How You Can Re-wire Your Brain To New Ways Of Thinking
Hey there!
As I've been meditating and working on healing myself through chakra alignment, I've been thinking a lot about how to make learning about all this esoteric stuff successful for YOU.
When we begin to open our minds and dip our toe into anything spiritual we can sometimes become discouraged quickly if it is too out there and woo woo for us. Even though we may want to start up a simple meditation practice, it can feel very confronting when strange terms like chakras pop up on that meditation video on YouTube. It is so much easier to close up, shut down and retreat back into our comfort zones.
When we make a habit of resisting new information we reduce our willingness to learn, experience and grow. We need new ideas and to be open and vulnerable to learning. We need to be open minded.
How can we do that?
I once wrote a high school essay on The Myth that is Global Warming and proudly showed it to my family (insert cringe here). Growing up in a strict pentecostal community for some reason breeds climate change skeptics and whilst a degree of skepticism is essential, we can’t shut our minds so tightly to the possibility that maybe - just maybe, we don’t know everything about the Universe.
It took courage to open my mind and willingly realise my own inherent fallibility and belief bias’.
Don’t get me wrong, this did not and will not happen overnight. The key to this is habit.
How can we form a new habit?
There are two parts to becoming an open minded person, the first is re-wiring your brain and the second is positive reinforcement.
Part 1 - Re-wiring your brain
You can start by encouraging more opportunities to experience something new. The best way to do this is to go to your local green grocer and choose 1 fruit or vegetable that you have never eaten before.
Go home and figure out how to eat it.
Well done! By doing something simple like this, you immediately have to bypass the usual defence mechanism we enounter when something foreign or unknown comes across our path.
The more chances you have to try something new, the more opportunites for you to be re-wiring the connection in your brain from New=Closed to New=Exciting and that’s where we want to be.
Part 2 - Positive Reinforcement
The crucial part to the rewiring is to positively reward yourself.
If you think about bad habits that are hard to break they are usually ones that provide an instant reward to our brains. Cigarettes are a prime example, by smoking a cigarette the brain receives the dopamine hit that it craves making this a hard habit to break.
Let’s now look at good habits like waking up early, this doesn’t give us an immediate dopamine hit so therefore is tougher to stick to unless we add one in ourselves - say like a square of delicious chocolate as soon as we wake up!
This is a great example for me as I LOVE chocolate, but you can sub in any other treat or reward that would incentivise you to get up early, like adding milk or sugar in your coffee when you wouldn’t normally.
If you do this every day for 3 weeks, your brain will have associated waking up early with a positive dopamine hit and BINGO you have a new habit!
But how will fruit and early mornings help me?
I know it all sounds a bit much but re-wiring your brain doesn’t have to be difficult. The reason for these examples is to put it into perspective so that you can see how easy and actionable it can be to become a re-wiring pro!
The goal here is to practice being open-minded in our every day lives before we can begin to level up into being open minded and willing to alter our current belief systems if new information makes a better fit.
It’s tough, but makes life a hell of a lot more interesting.
Brightest Blessings,
Hana the Suburban Witch
P.S. If you’re keen to put this new re-wiring skill to the test, hit the subscribe button below to be updated with all my future weird and wacky blog posts that will really stretch your mind!
Meet Hana
Hana O’Neill, the Suburban Witch is a professional Tarot & Astrology reader, Intuitive Coach and the host of the Witch Talks podcast.
