It was not long ago that scientists and doctors viewed the brain as a finite organ, incapable of any kind of growth or evolution. We became what we are through genetics and that patterns were simply there for good. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks…and this kind of thinking served mightily the Piscean mode of believing in limitations and hierarchy and survival of the fittest and power over and peace at any cost and separation.
That was up until now. The energy of the times has reawakened a collective knowing that is yet to surface…but it will. The design is revealing itself slowly but surely. This whole course is about planting the energetic seeds that trigger the reawakening of the cellular template of I am that I Am expressing as me. It is about shaking the trees and plowing up the soil of misbeliefs and distorted thinking. Why? Because the time is just right. The old institutions are being held together by stinking thinking and a posse of beliefs that are being picked off one by one. To reveal what we have always been. The bottom line is that we are malleable, ever oscillating, vibrant beings made of Love and Light. And, sorry, but there is nothing that can contain that for long…nothing.
The doctrine of limitations paraded around as the unwavering truth by scientists and doctors and businessmen and politicians is fast becoming dust in the wind. The new revelations are cracking the foundations upon which we have stood…thank, God. The brain and the mind are malleable. That which we consider unchanging is like plastic that can be sculpted into new forms…
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to rewire and create new circuits (neural pathways) at any age as a result of input from the environment and our conscious intentions.
Neurosculpting is based on the knowing that change and flow are constant and that nothing is immune to the process. Consciously engaging the process to impact an identified limitation in thinking, belief, or action results in a new relationship with self, life, and the forms that show up. We can alter the physicality of the brain and nervous system to create new passageways of potential and form within us that will attract the like vibrational expressions in the outer. When a neural pathway losses its source of nourishment it dies. In its place new pathways and actions are formulated out of the higher vibrational thinking. Life changes and feeds us…is this intriguing?
What follows are elements of the book Neurosculpting that will assist us in doing what is needed to rise above the old ways:
Morning Regimen
1 Brush your teeth with your nondominant hand and think about one of your favorite mantras.
2 Do a five-minute gratitude meditation in the shower that looks something like this:
a. Breathe deeply with attention for a few rounds, noticing the way the lungs effortlessly fill and empty.
b. Think of the concept of gratitude. I imagine what it looks like to be in gratitude, I spell it in my mind, and I remember a time in which I was filled with that sentiment.
c. Assign a color, texture, or vibration to the concept of gratitude and imagine it located and vibrating in the center of the palms.
d. Wash each part of your body while imagining the color of gratitude pouring out of your palms and filling up each body part.
3 Eat a balanced breakfast on a plate at the table after saying a brief statement of gratitude for the food.
Afternoon Regimen
1 Shake for a few minutes in the afternoon to help normalize excess stress from the morning.
2 Brush your hair with your nondominant hand and think about a favorite mantra.
3 Eat a balanced lunch on a plate at a table.
4 Look at or walk in an outside environment for at least five minutes.
Evening Regimen
1 Exercise in a way you enjoy, such as taking a brisk walk or a fitness class you love. (You might prefer to do this in the morning if it works better for your schedule.)
2 Engage in a nondominant hand gesture or activity while choosing a third mantra for the day to think about.
3 Eat a balanced dinner on a plate at a table at least a few hours before bedtime. Minimize carbohydrates in order to support a full and deep night’s sleep.
4 Shake for a few minutes in the evening to help normalize excess stress from the afternoon.
5 Shut off electronics or television an hour before bedtime.
6 Do a ten-minute evening meditation that goes something like this:
a. Breathe deeply with attention for a few rounds, noticing the way the lungs effortlessly fill and empty.
b. Think of any of your daily stressors. That might be conversations you’ve had, people you interacted with, or emotions that came up and seem unresolved.
c. Assign a color, texture, or even a vibration to represent each of these.
d. Imagine where you might be holding these colors or textures in your own body.
e. Create a receptacle in your mind’s eye in front of you and imagine your body releasing these colors into it.
f. When you’re done, notice if you perceive you’ve made more space in your body.
g. Imagine a concept that works well for you, like restfulness, ease, grace, joy, or any other idea. You might remember a time when you felt this, or maybe you focus on the concept and its definition, maybe you even spell it out in your mind’s eye.
h. Assign a color, texture, or vibration to this concept and imagine your body filling up with this as you prepare for sleep.
Daily Mantras
• I release attachments to unattained dreams and open up to the infinite possibility ahead of me.
• As other situations have come and gone, so will this one.
• This situation simply defines my current circumstances, but does not define me or my potential.
• As I open to the potential of change, I open to new and innovative solutions.
• Real or not, my memories have shaped me into the person I am today. For that I honor their validity, but they do not have to act like scripts that limit my potential from this day forward.
• Even though this situation hurts, I know there is more I can learn from this than meets the eye.
• Self-pity is just a limiting choice from the infinite number of choices I have in this moment.
