How to shift our perception into the here & now

We can also use the skills of our motor output systems to shift our perception into the here & now. Purposely relaxing muscles you routinely hold tense can help you release pent up energy and feel better. I'm constantly checking in with the tension in my forehead & inevitably, if I an't fall asleep at night, I loosen my jaw & then proceed to pass right out. Thinking about what's going on with your muscles is a great way to pull your mind back to the present. Systematically squeezing & relaxing them may help you come back to the here & now.

Another way is through purposely using our voice to interrupt those looping patterns of thoughts that were distracting. I find that using repetitious sound patterns such as a mantra is very helpful.

Listening to a verbal meditation that guides me into a thought pattern with emotion & physiology is another great way to shift my mind away from unwanted loops. Prayer, whereby we use our mind to intentionally replace unwanted thought patterns with a chosen set of thought patterns is another way.

The secret to hooking into any of these peaceful states is the willingness to stop the cognitive loops of thought, worry, and any ideas that distract us from being here & now. Most mportant , however, our desire for peace must be stronger than our attachment to our misery, our ego, or our need to be right. "Do you want to be right? Or do you want to be happy?"

Many of us may not choose happiness is because when we feel intense negative emotions like anger, jealousy or frustration, we are actively running complex circuitry in our brain that feels so familiar that we feel strong and powerful. I have known people who consciously choose to exercise their anger circuitry on a regular basis simply because it helps them remember what it feels like to be themselves.....

In an attempt to diminish the power of my fear/anger response, I intentionally choose not to watch scary movies or hang out with people whose anger circuitry is easily set off. I consciously make choices that directly impact my circuitry. Since I like being joyful, I hang out with people who value my joy

Your right mind takes in the big picture.it sees as a whole where everything is relative

When it comes to vision, there are basically 2 ways you can use your eyes. Your right mind takes in the big picture.it sees as a whole where everything is relative. It observes the entire expanse & does not focus on any details. Your left mind immediately focuses in on the contour of individual objects & delineates the specific entities making up the view.

In order to come back to the present moment, we must consciously slow down our minds.

In order to come back to the present moment, we must consciously slow down our minds. To do this, first decide you are not in a hurry. Your left brain may be rushing, thinking, deliberating &analyzing, but your right mind is very m-e-l-l-o-w.

Right now besides reading this, what are you doing? Are you running any cognitive loops in addition to your reading? Are you watching the clock or thinking of lunch? Become aware of your extraneous thoughts, thank them & ask them to be silent for a while. Rest assured, they are not going anywhere. They'll jump right back online when you are ready to reengage with your storyteller again.

When we are hooked into cognitive thoughts & running mental loops, technically we are not in the present moment.

If I feel tired, I give my cells sleep.

Really powerful thoughts are perceived as powerful because they simultaneously run multiple circuits of emotion & physiology. Thoughts that we would define as neutral are perceived as neutral because they are not stimulating complex circuitry. Paying attention to which array of circuits are are concurrently running provides us with tremendous insight into how our minds are fundamentally wired, & consequentially, how we can more effectively tend our garden. .............

At the same time, I listen to my body when it speaks to me. If I feel tired, I give my cells sleep. When I'm feeling sloth-like, I give my cells movement. When I'm in pain, I become quiet. Pain is the tool our cells use to communicate to our brain that there is trauma somewhere in our body. Our cells stimulate our pain receptors in order to get our brain to focus & pay attention. Once my brain acknowledges the existence of the pain, then it has served its purpose & either lightens up in intensity, or goes away.

The difference between the right & left brain

Thanks to the stroke, I have become free to explore the world again with childlike curiosity. in the absence of obvious and immediate danger, I feel safe in the world & walk the earth as though it is my backyard. In the consciousness of my right mind, we are laced together as the universal tapestry of human potential, & life is good & we are all beautiful- just the way we are.

My right mind character is adventurous, celebrative of abundance, & socially adept. It is sensitive to non-verbal communication, empathic, & accurately decodes emotion. It is open to the eternal flow whereby I exist at ONE with the universe. It is the seat of my divine mind, the wise knower, the observer. It is my intuition & higher consciousness. My right mind is ever present & gets lost in time.

One of the natural functions of my right mind is to bring me new insight i this moment so I can update old files that contain outdated information. E.g. throughout my childhood I would no eat squash. Thanks to my RH, I was willing to give squash a second chance & now I love it. many of us make judgements with our LH & then not willing to step to the right for a file up date. For many of us once we made a decision, then we are attached to that decision forever. I have found that often the last thing a really dominating LH wants is to share its limited cranial space with an open-minded right counterpart.

My right mind is open to new possibilities & thinks out of the box. It is not limited by the rules & regulations established by my left mind that created that box. Consequently my right mind is highly creative in its willingness to try something new. It appreciates the chaos is the first step in the creative process. It is kinesthetic, agile, & loves my body's ability to move fluidly into the  world. It is tuned in to the subtle messages my cells communicate  via gut feelings, & it learns through touch & experience................

My left brain is particularly gifted at identifying patterns. As a result, it is adept at processing large volumes of information quickly.To keep up with life's experience in the external world, my LM processes information remarkably fast- much faster than my RH. At times my LM may become manic, while my RM has the potential to become lazy.

