N Is For: New Neural Patterns

For those that place scientific research at the furthest edge of our capacity to know as human beings, there is not much more respectable than the field of neuroscience and the study of the human brain. Within this field of study, one of the most exciting concepts of the past three decades is the study of neuroplasticity and the notion that you can “rewire” your brain in order to heal from the damaging effects of stress-based trauma among other changes. When you are born, your infant brain carries a plethora of neurons, way more than you need, and over the course of a few years your brain forms millions of connections based on your early life experiences. Everything is new and everything is absorbed like it is the most important piece of knowledge in the universe, because it is to you! Though you do not come into this world as a blank slate, in some ways your brain is like Play-doh and molds into shape based on those early experiences. From childhood through adulthood, your brain goes through a process called synaptic pruning, which is the ridding of synapses - the connectors between neurons - that are no longer needed based on what your brain uses or is exposed to on a daily basis. You might refer to this general process as the neuroscience of learning. Simply put, your brain strengthens what it uses and discards what it does not. Neural patterns and connections form based on learning, experience, and the social conditions and expectations of your environment. There are benefits to this process as well as consequences. Ideally, you learn all of the knowledge, behaviors, emotions, and beliefs that support your highest intention for yourself and the world. However, the reality is that you enter the world in a brain and body already carrying some outdated software and settings of those who came before you, and as you navigate the world, your brain naturally tries to protect you from experiences it deems threatening, such as overwhelming emotions. This is the intergenerational process of human experience.

Certainly, some early life experiences are more damaging and detrimental than others and, like most things, traumatic experience and the brain’s capacity to respond resiliently is a spectrum. The spectrum of survival strategies depends on many factors both inherited and modeled and ranging from adaptive to maladaptive. There are no shortage of survival strategies to respond to and escape overwhelming emotional experience. The benefits of neuroplasticity are such that this is not as hardwired as was once previously thought. Your brain can change. So just as your hippocampus, responsible for longterm memory storage, can shrink and your amygdala, responsible for emotional reactivity to stress, can enlarge in response to traumatic events, your brain can also unlearn these responses and restore adaptive functioning. Factors like age, genetics, and the nature of the damage all play a role in how your brain can rewire, but the truth is that no one really knows the extent to which your brain can grow and heal. Specifically, your brain can unlearn the neural conditioning of your childhood, or of specific events, and create space for new patterning and neural connection that supports the life you were meant to live. Developing new neural pathways applies to all aspects of your life, including your brain’s communication of pain signals to your body and the chronicity of pain, fatigue, or sickness symptoms in your mind body experience.

Think of the brain like the wiring or code for your old belief and emotion patterns combined with primitive survival mechanisms it has learned over time. Though the brain has the capacity to change and grow, if you are not intentional with your practice to rewire and expose the brain to new experience, it will stay comfortable with what it knows. The brain knows how to protect you based on old survival mechanisms that likely no longer serve you and it requires courage - all that you can muster - to begin discarding these neural patterns and creating space for new ones.

Perceived threat or danger is the source of all your brain’s protection energy and it reacts to situations with a variety of basic physiological functions such as fight, flight, freeze, but also with more nuanced behavioral forms of protection or avoidance such as substance use, isolation, aggression, relational dependency, and many, many more. Your brain is a powerful problem solver but it is not so good at self-reflection and pivoting when one mode of protection is no longer serving you. This is where cultivating a deeper awareness of the breath and body creates space from your brain-derived modes of protection and gives you a deeper sense of who you are separate from your brain’s conditioning. Society conditions you to identify with the brain as it is celebrated it for all of its magnificence. And yes, the brain is quite magnificent in all its capacities for logic, reasoning, and complex problem solving. However, in the emotion and belief realm, the brain fails to acknowledge that you are more expansive, powerful, and safe than the traumas you carried into this world or the situations endured in this lifetime. A computer is only as powerful as its programming.

 A computer is only as powerful as its programming 

The evolutionary programming of the brain is always scanning for danger and threat. This mechanism helped humans survive in the earliest days of life and are some of the oldest structures in the brain. The brain’s reaction to threat happens faster than your conscious mind can catch up and your body is already responding before you recognize what you feel. This process proved to be of immense value throughout history when you needed to respond to your environment rapidly, and to this day it still serves you in a powerful way. However, over time this process has been left on or activated to the point where you are walking around in chronic states of hypervigilance and anxiety without recognizing it and, therefore, reacting automatically in ways that no longer serve you. The survival mechanism is no longer able to effectively detect what is actually a threat. Your brain, your whole nervous system in fact, needs an upgrade and this first happens by expanding your awareness to what is happening beneath the surface.

 You do not change a computer’s programming from within its programs. You do it with expanded awareness, tools, and knowledge of how the systems work. In the Sci-Fi thriller The Matrix, the crew did not change the matrix coding from within its illusory world, but from without. Your brain works the same way. You cannot change the neural networks from within the mental matrix that your brain produces. You must use a different source of knowing, whether you call it your ‘true self,’ your inner voice, your intuition or your awareness, it is a source that serves your highest and best intention for yourself and can guide you to make decisions that go against what your brain is constantly reacting to. If you find yourself living in fear not only as a result of external experiences, but as a result of the thoughts, beliefs, and emotions flowing within you, this is because your brain is still programmed by an outdated model, which detects danger and threat at every turn and react to inner and outer experiences out of fear. The story your brain creates is not the problem, it is the programming itself that continues to create the fear-based stories; you must be able to step outside the programming in order to grow and expand.

 As you expand your awareness of the body and recruit a different voice to quiet the mental chatter and brain-driven impulses, you will help the brain to recognize when it is not actually in danger. Think of it like waking from a dream. Your brain has been dreaming that you are in danger and sending repeated danger signals throughout the body, activating your sympathetic nervous system and manifesting pain. Instead of continuing with this programming and attempting to numb it with a pill, a food, or simply manage it, you need to create space for the source of discomfort to emerge - your emotions and beliefs. With practice, you can be with and move through the emotion and belief energy you carry and, therefore, change your brain.

Think of the beliefs and emotions you carry as fuel that is feeding your brain messages every moment of every day. If you are carrying traumatized, limiting, or negative beliefs and emotions, you are feeding your brain the equivalent of McDonald’s all day long. Your brain may become addicted to this type of fuel, similar to how you may find yourself addicted to the taste of McDonald’s food, but what you are really doing is feeding your brain toxins devoid of any real nutritional value. In order to change the neural patterns in your brain, you need to change the “food,” or messaging, it is receiving from within and without. Only then will your brain start to reorganize itself to align with the higher nutritional energy you are cultivating and, therefore, update its programming. You are not victim to the brain, you are a deeper source of knowing and, with expanded awareness, you can create new neural patterns that support the life you were meant to live.