Blog : Mindfulness

Healing PTSD with Expressive Arts Therapy
Integrative Counsel

Healing PTSD with Expressive Arts Therapy

Today is National PTSD Awareness Day. PTSD is a psychiatric disorder that results from a traumatic event. Those who have PTSD are often triggered by memories of the traumatic event, which causes them to feel as if they are experiencing the event again, accompanied by feelings of intense anxiety/panic, touchiness, and/or disassociation.

In order to heal, those traumatic memories must be processed and digested. Because PTSD is mostly experienced through memories, emotions, and the body, traditional talk therapy does not always help. Expressive arts therapy, however, helps people with PTSD safely process these memories when it is difficult to find the right words to express how they feel.

Making artwork and reflecting on it helps you access different parts of your brain, creating more self-awareness and giving a voice to the traumatic experience through visual art. While painting, drawing, using clay, etc, you are allowing the area of your brain that stores trauma to wordlessly express itself.

Creative expression targets the right hemisphere and limbic system of the brain, which are visual, sensory and emotional in nature. (The right prefrontal cortex is deeply connected to the limbic areas of the brain and is central to affect regulation.) This allows art and imagery to circumvent psychological resistance, which is typically analytic in nature.

The Arts (in all their forms) also allow for the externalization of these very inner experiences and gives them shape and form outside the body and mind. Creativity gives expression to that which cannot, because of the structure of the brain, be spoken. This, in turn, provides an opportunity to re-imagine concepts of self and identity. Scientists have also discovered that the very act of creating – integrating the brain both vertically and horizontally – reduces anxiety, depression and pain, decreases blood pressure, strengthens immune functioning and improves attention and concentration.

Starting your own, personal expressive arts practice will help your mind in so many wonderful ways. Checkout this article here for creative prompts to help you get started. Additionally, Integrative Counsel hosts an Expressive Arts Group the first Thursday of every month. Our next group meets on July 2, 2020. For more information, checkout our groups page.

 

*Sign Up for our free 9 Essential Ingredients To Court Your Creativity PDF. Learn nine crucial skills you can implement RIGHT NOW to increase your leadership creativity by stepping back into your right brain! Click here to sign up.

Alli is our office manager and writer who is passionate about connecting people through words. Alli studied English at Arizona State University, just recently moved to St. Pete and is enjoying paradise. Her interests include painting, nature, and learning about other people.

6 Ways to Celebrate the Sun This Solstice
Integrative Counsel

6 Ways to Celebrate the Sun This Solstice

The summer solstice is about reflecting on personal growth, important cycles, and transformations. It is the day the sun stays out the longest, symbolizing the illumination of our consciousness. In ancient times, the solstice was believed to symbolize the journey to enlightenment. Sacred texts and traditions throughout the world admire the sun and it’s life-giving energy. This life-giving energy is certainly worth celebrating. Here are six ways you can celebrate the sun:

1. Wake up early with the sun as it rises.

Contemplate the way the earth looks as the rays of the sun touch down on it, and have gratitude for the day ahead of you.

2. Do a sun salutation.

At sunrise or sunset, get balanced by doing 12 rounds of sun salutation. As you move through the sequence, meditate on the energy of the sun and its life-giving light. A local studio might even have a virtual class you would like to take. Check out one of our favorite yoga studios, The Body Electric Yoga Company. They offer in-person and online yoga classes.

3. Have a fire ceremony

Using fire is a powerful way to connect with the sun. It will help you fully harness the energy of the summer solstice. To do this, start by creating a relaxing, comfortable, and still environment. Next, light a fire. If you don’t have access to an outdoor fire pit, you can light a candle indoors and create an altar. Then, write on a sheet of paper everything you wish to release from your life. Roll your paper up and burn it in the fire with the intention that all the things that no longer serve you are being burned away.

4. Make a sun wheel

Create a wreath with flowers and moss. Then, get strips of paper, write wishes on them, and tie them with strings to the wreath. Pass it around the group, giving it your good intentions, and burn it in the fire.

5. Make a sun tea

Making sun tea is a wonderful way to absorb the energy of the sun. You will need a large jug with a lid, a tea strainer, 3 tablespoons of your favorite black or herbal tea, and any additional fresh herbs you would like to include in your tea. This can be lavender, basil, mint, etc. Add your tea strainer in a jar with fresh water and let it steep in the direct sunlight for 4-6 hours. Finally, add ice and enjoy.

