I ended last month’s column with a short description of a simple, yet powerful mindfulness practice called walking meditation. The purpose of this practice is to begin to turn your focus outward and pay closer attention to others and your surroundings instead of yourself alone, in addition to cultivating stillness, balance and calm inner strength regardless of the situation you find yourself in. Those of you who have practiced walking meditation in peaceful surroundings over the past month may have found that it was not as easy as it appeared to be at first, yet hopefully you have stuck with it – daily if possible. Some of you may have been able to take the next step – to practice on a crowded street or in a busy shopping mall.

Over the years, I’ve discussed how imperative repetition is in the process of inner growth and change, and that it was precisely why I revisit some of the same universal principles of lasting personal transformation regularly. The grooves within our minds are often quite deep by the time we reach adulthood, and it takes much more than a weekend seminar or a single reading of a great book to create new ones that will lead us in more productive, positive and enduring directions. When I teach specific mindfulness-based techniques, it’s always with the instruction that permanent change doesn’t occur within a single session. We have become so conditioned to expect instant results that it has made us often impatient and entitled, but work on ourselves is a life-long, and at times frustrating process. However, if we incorporate consciously chosen mindfulness-based approaches into our relationship with others as well as with ourselves, it makes the growth experiences much more pleasant while concurrently minimizing the kicking and screaming that often comes with ego-based resistance strategies such as defensiveness, denial, blame, justification etc.

After reading The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force by Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D., and Sharon Begley in 2004, I became enthralled with groundbreaking discoveries in the field of neuroscience that corroborated what I’d been both witnessing and teaching for several decades regarding how we use our minds and our brains. No longer did I, or others like myself, have to defend ourselves with our non-clinical observations alone; we had neuroscience and medicine to back us up. At the same time, advances in quantum physics were doing the same thing. Yet with all this fervor to cite science and medicine as supporting our experiences as lay people, I have also discovered that many people don’t have the time or desire to fully understand the science behind the inner workings of the mind/brain and often fall back on anecdotal information and hearsay. However, it’s my strong opinion that those who toss around words like “neuroscience,” “neuroplasticity” and “quantum mechanics” will benefit by investing the time to authentically know what they are talking about instead of merely trying to appear that they do. It’s my hope that I will be able to help educate readers of this column on these exciting subjects in a manner that is relatively easy to grasp, and which will also incorporate repetition over time. It’s also my intention to dispel any myths or exaggerations that have arisen about how the mind/brain works which, unfortunately, have created false hopes over what is possible.

When presented with the possibility of learning something new, our brain can respond in two different growth-oriented ways, neither of which would be possible if we did not have malleability within the brain itself. All human beings have the capacity throughout our entire lives to constantly a), lay down new grooves of neural (“gray matter”) communication, or b), refine or expand existing ones. The ability for even an old dog to learn new tricks is due to the neuroplasticity of that individual’s brain. With mindful, focused effort, we can increase our brain’s plasticity through activities that have been clinically proven to be successful. This not only includes brain exercises, but also the type of thoughts we think on a regular basis.

Upon exposure to new information and ideas, data enters into our short-term memory field, which depends mostly upon chemical and electrical processes known as synaptic transmission. The electrochemical impulses of short-term memory fires up one neuron, which then fires up another; however, the conditions required to make information last occurs only when the second neuron repeats the impulse back again to the first. This is most likely to happen when we have decided (either consciously or subconsciously) that the new information is particularly important or valuable to us, and/or when certain information and ideas are repeated on a consistent basis. In these cases, the neural “echo” is sustained long enough to amp up the brain’s neuroplasticity, leading to lasting structural changes that hard-wire the new data into the long-term memory neural pathways of our brains. During the physical aspect of learning, the brain must move the new information from short-term “working memory” to the basal ganglia at the base of the brain. Attaining short-term memory alone is energy-intensive; that is why we can easily become overwhelmed with new data during an “intensive” workshop, and why I have come to prefer both teaching and learning via shorter sessions with adequate time for reflection and absorption before more data is piled on. It also explains why “cramming” for a test is more stressful for many people than truly learning the same information through repetition over time. Unless knowledge becomes integrated into the part of the brain associated with long-term memory, it ultimately does not serve us.

What is important to acknowledge is the fact that information which is programmed into our brains (and therefore our minds) isn’t always healthy or positive; for example, someone exposed to abusive or socially unacceptable and divisive mental and emotional patterning over and over will begin to believe and buy into it just as much as a someone who is receiving consistently emotionally and mentally healthy, socially inclusive and humanitarian impressions. But the good news is that because our brains are plastic even as we age, life force debilitating patterns can be replaced by more enlivening ones - if both the value and repetition of such new information and ideas are present.

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