When Breathing in Love is Not Enough
Are you tired of pretending to be calm and compassionate when inside you really feel like kicking and screaming? In my life-long meditation training I was often told to “breathe in love”. I so desperately wanted to do this, but there was no manual other than to just do it. When one is in a […]
Rewiring Fear While We Sleep
Fear is a relationship we create with events in our lives. The events are simply moments in time but the fear we cultivate drags those moments from the past into our current lives, causing a cascade of hormonal, emotional, and physiological stress changes in the body. But neuroplasticity gives us the ability to unlink the […]
Is Your Head full of Plastic?
In the last few decades the concept of neuroplasticity has taken hold of the science community. We agree now that our brains are malleable, waxing and waning in their structure and function, and ever changeable. NOW we know it’s even more plastic than that! Not only can we birth new brain cells, and strengthen […]
Are Two Brains Better than One?
The enteric nervous system, or intrinsic nervous system in our intestines is called the second brain because it contains many of the same neurons and neurotransmitters as our brains do. Many of these are involved with processes like learning, memory formation, and communication. The communication between brain and body is bi-directional. How much more information […]
Goal Directed or Avoidance Directed?
Science is showing us that the left prefrontal cortex activates more with individuals who are goal-directed, and the right prefrontal activates more with individuals who are avoidance-directed. Consider this ad: “Floss regularly to avoid gum disease” vs. “Floss regularly to have healthy gums”. The first ad will motivate the avoidance-directed people, and the second ad […]
How the Brain Creates Beauty: this is NOT about Renee Zellweger’s Face
They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, yet so many of us are concerned about social standards of beauty and body image. If it’s truly in the beholder’s eye, then perhaps we should remind ourselves that we behold our own image each time we look in the mirror. What if my beauty […]
Rewriting the Brain’s Stories
Our ability to learn is one of the great brain functions that keeps us young. Learning can be considered moments when one pays focused attention to an experience and then encodes that experience as a memory which can then be retrieved at another time. Each of our memories is then a story line regarding a […]
We ARE Magicians
What if you had superhero powers to sculpt reality as you wanted it to be? What if science began to admit such powers? When scientists discovered our gifts of neuroplasticity late in the last century we officially entered the age of the Magician. According to Dr. Robert Scaer, author of 8 Keys to Brain-Body […]
Brain-Body Balance
When we ignore our brain or our body, we easily enter a state of imbalance. Dr. Robert Scaer, Neurologist and author of 8 Keys to Brain-Body Balance, notes “The relative health of the brain depends on the health of the body, and vice versa. If trauma has adversely affected either one, you’ve got to find […]
Our Plastic Thoughts
Did you know your brain is plastic! The brain is a substance that can easily be shaped or molded. NY Times best seller Dr. David Perlmutter, author of Grain Brain notes in the foreword of New Beliefs, New Brain that researchers not only demonstrated that the human brain remains in a dynamic sate of renovation, but moreover, […]
