Question of the Month: “Why Don’t I Do What I Want To and How Can I?”

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Welcome Members to our June “Question of the Month.” I’m Kevin Schoeninger.

This month, we’ve been discussing material from Dr. Joe Dispenza’s book, “Evolve Your Brain.” In the first two Weekly Messages, you’ve learned the Four Pillars of Healing, the two laws of brain function, and a practice for rewiring the circuits in your brain.

In this Week’s Message, we’ll discuss why we don’t do what we want to do, why it can be a challenge to live out our best intentions, and how we can overcome that.

If you are a member of SGM, you are a student of personal development and spiritual growth. You are learning insights about how to function at the highest level and practices to enable you to do that. I’m sure that all of you have had the experience that your knowledge is sometimes ahead of your being. We know what to do more than we actually do it. We’ve learned a lot of good stuff, but we don’t live all of it, all of the time.

Why don’t we do what we know is good and best for us and those around us? Why don’t we live what we know 100%? What gets in our way?

The simplified answer to this is that old habits get in the way. We have inherited and learned patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that assert themselves over our best intentions. I call these old patterns our default patterns. Default patterns take over especially in certain circumstances, such as when we are stressed, afraid, angry, tired, or overwhelmed.

When we feel threatened in any way, our hind brain, hardwired, survival habits shut down and override our higher conscious functioning. It takes a good deal of conscious practice to create new conscious patterns that are hardwired in place of these old default patterns. It takes knowledge, skill, and practice to create higher conscious patterns as our default patterns.

We need to practice higher consciousness thoughts, feelings, and behaviors on a daily basis, so that when we get stressed, afraid, angry, tired, or overwhelmed we can draw on these patterns in those moments. When we activate new conscious patterns in times that we would normally revert to old reactive patterns, we change our neural wiring in a significant way.

So the key is twofold: first we need to practice new higher consciousness patterns and second we need to apply them in the moments when our reactive, hind brain, survival patterns would normally dominate.

Let’s talk a little more about the nature of our old habits and why they are so strong, then we’ll talk about how we can strengthen our conscious intentions so that they become the “way we are” at all times.

Recall from last Week’s Message that new learning heavily involves the pre-frontal lobes of the neo-cortex, the front of your brain just behind your forehead. Once something is so thoroughly learned that you can do it without conscious attention, it is recorded in the hind brain, the cerebellum, where it becomes an automatic response that is triggered by appropriate cues in the environment.

For instance, when you are learning to ride a bike, at first you have to really focus on what you are doing. You have to find your center of balance and coordinate your leg motions with your steering motions with looking where you are going. There seem to be many things to pay attention to until you groove the experience. Your pre-frontal lobes house your ability to pay attention and to take in new information and integrate the different areas of your brain that will be involved in the activity that you are learning.

Once you have grooved the sensory-motor skills necessary for riding your bike, control of these pathways is shifted to the cerebellum in your hind brain. The cerebellum stores all your learned patterns.

Why is this important? It’s important to help us understand why we so easily go to our default modes, those patterns that are well-grooved. The body seeks homeostasis, the familiar and routine patterns that make for safe and healthy function and survival. The body tends to return to the familiar patterns stored in the cerebellum. This tendency is strongest when we are stressed, afraid, angry, tired, or overwhelmed.

When we are stressed, afraid, angry, tired, or overwhelmed the body actually shuts down the activity of the pre-frontal lobes and shifts into activation of the hind brain. We go into survival mode. In survival mode we don’t have access to our higher conscious abilities, nor do we have the ability to learn new patterns or even be aware of our capacity to control and choose our way of being. We run automatically on whatever default patterns have been safest for us in the past, on whatever ways we’ve learned to survive.

Now this is good when there is a real physical threat to our survival. However, most of the stresses and overwhelm in our modern society come from mental-emotional stresses. These type of stress are best responded to with the ability to observe, feel, think, and choose that is coordinated by the pre-frontal lobes. The problem is that these functions are shut down when we need them the most. The solution to our challenges lies in the functions of the frontal lobes and these functions are off-line when we are stressed.

For instance, you learn about something that is good for your health, like meditation, exercise, or eating well. You know that you need to do these things, but when you need them the most, such as when you are stressed, afraid, angry, tired, or overwhelmed, you unconsciously shift into old patterns of distraction, lethargy, upset, criticism, and emotional eating that exacerbate a downward spiral. You know what you need to do, but you have neither the powers of attention, the energy, or the motivation to do them. You don’t feel like doing the good stuff even though that is your way out. Those feelings of motivation, curiosity, interest, and energy are shut down.

So what can you do about it? How can you get yourself to do what you know you want and need to do, what is best for you, when you really don’t feel like it?

If you understand how you learn any new pattern and make it a practice to learn and reinforce new patterns, you’ll get good at using them when you need them. You’ll also be able to adjust how you think, feel, and behave as the needs of specific situations require.

Let’s look at four stages of learning and embodying a new pattern to better understand how you can do this. These four stages are drawn from “Evolve Your Brain.” I’ve actually added stage three based on my experience working with people who are making shifts in their lives.

O.K. here are the Four Stages of Learning and Embodying a New Pattern:

1. Semantic learning

2. Episodic learning

3. Conscious shifting

4. Continuous learning

Step One: Semantic Learning

In the semantic learning phase, you learn about a new field of inquiry, activity, or behavior. You learn the principles and concepts behind something, the history of it, and the instructions for doing it well. You might call this the research or “head knowledge” phase of learning.