6. Unlock your creativity and sign up for our solstice expressive arts group!

On June 18, 2020, explore your place in time with a special summer creative practice – and a celebration of the sun at Solstice! We’ll set the mood with a guided, solar-centered meditation and reflect through art-making on the important cycles, transitions, systems, relationships and seasons of our lives. Click here for more information.

 

*Sign Up for our free 9 Essential Ingredients To Court Your Creativity PDF. Learn nine crucial skills you can implement RIGHT NOW to increase your leadership creativity by stepping back into your right brain! Click here to sign up.

Alli is our office manager and writer who is passionate about connecting people through words. Alli studied English at Arizona State University, just recently moved to St. Pete and is enjoying paradise. Her interests include painting, nature, and learning about other people.

How to Reduce Stress with Creative Writing
Integrative Counsel

How to Reduce Stress with Creative Writing

Lately, it feels as if there is this uncomfortable, worried energy that surrounds us. It affects us even when we aren’t at our most vulnerable, and it can be hard to move past that anxiety and worry without the proper tools. Reduce stress with creative writing! Getting creative and writing about your feelings is one of the best methods for alleviating unwanted anxiety.

Creative writing is a wonderful way to reduce stress because it allows us to really sit with our emotions and dig under the surface. Writing reduces stress because it helps people process their thoughts and emotions. It also helps you view the situation in a different way, because your thoughts have to be processed slowly in order to get the words down on paper. Writing is a safe place for you to let go of your bottled emotions without worrying about other people judging you.

In addition, creativity stimulates the brain, and it allows your mind to only focus on the task in front of you. This makes it more difficult for the mind to wander off to dark places. We spend a lot of time and mental energy on our problems–what if we put all that energy into creating another world?

Furthermore, the work that you create allows you to reflect on yourself. Self-reflection coupled with creative writing can strengthen your outlook on life because it helps you become more mindful. If you have a clear idea of who you are and what you are feeling, it is easier to find a solution.

Finally, if you want to start writing, do not let the fear of “not being good enough” stop you from starting your writing journey. Cozying up in a quiet corner, putting on relaxing music and taking deep breaths will help you focus on writing. If you aren’t sure what to write about, here are some helpful prompts.

*Sign Up for our free 9 Essential Ingredients To Court Your Creativity PDF. Learn nine crucial skills you can implement RIGHT NOW to increase your leadership creativity by stepping back into your right brain! Click here to sign up.

Alli is our office manager and writer who is passionate about connecting people through words. Alli studied English at Arizona State University, just recently moved to St. Pete and is enjoying paradise. Her interests include painting, history, and learning about other people.

5 Things We Love About Art Therapy
Integrative Counsel

5 Things We Love About Art Therapy

1. Art therapy helps express what words cannot

Creating art helps cultivate self-expression, communication skills, and the ability to reach out and ask for help. The creative process helps individuals who are struggling slowly begin to express themselves and take the necessary steps to move forward.

2. Creating puts you in a meditative state

Making art puts you into a calm, thoughtful state because you are using more of the right brain and channeling your intuition. This helps you recognize the feelings that are hidden in your subconscious.

3. Making art helps build self-esteem

Creating art makes you feel accomplished, which plays an important role in improving your self-confidence and helps you to better appreciate yourself.

4. Art therapy uses the entire brain

In art therapy, both hemispheres of the brain are being used. Art therapists are able to promote this by encouraging full creativity and spontaneity as well as the ability to communicate and have a logical understanding of what is being expressed.

5. Making art improves mental health

Taking the time to sit down and make something forces the mind and body to sit with the feelings that come up and work through them. Over time, this practice strengthens the mind and mental health sky-rockets.

 

*Sign Up for our free 9 Essential Ingredients To Court Your Creativity PDF. Learn nine crucial skills you can implement RIGHT NOW to increase your leadership creativity by stepping back into your right brain! Click here to sign up.

About the Author

Alli is our office manager and writer who is passionate about connecting people through words. Alli studied English at Arizona State University, just recently moved to St. Pete and is enjoying paradise. Her interests include painting, history, and learning about other people. 

