Updated: Sep 19, 2022
Mindful Practices and Developing Response-Flexibility
Noticing and Naming strategy:
When we experience triggers from old reactive responses and difficulties, it surfaces our habitual unconscious patterns as an opportunity to overcome them in the organic moment to shift and learn new, healthy coping capacities. Modifying our behaviors into long term correction.
This strategy keeps our PFC functioning well. Out of confusion and into clarity.
The neuroscience of recognizing opportunities to shift old patterns to create new options.
By framing every moment as an experience,we have an opportunity to employ the “Noticing and Naming” strategy, which helps us to break up preconditioned automatic pattern responses to create new opportunities of choosing a different response. This is essential to creating new awareness.
Mindful questions to ask:
When you have an event that activates a trigger or old negative pattern, simply notice it and name it.
1. Think of a name to identify a current pattern you would like to change?
2. Is what I’m doing right now skillful or unskillful? Yes/No
3. Is it effective or ineffective?
4. Efficient or Costly?
5. Do I feel good about myself of bad about myself?
Mindful practices help us to create awareness moving forward in healthier coping and choices.
Experiment when you experience distress. Practice integrating the “wise mind”.
SHIFT HAPPENS:
1. Pause, Notice and Name old pattern?
2. What are you thinking and feeling?
3. Shifting the perspective of the event (mindful empathy)
*Notice shifts of events and thoughts about yourself. Practice inhabiting wise mind to more open and flexible shifts.
1. Set intention to develop a new habit of perceiving life events, stressors, and responsiveness differently by creating new choices of responding more resiliently and differently. Think of an example/Mindful empathy.
2. The more difficulty the event, the more the opportunity of letting them transform you. Mindful skills transform the prefrontal cortex on the spot and improves its function of self-awareness, essential to creating new options. What new skill would you like to embody?
3. Create new neuro peptides (thoughts/emotions). To rewire mind and recode DNA. Imagine an example of practicing this skill and new awareness in a future event.
How do you feel?
4. “Monitor and Modify” when you notice unwanted behavior to change new behavior you can harness neuroplasticity by shifting gears and re-calibrate responses quickly.
5. Use examples of:
1. De conditioning
2. New conditioning &
3. Reconditioning old patterns, beliefs or awareness.
1. De-conditioning the old belief:
2. New Conditioning:
3. Reconditioning new pattern/belief:
6. Utilizing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for new Affirmations...
For Example: Sounds of Music: “when the dog bites, when the bee stings, I simply remember my favorite things”.
To interrupt negative thoughts and validate the power of positive thoughts activates new circuits in our brain and shifts our view/perception. The practice of refocusing our attention, by shifting and reframing our experience, we strengthen our brains responses.
Create a new affirmation around an old pattern you would like to perceive differently and transform? (gratitude is an excellent mind shift).
Exercise to shift perspective (reconditioning negative thoughts)
1. Identify one habitual negative thought you would like to replace____________________________
2. Brainstorm several alternatives thoughts to counter your negative thought. It may be a directly alternative thought.
For Example:
“I’m lazy”, countered with, “I am motivated when I’m interested and can feel excited for new opportunities”.
This can interrupt self-deprivation, sending the brain in a new direction and re-calibration. Reconditioning the brain for resilience and new response-flexibility. No longer ruminating on the deep groove of old programming and neuropathways to shake the brain loose of old habits.
Tip: Identifying what has been a new learning opportunity can help re-calibrate the brain And shift to gratitude.
Switching the channel
By repetition and perseverance, the brain learns new thought skills creating a new normal, by shifting perspectives, perceptions and feeling healthier. Seeking new landscapes. Like new experiences and a bigger picture to create and enhance the senses and neuro-sensations. Quantum shifts can quickly change and shift perspectives.
Experiential to gain fresh perspectives
Find a square foot patch anywhere in an outdoor area.
Refocus your attention from your negative emotions to activity around you. Notice:
Color, shapes, oddities, objects and de focus on self. Notice whatever you see. Take a deep breath, then bring your attention back to yourself, allow new perspective or view of yourself to gain fresh perspectives.
The neuroscience of defocus tool
Focusing attention away from yourself engages a de-focusing circuitry in your brain, which allows new views and perspectives to emerge.
The subjectivity of focusing on others, objects, tasks and our present environments of concrete neural structures, as well as to more fluid, being and insightful, intuitive knowing helps shed old identities.