The difference in speed of thought, information processing and out put as thought, word or deed, between our 2 hemispheres, is in part link to their unique abilities to process different types of sensroy information. Our LB perceives the longer wavelengths of light. As a result, the visual perception of our RM is somewhat blended or softened. This lack of edge perception enables it to focus on the bigger picture of how things relate to one another. Similarly our RM tunes in to the lower frequencies of sound that are readily generated by our body gurgles & other natural tones. Consequently, our RM is biologically designed to readily tune in to our physiology.......

One of the most prominent characteristics of our LB is its ability to weave stories. This story-teller portion of our LM's language center is specifically designed to make sense of the world outside of us, based upon minimal amounts of information. It functions by taking whatever details it has to work with, and then weaves them together in the form of a story. It's brilliant in it's ability to make up stuff, & fill in the blanks when there are gaps in its factual data. It's genius in it's ability to manufacture alternate scenarios. And if it's a subject you really feel passionate about, either good or bad, it's particularly effective at hooking into those circuits of emotions & exhausting all the " what if " possibilities.

As the LB enthusiastically manufactured stories that it promoted as truth, it had a tendency to be redundant- manifesting loops of thought patterns that reverberated through the mind over & over again. These loops of thought run rampant & we find ourselves habitually imaging devastating possibilities. Unfortunately as a society , we do not teach our children that they need to tend carefully the garden of their minds. Without structure, censorship, or discipline, our thoughts run rampant on automatic. Without management of what goes on inside our brains, we remain vulnerable to not only what other people think about us, but also to advertising and/or political manipulation.

My Right brain is all about right here, right now,

Sadly, the expression of compassion is often a rarity in our society. May of us spend an inordinate amount of time and energy degrading, insulting, and criticizing over selves and others for having made a 'wrong' or 'bad' decision. When you berate yourself, have you ever questioned: who inside of you is doing the yelling and at whom are you yelling? have ou ever notice how these negative internal thought patterns have the tendency to generate increased levels of inner hostility and/or raised levels of anxiety? And to complicate matters even more, have you noticed how negative internal dialogue can negatively influence how you treat others and, thus, what you attract?

As biological creatures, we are profoundly powerful people. Because our neural networks are made up of neurons communicating with other neurons in circuits, their behavior becomes quite predictable. The more conscious attention we pay to any particular circuit, or the more time we spend thinking specific thoughts, the more impetus those circuits or thought patterns have to run again with minimal external stimulation.

In addition, our minds are highly sophisticated " seek and ye shall find" instruments. We are designed to focus in on whatever we are looking for. If I seek red in the world then I will find it everywhere. perhaps just a little in the beginning, but the longer I stay focused on looking for red, then before you know it, I will see red everywhere.

My 2 hemisphere personalities not only think about things differently, but they process emotions and carry my body in easily distinguishable ways. My RH is all about right here, right now, It bounces around with unbridled enthusiasm and dose not have a care in the world. It smiles a lot and is extremely friendly.

In contrast my LH is preoccupied with details & runs my life on a tight schedule. It is my more serious side.It clenches my jaw & makes decisions based upon what it learned in the past. It defines boundaries and judges everything as right/wrong or good/bad.

My right mind is all about the richness of this present moment. It is filled with gratitude for my life and everyone and everything in it. It is content, compassionate, nurturing and eternally optimistic. To my right mind character, there is no judgement of good/bad or right/wrong, so everything exists on a continuum f relativity. It takes things as they are and acknowledges what is in the present. The temperature s cooler today than yesterday. It doesn't care. Today it will rain. It makes no difference. It may observe that one person is taller than another, or this person has more money than that person, but these observations are mad without judgement. To my right mind, we are all equal members of the human family. My right mind does not perceive or give heed to territories or artificial boundaries like race or religion.

One of the greatest blessings I received as a result of this hemorrhage is that I had the chance to rejuvenate and strengthen my neuro-circuits of innocence and inner joy.

I was fluid & my spirit was at ONE with the universe

Making the decision to recover was a difficult, complicated and cognitive choice for me. On the one hand, I loved the bliss of drifting in the current of the eternal flow. Who wouldn't? It was beautiful there. My spirit beamed free, enormous, and peaceful. In the rapture of an engulfing bliss, I had to question what recovery really meant. Clearly there was some advantages to having a functional left hemisphere (LH). It would allow me the skills of interacting with the external world again. In this state of disability, however, attending to what I perceived as chaos was pure pain, and the effort it would take for me to recover, well, was that my priority?

Honestly, there were certain aspects of my new existence that I preferred over the way I had been before. I was not willing to compromise my new insights in the name of recovery. I liked knowing I was fluid. I loved knowing my spirit was at ONE with the universe and in flow with everything around me. I found it fascinating to be so in tune in to energy dynamics and body language. But most of all, I loved the feeling of deep inner peace that flooded the core of my very being.

I yearned to be in a place where people were calm and valued my experience of inner peace. Because of my heightened empathy, I found I was overly sensitive to feeling other people's stress. If recovery meant that I had to feel like they felt all the time, I wasn't interested. It was easy for me to separate my 'stuff' and emotions from other people's 'stuff' by choosing to observe but not engage. As MW puts it, " Could I rejoin the rat race without becoming a rat again?"