Add your own mantras here:
Weekly Brain Changers
• What if side-by-side nutritional therapists, MDs, mindfulness practitioners, and science-minded professionals explored the same concepts of self-empowerment?
• What more could happen if we broadened the dialogue around how to cultivate mind, body, and spirit as though they were inseparable?
• What makes your vacation self so expansive, joyful, and full of permission?
• What special permissions do you give yourself when you are on vacation?
• What strips you of that when a random day printed on the calendar notes the end of the vacation?
• How much more could you learn about yourself if you were aware of your subtle scripts?
• What experiences give you the clarity and drive to change what you’ve always done?
• What inspires you to redefine and rescript that which is predictable?
• Where do you find strength to dive into the unknown and rise up with integrity?
• What if all you had to do was find your power and take it back? How would you use your potency?
• What would it be like to be able to identify a limiting script and simply edit it, or even file it so it remained in the past as an experience you had, but don’t need to keep having?
• What would it be like to create a clear communication between all that the body experiences, all that the mind thinks, and all that the spirit is called to do?
• What more could you discover about your own life if you noticed how your thoughts and body interacted and informed each other?
• What could be different about a person’s mental healing if the body-world is incorporated as the organ that expresses the mind’s state rather than as an unconscious container?
• What physical patterns are you engaging in that potentially reinforce a negative or imbalanced perspective?
• What thoughts are you thinking that are communicating danger and disease to your own body?
• In what ways are you physically numbing to mitigate emotional pain?
• In what ways are you emotionally deadening to mitigate physical pain?
How are you choosing to hurt yourself to give moments of relief or distraction to what’s going on inside?
• What illusions are you buying?
• Are you going to see the glass half empty at that point or half full?
• How easily do you to find the silver lining?
• How well are you there for those around you in need?
• How open are you to seeing another’s perspective?
• How much do you have left to give?
• How might you look at your choices differently knowing that each decision can have a ripple effect far into the future?
• What if we knew exactly where our food came from, what went into the life cycle of that meal, and all the hands involved in getting that food to our plate?
• How would we eat differently if we had an in-depth relationship to the food we consumed?
• If you had a reverence for the food you consumed would you waste any?
• What would it take for you to be able to stand naked in front of a mirror and walk away feeling happier and more fulfilled than before you looked?
• What if you could squeeze all the richness and vitality out of your experiences and program that into your memories so that each time you remembered it was with vivid and alive detail? What would you choose to hold on to?
• What would happen to our interactions with others if we cleaned up all the pieces of ourselves held captive by our unhealthy memories and had our full potency in each moment?
• What if we were to take our skill of unconscious programming and make it conscious?
• So what does one do with their own limitations once they find out they are outdated, out of place, and out of time?
• What limiting and fear-based stories are keeping you from fully giving and having love?
• How much better would you feel if after a terrible interaction closing your eyes enabled you to forgive the person rather than continue the blame loop?
• Is it possible for the heart to be in love while the brain is in fear?
• Can we have a genuinely strong desire for connection while still having a strong disposition toward fear, territorialty, and threat?
• How can consciousness help us break free from limiting and reactionary patterns and open to more reverence?
• What if you were to stop hiding behind all you think you know?
• What more could you notice about the wonders of life?
• What if you could put down your expectations and stories long enough to be swept off your feet by childlike curiosity?
• What if in your die-hard grip of data and proof you entertained the idea that it’s only proof based on your limited knowledge up to now?
• What if you realized the more you know, the more there is to know and experience?
• What if you stepped out of judgment?
• How are you identifying your battles?
• What would unconditional love do?
• What would it look like to bring grace into strained relationships?
• What would it feel like to yield your judgments to neutrality?
• What could be different if you chose not to react to others’ fight-or-flight responses?
• Who do you need to say “I love you” to before it’s too late?
Practices to support plasticity:
• Brush your teeth with your nondominant hand.
• Use your nondominant hand to stir things when you cook.
• Squeeze the shampoo bottle with the opposite hand.
• Fold your laundry in a different way.
• Rearrange your drawers.
• Choose a new route to work.
• Hold your car keys in the opposite hand.
• Turn your coffee cup so the handle is on the opposite side.
• Walk around the opposite side of the car when pumping gas.
• Brush your hair with your opposite hand.
• Remember your funniest stories at least once a day, or watch something that gives you a real belly laugh.
• Take a laughter yoga class.
• Have someone you trust walk you around by the arm while you keep your eyes closed.
• Use the nondominant leg to start your climb
• Sleep on the other side of the bed.
• When clasping your hands position your fingers in a unique way.
• Count your money with the nondominant hand.
• Water your plants with the nondominant hand.
• Reverse the order of your morning face and teeth routine.
Wimberger, Lisa (2015-01-01). Neurosculpting: A Whole-Brain Approach to Heal Trauma, Rewrite Limiting Beliefs, and Find Wholeness .
