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| By Stephanie Costa, Creative Commons-by-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons |
One year ago today, I began an
experiment to reconnect my mind, heart, body, and soul. I started with a 90-day
intensive period to create new habits of self-reflection, self-care and
connection with folks in my life who are also committed to self-transformation.
Grounded in neuroscience and with a growing connection to my spirituality, I
have been cultivating faith in myself – a belief that it is possible to create
radical change in any aspect of my life and myself.
Through this process, I have also found faith in the potential we all have to
heal and transform our selves, supporting each other in community. As an
activist and educator, part of my true self has always believed in the
possibility of real change personally, interpersonally, and globally, and yet
there have been so many dark nights and so many negative voices in my head
countering that worldview of infinite human potential. Many times I have felt
weighed down by the enormity of the problems we all face – of my personal pain,
of the ways in which my communities harm ourselves and sabotage our own
liberation, and the overwhelming scale of human suffering and degradation in
the larger world. Through what I have witnessed this year in myself and in the
supportive role of my communities, however, I have birthed a deep belief in the
resilience of the human spirit, of myself, and of the world around me.
As I
try to make sense of the work of re-wiring my brain, as I strive to explain the
“results” I have seen from this process, I find myself crying, laughing, and
shaking my head in amazement, overwhelmed by the changes this year has brought
about in my life. Even this reaction is a testament to the efficacy of this
process. In reconnecting to my heart, I have newfound access to the emotional
highs and lows that were once so far from my conscious experience. Growing up
in a mind-dominated culture, in an intellectually oriented family, encouraged
since birth to dissociate from my body, spirit, and emotions, my capacity for emotional
experience was quite limited. I was numb, frozen, and experiencing the world
from behind a wall of ice. I was here, but not Present.
For
most of the past year I was at war with this wall, combatting it and trying to
topple it roughly, aggressively, with self-hatred as the fuel. I saw this wall
as evidence of my brokenness, something that had to be fixed for me to be okay,
for me to be lovable to myself and to others. I had envisioned this clear wall
to be made of plexiglass that I needed to shatter. This approach involved
violence, struggle, and resistance, which are all qualities I am releasing from
my life. I was conceiving of change within the same destructive framework I had
always known. Now I see this barrier between myself and the world as ice rather
than glass, re-visioning plexiglass as permafrost. Although this metaphor may
sound ecologically suspect given the environmental threat that melting icecaps
plays in our world today, on the personal level this metaphor is apt. This
frost has always existed around my heart and melting it is causing significant and
frightening shifts to my internal landscape, and yet this change is crucial to
my life’s journey.
I am
now focused on embracing the ice that encircles my heart, melting it into a
pond of clear water with the power of self-love. This technique feels much more
aligned with my new practices of self-care and self-respect, and has also
created a noticeable impact in a much shorter time than my previous method of
self-abuse masked as self-improvement. This radical shift in my approach
happened only a few weeks ago, after almost a year of cultivating this new
outlook, these new techniques for growth and change, and a group of like-minded
supporters who can help me navigate through the treacherous roads of my old
neural pathways while I’m in the process of building the new ones.
Through
this process, I have come to see how slow change is actually be fast, when I
zoom out a bit. The foundational work I did in the first 90-days of this year
led the way for much more dramatic shifts to occur many months later, including
shifting my view of the wall around my heart from one made of plexiglass to seeing
it as a layer of permafrost. This is just one example of how every step of this
process is based on previous assumptions, which are really just neural pathway
ruts. As new neural roads get built and older ruts get filled in with dirt, I
am able to form radical new ideas that would have been impossible to conceive
of when I was still working with the previous architecture of my brain.
After
one year of brain rewiring, I feel ready for another 90-day intensive period of
building new habits that can help support me in this growth process. I’m not
entirely sure yet how this new 90 days will work and what role this blog will
play, but I do know that I am ready to add new habits to my life, to expand the
role that self-care plays in my daily existence, and to do more work on the
foundations of my neural structures to allow for further growth. I am also in
the incubation phase of figuring out how to offer the wisdom I have gained from
this process to others. There are many changes to come and I look forward to
sharing them with you, and to hearing more about how your lives are changing as
well.
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