The Pain of Gratitude
Integrative Counsel

The Pain of Gratitude

There is something fundamentally challenging about gratitude that goes beyond remembering to practice it. If I truly admit how damn fortunate I am, I usually experience a myriad of feelings: pure love, then guilt, and then sheer terror.

Guilt and terror? That might surprise you. After all, we practice gratitude to help us become more positive and serene, and more appreciative of the good things in our lives. But sometimes, when I’m thinking about how grateful I am for the people, places and things in my life, I can become paralyzed by the thought of all of it just…vanishing. And that’s a terrifying thought indeed.

I don’t believe this stems from a fear of abandonment, or an attachment disorder issue. Rather, it comes from a deep understanding that everything is temporary. My four-year old daughter, jumping up and down naked on the bed, laughing with pure glee, will soon be a memory. My almost-seventeen-year-old cat, who likes to snuggle in the mornings, will also be gone. As will my partner someday.

So, the question becomes: how do I allow myself to fully open and experience the absolute love and gratitude that abounds in these moments, while also fully comprehending that it will never be the same again?

This is not a rhetorical, philosophical question. Really, how do we receive and embrace the good, when we know it can’t last?

I’m reminded of a Carl Jung quote regarding dichotomy (the division between two mutually exclusive or contradictory situations): “But there is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites…”

When I practice tools that help me become more comfortable with dichotomy, I’m better able to sit with this tension without reacting. These reactions typically take the form of any number of distractions and unproductive behavior, including negativity.

While our brains are wired for negativity and, as I mentioned in a previous post, it kept our ancestors alive, we now know we can actually rewire our brains. Ironically, gratitude is one of the best ways to accomplish this. (See Rick Hanson’s work for more on the brain’s negativity bias).

However, if the experience of gratitude can be painful, then where does that leave us?

There are a few mind/brain hacks you can use to hold dichotomy or, as I call it, brain integration. To give an oversimplified description, our brains have two hemispheres, the left and the right, and they quite literally understand the world differently. The left hemisphere sees things in black and white, yes or no, one way or the other. But the right hemisphere allows for a multitude of shades and colors. It can tolerate the tension of division, and can begin to detect webs, or patterns, that are impossible to see when viewed only in a linear fashion (e.g., yes/no, right/wrong, good/bad, etc.).

So how do we facilitate the integration of these two parts of our brains? Well, we have to start by flexing the hemisphere that is most atrophied, which is – unsurprisingly – the right hemisphere. When we have an awareness that these right-brain experiences are 1. available, and 2. valuable, we can bring back the subtle, yet powerful, knowledge of the right hemisphere into our everyday experiences.

How do we begin to “listen” to the vast amount of information offered to us from the right-hemisphere?

First, we have to listen in a different way, as the messages we receive will “sound” different from what we’re used to. For instance, our bodies speak volumes and are directly connected to the right hemisphere. We can start to become aware of the ways our bodies “talk” to us. You might feel queasy when you’re about to give a presentation at work. Or you get goosebumps when watching a scary movie.

Our intuition is also talking to us all the time. Intuition has gotten a bad rap over the years, with many people feeling it’s “airy fairy” or “woo-woo”. However, our intuition is actually “the ability to understand something immediately”. It’s a sense of knowing. And it’s the way the right hemisphere works: by instantly taking in and comprehending the whole picture. Think about the feeling you get when you know someone is lying to you. You might not have proof, but you just know. Or when you get a really good “feeling” about an interview candidate. Eureka moments are possible in this state!

I’m not suggesting that analysis and mental dissection, which are classic left-hemisphere attributes, are not valuable. They absolutely are. However, we tend to get “stuck” in this way of knowing without allowing or acknowledging input from the right hemisphere. As a result, we miss out on the opportunity to understand the situation from a different perspective; one in which the whole (or gestalt) can be understood.

The right hemisphere doesn’t use everyday language (which is housed in the left hemisphere) to communicate. It usually “speaks” without words – you get a gut feeling, or an image or diagram pops into your head seemingly out of nowhere. So, we have to listen in different ways:

  • Making art

  • Creativity (crafting, cooking, gardening, etc.)

  • Spending time in nature

  • Stepping back to see the whole picture – what I call “zooming out”

  • Being embodied (practicing yoga, dancing, etc.)

  • Listening to music

These are just a few ways you can practice tuning into your brain’s right hemisphere.

