The Blog

The title of this blog suggests that a sustained shift in attitude can produce a profound change of life, large enough to change the very structure of our brain.  The simple ways of being and relating outlined below are ways of producing this shift.  They are not hard to do.  Any one of us can practice these small steps without adding anything to our to-do list. 

After reading the list below, you may think these steps are too small to shift stress to joy, struggle to ease, frustration to confidence, and fatigue to vitality.  All these qualities represent neural networks.  A large body of research reveals that small steps such as these are powerfully neuroplastic, meaning the positive change in attitude they generate actually expands higher order brain structure to change our experience of life. In my book, Mystic Cool, I present the body of research that proves it.
  

I invite you to practice these steps for two weeks and see if they gift you with a better brain for a better life.  

1. In the morning, when you come into the kitchen to make coffee or tea, while it is brewing sit in a chair and quietly take in the morning.  Be present, here and now.  Relax your mind, and open your heart. Before getting up to pour yourself a cup, tell yourself, I have another precious day of human life.  I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to be more enlightened for the benefit of everyone.

2. During the day, when you are stressed, ask yourself: What am I afraid of?  Biologically, it takes some form of fear to trigger a stress reaction.  Thus, the operative question to ask whenever you feel stressed is — what am I afraid of?  Look at the fearful thoughts you are thinking at the moment.  Don’t edit anything.  Most if not all of these thoughts will be exaggerations, multiplying simple problems into catastrophes or turning fiction into facts.  Ask yourself, who would I be without these fearful thoughts, and then go be that person.

3. Be aware of your negative thinking. Don’t judge it or even try to change it. Simply be aware of the negativity that the unconscious brain generates when you are fearful. Simple awareness slows the neural firing and these thoughts start losing their power.  Soon you will find yourself in touch with the power to choose the experience you want to have, instead of tolerating the experience the unconscious forces on you.   Two weeks of practicing in this way and you will start to feel more peace and joy. 

4. Take a one to two minute break — often. Simply looking out the window and being present with the day outside can be quite rejuvenating. Let go of work for a moment and notice the quality of light, or the wind blowing through a tree, or what’s happening in the sky.  After lunch, take a 5 minute walk around the building.  During your walk, let go of future concerns and be fully present. You are seldom stressed when you are fully present.

5. Start work in a relaxed state of mind.  There is an experience science calls flow, which research has established as the optimal state for creativity.  Flow is “the zone” athletes seek.  It is the experience entrepreneurs call “the top of your game.”  It is the “effortless effort” mystics cultivate.  So take your nose off the grindstone. The joy of excelling begins with a relaxed state of mind.

6. Listen better, judge less and forgive more.  The reward is authentic relationships that resonate with the sense of connection.  The strength of our connection with others is the #1 factor in determining how long we live.  So hold others with positive regard and be kind, empathic, and interested.

7. Practice loving yourself just the way you are.  Practice loving life just the way it is this very moment.  As you do, you will begin to notice something tight inside you loosen.

8. Now and then, stand in the longest line at the store and practice being at peace. Drive home in the slow lane and listen to classical music instead of the news.

I think of “wholeness” in simple terms.  I experience wholeness as loving myself just the way I am. I relate to it as loving life just the way it is.

Wholeness is the affirmation and acceptance of the man or woman you are and are becoming, encompassing the whole of you—your failures and successes, your strengths and weaknesses, your joys and sorrows, your positive qualities and those that are not so positive. Wholeness is a sense of perfection emerging from the imperfections. It is an authentic moment in which the authentic person that is you is felt by you, opens wide in you, and is welcomed into the heart of all that is. Five seconds of this feeling is enough to transform the day.

Our authentic self is found right here, right now, through our openness to our immediate experience, whatever that experience may be. If we judge, reject, or feel conflict with our present experience, the sense of wholeness will instantly splinter and fragment. Fault finding obstructs the experience of wholeness, eventually calcifying into the belief that we are not good enough. We underestimate our strengths and undervalue our worth and often end up feeling separate, alone, inadequate. We develop a slavish concern for the expectations and evaluations of others. It can reach the point that we have no sense of our own strengths and talents, and no awareness of who we really are.

The Red-Pencil World

Most, if not all, of us have been conditioned to be fault finders. It is a kind of cultural virus that has infected us. Fault finding springs from the age-old belief that humankind is, by nature, flawed and untrustworthy. This notion is ingrained in nearly every institution in the world, in every strata of society—in family, religion, government, education, and workplace.

