Introduction

Being successful at life involves changing a vision of limitation, where one focuses on suffering, to recognizing your potential and envisioning the future that you wish to create.

Rick Hansen talks about mental hygiene (tending to your thoughts, as they create your brain/mind)...neurons that fire together wire together...and why it is SOOOOOOO important what we choose to think.  It is unbelievable to me that recent stats showed that about 50% of our thoughts are negative.  I know that I do not want to spend 50% of my life feeling unhappy.

"Perhaps your mind is running themes of threat, grievance, and loss. Or alternately, perhaps it is running heartfeltness, generosity, kindness to self and others, awakening. Whichever movie we're running, those neurons are firing and wiring together. So learning how to use your mind to shape the wiring of your brain is a profound way to support yourself on the path of awakening."  

Your brain changes your mind.  Your mind changes your brain.  Areas which are stimulated via thoughts - increase their blood flow and over time cortical thickening occurs.  So how can we make these positive changes?  It turns out one of the easiest and most profound ways is through meditation.

Meditation does the following:

Increased interoception - the ability to sense what is happening in your body

Eliminates alexithymia - the inability to express verbally what one is feeling

Increases our ability to see our emotions and gives us time before our reaction

The cortical or thinking layer of our brain gets thicker, preventing memory loss associated with aging

Increases empathy via strengthening our mirror neurons that mimic other people's behaviour and expressions so that we can literally feel what they feel (interestingly this is why people who have Botox have a decreased ability to know what another is thinking.)

Decreases the right frontal lobe activity which was designed to warn us about threat and danger, and increases the left frontal lobe activity which increases our ability to feel happy, loved, empathy and stable.

For me meditation has made all these wonderful changes for my life, but if I had to simplify it even beyond that, meditation allows me to be curious rather than judgmental about myself and allows me to be stable and spacious with whatever arises in my life.

As Rick Hansen says: " you can use your mind to change your brain to benefit your whole being— and every other being whose life you touch."  

Here is the article by Rick Hansen, if you wold like to read more about the effects of meditation: 

MindChangingBrainChangingMind