Neuron

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Choose Well, What You Will Live For

Self-Care Tip #96 – Choose well, what you will live for.

Yesterday we discussed finding our reference point for why we do what we do.  All day today I found my thoughts returning there and had to spend another blog-post-opportunity on it’s “friendliness.”  I was happy to find that I was not the only one when I got a reader‘s response:

I’m still coming out of the fog of doing anything for survival-as-a-habit.  As in, being in panicked survival mode even when all is calm and safe–that is no way to live, any dog knows better than to live like that.

I contrast her response with my colleague’s:

The intentions of any life is self-serving.  Altruism doesn’t exist except in God, (which I accede not to understand), and people can’t rise above their own genetics.

Now this man is the kindest, sweetest, most generous man you’d ever meet and he doesn’t say these things with any meanness, anger towards a past offense, or to turn people from God.

However, contrast his take on our reference point in life with the reader’s above.  She talks about her choice.  Can a choice transcend our genetics?

You may remember some of a previous post mentioning the work of MIT neuroscientist, Sebastian Seung. His research tells us that memories are stored in our neurons and not in our genes.  Eg. Habits are memories and not genetic therefore not permanent.

There is an interplay between choice and genetics.  YES!!@!!  We aren’t robots!  😉  Nor are we a picture without a frame.  We so often don’t think about all the good that our genetics do for our lives.  There’s just so much talk about how we fight our genetics.  We have been given both a design and free choice.  Of course we can’t change our design, but as our reader later said so well:

For some people it is a process just to ask “why am I doing this?” … AND actually ask that question to themselves. (man-o-man the times I have asked everyone else why I was doing something) Maybe it will take sometime for an answer to come, but asking means we are on our way!

Choice is the gift from God that the apple and the serpent and thousands, or billions of years (what ever is true) can’t take away from us.  Only you can.

Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  Where are you in process between your choice and your design?  Is the interplay one that is smooth or rocky for you?  Please tell me your story

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Why Are You Walking The Road Alone?

Part of humility is not isolating.  You have to be able to receive to be a friend.  Dan Allender Ph.D. calls it suffer the kindness.

From looking at him, I didn’t guess at first that Fink was lonely, but he was.  Under-appreciated, whenever Fink thought about making new friends, he remembered that he wasn’t young any more.  All his “real” friendships were made when he hung-out for hours, had spares in the trunk so to speak.  If one relationship didn’t develop well, he still had time and possibilities that the future offers.  In this sense, Fink had been rich.  He had after all that, maybe 3 friends he considered “real.”  But over the last several years, with real jobs and families of their own, his real friends weren’t returning his calls.  Now, he thought, he may as well as not have given them his special self.  Now he was older and not so rich.  Fink kept picking at that scab, even though he knew it wasn’t so masculine to be upset about your neglected special self.

At times we are lonely, but have trouble valuing the relationships being offered.  We see ourselves as something set apart.  This might be part of our drive to self-preserve.  Bits of neurons fighting over signals in our brain telling us that we need to dominate to propagate our genes.  Maybe.  But there is that intersection when choice crosses.

We remember from Sebastian Seung‘s work that our memories are not stored in our genes.  That gives us something tangible to work with.

I remember walking on the beach with a girlfriend when we were still in medical school.  I told her, “I’m tired of feeling bad about things I never had a choice in!”  It still seems wasteful to moralize things like temperament and our nature.  In fact, we’ve argued the opposite at length in previous blog posts.  Embrace that part of you and run with it! we said.

So what do we do with Fink?  For starters, tell him that his drives are what they are.  The real question is, what’s he going to do with his genetic drives?  Do good things with that energy?  (If we can call genetic drive an energy.)  Or will he do things that aren’t so good for him.  There comes the choice.  Fink.  Suffer the kindness.  (Thanks Dan Allender!)  In the end you will be happier and healthier for it.  Even if you are half as hot as your genes tell you you are, who cares if you are walking the road alone.

Self-Care Tip #86 – Suffer the kindess.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What has been a barrier in your life from connecting with others?  Please tell me your story.

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Believe What You Say! It Might Make a Difference.

If you want to get passionate about something, You have to believe it.  Many people speak it, read it, plan on it, but they don’t believe it.  Do you?  Do you believe that you can actually start doing what you want to do, feeling what you want to feel, become who you want to be?

And how bout the opposite?  Too many of us quietly or loudly hold our negative patterns.  A Heathcliff with Catherine scenario in Bronte‘s Wuthering Heights – slowly bringing on our own demise.  Reminds me of the mistletoe, a parasite on it’s host but accepted and beloved nonetheless.

MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung gave a wonderful TED conference, “I am my connectome.”  He tells us the good news that we are more than our genes. Our memories are not “stored” in our genes.  They live amongst the neuronal connections.  He empowers us saying that because we can change our neuronal connections, we can change our behaviors and habits – which are based on neuronal memory (indian trails.)  You see, because our habits are really memories ground into the fiber of our minds, and not into the constitution of our matter, we can make different ones.

Wow!

We may not have pixie dust or elf stones, but we do have power.  We can stop, drop and roll! to that destruction in our lives.  We can be friendly with ourselves at any level of our beings – neuronal to behavioral and emotional.  Mr. Seung, that is great news!

Self Care Tip #70 – If you are going to do it, have courage and believe it!  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What do you think?  Please tell me your story.

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Claim Your Brain

My mind, like rusted gears, was not moving well.  It hadn’t been really since my 1st pregnancy 8 years ago.  There are few things that dumb us down as much as pregnancy and children!   Hormone changes, lack of sleep, fluctuating from 145-200-145 pounds three times, and then the subsequent growing beloveds around me to contribute to mental dissociation.  Simple sensory overload from talking, yelling, crying, petitioning, inquiring kids factors in.  You may read more about sensory issues here.

Daily writing, like a staunch governess, found my brain under cobwebs, bug carcasses, and musty stench.  (Hello old friend!  There you are!)  This helps to explain the joy gripping my hand, like girlfriends on the playground, when I sit down to write!  The world is active to me, including rather than excluding me. My in-between moments used to hang like an old woman’s breasts.   Now much more time full of nourishing thoughts bless me.  I am in awe.

My patient came in sighing deeply.  He wasn’t better.  No, he said.  He lacked motivation and interest and connection from the world.  He felt selected out to suffer.  A dumping ground for misfortune and misunderstood.  Efforts through medication, after medication changes were like looking for love in all the wrong places.

We talked about cognitive distortions, tapping into things that used to make him happy, road-blocks in poorly designed neurological grooves – volunteering at the library or animal shelter, journaling, sharing his life story with others, exploring his spirituality.  No.  No good.  Nor could he consider psychotherapy as he’d been through too much of it already to consider it again.  And he just couldn’t get interested in groups such as through NAMI.

His brain, assaulted by stressors, disease, and disuse was growing silent.

Being a friend means yelling, fighting to reclaim your journey, finding something to connect you to your process of life.  My patient was letting squatters take his property simply by being absent.

Self Care Tip #60 – Claim your right to health.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What has helped you connect with your own journey in life?  What do you think?  Please tell me your story.