If you’ve been reading the Healers of the Light Blog with any consistency, you’ve learned a lot about your power to change your own DNA. You’ve learned that it isn’t some mechanistic set of tools locked into an immovable machine. You’ve learned that your thoughts, attitudes, diet, and subconscious motivations can call change your DNA. We won’t rehash the scientific documentation that all this is possible in the article.
Instead, we’re going to get down to the nitty gritty. Down to the beach sand, microcosmic level. By the time you finish reading this article, you’re going to have granular level things to put into action that will change your life. Not new-age, spaced out ideas of a utopian world, but the real-deal. Stuff that works, and has been proven to. Things that you can wake up tomorrow and start doing so that incrementally, your consciousness evolves, and your DNA starts to reflect those changes.
Persistence and Practice
Motivation isn’t something that magically happens to you when the stars align and your birth sign is in alignment with Pluto. Persistence and practice are what motivate you to keep going, and eventually change. If you keep coming up short – in anything: relationships, the level of health you want to experience, the financial success you’d like to see, feeling more spiritually grounded and insightful – you likely lack persistence. You need to practice these things on a daily basis. Let’s see what that looks like on the microcosmic level.
If your goal is to experience relationship success, how much of a priority have you truly made the people who are most important to you? If you were to make a concerted effort every single say to make someone you love (or even a complete stranger if you want to practice this at a master level) feel special and cherished?
Could you buy someone a cup of coffee? Could you leave a note for your husband or wife telling them that you love them and you hope they have a great day? Could you meet a friend for lunch instead of sitting at your desk again, inhaling a sandwich or fast food?
If your answer is yes to all of these things, and it should be, then start doing that every single day. Not only will your relationships start to transform, but so will your health.
So will your stress levels. A singular action has exponential effects. This works in both directions. Stay grumpy and closed off all the time and no one will want to be around you.
Make people feel special even if it’s in the smallest things you do, and you are signaling to the Universe, that you want more connection and are willing to participate with the myriad forms of the Divine in a more compelling way.
And check this out – the more loving and kind we are to others – the more it not only changes the way they perceive us, but it changes their DNA, too. People who are loved start to experience protein methylation that alters even their immune systems! So, your love makes you and them healthier!
Discipline
Almost anyone can start a good habit. Can you keep doing it day after day? Maybe you’ve practiced a kind act, or you’ve gone to the gym when you’d rather sit on the sofa and watch television, and you felt great after doing so. Maybe you did it a few times and then reverted to old habits. The nitty gritty truth is that the habits we most often engage in, are what shapes our biology and physiology. It sounds like sheer common sense, and it is. But how much discipline do you really have?
If you find that you lack discipline in any area of your life, start small and build on that success so that you feel motivated to stay the course. If going to the gym at the end of a long work day is too exhausting, get up 30 minutes earlier and do a quick workout right next to your bed – a few sit ups, push-ups, and jumping jacks will suffice to get a good habit started. You don’t have to go out and run a marathon.
Pretty soon, this will become a habit, and your body will have adapted. You’ll actually WANT to do more exercise. At this point, you can develop a new habit that is slightly more challenging.
If you keep doing this incrementally, then you will change your body and mind. You’ll have more energy. You’ll achieve more. You’ll have more confidence. And once again, your DNA will change. Physical exercise is scientifically proven to alter your DNA.
Juleen Zierath, a professor of physiology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, explains in the journal Cell Metabolism that there are changes in muscle cells the very first time you get off the couch and into the gym.[1] What’s better though, is that with the discipline to keep exercising, those changes grow more profound.
Bounce-Back
How do you overcome challenges and setbacks? This is imperative to understand if you want to change your DNA. With research suggesting that the habits of your great-great-great-great-great (to the 14th power) grandparents are still affecting you,[2] you can imagine that you might have some stubborn habits that may not serve you any longer. If at first, you don’t succeed in overturning a genetically inherited trait, then you must try again.
Those habits can be hard, and old, and crusty, but they are not impossible to change. Moreover, each time you decide to go against epigenetic programming, you create new epigenetic memories which alter your DNA. This means that you are changing the blueprint, not just for yourself but for future generations.
How do you do this on the microcosmic level. Meditation helps a lot. It can help to reveal subconscious memories which are causing you to act and think in ways that you don’t want to. Becoming conscious of the unconscious memories empowers you to change them.
Once you’ve incorporated a consistent meditative practice into your life, take one “bad” habit at a time, and consciously replace it with a different habit. Science proves you can’t will away a habit. You must replace it with a new one in order to change.
With persistence and practice, discipline, and the ability to keep going when things don’t initially go as you want them to, you’ll succeed. It’s inevitable.
[1] Park, Alice. Time Magazine. How Exercise Can Change Your DNA. Karolinska Institutet. http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/07/how-exercise-can-change-your-dna/
[2] Dean, Singe. Scientists Have Observed Epigenetic Memories Being Passed Down for Fourteen Generations. Science Alert. https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-observe-epigenetic-memories-passed-down-for-14-generations-most-animal