Most important in this phase of learning is to choose something that you are interested in, so that you will strongly focus your attention on the new information. Focused attention is key to activating the frontal lobes and setting down neural pathways and connections for new information.

In the semantic learning phase, you take in new information and associate it with other concepts and experiences that you’ve had in the past. You look at pictures, listen to instructions and facts, or observe someone else doing what you want to do and record those images and instructions in your brain. In this way, you lay the initial neural tracks that will serve to guide you into your first experiences with this new knowledge.

For example, if you are learning to surf, you meet on the shore with your instructor who tells you about the history of surfing, the kinds of surfboards, the types of waves, wind, and water conditions, and demonstrates the basic maneuvers you will need to get up your first time. This is semantic learning.

Once you have conceptually learned the basics, you are ready to try out your knowledge experientially.

Step Two: Episodic Learning

In the episodic learning phase, you receive practical instruction while doing something. You have a full-body experience. Again focused attention is crucial, yet in this phase, it’s focused attention using all your senses and your felt emotional experience.

Using our surfing example, you’ll first lie on your board on the sand, then learn to get up to a standing position and take a good stance on your board. Then, you’ll go into the water and try to do this with water underneath you and waves propelling you forward.

You get accustomed to the full sensory experience of paddling out, choosing a good wave, positioning yourself in the wave, standing up, riding on your board, falling, recovering, and so on. While your semantic knowledge was important preparation for this, there’s nothing like the full-body experience to really activate the neural circuits in your brain and body. You have to be fully present in your body and exercise your full powers of attention to really learn your new activity.

Along with the sensory experience there is an emotional experience with episodic memory. For example you may be afraid, you may feel exhilarated, you may feel embarrassed when you fall, you may laugh at yourself, and you may feel all these things in the matter of a few minutes.

The stronger your emotional experiences when you are learning something, the stronger that experience and that new pattern will be encoded in your body and your brain. If you repeat your episodic learning enough times with focused attention, you will start to groove a new pattern.

Once this pattern starts to become second nature, you will begin to store it in your cerebellum. You will begin to be able to do that activity without thinking about every little thing. It becomes automatic given the right conditions.

Step Three: Conscious Shifting

In the conscious shifting phase of learning, you learn to apply what you know when the going gets tough, when conditions aren’t just right. You learn to be able to use your new skills when the waves are bigger, when you are tired, or when you feel overwhelmed by the conditions around you. In those conditions, your body is telling you to get off the board and go in to shore. You want to be back on familiar ground.

It’s like when you are kicking an addiction and things are go well until you have a high stress day. In that moment of stress, fear, anger, fatigue, or overwhelm you lose your will power. You want that cigarette. You want to eat a pint of chocolate chunk ice cream. You want to lash out. You want the old, the comfortable, and the familiar even if it is harmful to you and to others.

The conscious shifting phase happens when you learn to activate your new learning in challenging moments. You learn to shift your attention and your experience by choice and by will. For instance, when you are angry and irritable, you take a deep breath and appreciate the other person’s point of view. When you are craving a cigarette, you decide to chew a piece of gum. When you are overwhelmed by your day, you go out for a walk instead of mindlessly vegging out in front of the TV.

The secret to really shifting out of an old pattern is to activate a new pattern at the moment that you are involved in your old pattern. In other words, the moment when you feel stressed, afraid, angry, tired, or overwhelmed is your moment of opportunity. If you can access and shift toward a new pattern, behavior, thought, or feeling in that moment when your old pattern is most active, you will have changed that old pattern right then and there. Even if you can simply shine the light of focused present attention on your old pattern in that moment, if you can observe it without being swept away by it, you will create a conscious shift in that moment.

Conscious shifting is most possible with good preparation. It helps to have grooved your new pattern in conditions of ease, so that you can apply your new habit when times are challenging. For instance, if you meditate on a daily basis, you will have a baseline experience of inner peace that you can return to when you need to.

This is where the importance of daily practice comes in. Daily practice is a way to groove, expand, and refine whatever you want to grow in your life, so that new knowledge or skill is available to you when you really need it.

When you have practiced something enough that it becomes second nature and something that you can shift into at will, you are ready for the final stage of learning and embodiment.

Step Four: Continuous learning

Once you have learned something new very well and practiced it to the point where it is an automatic response stored in your cerebellum, that pattern isn’t new to you anymore. It’s one of your default patterns. At this point, it’s important to shift into a continual learning phase to keep your learning going, to keep you interested, energized, present, focused, and motivated.

One of the main points that Dr. Dispenza makes in “Evolve Your Brain” is to continually involve yourself in new learning, in new experiences, so you continue to make new neural connections and keep your brain adaptive, expansive, and alive. You can do this in infinite ways. You can travel, meet new people, or join a group like SGM that is exploring and supporting you in an area of interest. The key is to try new things and learn new information. Keep following what catches your interest and sparks your imagination. The bottom line is to avoid becoming stagnant.

To do this in a way that makes a difference, the secret is to stay present and focused. Be alert and aware with all your senses. Get feedback from your results, from the environment, and from others on what you are doing and how you can improve.

The number one rule for evolving your brain is this:

Always keep trying and learning new things with focused attention.

At SGM, we do this by exploring new research, by continually asking ourselves the big questions in new ways, and by interacting with each of you to expand and diversify our knowledge, skills, and experiences. In this way, we cooperatively support, motivate, and inspire each other to evolve together.

In that spirit, I would love to hear your questions, comments, and experiences in the Comments section below this Weekly Message.

Also, mark your calendars for our Group Coaching Call next Sunday, June 28^th at the usual times and numbers which are posted on the website.

Until next time,

Happy practicing,

Kevin