Bringing this information into our daily lives does take a certain amount of trust. However, when we begin to consciously listen and make the effort to become familiar with what might at first feel very foreign, uncomfortable, and maybe even undefined or wishy-washy, and then implement this knowledge, more will follow.

The right brain can become a storehouse of valuable wisdom. And, it can be really fun (humor and wit are also right-brain attributes!). With a bit of practice, we can become more familiar and comfortable with the opaque and the dichotomous. And getting comfortable operating from this place can feel like coming home.

Ultimately, we’ll be able to more easily manage the sometimes terrifying feelings that can come up when practicing gratitude. And that’s something we can be truly thankful for.

 

*Sign Up for our free 9 Essential Ingredients To Court Your Creativity PDF. Learn nine crucial skills you can implement RIGHT NOW to increase your leadership creativity by stepping back into your right brain! Click here to sign up.

 

Dayna-Wood-Blog-Post

Dayna Wood, EdS, REAT

Dayna is the founder of Integrative Counsel, where she shows stressed out professionals how to reignite their creativity and spark new meaning and adventure in their lives through the power of brain science. Take the 7 Day Creative Brain Challenge to reclaim and recharge your creativity – in 10 minutes a day or less!

Walking Towards What Scares Me
Integrative Counsel

Walking Towards What Scares Me

Like many people, I’ve made a lot of mistakes in the love and relationship department.

Once, many years ago, I fell hard and fast for a man. He was smart, funny, handsome, creative, and attentive. And, the chemistry between us was so intense, it was like fireworks on top of fireworks. He wasn’t just good-looking, he was positively dreamy, and I thought he was way out of my league.

I thought I was in love. But deep down, I was holding back. I started to tell myself that the timing wasn’t right, that I wasn’t ready for a relationship. Or maybe it was him that wasn’t ready.  But the truth is that I was afraid. And not just afraid; I was terrified. I was scared that he didn’t like me as much as I liked him, and that made me feel even more vulnerable. I was sure I’d be emotionally devastated if things went wrong between us.

So I sabotaged things and ran from a relationship that could have become something special. I will never know, because I let my fear rule.

I remember recognizing myself in this line from Leonard Cohen’s hauntingly beautiful song, Hallelujah: “But all I’ve ever learned from love was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you.”

I beat myself up about running away from that relationship for longer than I care to admit. Because even though I felt like I’d glimpsed a possible future that was filled with all the things I’d wanted, I bailed anyway.

I still carried a lot of guilt from past relationship mistakes, so I didn’t feel worthy of the kind of love I craved. I wasn’t ready for it when it presented itself, because I had more work to do: more healing, more work on changing unhealthy patterns, and ultimately, learning to forgive myself.

I had chosen the most familiar path to me – the path of yearning and remorse – rather than the path of living fully. I chose it because it was safe, even if it was painful.

At a certain point, I realized that the story I had spun about past hurts, and the guilt I held so close, was keeping me stuck. Ultimately, I had to question whether that story was true. I had to confront myself and take as an objective, non-reactive look at the facts as I could – the good stuff and the not-so-pretty.

Was this scary? Extremely. The sense of frozen apprehension I felt at the thought of looking at my “mistakes” – or, more accurately, the distractions I had created – was nothing compared to what I felt when I finally took an honest and unflinching look at myself. That fear showed up as a knee-wobbling, stomach-churning feeling every time I took a step forward. Events that I now know were “opportunities for growth”. These included a time when I broke up with someone I loved, who loved me too, because we wanted different things. Another time when I saw clearly how my attitude towards money was intertwined with my relationship with my parents. A time when I confronted people I cared about who had lied to me. And times when I apologized, from the heart, to those I had hurt.

Ultimately, I chose to learn from my past. I didn’t want to sabotage any more relationships. I became mindful of my patterns of grasping and running, and paid close attention to how I felt when faced with something I was afraid to do.

How did I do it? I got good therapy. I practiced what I knew. I trusted the process. I forgave. I surrendered (some) control.

I came to recognize that the sensations I experience in my body when I feel fear – pounding heart, shallow breathing, impulse to flee – are the same ones I experience when I am presented with an opportunity for growth.

When these feelings come up, my first instinct – like most people – is to turn and run in the opposite direction. I did just that for years, and then I’d sit around wondering why my life never changed.

