This week’s blog, Brain Management, is the fourth in the Spirit or Organs series where I’ve been exploring organs on all levels of being: physical, energetic, emotional, ancestral and spiritual.
This week I’ll cover important ways to keep your brain healthy with nutrition, and mindfulness exercises to release the monkey mind and quiet the mind. You’ll learn how to re-wire your brain chemistry to release childhood imprints and create a positive mindset that adds power to manifesting your intentions. Experience ways to boost your brain function and elevate your conscious presence of being in every moment.
As a physical organ, the brain is an intricately balanced series of systems that functions as a central intelligence guiding our body in its daily functions. It is tissue, blood vessels and neurons, which are brain-specific cells that transmit electrical signals that are responsible for brain activity. Scientists have mapped the brains’ regions to understand more deeply how each lobe of the brain has a specialized function from thinking, talking, storing memories and primal instincts to name a few. There are neural receptors all over the body that rely on signals from the brain to breathe, see, speak, reason, and motor skills.
Supporting brain function throughout a lifetime, and especially as we age, is a great way to keep our brain and all the connections it supports in tip-top condition. Ginko Biloba and Lion’s Mane mushrooms are wonderful supporters of brain function for better concentration, memory and mental clarity. These plant-based remedies allow the brain to be supported in remaining nimble in transmitting signals quickly and cleanly. There was a study recently published showing the link between an imbalance in the gut microbiome, specifically an overgrowth of candida, that was linked to the onset of Alzheimer’s, a condition affecting the brain. This shows how supporting your gut microbiome can have a positive effect on brain health. Listen to the first episode of this series for more about how to keep your microbiome healthy.
Like your body, your brain needs exercise to stay fit and function optimally. Reading is a great way to exercise your brain, as well as conversations and storytelling. Some of this is falling away as we become more of a video snippet society, so making a conscious effort to keep reading and verbally sharing life stories will help keep your brain strong and vibrant throughout a lifetime.
The mind-body connection is a strong, tried and true relationship that works outside of our conscious awareness and can be supercharged when we bring greater awareness to the other levels of being across our body matrix. For example, our brain chemistry is tightly interwoven with our emotional body. The brain’s neural net pathways become habituated over a lifetime and are built on our earliest experiences in childhood. Significant and traumatic experiences in childhood imprint the brain’s memory that shapes our beliefs about ourselves and the world and ultimately becomes locked in as our identity.
I first became aware of the importance of brain function in emotional well-being when I became a NLP practitioner. NLP or neuro-linguistic programming is a beautiful approach to repattern our brain chemistry by revising old neural net pathways into new ones that support our intentions for the future. When you change your brain chemistry, you update your personal vibration of being that creates your experience of reality. This is how rewiring your brain transforms your reality, in a deep and lasting way. I quickly learned that the magic behind the NLP transformations I was experiencing with myself and my clients when using the NLP toolbox was as simple as revising brain chemistry. The only way to bring forward a change that will stand the test of time is to create and habituate new neural net pathways to support the new way of being. NLP gives a protocol for how to do that with skill, precision and compassion. This is why NLP is a foundational practice I’ve based the practice of Consciousness Medicine on.
Our brain stores emotional distress in the form of memories, primal reflexes and brain chemistry that is a result of old neural net pathways. Therapies such as NLP are designed to do just this, using language patterns, timeline therapy and re-imprinting techniques that release the old conditioned patterns that no longer serve our greatest good and literally rewire the brain to support your desired state intentions.
How our brain is wired has a direct effect on our emotional well-being. If there are shocking or traumatic experiences in the past, that have not been addressed and resolved through some form of therapy, then these memories will begin to shape our subconscious patterning resulting in dysregulated emotions and dysfunctional behaviors and relationships. True healing from past trauma involves changing the relationship with the past memories to a healthier way of being. In other words, while we can’t change the past we can change the way we relate to past experiences.
When we can fully acknowledge and honour our past experiences, they no longer show up as triggers to derail our emotional stability. The only way we can do this is if we repattern our brain chemistry to release old neural net pathways and replace them with new ones. These new neural net pathways support the empowered adult who can see childhood experiences with perspective, forgiveness and strength.
95 % of how we behave is driven by the subconscious patterns in the brain. 5 % from the conscious. This is how we can end up feeling so stuck in life since you may have a clear intention for what you want to create but the regions of your brain that house subconscious patterning are functioning with limiting beliefs, ancestral entanglements, childhood conditioning and parental influences.
In order for our brain to fully support living a new way of being, these subconscious patterns must be managed and updated into ones that fully support the creation of our conscious mind’s intentions. To do this we must treat the emotional body in a way that releases old imprints while installing new empowering beliefs.