Inquiry Exercises
We have more neural pathways devoted to noticing what’s wrong rather than what’s right. We build our experiences off these pathways, which then build our implicit memory— the part of us that includes our expectations, models of relationships, emotional tendencies, and outlook on life. Implicit memory creates what it feels like to be you. To ensure you build your experiences off what’s right about the world rather than what’s wrong, it’s your job to create and increase your positive implicit memories.
What can you do today to identify what’s right in the world rather than what’s wrong?
is dependent on this area of the brain being healthy. Unfortunately, the hippocampus is easily damaged by cortisol, a main stress hormone. Once damage occurs we easily lock ourselves into stress patterns and further damage that area of the brain.
In what small way can you take control of your stress today?
Novelty and laughter stimulate a sweet spot of dopamine production in the brain that’s helpful in learning and encoding memories. Novelty and laughter are also associated with a heightened activity in the prefrontal cortex, which correlates to attributes like compassion, empathy, and insight.
What new enjoyable activity can you engage in today? What one joke can you think about before starting your day?
Focused attention to an experience gives rise to neural excitement in the brain and the stimulation of new neurons, even if that experience is just in the mind’s eye. As you are careful to put the right gas in your car, so should you be careful to put the right thoughts in your head.
What one negative thought can you eliminate from your mind’s dialogue today?
Multitasking isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Focusing on many things at once taxes the resources needed by our prefrontal cortex, which can only hold a small number of things in its focused attention at one time. Multitasking doesn’t mean you can pay full attention to multiple things at one time; it means you can pay attention to one thing at a time and quickly jump back and forth between things. In this way we miss a lot as we become exhausted from this constant toggle. An exhausted prefrontal cortex means we have a diminished ability to access compassion, problem-solving, creative thinking, and joy.
What tasks can you reprioritize or drop for the moment so that you are doing just one thing at a time?
The science community is now saying that a daily meditation practice can help depression, anxiety, panic disorder, stress, and even some neurodegenerative diseases.
Which five minutes will you use today to breathe a little more deeply, look at nature, and focus on some positive thoughts?
Neurons communicate through electrical and chemical signals using, among other things, ions. According to the Quantum Zeno Effect discovered in 1977, ions are affected when observed. When we observe our thoughts or stories we affect the way the neurons and ions function.
What one repeated thought will you notice today?
In what way can you rephrase that thought? Neuroscience has learned about the process leading up to moments of insight or revelation. It seems that meditation helps the brain move from beta waves, which correlate to active thought and attention, to alpha waves, which correlate to brain relaxation. This move from beta to alpha seems to happen just before the brain bursts a gamma wave at a much higher frequency. Some fMRI studies show that gamma wave bursts correlate to the person’s feeling of “Eureka!”
Where will you place your small meditative moments today to prime yourself for those “a-ha” moments?
Dr. Sara Lazar notes in her TED talk (http:// tedxtalks.ted.com/ video/ TEDxCambridge-Sara-Lazar-on-how) that in her own experiments, she’s measured an increase in gray matter in the prefrontal cortex of those who meditate, and a shrinking of gray matter in the amygdala, which is in the heart of the fight-or-flight center. This is precisely the dynamic that can begin to curb our fear-based tendencies. In other words, our brains are not rigid.
What one fear-based rigid thought will you notice today? How will you change that thought?
In one recent study done by scientists at Wake Forest University, after only two hours of meditation training subjects could reduce their physical pain by up to 57%, which equated to similar pain management results using morphine. In brain scans changes were noted in their insula and anterior cingulate cortex— the same areas targeted by pain medications.
In what ways can you take charge of your own discomfort today?
By paying attention to your own breathing, emotions, and body sensations throughout the day, you will stimulate activity in the region of the brain called the insula. This area is instrumental in our ability to understand and empathize with others. By tuning in to yourself with intention you can enhance your ability to understand those around you.
How much time will you spend today tuning in to your breath and body?
Geoffrey West, physicist at the Santa Fe Institute, notes that a human brain at rest uses 90 watts, 250 watts for a hunter-gatherer in the Amazon, and 11,000 watts per person for the American lifestyle using all of our modern conveniences. Innovation and technology place quite an exhaustive tax on our prefrontal cortex, which needs to consume and then generate more innovation to keep pace. Meditation helps exercise the prefrontal cortex.
What will you do today to bring down your own wattage consumption and feed your head?
Technology can be our friend or foe. We can use this to our advantage. What if you were to set your phone alarm to beep twice a day, each time signaling you to take three minutes to neurosculpt and engage your higher-order thought processes? In a very short time you may even develop a reward-relaxation response to the sound of the phone beep. Studies show that sounds accompanying stimuli will eventually be linked to the effect of the stimuli even in the absence of those same factors.
What other daily technology sounds can you create relaxing and positive associations with?
Wimberger, Lisa (2015-01-01). Neurosculpting: A Whole-Brain Approach to Heal Trauma, Rewrite Limiting Beliefs, and Find Wholeness .
