Day 7: Just Being

Sometimes I just have to get out of my head and have a dinner party.  And so it was this evening.  There is an ebb and flow to the process of reflection, and on a nice rainy day like today, an ebb felt right. I kept up my thrice daily moments of reflection because it is a new habit I am practicing, but this evening's new routine was truncated by my social plans, and that felt right.  Not avoidant, but almost celebratory.

Hopefully this ebb will make it easier to sleep. With such intense energies flowing through me all day it has been difficult to turn it all off at night when I'm trying to fall asleep.  I am hopeful that the slightly slower pace of today's emotional rewiring work will lead to a better night's sleep.

Just Being is a real challenge for me. I've always kept extremely busy and distracted myself with a million different project. Is this project one of those distractions? I don't think so, since they usually involve avoiding my emotions rather than integrating them, but in a way it does feel comforting because it is a way to Be through doing the project of being. A loophole perhaps, to help make myself feel better about the slow internal process of transformation.

Day 6: Early Results

It is only day six of my 90 day project to rewire my brain, and I am rather stunned by the results thus far. My approach to this project is to operate from the Beginners Mind. I've committed to try any rewiring strategies suggested by people I trust and respect, and simply observing the results.  Whatever is useful to me, I will continue to do, the rest I will discard. I have been quite amazed with the results thus far, with a lot more noticeable changes than I expected this early on. For example, beginning each day with an intention has helped me wake up in a better mood. This is significant considering I'm notoriously grumpy in the mornings.  There are certainly challenges, such as needing significantly more rest than usual, but at the moment it all seems so worth it.

My new motto is The Only Way Out Is Through. It is simple, but it's not easy. At first (i.e. six days ago)  it felt scary and difficult to face my emotions, and now... well it still feels difficult and scary, but I also feel more calm, focused, and centered. That positive experience is affecting my outlook on the process. I am actually excited for the next 84 days rather than overwhelmed by them as I was on day one. Plus I've already had one wish come true. As if I ever thought that particular suggestion would work! Perhaps my current assessment is a brief peak in an otherwise difficult experience, but so far I feel fantastic. (And weepy, mind you, but fantastic the rest of the time...) All in all it's better than I've felt in a long time.

Day 5: When is helping healing?

Today I spent some time supporting friends that I know are having a difficult time right now. I wrote cute emails, texts, and facebook messages to people, and it felt great. I felt happier and more energized afterwards.  Helping others in this way felt like healing to me.  And yet, sometimes supporting others feels stressful, triggering, painful, and draining.  

This got me to wonder - when is helping other people healing, and when is it harmful to myself?  When am I stretching myself too thin, neglecting myself, or preferring to focus on someone else's problems to bury my own? I can usually tell if a certain encounter was healing or harmful based on my energy level afterward, but is there a way to know before I reach out to someone?  There are certain individuals who I have come to view as toxic and always a drain on my energy, but there are many other situations that are more fluid, where sometimes I feel fuller after reaching out and other times I feel emptier. I often watch others spread themselves thin caring for everyone around them, and never giving themselves the same loving attention they seem to give to anyone else who needs it.

So, dear readers, I ask you now - How do you determine if helping another person is the "right" thing to do? Do you have a way of deciding if it will be fulfilling and healing for you? Does that factor in to your decisions about helping people? Do you think it should factor in?

Day 4: What I learned in Kindergarten

Me & my buddy, Zero the Hero 11/27/12

I spent the day substitute teaching kindergarten, which is always an exhausting yet exhilarating experience. This drawing was my version of the assignment for one of the "stations" we had in kindergarten today, which was drawing ourselves with Zero the Hero. As you can clearly see from my drawing, he is my puppet friend. The kindergarteners and I learned many things today, including some painful lesson on conformity.

Working within the mainstream educational system, I often feel stifled and constrained. There is an expectation in the classroom of conformity; students are treated like robots in need of programming. There is a nearly dissociative denial of the present moment and of emotions in the classroom. Growing up I strongly identified with school, even though I felt strangled by the conformity it demanded of me. I am still brainwashed by early childhood conditioning to feel rewarded when I receive stickers.  So much so, that I actually give myself stickers for doing certain chores. It's ridiculous, but it works! Stickers and rewards, just like I learned in kindergarten.

Guest Post by Professor Purple

If you would grow to your best self

Be patient, not demanding

Accepting, not condemning

Nurturing, not withholding

Self-marveling, not belittling

Gently guiding, not pushing and punishing

For you are more sensitive than you know

[Hu]mankind is as tough as war yet delicate as flowers

We can endure agonies but we open fully only to warmth and light

And our need to grow is as fragile as a fragrance dispersed by storms of will

To return only when those storms are still

So, accept, respect, attend your sensitivity

A flower cannot be opened with a hammer.