We must then support this work by addressing any ancestral entanglements that may be present in the ancestral body. These ancestral entanglements also reside in our subconscious mind and are also related to the part of the brain that holds our primal instincts such as survival. In order to survive, we must belong to our family, and one way our brain is wired to do this is to stay loyal to repeating the struggle and suffering that is present in our ancestral lineage.
Family Constellation work is the tool I have woven into the Consciousness Medicine practice to treat the ancestral body so that belonging no longer is conditional on repeating ancestral struggles but instead is known as a certainty through receiving life from your parents. When we access this place of guaranteed belonging, our survival instincts are no longer on high alert, and our brain chemistry can adjust to one of balance, peace and joy. Being free of our attachment to ancestral entanglements allows our brain to release these dense patterns stored in the subconscious mind and bring freedom and alignment to brain chemistry for manifesting your heart’s desires.
Overthinking is another aspect that must be addressed for a healthy brain which is often called the monkey mind. That part of the brain that is full of thoughts, and running around in circles is really just a waste of time and energy. Thoughts are energy as well, so the energetic disturbances of overthinking will have a negative impact on the energy body’s ability to remain aligned, balanced and vibrant.
When the mind is overactive, this is a signal that the root chakra needs some attention for greater grounding, connection and safety. In times of stress or fear, the root will become closed off sending excess energy upwards where it recirculates in the head and brain in the form of thoughts. As we work to clear, align and balance the root chakra, this relieves the energetic pressure of the head and is an opportunity to calm and quiet the mind.
Quieting the mind is a great way to support your energetic body and also has a positive effect on the emotional, physical and spiritual aspects of the brain as well. Once the subconscious emotional patterns have been cleared and the root chakra opened and aligned it is then possible to access states of mental stillness, peace and full presence in the moment. This is why it can be so difficult to quiet the mind, since in doing so we must address any issues in our conscious and subconscious minds we’ve been avoiding, deflecting or repressing.
Finding a place of no-thinking where the mind can become still and quiet allows the brain to become fully empowered to stay positive, be a conduit to manifest what you want and heighten your intuitive abilities. The brain is in the region of the body associated with the third eye and crown chakra energy centres that are connected to our intuitive abilities and having a greater vision for our path in life. When the brain itself is in a healthy supported and clear state, our ability to expand our conscious awareness into other realms, and dimensions of states of being becomes more available. Clarity in decision-making, trust in the future, and the ability to see our future path are all benefits of quieting the mind.
While this can be difficult for some, I encourage you to keep working at it, since it does take some time to retrain the thinking muscles for rest and recovery. Ways to practice quieting the mind can be to do mindfulness practices, which focus on thinking in a centralized way allowing the excess chatter to stop.
One of my favourite mindfulness practices is a walking mindfulness practice. Doing this in nature is the best way to realise its full potential, but you can adapt it to your walk or drive to work for example. If you’re walking outside first notice how active your mind is by listening to your internal dialog. Then bring your awareness fully into the present moment and take a moment to listen to the sounds that surround you, take in the scents in your surroundings, notice the sights you see before you, feel the sensations on your skin like the sun, wind or rain. As you bring your awareness to all of the sensations notice how your relax, your breath eases and the mind has calmed. As you walk continue to notice the sites, smells, sounds and sensations without thought. If your mind wanders and you think of past or future things, simply bring yourself back into the moment by connecting into your senses. The more you do this, the more this state of full presence and awareness will become habituated, building new neural net pathways to support a fully embodied, present and connected state of being.
As you release yourself from the hold of having a mind full of thoughts, you will be able to access your conscious presence more deeply. The brain is not the seat of conscious presence, the heart is. The brain is the worker bee, the heart is the queen bee. As you release yourself from the hold of thinking and quiet the mind, you will have more direct access to where your conscious presence resides, recirculates and refills…the heart.
To get a clearer sense of this take a moment to drop into the heart by bringing your awareness there. When you bring your awareness, energy will follow. stay your heart centre as you let your awareness drift upwards to where your head is. Notice the distance between your heart and head. Perhaps when you do this you’ll be able to visualize your brain as an intricately talented organ that is fine-tuned with divine precision to drive the functions of your body, regulate emotional well-being, receive life force energy from the heavens and govern your actions and behaviours on conscious and subconscious levels. Send love from the heart up to the brain as an act of self-love and appreciation for all parts of you.
Find a place of stillness in your mind, as if you’ve walked into another room in your house. From loud to quiet, active to stillness. This place of a quiet mind is always present, all you need to do is walk into that place and choose to stay. You can always go back to faster-paced thinking when it is needed and appropriate. But you also have access 24/7 to a place of quiet and stillness that you can visit any time you like. I encourage you to make regular visits to this quiet-minded place to habituate it as you build new neural net pathways to more easily access peace of mind and contentment whenever you wish. _____________
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