Create new internal working model
Question: Anchor an investigation of what is missing in yourself and find ways to create new ways to repair conditioned messages about childhood and recondition the belief with new investigation. From your old story.
1. What do you feel is missing in yourself?
Look for ways in which the new view can counter old views in your experience and environment. Name an example?
For example: Like falling into a trap repeatedly, then by being aware that you’re falling into a trap and choosing a new path.
Experiential: Use a live example as you’re walking outdoors, notice all of the holes and divots on the road and walk around them to create this new internal awareness and shifts around this perspective. Adopting new habits.
Identify negative perspective you have of yourself, and what you would like to change or re-wire?
*For example: I am not good enough/competent.
I am competent wise, capable and resourceful and look for examples when you recall feeling competent and capable?
Evoke this experience with new sensation. Create a new name of your wiser self. A new identity and let yourself light up new neural networks of this awareness, a new identity you can rewire/anchor.
Mindful empathy exercise & Meditation: Anchoring a new identity.
Imagine both the old and new self, old beliefs and newly imagined identify simultaneously and alternately.
Imagine new ideas this new identity and action you would take in this new identity. Imagine knew emotions, sensations, feelings and lifestyle and let yourself feel this new identity. What are your strengths, innate and new you bring into your new identity and life? What new opportunities are you ready for?
Socially, educationally, physically, environmentally, recreationally, creatively, mindfully, professionally, personally?
Anchor this new identity. Mindfully alternate between the old and the new identity several times.
Whenever you need to, take a moment to refresh the awareness of your new higher conscious and wiser self. When the sense of the new identity is stronger than the old, you can let go of the old identity.
You can now rest your awareness solely in the awareness of the new identity.
After a few moments of anchoring your new awareness, only in the new identity, revoke the old identity once more, and notice if that network lights up as strongly as it did before?
What belief or feeling surfaced?
The old identity will eventually fade. Empowering us to recondition our new identity again & again. Like a construct that can be learned and unlearned. It can be encoded to reinforce overtime to rewire the old.
This will also let go of the power we once had to our old behaviors retiring/shedding our old identity.
This will dismantle the old encoding that lives in the old patterns (neuropathways) as we are practicing new self-identity (neuropathways).
This technique helps us with new coping strategies of the new wiser identify. By accessing our PFC and super conscious, we gain a stronger sense of self. Add new experiences, nuances of new self-identity, new environments/constructs, and sensations to eradicate old programming or trauma patterns.
*Use this mediation exercise anytime you wish to anchor and quickly advance to the next best version of your new identity.
•What are some new experiences, behaviors, feelings, and beliefs you would like to invoke in your new identity?___________________________________
Pulling it altogether
Once we’ve established the confidence of our new identity we can let go of the old patterns once we can modify and monitor our perspectives, and beliefs to create the most significant shift of all, from the helpless, poor me victim mindset to the empowered “I”. I can generate new options, opportunities, skills and choose them wisely.
5 C’s of coping: use Calm, Clarity and Connections to generate the Competency and Courage of resilience.
· Calm
· Courage
· Clarity
· Choices/Connections
· Competence
Every choice has an impact. Aligning to our Moral Compass & Core Values. Living congruent to core values enhances feelings of self worth. “To thine own self be true”.
Learning good judgment from forming in opinion objectively.
How do you feel about your behaviors and discerning choices?
______________________________________________________________
How to catalyze change
Where are open to new learning? ______________________________________________________________
Where are feeling resistance and in denial? ______________________________________________________________
Where in your body do you feel blocked? ______________________________________________________________
Create a new empowering narrative i.e., I choose to, I am ready to, or I can begin (any new skill). ______________________________________________________________
Identify self-limiting beliefs that may have generated the conditions you’re currently in or maybe derailing you from new opportunities?
1. ______________________________________________________________
2. ______________________________________________________________
As soon as you can identify these inner saboteurs, you can take the clarity to walk down a new path. Adopt new perspectives/wiser self with optimism and courage. Your wiser-self embodies your highest values at that moral compass. Remember to have a heart to heart with your wiser self and state your dilemma with someone safe or with your friends. Remember your Wiser self will guide your choices and to create better options.
For example:
As strange as this sounds if you feel conflicted you can flip a coin and see how you feel from a quick “gut reaction” at the coin toss.
Shifting: Reflective inquiry
Asking ourselves the question “how could I” to, “well, why did I”?
Allows us to come to a clear perspective of our former beliefs about ourselves and as to what needs to be changed. Forming good judgments from old to new perspectives without devaluing, criticism or condemnation.
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