny and beautiful. Now imagine that a knife is cutting the lemon in half, as the blade breaks the skin a spritz of lemon juice squirts out and runs down the blade of the knife. You can smell the lemon juice. Now imagine you are taking half of that lemon and squeezing the juice into your mouth. The bitter lemon juice is swirling over your tongue. Swallow it. Now, did anything occur in your mouth as you read and imagined that lemon? Did you find your mouth watering more than normal?
Most people do. Your mind stores the memory of lemon juice and your past experiences. Simply by imagining the lemon you altered the moisture in your mouth. The saliva glands are regulated by the autonomic nervous system. This system controls your heart rate, blood pressure, immune function; digestive, respiratory, circulatory systems and much more.
4.
Let’s just experiment for a moment, let’s put it to the test. It will be interesting what you may notice when you close your eyes and let yourself think about a juicy lemon. Now let yourself get involved with the idea and think about slicing the lemon in half. Lemon juice dripping. Now bite into the lemon…. At the thought of biting into the lemon, how did you feel? Most people say they feel saliva increase in their mouth and a shudder or a grimace on their face.
5.
The body is a robot. It does what the mind tells it to do.Imagine a large yellow lemon, one that is very heavy for its size because it is very, very juicy. It is so full of juice that once the skin is broken, juice will come pouring out over the sides of the lemon. The juice of this lemon is extremely sour. Just imagine the lemon sliced in half, with the juice dripping over the sides. You might even want to imagine testing the sourness of this lemon by bringing it up to your mouth, and sinking your teeth down into the pulp of the lemon, bringing the sour juice into your mouth and allowing it to swish around your mouth for a few moments, fully tasting it before the extremely sour juice slides down your throat.
Notice how your mouth is responding to this suggestion. Is it producing saliva? Are you swallowing? Perhaps your mouth is even puckering up. This is what the body is designed to do when you introduce sour tastes into your mouth.
Do you find your body responding to a scary scene in a movie by holding your breath, tensing up, or experiencing “fear” feelings? How does your body respond when someone tells you about a painful experience, or gives an explicit description of vomiting?
But wait! What’s going on? There IS no lemon here. There IS no juice swishing around in your mouth. So why is your mouth responding? Why is the body reacting to a scary scene when you know the person is merely acting? Why does it respond to someone else’s pain? Why does it respond to someone else vomiting?
Only the mind can think. The body is simply a robot controlled by the mind. What the mind perceives as reality the body respondes to accordingly. If you don’t like the way your body is responding, change your mind.
6.
To further demonstrate how strongly our minds influence our cells, consider just thinking about biting into a lemon. Visualize holding half of a nice, ripe lemon in the palm of your hand. Notice how juicy it is and the strong aroma it gives off. Now slowly raise it up to your mouth and . . . take a great big bite and taste the sour taste. I bet just visualizing this makes your mouth water, doesn’t it? This demonstrates that merely words and images work as well as “actual” molecules to trigger biological responses.
7.
The amount of saliva you produce after putting a drop of lemon juice on your tongue might tell you something about your personality.
It’s to do with a part of your brain called the Reticular Activating System (RAS) which responds to stimuli like food, or social contact. For example, it controls the amount of saliva you produce in response to food. A good food stimulus is lemon juice. Squeezing lemon juice on to your tongue makes your mouth water, and it does this because your RAS is responding to the lemon juice.
Scientists now think introverts have increased activity in their RAS and therefore increased production of saliva. The theory is that the RAS in introverts has a high level of activity, even when it isn’t being stimulated. So it only needs a small stimulus to produce a large response. This means that introverts are likely to produce a large amount of saliva in response to lemon juice. But because the RAS also reacts to social contact, introverts react more strongly to meeting people too.
In extraverts, on the other hand, there is a low level of activity in the RAS when it isn’t stimulated, so they require a much larger stimulus to generate a response. So they usually produce less saliva in response to lemon juice than introverts, but are more comfortable with social contact.
8.
Think about a lemon, imagine biting into a wedge of a ripe lemon and tasting the sour, tangy juice. Notice the salvia forming in your mouth right now? We call this a psycho somatic response. It is when the body reactions to the mind’s thoughts. There have been numerous studies on this topic including the respected field of psychoneuroimmuology. The mind and the body are interdependent, they respond to each other.
Oh and go to Happy Lemon site! It will cheer you up! Happy Lemon
Well done. I love this page .Bring on some more interesting stuff.
kind regards
anton Kooimans