"Step to the Right!"

Brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor, in her wonderful book Stroke of Insight, reminds us that we can "step to the right" soon after we experience the 90 seconds of physiological response that accompanies fear, anxiety, anger or other negative emotions. In other words, after experiencing the negative emotion, we can choose either to engage with our left hemisphere of our brains or our right. We can let it pass and focus on something positive (right brain), or we can let those negative emotions eat us up, and stay with the left hemisphere dominance.

The right brain, writes Taylor, is the seat of our inner joy, and our connection with all other living things in the universe. If we allow our judgmental left brain to dominate, it will mull the negative emotions over and over again, leaving us with the same negative outcome. If, on the other hand, we can allow our right brain to dominate, we can be in touch with the joy and inner peace God designed us to experience.

In other words, it is a choice we always have to feel deep inner peace, and practice forgiveness and kindness. God gives us that power. Dr. Taylor recommends that we train ourselves to observe what "loops" our brains are running. If the brain is running negative thought patterns, we can add a kinesthetic component and wag our finger in the air while telling our brains to stop those negative loops. Our cells need to get the message that we are paying attention, and do not want the negative "storyteller" portion of our brains to dominate. Taylor recommends we "tend the garden of our mind" to get away from the negative cell circuitry. We need to be persistent in unengaging with the negative and turning to thoughts of something that brings us joy. If we are physically or emotionally tired, we are more vulnerable. Nevertheless, we can learn to scrutinize our patterns of thought.

Subject circuitry and emotional circuitry can be joined with physiological circuitry such as excitement and animation. We have the power to choose which loops we want to hook into. We need to honor the emotions, surrender to them for 90 seconds, but then use our power to choose something positive to focus on. We can give thanks to God for the 50 trillion cells in our body that work together to help us heal and find happiness. We can use the left brain language function to persistently and consistently give thanks to God for the functions our cells are performing to enable us to function.

I am going to consciously try to implement these concepts!