We were all reared in a red-pencil world, and it has shaped us. This red-pencil coercion had such a deterring effect on Albert Einstein that after he had passed his final examination, he found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to him for an entire year. Einstein said: “It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom. Without this, it goes to wrack and ruin without fail.”

We believe an oxymoron that says we fortify strengths by focusing attention on weaknesses. Meanwhile, it is our innate strengths that grow weak. Our strengths, not our weaknesses, have power to point us in the direction of the unique contribution we are here to make.

Becoming a Strength Finder

Becoming a strength finder is simple. It begins with quieting the voice that says we are not good enough. The best indicator of strength is the fire it lights in our hearts whenever we exercise it.

1. Make a list of at least five of your strengths. Write them down.
2. Pick one strength and, starting tomorrow, commit the morning to strengthening it by becoming familiar with the various ways you can put it to use.
3. As you use it, acknowledge its value.
4. In the afternoon, commit to seeing one strength in another person and acknowledging it, at first quietly to yourself, and then openly to the other person.
5. Identify three people who are attuned to your strengths, and use the relationships to affirm you.

Take small steps at first, weaving your strength into other functions you perform. Then commit to growing this strength by gradually increasing it, this week, the week after, and the week after that, until you begin to feel it growing what is best in you.

Part 2 of this blog is now posted. Click-on to read.

Robert Sapolsky of Stanford relates a story about a boy from a psychologically abusive setting, who was hospitalized with zero growth hormones in his bloodstream. Chronic stress had completely shut down the body’s growth system, threatening his life. Over the next two months the boy developed a close relationship with the nurse at the hospital—undoubtedly the first normal relationship he had ever had—and soon, amazingly enough, his growth hormone level zoomed back to normal. However, when the nurse went on vacation, the boy’s blood level dropped again.  Then, immediately on her return, his blood level bounced back to normal. “Think about it,” Sapolsky commented. “The rate at which this child was depositing calcium in his bones could be explained entirely by how safe and loved he was feeling in the world.”

The research of Dr. Helen Fisher of
Rutgers into the biochemical, neurological, and social foundations of love has led her to conclude that love is not an emotion; it is a drive more powerful than the sex drive, emanating from the engine of the brain.

Mirror Neurons

The neural network most responsible for achieving our state of connectedness

is the mirror neuron system. This cluster of nerve cells was discovered in 1996 in an experiment conducted on macaque monkeys. Researchers observed on brain scans that a specific cluster of brain cells fired in the frontal lobe of a monkey when it grabbed a peanut. The curious thing was that in another monkey, who was watching the first monkey grab the peanut, the same cluster of cells fired. The cells seemed to reflect the actions of the other monkey almost like a mirror reflects one’s image. As the researchers investigated further, it became easy for them to predict which specific neurons would fire based on the activity performed by one monkey and observed by another. The scientists dubbed this cluster of cells mirror neurons.

In humans, the mirror neuron system is highly developed.  It provides the neural mechanism by which we are able to read each other and feel empathy.  “With mirror neurons [we are] practically in another person’s mind,” states Dr. Marco Iacoboni of UCLA. Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, writes, “Mirror neurons track the emotional flow, movement, and even intentions of the person we are with, and replicate this sensed state in our own brain by stirring in our brain the same areas active in the other person. Mirror neurons offer a neural mechanism that explains emotional contagion, the tendency of one person to catch the feelings of another, particularly if strongly expressed. This brain-to-brain link may also account for feelings of rapport, which research finds depend in part on extremely rapid synchronization of people’s posture, vocal pacing, and movements as they interact.” 

Goleman points out that mirror neurons work both ways. My hostility bumps up your blood pressure; your nurturing love lowers mine. Biologically, friends are healing, enemies are toxic.  This explains why the research of Fred Luskin at Stanford has shown, over and over, that a willingness to forgive reduces serious health risks.

A Person-Centered Approach

The psychological approach that maps to the way mirror neurons achieve interpersonal resonance is the person-centered approach, formulated by Carl R. Rogers, Ph.D.  Rogers’ approach is one of the most scientifically validated approaches in psychology, earning him a nomination for the Nobel Prize. The three essential conditions he estabilshed are now at the core of nearly every form of  psychotherapy, communication, conflict resolution, community building, and education.   In the next blog, I outiline his approach (the next blog is now posted.  See below or click here).