As time went on, I began to realize that I’d experience that fight-or-flight sensation every time I was about to do something I had been working really hard to bring to fruition. Or, when something I wanted to happen, like a new relationship, looked like it was finally going to come through.

Our brains have a negativity bias, and we’re hardwired toward pessimism. Our ancestors stayed alive because they not only ran from snakes, but also from sticks that looked like snakes. So our natural instinct is to run away from the things that scare us. But in modern life, many of our fears are based on nothing but instinct – not facts – and most of them never come to pass.

All that goes a long way to explain why, at the moment I’m on the threshold of something I really, really want, I feel that instinct to cut and run.

About six years after my ill-fated relationship, I had another chance at love. I was still scared, even though the circumstances were different and I felt more “ready”. But I had become self-aware enough to recognize my fear for what it was. And this time, I didn’t let it make the decision for me. I still felt it, but I realized that having this experience meant more to me than staying “safe.”

“I have to walk towards this,” I thought. And I did.

Was it hard? Absolutely. But it didn’t kill me or even wound me. In fact, the fear lessened as soon as I made the decision to move through it.

That man and I are still in a deeply committed partnership, and we have a beautiful daughter together. He teaches me, on an almost daily basis, what love really means. It isn’t always about fireworks (although those are nice, too). It’s more often about showing up, even when it’s hard.

Proving to myself that I could “feel the fear and do it anyway” is an experience I will never forget, and one that serves me to this day. Once I broke through the fear, I knew I didn’t have to let it rule any longer.

Growth opportunities continue to present themselves, as I dare to dream big dreams for my life and my business, and take one step after another – even though I can’t see all the way down the road. Do those feelings of terror still come up? Yes – every single time. But now I know that they signal a chance to engage with life on a more profound level. So I take a deep breath and keep walking, moving through my fear, instead of letting it stop me in my tracks.

This article originally appeared in Elephant Journal.

 

*Sign Up for our free 9 Essential Ingredients To Court Your Creativity PDF. Learn nine crucial skills you can implement RIGHT NOW to increase your leadership creativity by stepping back into your right brain! Click here to sign up.

Dayna-Wood-Blog-Post

Dayna Wood, EdS, REAT

Dayna is the founder of Integrative Counsel, where she shows stressed out professionals how to reignite their creativity and spark new meaning and adventure in their lives through the power of brain science. Take the 7 Day Creative Brain Challenge to reclaim and recharge your creativity – in 10 minutes a day or less!

How are Purpose, Universal Flow and Dirt Related?
Integrative Counsel

How are Purpose, Universal Flow and Dirt Related?

I recently watched an excellent documentary on dirt – or soil, to be more precise – called Symphony of the Soil. The film offers a different way to think about agriculture, challenging the “rules” of the past 7,000 years and presenting a true paradigm shift. It was definitely worth the watch!

The film got me thinking about all the ways that humans have devised to dominate, engineer and take from the land. Farming is one example. The Industrial Revolution is another. In short, we’ve lived with this paradigm of dominating and taking for a very long time.

So it’s no wonder that many of us, if not most, came to believe that in order to get what we wanted out of life we had to “take it”. Follow the rules. Climb the ladder. But do we really feel happy and fulfilled as a result?

Study after study shows that happiness and fulfillment are not a result of unlimited wealth and health. Rather, they are the byproduct when our focus is elsewhere – on a broader empathetic attention on things we care about.

In Symphony of the Soil, they suggest that if life as we know it is to continue, we must stop behaving in the ways we’ve been conditioned to behave.

For example, farmers could choose to cultivate their crops in ways that are actually sustainable and healthy for the soil. One way to do this is to “give back” to the soil, in forms such as compost. Similarly, if we want to live truly happy lives, we must make a mental shift in order to go from a life of dominating and taking to one of giving back.

Our entire universe is a web of interconnectedness. It makes no sense for us to impose our desires on nature without taking nature into account. In embracing a cooperative role, rather than a ruling or dominating one, we will, as Flow author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi so beautifully states, “feel the relief of the exile who is finally returning home.”

