Held Energy Patterns — The Theta brainwave state and your Limbic Brain

The Theta brainwave state

When we’re kids — seven years old and under — we’re predominantly in a brainwave state known as the Theta state. In the Theta brainwave state, we are very absorbent to the environment around us. Receptive to suggestion. Highly impressionable.

This is because in the Theta brainwave state we’re processing the data of our experiences with the limbic brain (the emotional brain), using the language of the subconscious  — imagery, sensation, symbolism and feeling. This domain is pre-thought. It’s purely experiential.  

This is the state upon which thoughtforms are actually built.

In this state, we process data in pictures, scenes/scenarios, soundbites and sensations — via the senses.

The limbic brain registers all data in a situation down to the smells in the room and the colour of the clock. Not all of it will be declared necessary for the conscious mind to recall.

We naturally fall in and out of the Theta state multiple times per day through our natural ultradian rhythms.

If you've ever daydreamed about a place or a person while gazing out the window — this is you in the Theta brainwave state.

What’s important to note about the Theta state that it is not linear or logical. It's everything everywhere all at once, and because we haven’t fully developed the full scope of our executive functioning, our ability to discern and filter doesn’t exist.

As a result, we absorb the environment like a sponge, taking in streams of data — visible and invisible.

Invisible meaning taking in the energetic nuances of situations; like the way the room feels, the energy being presented by others in that room, the quality of the attention being directed at you (or the lack thereof), the power dynamics at play, and the presupposition of roles too.

Imagine a small child trying to navigate the broad spectrum of energies (visible and invisible)(read: spoken or unspoken) of the human condition with no prior experience to draw upon and no ability to discern.

Imagine how many data points you’re receiving as a kid, where everything is new. The subconscious is imprinted with this stimuli. The higher the ‘charge’ of the experience, the stronger the imprint. Like the camera captures the moment on the negative of a film, your body captures the nuances of the moment care of your limbic brain.

As made clear by Gabor Mate, our nervous system is wired to read our environment one way or another, good or bad or neutral. The body is always reading the energy presenting in the field.

He says:

“When the brain is reading the environment, the unconscious messages about what’s going on go to the gut, and the gut magnifies those messages and send it up to the brain — and those are your gut feelings. The gut is an important sensory organ. It’s not just an organ of digestion. It is very much an emotional organ.” Source

The Limbic Brain

As mentioned, the emotional brain (the limbic brain) doesn’t run in linear sequence. Linked to memory recall, it speaks through your senses and links abstract scenarios via those senses. Instead of a straight line, it’s a multi-dimensional spiral with portals everywhere — seen and unseen.

Having had initial sensitising experiences (ISE) in these early years when neural pathways are forming constantly creates circuits which wire the nervous system. At least one data point as a reference is enough to set a pattern in place.

Typically, the more adverse the ISE, the stronger the anchor.

Any energy with similar qualities of the ISE will trigger a response  —  usually an automatic reaction — which is how the body shows you there’s a waveform (the initial sensation) that's was stored at the time because we couldn't cognitively process the scenario and run the energy. We couldn't discern.

As we get older, new yet familiar scenarios will touch on those initial experiences, teasing at the edges, pointing to a specific waveform which has been stored and is being re-enacted now, ready to be processed and released.

Naturally, the Neo-cortex (the logical, reasoning, linear mind) has organised it into some logic or sequencing  —  but this is where we can go wrong in actually 'doing the work' on the pattern.

It's not a matter of logic or a matter of sequencing or making sense of the occurance, what needs processing is the direct somatic experience, which remains remembered by the body, via the limbic brain. 

This is what one might call ‘holding energy’.

In order to tend to these captured waves of energy, using the part of the brain that was first affected — the limbic brain — is required. 

We need to speak in a language the body understands. We need to use the senses.

By speaking the language of the subconscious; allowing imagery, sensation (sensory information) and feeling to occur, that acknowledgement that was missing back then, and what is been sought out now, can occur and the wave can be released.

By returning to the Theta state, there's no need to make literal sense of anything.

Likely the initial sensitising event didn’t make sense, so it might be much to ask our rational mind to take on the responsibility to healing the inner discord for us, given that it wasn’t involved in the initial scenario which left the imprint.

It goes deeper than that. It’s pre-verbal.

When you interocept (the ability to sense, interpret, and regulate signals from within the body), you give your subconscious the stage to show you what’s important for you right now; consciously creating space for the processing to occur, witnessing what appears and feeling through the sensations.

Without much force the subconscious will show you exactly what you need to know in that moment and you won’t have to think your way through it at all. It’s experiential, after all.

Energy is always in motion. What is perceived as stuck or solid is simply moving in very small, contained quarters, and likely if there are repeating patterns in your life pointing you back to a particular point in time or part of the body or area of life, likely there’s a wave in there trying to get your attention. Trying to get acknowledged and released.

“What you are thinking, feeling and believing is changing the genetic expression and chemical composition of your body on a moment-by-moment basis.” — Dr Bessel Van Der Kolk.