Believe it or not, we are neurally constructed to feel connected to each other. That’s not an opinion; it’s hard science. The quality of our relationships not only determines how well we live, but how long we live. To the brain, connection is synonymous with survival to such an extent that any form of separation makes the brain nervous. Expose an infant primate to an unpleasant stressor, place her in a room with primates that are strangers, and the stress reaction will exacerbate. Place the infant in a room with other primates who are her friends and family, and the stress reaction is mitigated. 
 

Carl Rogers formulated three indispensable conditions that must be present to create a climate of growth and resonance in a relationship. These conditions apply in any and all relationships, whether it is lover or friend, therapist and client, parent and child, leader and group, teacher and student, or management and staff. The conditions apply, in fact, in any situation in which the development of the person is a goal.

1. Genuineness

The first condition is genuineness, realness, or congruence. The more a person is him or herself in the relationship, presenting no professional front or personal facade, the greater the likelihood for resonance and connection. This requires that we be aware of and open to the feelings and attitudes flowing within us as we relate to another. The term transparent catches the essence of this condition: we are willing to make ourselves transparent to the other person so the other person can clearly see what we are in the relationship. There is no holding back. There is a close matching, or congruence, between what is being experienced at the gut level, what is present in awareness, and what is expressed.

2. Acceptance

The second attitude of importance in creating a climate for connection is acceptance and caring, or what
Rogers called unconditional positive regard.  He refrained from using the word love to define this condition, but love is what it is.  By love, I mean a positive, acceptant attitude toward whatever the other person is at that moment. We are willing for the other person to be whatever he or she is experiencing, whether confusion, resentment, fear, anger, courage, pride, kindness, or compassion. We value the other in a total rather than a conditional way.

3. Empathic Understanding

The third facilitative quality of the relationship is empathic understanding. Being empathic is to perceive the point of view of another with accuracy, along with the emotional components and meanings. It means to sense the hurt or the pleasure of another as he or she senses it and to perceive the causes of the feelings as he or she perceives them. It is to enter another’s private world so completely that we lose all desire to evaluate and judge it. “This kind of sensitive, active listening is exceedingly rare in our lives,” Rogers stated. “We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change [in a relationship] that I know.”

Resonance proceeds from an accepting, empathic, and honest way of being in a relationship. This way of relating arises naturally in the absence of judging, advising, admonishing, ordering, or directing. It helps us to get in touch with our actual feelings and experience so we can become more real, less distorted, and ultimately achieve a close match between the person we strive to be and the person we are. Resonance means we are alive in the present moment, attuned to its ebbs and flows, open to a state of becoming; rather than being fixed on who or what we think we should be, or how another person should be.

How Mirror Neurons Come Into Play

The more a person feels accepted and prized, the more they tend to develop a more caring attitude toward themselves. Our acceptance literally mirrors in their brain as self-acceptance.

As a person is empathetically heard, it becomes possible for them to listen more accurately to the flow of their own inner experience. Our listening mirrors as self-understanding.

As a person understands and prizes him or herself, he or she becomes more congruent, in ways that feel real, grounded and genuine. Our willingness to be authentic with another mirrors within them as the courage to be authentically who they are.

When all three attitudes are present in a relationship, resonance is inevitable.  This is because inevitably, it shifts the question from how can I change or fix this person to how can I provide a relationship which this person might use for personal growth?

Who doesn’t want a relationship with a person like that?

We all want to live a good life. And it is just as true that most of us want the life we live to open the way for an even better life for the next generation.  It is an  ideal that has been with us for more than 2,000 years. The ideal of the Good Life was originally formulated by Aristotle around 400 BC in the Nichomachean Ethics.  It served as the vision and aspiration that sustained the Greeks for hundreds of years in advancing one of the greatest civilizations in human history.  Ironically, Aristotle’s ideal does not define a life situation, such as material wealth.  Rather, it defines an attitude toward life.

·        The Good Life is a state of flourishing at every level that matters. 

·        It’s a sense of prosperity, internally, that manifests externally.

·        It’s living fully; being joyful and at peace: Meaning we enjoy our work and our life.  We are at peace within, comfortable in our own skin; comfortable with people, and calm under siege.

·        It is also fulfilling our innate potential. It is the joy of excelling at whatever we do, along with the sense of making a contribution. The ancient Greeks actually defined joy as “the full use of our powers along lines of excellence.”

