To start, Wimberger asks us to choose a habit or behavior we want to change, a fear we want to remove, or a story that we keep telling ourselves about our lives that we’d like to edit. Perhaps, she suggests, you want to quiet the little critical voice that pops up at the back of all brains from time to time, the one that tells you you’re worthless. Who wouldn’t want to get rid of that little liar? (Calling them out as a liar is a pretty good start.) Her meditation takes us through five steps:
1. Calm the primitive brain and its flight, fight, or freeze mechanism. Recognize that it’s really hard! Reassure yourself that you are comfortable, safe, in familiar surroundings; your needs are met. Wimberger lingers on this step longer than the others, even going so far as to remind us that bottles of water are at our side, the bathroom is steps away, and gravity is still working.
The guy from Jordan is too tense to get past this step. He has a moment that reflects the concerns of some researchers that mindfulness can sometimes backfire, bringing us closer to our trauma instead of dissipating it. My colleague Rebecca Ruiz took a lengthier look at this topic; the bottom line is that trauma sufferers need to choose mindfulness practice with care.
2. If you can get this far, stimulate the prefrontal cortex. Wimberger suggests a series of strange ideas to visualize: If you have a third leg, how would you walk? If you had 12 toes, what would your shoes look like? Humor, novelty, wonder, awe: all these things our clever front brain adores. They give it something to work with instead of grumbling about meditation. “The analytical brain’s like, ‘Hey, I’m invited to the party!’” says Wimberger.
3. Only once you’re past the first two steps, start to visualize the thing you want to change, while “toggling” across the left and right brains. Wimberger interjects with requests to mentally spell out words, to think about various numbers, colors, textures and smells. Choose new ones to associate with a positive version of whatever you’re working on. “Don’t ever go back to a traumatic thought the same way twice,” she says. “Neurosculpting is about keeping you safe from that kind of reinforcement.”
4. Do an inventory of your body in relation to the subject in question. Where do you seem to be holding any tension when thinking about it — your shoulders? Your gut? Touch that spot. When you’re affected by the problem in the future, touch the same spot and see if it helps remind you of the new association.
5. To keep the rational brain happy, come up with new names and descriptions. In my mind, for example, I had found the low-key fear I was experimentally sculpting away — the fear of writer’s block, the fear of an empty page — was represented by a jumble of jagged blue lines. I turned them into a smooth wooden globe.
A single meditation like this, Wimberger says, is just a light pencil sketch. To build new habits, new thought patterns and feelings, you have to keep going over the sketch. So long as the “bottom up” reassurances of step 1 is firmly in place before the “top-down” steps 2 through 5, any kind of mental change you want, within reason, is in your grasp, over time.
I’d already gotten into the habit of a 20-minute-a-day meditation practice, so it was easy to slot neurosculpting into my day by listening to the recordings instead. Does it work? Hard to tell, given that, at time of writing, it’s been fewer than three days since the workshop. With that caveat, however, I have found I have more energy and focus for writing; I’m more receptive to exercise, and it became easier to nudge myself into a new diet I’ve been meaning to start.
Placebo effect? Possibly. Regardless, the participants in the 1440 workshop all gave neurosculpting enthusiastic thumbs up. The anxious faces that walked in on Friday had turned into smiles by Sunday, though a few were bathed in tears. Facing your deepest fears and darkest critical voices in the arena of your mind is no joke. As the 17th century poet John Milton put it in Paradise Lost, that gelatinous lump of ours is capable of making “a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
Class dismissed, we stepped outside into the redwoods on a crisp, sunny California winter Sunday. It may not have felt like hell-free heaven for all of us. But to a pupil, our desire for further study was piqued. “I’m just so fascinated by my brain,” said the no-longer-jet-lagged traveler, “that I really wish I could be present at my own autopsy.”
I agreed, and promptly flashed back to my weird, self-slicing dream. Again I heard the anguished internal cry of that movie’s audience. I considered shaking it off, but then I realized it was also the constant question of the present moment, the question that sits at the heart of 1440 Multiversity, the heart of neurosculpting, and indeed all mindfulness practice:
What are you thinking?
Be the first to comment