So then…what if happiness is actually a dichotomy? What if it’s the delicate balance between reflection and focused attention, and the immersion in a chosen set of goals? And if, as suggested by Csikszentmihalyi, those goals are truly aligned with our purpose, then we can actually merge with the universal flow. It’s in this “sweet spot” that we find focus, as well as openness and the ability to be fully present.

Therefore, consider the idea that happiness and fulfillment are a result of experiencing life right now, of growing and learning and giving back. This is the vow of the bodhisattva.

If you’re curious about how you can get back in touch with – or discover – your purpose, and how you can live from your sweet spot, join us for our Imagination Intensive! From October 13 -16th, we’ll lead you through a transformational weekend on Anna Maria Island, filled with activities, exercises and meditations to help you reconnect with your intuition and creativity, and get clear on your authentic purpose. And there will be plenty of beach time, too! Visit www.ImaginationRetreats.com to learn more and register.

 

*Sign Up for our free 9 Essential Ingredients To Court Your Creativity PDF. Learn nine crucial skills you can implement RIGHT NOW to increase your leadership creativity by stepping back into your right brain! Click here to sign up.

Dayna-Wood-Blog-Post

Dayna Wood, EdS, REAT

Dayna is the founder of Integrative Counsel, where she shows stressed out professionals how to reignite their creativity and spark new meaning and adventure in their lives through the power of brain science. Take the 7 Day Creative Brain Challenge to reclaim and recharge your creativity – in 10 minutes a day or less!

How Distracted Am I?
Integrative Counsel

How Distracted Am I?

In modern Western society, we often find ourselves in a permanent state of unfulfilled desire. We are offered continuous distractions and stimulations that mimic reality, such as mass leisure, mass culture, and mass media.

Constant intrusions and interruptions – now the norm in our culture – drive up stress, deplete mental and emotional reserves and shrink our attention spans.

Instead of directing our energy towards personal growth and achieving complex goals, we instead focus on the activities above, which absorb mental energy without providing anything substantive in return. This behavior can leave you feeling even more depleted and disheartened.

Bottom-up attention, in which something or someone other than you dictates what you focus on, is part of our brain’s survival apparatus. It alerts us to potential danger in our surroundings; for example, when you hear a siren or a car backfire.

Bottom-up attention kept our ancestors alive. It instantly shifts our focus to a potential threat. This issue is when our attention is continuously hijacked by these types of alerts (such as the “ding” on your phone when you receive a message).

Can you relate to this? And are you wondering what the alternative could be?

“Top-down” attention is when you set the terms of engagement. In this scenario, you are in control of where you direct your attention, and you’re able to focus on a specific, chosen set of stimuli. This is also known as concentration!

The opposite of distraction is the ability to align your thoughts, intentions, and feelings towards the same goal. This produces an experience of harmony and flow. To do this, though, you must be able to concentrate and “order your consciousness”.

Each one of us has the power to decide whether mental order will come from the outside (bottom-up, with little control) or the inside (top-down, making conscious choices based on personal skill and knowledge).

A complex self is one that succeeds in the type of mental resilience that enables one to switch between bottom-up to top-down attention. This can be achieved with training.

We all have the ability, and in my opinion the responsibility, to create ourselves. We are a direct result of how we invest our mental energy. Understanding how to create ourselves is our most important skill!

That’s why it’s vital to ask yourself, “How distracted am I?” With the ever-growing onslaught of disturbances, both digital and physical, it’s more important than ever to determine the answer to that question.

To assess your current level of distraction, download the infographic here!

 

*Sign Up for our free 9 Essential Ingredients To Court Your Creativity PDF. Learn nine crucial skills you can implement RIGHT NOW to increase your leadership creativity by stepping back into your right brain! Click here to sign up.

Dayna-Wood-Blog-Post

Dayna Wood, EdS, REAT

Dayna is the founder of Integrative Counsel, where she shows stressed out professionals how to reignite their creativity and spark new meaning and adventure in their lives through the power of brain science. Take the 7 Day Creative Brain Challenge to reclaim and recharge your creativity – in 10 minutes a day or less!

The Secret Revealed in 350 Words
Integrative Counsel

The Secret Revealed in 350 Words

The REAL Secret Revealed

The Secret, a film and best-selling book by Rhonda Byrne, is based on the Law of Attraction. One of the major tenets of The Secret is that positive thinking can create life-changing results, including increased happiness, wealth and improved health.