Who wouldn’t want to live a life that felt and moved like that.  It is the description of an intrinscially rewarding existence.

A Stressful Life

If we want to attain the good life, which we have the inherent right to live, the primary condition we need to overcome is stress.  A stressful life is the polar opposite of the good life.   It is an anxious life incapable of sustaining the joy and peace that engenders creative intelligence. Stress is fear. Biologically, it takes some form of fear to activate a stress reaction, and when stress becomes chronic, we pay a heavy price.

• Stress makes us sick, prematurely ages us, and ultimately shortens our life. There are a million people out of work everyday due to stress (American Institute of Stress). Nearly 80% of serious illness is preceded by high stress in the previous year (AMA, 2004). A hundred years ago, the #1 killer of human beings was bacteria and viruses. Stress now holds that distinction.
• It shortens our careers. Nearly 2 in 3 people no longer enjoy their work because of stress (Conference Board, 2007). It is also having a severe impact on people in leadership (Center for Leadership, 2007).
• Stress shortens our fuse which, in turn, shortens our relationships. Chronic stress activates a primitive survival mechanism that locks the brain into threat mode and emotional negativity.
• Stress hormones debilitate higher order brain function that generates creativity and produces everything we think of as intelligence.

Obviously, this is not the expansive life sustained by the joy of excelling.

Shifting Stress: A Tool To Get You Started
Fear, and the stress it can generate, is living our life in the storm of circumstances.  The good life means we know how to shift fear and the stress it generates to become larger than circumstances. The proven approach is so simple that most of my clients don’t believe it possibly work. Two weeks later they are amazed.  Click-on here to download a tool that can get you started in shifting the stress you experience.

The Four Qualities of Mystic Cool

The four qualities of Mystic Cool incorporate a proven approach to transcend stress and actualize a dynamically peaceful attitude.  Studies have confirmed that a dynamic state of peace is highly “neuroplastic.”  This means it optimizes and expands higher order brain function, especially in prefrontal regions, to make us smarter, wiser, kinder and more artful in whatever we do.  All these qualities are actually neural circuits that stress hormones impede.

Stress is psychological fear; peace is neurological power. Thus, success in life is inner peace; succeeding is letting go of fear.

A Condition Called Flow

As we ingrain a dynamically peaceful attitude by practicing the four qualities of Mystic Cool, we build the neural circuits that sustain a condition called flow.  Flow is finding “the zone.”  It is reaching the eye of the storm. It is you at the top of your game.  It is achieving you best day, every day. Flow is an intrinsically rewarding experience, transforming our effort into a labor of love and our labor into the joy of excelling.  And it applies to everything we do, from washing the dishes to writing a book; from selling a widget to running a company. 

This is the “good life,” and it is attained and sustained by making the psychological shift from fear to peace.

Click here for the Mystic Cool website

The Power Of The Mind To Change The Brain

Back in the 1980’s the Dalai Lama asked a group of world class neuroscientists if the mind could change the brain. It is a critical question. Does the brain direct us, or do we direct the brain?  Are we genuinely free? Or are we stuck with the way genetics and early childhood wired our brains, with no real potential in our make-up for personal growth and spiritual transformation. The latter is the answer the scientists gave the Dalai Lama.  They said, the mind cannot change the brain.  Nothing can.

Science Was Wrong

Happily, the scientists were wrong.  Breakthroughs in research have now proved that the brain responds to the mind. Mental practice can take a small village of high level neurons and build it into a humming metropolis, providing you with the brain power to produce optimal results in whatever you pursue. The term given to this wonderful neurological property is neuroplasticity.  Neuroplasticity just might be a human being’s most powerful asset. It’s analogous to the mustard seed Jesus spoke of, “the smallest of all seeds, but when it falls on prepared soil it produces a large plant and becomes a shelter.”  Neuroplasticity is the mechanism that builds the brain structure for something as simple as the dexterity for a monkey to retrieve food from a tight spot to something as advanced as our capacity to master an art form.

It Even Works Through Imagination

Neuroplasticity even works through imagination to learn, build, and strengthen difficult skill-sets, such as playing the piano. In 1995, a neuroscientist at Harvard instructed subjects to play a five-finger piano exercise two hours every day for five days. At the end of each practice session, he measured the motor cortex of the brain that controls precise finger movement. Within five days, the amount of motor cortex devoted to the finger movements had spread, taking over surrounding areas of the brain. At the same time, the researcher had another group simply think about practicing the five-finger piano exercise. They played the simple piece over and over in their minds, keeping their fingers still and simply imagining how their fingers would move if actually playing the piano. The results were astonishing. The area of motor cortex had expanded in the imaginary players in the same way it had in subjects who had actually played the piano. The finding: the mind can change the brain.

