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Time, as a Perception of the Limbic Brain

Time comes up to us, gives us a moment, and disappears.
I need more to time do this, I’m frantic. I won’t have time to get it all done.
I’ve been waiting here for twenty minutes, where were you?
It takes two hours to drive to Sacramento. Better hurry.
So sorry I’m late, I tried so hard to be on time, but the traffic.
I have to get there in time to meet my friend, he has to leave by four.

Time is often regarded as an adversary.

The Role of the Limbic Brain

Your limbic brain looks at time in a different way. It can function in a non-linear mode. The limbic brain perceives that every emotionally charged experience is happening continuously, and no matter how many highly charged events happen in your life, they are all perceived to be happening continuously, held in memory as simultaneous. They can burst unexpectedly into current time at any moment, whenever a similar situation occurs.

This twist of spiraling time can cause you to overreact unexpectedly to a situation in the present if it resonates with an emotional charge from an earlier time. Just as past and present emotional wounds run concurrently, so do joyous experiences. They, too, build upon each other, developing a system of positive expectations that can magnetize a wonderful reality.

The limbic brain has a “time-free zone” where it holds all of your emotional experiences in suspension. The experiences that are favorable and empowering are consistently available. They are resources for your creativity. Fortunately, the ones that are out of harmony can be processed and released, but until they are released, the signals from the limbic brain will continue to connect the unresolved emotions with uncomfortable effects in the physical body.

This could show up as enzyme repression, heart or circulatory changes, amino acid utilization disorders, immune suppression, muscle tension, emotional dysfunction, etc. In the same way, the impact of successful satisfying experiences reinforce the natural harmony of the physical body, giving it the stamina and resilience that can maintain it in optimal health.

Once a stressful incident has been resolved, it slips out of the frequency of the time-free zone. Then it can be permanently relegated to an inconspicuous past. The limbic memory reservoir is then free to reveal the positive emotional skills that could motivate you to rewrite your life script in a different way. From then on, you come from a place of choice.

If a memory happens to arouse allergic symptoms repeatedly upon contact with the triggering stimulus, then it follows that processing the charge and drawing it out of the time-free zone would end the allergy. In our experience at the Balancing Center, we have found that it does.

In the same way, the limbic time-free zone forms the basis for post traumatic stress syndrome. Any subsequent stimulus that is similar to the circumstances that initiated the trauma will repeatedly evoke the original response. The reaction would be likely to appear excessive in the context of current time, but knowing that it is coming up uncensored from the original context, probably with minimal modulating inhibitors, the incongruity with current time begins to make sense.

The trauma is still being held in the time-free zone, and reexperienced repeatedly because it is perceived as still happening. Post traumatic stress syndrome can be thought of as a “situational allergy,” and it can usually be released like any other allergy.

A Few Structures and Functions in the Limbic Brain

The limbic brain is a group of structures that lie below the cerebrum, the main part of the brain. As it receives the impression of an experience, it initiates a swift physical response to the emotions of the moment.

The hypothalamus is a tiny area just above the pituitary, with several nuclei floating in cerebro-spinal fluid. Each nucleus in the hypothalamus engages a specific emotion or function: fear, anger, grief, pleasure, hunger, thirst, water balance, sexual arousal, temperature regulation, etc. The applicable nucleus flashes emotional information out to the nervous system for a fast reaction, and down to the pituitary, where it is relayed to the other endocrine glands.

Hypothalamic signals can either throw the entire nervous system into fight and flight reactions, (sympathetic nervous system) or into a relaxed sense of enjoyment, (parasympathetic nervous system.) Whatever feelings are evoked by what you see, hear, or sense, your limbic connections will mobilize a congruent physical response.

Depending on which hypothalamic nucleus sends the signal, you will protect yourself, or you will laugh, or burst into tears, or eat something, or get a fever, or whatever the hypothalamus perceives to have been requested by the amygdalas.