Daniel F. Mead

Day 3: Feelings...

Since I was a child I've struggled with how to reconcile the world as it actually is with my beliefs about how it should be.  Today that struggle came to light during my one block walk from my house to the grocery store.  So here I am trying to "feel my feelings" and "practice mindfulness" on my walk, and I pass two people sleeping on the street, and one person begging for food.  This, mind you, is in the one block walk from my house to the grocery store.

How do I not repress my emotional response to this clear desperation and suffering? Today what this looked like was me giving the person begging a dollar, crying for the rest of my walk, and wiping my tears on  my jacket as the automatic glass doors opened up and I walked into the grocery store. I then found myself wandering the aisles slowly, distractedly, trying to figure out how to make decisions for myself in the midst of such a broken world.

In a world that is so desperately in need of healing and repair, how can I continuously acknowledge "what is", and not look away from the darkness?  How can I experience my feelings about this seemingly all-consuming brokenness without falling into despair?  Somehow, letting the tears fall, letting myself acknowledge the pain of the strangers around me did feel better, cathartic in some small way.  And yet here I am at 9 pm exhausted and emotionally drained by a day of feelings. Is it possible to experience all of my feelings everyday and not feel overwhelmed?

Guest Post: Snakes and Ladders

Today I was reminded of why I am participating (in a less organized fashion) in this brain rewiring: for my brain, negative thinking is easy, but positive thinking takes practice. After putting in weeks of mental gymnastics to climb the ladder out of a hole, it takes only one line of thought to shoot me back down again. My hope is that, just as I have strengthened my muscles to recover from some nasty physical injuries, I can strengthen the positive areas of my brain to make mental injuries less frequent and less serious.

One of the exercises I was given by a physical therapist to fix an aching shoulder was a breathing exercise to be done lying on the floor--almost an example of "doing by not doing." I think I am now looking for the mental equivalent. 

Day 2: Structured Connection

We are all connected to everything.

It's Day Two of my 90 days of rewiring my brain, reconnecting to my heart and soul. I figured I'd share the process I'm using so far. I have decided to reconnect to my heart three times. In the morning I remind myself of my focus for the day, I'm doing a short check-in with my body in the afternoon, then reflecting/writing in the evening.

In the mornings I remind myself of my purpose right when I wake up by choosing a small thing (Turtle Step) that I will do that day that feels scary but true to myself, and by reading a short passage from a philosophy book.  This morning I found this helped me focus on being present, and helped remind me that I am trying to connect my heart with my brain.

My favorite quote from today's reading:
"I relate, therefore I am. I partially relate, therefore I partially am." - New Self New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-first Century


If you have recommended readings or exercises or guided meditations, I'd love to hear about them.

Oh yeah, I started a twitter for this project too, you can follow the blog at @heart_brains

Day 1: Rewiring my Brain - The Overview

This is the first day of a 90 day project -- A project to reconnect my heart to my head and to rewire my neural pathways.  The more you think something, the more you strengthen the neural pathways of that thought - like creating a highway of thoughts - and I've got some "thought highways" I'd like to reroute!

So what the hell does that mean anyway?
Basically it means feeling my feelings and thinking my thoughts without resistance, without judgment, without needing to control or change them.  Also, by thinking new thoughts, I can build new roads, new highways to places I actually want my thinking to go.

Why 90 Days?
Using the research of neuro plasticity as a guide, as well as certain recovery programs and self-help courses, I have chosen 90 days as a time frame that will allow me to develop new habits and break old habits. Neuro plasticity refers to the amazing fact that we can actually grow new neurons and create new pathways in the brain, just by taking an action or repeating a thought over and over again. By concentrating on this project for 90 days, I hope to make a new habit out of feeling my feelings as I have them, and break certain negative thought patterns that I've had for many, many years.

Why should anyone care?
I believe that the techniques that I am going to be exploring, inventing, reinterpreting, and gathering from other sources may prove useful to others, which is why I've created this blog in the first place. I've also invited some friends to join me on this journey and record their experiences of transformation as guest bloggers as well.

What's the system?
For each of the next 90 days I will be spending some time each morning centering myself and setting my intentions for the day vis-a-vis acknowledging and feeling my emotions as they come up. I will also focus on affirmations related to the issues I am working to change in my thought patterns. In the afternoons I will spend some time reconnecting with my body, reconnecting the knowledge coming from my body with that from my head. In the evenings I will write and reflect on my past experiences and how they are affecting my current actions and decisions. This will probably keep shifting over the course of the 90 days, but that's the plan as of Day One.  If you have ideas that have worked for you, leave a comment for me and I'll try out your suggestions too!