You Can Teach Old Dogs New Tricks

The adage that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks does not apply to the brain. The brain is quick to organize around changes we want to effect, when we practice consistently. When we do, neuroplasticity makes changes quickly. As just discussed, it takes less than one week of mentally practicing a five-finger piano exercise for the motor cortex to expand in support of the new skill. It takes:

• Ten days of constraint induced therapy to rebuild the motor cortex in stroke victims and restore significant use of an arm that physicians once thought was irrevocably damaged. (Pidikiti, Taub, and Uswatte, 1999)
• Ten weeks for mindfulness therapy to change the brain in obsessive compulsive disorder (Schwartz, 1995)
• Eight weeks of cognitive therapy to change the brain in depression (Segal, Mayberg, 2002)
• Eight weeks of mindfulness-based stress reduction to shift the prefrontal corical activity from right to left (shifting the dominant attitude from negative to positive) in highly stressed workers in a biotech firm (Davidson, Kabat-Zinn, 2003)

Some of these problems, such as stroke damage and obsessive-compulsive disorder, were once considered incurable. Yet the power of neuroplasticity generated significant change in these cases and in a relatively short period of time. If neuroplasticity is this effective in extreme situations, how much more can it do to transform a brain wired for stress? It all comes back to practice. Through practice, we can construct a new autopilot that is wired for a calmer, clearer, more fiercely alive intelligence that can do anything we set our mind to.

Our Brain At Its Absolute Best 

When neuroscientists tested brain activity in Tibetan monks, they found inner peace had significantly expanded the usual networks that generate higher order brain function. These networks were larger and more fully integrated than brain scans show on the average person, with increased blood flow to the region. 

As a result, brain function in these monks had reached levels never before reported in the scientific literature. The readings on Gamma Wave activity, signaling higher mental activity, was off the chart.  The highly developed neural circuitry generated a flow of intelligence that was emotionally peaceful, positive, and fearlessly self-confident, all of which made the monks immune to stress. Even more astounding was the finding that when the monks were not actively practicing mindfulness meditation, they continued to sustain these optimal brain states.

It’s In Every One Of Us

The conclusion of science: Inner peace builds a powerful brain. When the scientists drilled into the basic approach to inner peace that these monks practiced they found it consisted of four essential qualities that any of us can develop. Better still, science found that a little practice goes a long way in building brain structure.

These four qualities not only produce a great monk; they produce peak performers.  The dynamically peaceful attitude the monks mastered is the zone athletes work toward. It’s the calm under siege that drill-sergeants ingrain in soldiers. It is the stream of creativity that entrepreneurs call the top of your game.

I call this dynamically peaceful attitude “Mystic Cool,” which is the name of the book I wrote on the subject. In the book I provide a simple set of tools for integrating each of the four qualities into daily life to sustain this powerful attitude.  The reward is a powerful brain generating a joyful intelligence that can excel at work and at life. 

1. The first quality of Mystic Cool focuses our attention. We are quietly engaged, fully present. We drop the incessant thinking that produces a pointless preoccupation with the past or endless worries about the future. We practice being present, right here, right now, engaging whatever is before us with an open, alert mind.

2. The second quality sets our stance in life. We are peaceful inside regardless of what is happening outside. We are not afraid or threatened by the outside. Thus, we can face a challenge confidently and feel our way to the best possible response to the situation. 

3. The third quality creates our sense of connection. Our hearts are open and empathic, with the intention of creating an atmosphere of interpersonal resonance. We consciously connect with our own internal center, with the people we happen to be with, and to that which we conceive of as greater than ourselves. We practice listening better, judging less, and forgiving more.

4. The fourth quality of Mystic Cool engenders a wider perspective. It is an enduring sense of the whole that transcends the fragments. We see the proverbial forest and the trees as we hold to the big picture.  

These four qualities, when evoked consistently, transform a disconnected, stress-provoking way of living into a richer, more integrated way of being.  In the process, this simple approach to mindfulness builds higher brain structure so we can reach higher ground, in whatever we pursue.  Mercifully, it could not be simpler.  It is no further than a basic shift in attitude.