Now, I’m all for changing our thinking. By becoming more mindful of our thoughts and how they influence our lives, we can transform them from unhelpful, repetitive stories that don’t serve us into empowering beliefs that help us live our best lives.

That said, in this article I want to focus on the The Law of Attention rather than the Law of Attraction. Attention is a hot topic in a number of disciplines, such as cognitive psychology and neuroscience. It has also been discussed by philosophers for eons.

A broad definition of attention is “the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information…while ignoring other perceivable information”. As humans, we have an impressive, but still discrete, amount of brain processing power. Attention is how we allocate those limited resources.

Let’s pause and take that in for a moment, because this concept is incredibly important.

What we focus our attention on determines how we come to see and understand the world. In other words, the power of our attention determines what will, or will not, appear in our consciousness. Memories, thoughts and feelings are all influenced by this!

Our lives depend on the direction and nature of our attention, because what we see and who we are is a direct result of what we focus on. We are truly partners in this co-creative process.

We have a responsibility – an extremely important one – to tend to the garden of our own minds. And, we have the ability to pull up the weeds and plant flowers in their place. This isn’t necessarily easy work; it takes awareness and consistency (two things that most of us are inclined to avoid!).

So my question for you is, “How will you choose to use your attention?” This question can open the door to making the desired changes in your life by changing your mind – one synapse at a time!

 

*Sign Up for our free 9 Essential Ingredients To Court Your Creativity PDF. Learn nine crucial skills you can implement RIGHT NOW to increase your leadership creativity by stepping back into your right brain! Click here to sign up.

Dayna-Wood-Blog-Post

Dayna Wood, EdS, REAT

Dayna is the founder of Integrative Counsel, where she shows stressed out professionals how to reignite their creativity and spark new meaning and adventure in their lives through the power of brain science. Take the 7 Day Creative Brain Challenge to reclaim and recharge your creativity – in 10 minutes a day or less!

Stop spinning round and round
Integrative Counsel

Stop spinning round and round

Living under old belief systems that keep us stuck can be automatic for us. Mindfulness practice and other tools that assist you in accessing the power of your whole-brain can help you identify these destructive thought patterns so you can move forward instead of just spinning in place. When we become aware of them and their cause we can shed light on these ineffective thoughts, release them and jump off the carousel. From there you can replace them with constructive systems and continue onto the path you are craving to be on.

Here are a few steps to help you:

1st Step:  Quiet and Gentle check-in with your thoughts

Sit in a quiet place GENTLY notice where your mind takes you.  Being gentle and non-judgmental is important because any judgmental “thoughts of your thoughts” is going to feed the hurtful cycle. I know that sometimes the thought of being alone with our thoughts is intimidating in itself but trust me that much power lies in this quiet practice. Journaling, sharing them with a friend, and/or joining a supportive mindfulness group are great ways to practice this awareness process.

2nd Step: Reality Check

It’s AMAZING how untrue our thoughts can be.  Whether it’s an ingrained message from our childhood OR an irrational belief we hold of ourselves, or both, it can be quite life changing to recognize what thoughts we play over and over that aren’t even true.  Again, a professional along with support can really help you become aware of and confront these destructive patterns in a safe and structured environment. Individual counseling and groups with a mindfulness focus give you time and space to do exactly that.

 3rd Step:  Soft and Immediate Replacement

Now that you know what thoughts you don’t need, you need something more to interrupt the cycle. The next time those heavy, destructive thoughts creep in, try replacing them with one of these “ARTS of DISTRACTION.”

Deep Breath.  A Song. Affirmation/Mantra/Grateful thought. Engaging Your Senses (Which are all the right brain tools you can find in the creative brain challenge.)

4th Step:  Continual Practice

Like everything in life, practice makes better.  When you think uplifting and constructive thoughts, you have more energy, feel better and your mind feels clearer, fresher, like the Spring air. That renewal will free you from the past and take you to the place you’re longing to move into. It doesn’t happen overnight, but I promise it will become more and more natural each time you practice it.

 

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Jennifer Carey EdS, LMHC

Jennifer Carey Ed.S., LMHC

Jennifer has been teaching and counseling individuals and groups for over a decade. Her counseling background combined with certificate as a Reiki Master Practitioner provides a strong foundation in helping others learn, heal and grow through mindfulness practices.