Reprogram Your Brain (Live 29 Jul 2022)

Namaskaram everybody.

Good morning,

Good afternoon,

Good night,

Wherever you are.

We're going to have a good session today.

Today is really about understanding the science and practicality aspects of how to reprogram the brain and how to utilize modern science and the research that's been done on neuroplasticity and neurogenesis to aid in our spiritual practice,

To bring about change in our lives and really understand that we are constantly evolving beings and we can actually reprogram,

Rewire the brain as we see fit.

And it might sound a bit heady,

It might sound a bit complex to you,

But it's actually can be broken down quite simply and that's ultimately my goal today is to not complicate this material.

When it came into my life and I started studying neuroplasticity,

I was amazed by the stories.

So if you guys have got any stories to share,

I would love to hear them.

I think everyone does have a story that's in some way related to neuroplasticity because what neuroplasticity is,

Is really the remodeling of the brain and we remodel our brain every time we learn something and every time we forget something.

And this is constantly happening.

The brain is a use it or lose it kind of organ.

So if we're not really using it,

It starts to fade away.

It gets the signal from us,

It understands that if it's not being used,

It's not being useful and therefore it's not needed.

So the more that we use our brain and more importantly how we use our brain is really important for our health,

Our wellbeing,

Our quality of life.

So these are all things to consider when looking into this field.

Before we begin,

I'd like to introduce myself.

My name is Elliot Chavez.

I've been on Insight Timer for about five years now.

I'm a bit of an OG at this point and I'm a meditation instructor.

I'm a spiritual guide,

A sound healing artist,

Music producer and engineer.

And I use all these different modalities to facilitate healing and self-expression so that we can truly discover our ultimate nature by learning how to turn inward and becoming reflective,

Becoming still,

Becoming silent.

And in this way,

Our entire lives can be beautified and open up and blossom.

One of the biggest things that I can testify with neuroplasticity is when you have social groups that kind of keep you from turning inward.

This was my case about seven years ago and beyond.

I had social groups that were very different than what I have now.

And this was a really strong pattern of mine where every time that I would feel this sort of inkling and tendency to go towards myself inside,

I would kind of tense up because I didn't really feel like I had the tools.

I didn't feel like I had the vision to be able to do that.

I had learned meditation in my teens.

I had picked up yoga in my twenties,

But it still wasn't like my practice.

Still wasn't really my way.

I still felt like I was just picking up something from outside and putting it on my head.

Really silly.

And then,

You know,

While I'd sit in meditation or while I'd practice yoga,

It didn't feel like I was really taking it in inside of myself.

It was still something that I picked up and then put down.

And this was my conditioning.

This was the way that I was conditioned to think.

This is the way that I was really understanding these forms of inner well-being.

And so unconsciously,

I actually chose friends who kept me in that place,

Who kept me at bay from really going out and exploring the deep seas of my inner world,

Of my consciousness.

And so I was actually wiring myself.

You know,

This is one of the ways that we can program our brain is through our social circles because when we don't want to be challenged in our thoughts,

In our beliefs,

In our way of seeing things,

We will,

You know,

Choose people to be with,

Choose people around us who keep us in that place,

Who keep us from not questioning those things,

Who keep us from,

You know,

Going deeper into that one aspect of life because we really don't know what we're doing or we don't feel comfortable or we have a lot of shame or we have a lot of doubt surrounding it.

And for me,

I had a lot of doubt surrounding really how far meditation and yoga could take me.

And instead,

You know,

I focused on my arts.

I focused on music.

I focused on visual arts.

I focused on lots of different distractions.

Those were the better ones.

Those were the more healthier ones.

But I chose people to be around me who kept me locked in this sort of state of repetitive nature,

Where I kept cycling through the same stuff.

Me and my friends were not creating new ideas and things around what life was.

We were just adding more and more of our own fabrications and impressions and becomes a bit of a think tank,

Right?

And if you don't refresh that think tank,

It can get stale.

And I was feeling really stale.

I was feeling like this,

You know,

I was feeling the tension from not being able to fully go into the mindfulness practices and the science of yoga and everything going on there.

So I felt kind of trapped there.

And then I trapped myself again by creating a social circle that was not exploring any of these sort of dimensions of life.

And so after a while,

I wasn't really receiving any new information regarding any of this stuff or anything at all,

Really.

So this is a trap.

This is a trap of the ego because the ego doesn't want to be,

It doesn't want to be threatened.

Right?

And no one wants to be threatened.

But this depends on how open you are to what life is that shows you what you're truly capable of handling in any given moment.

And so you start to become insular in this way.

We start to become insular in the sense that we surround ourselves with people who agree with us and people who,

You know,

Think the same way,

Believe in the same things and everything just starts to sound homogenous and feel homogenous and look homogenous.

And we become,

You know,

Stagnant in a sense.

And this is really important because this is not how the brain wants to,

This is not how the brain is going to naturally flourish as an organ or as our means of,

You know,

Perception.

Because as you know,

The mind is partially controlled and powered and housed by the brain.

So if we're continually surrounding ourselves with people and things and activities and things to do that keep us in a certain pattern of life,

It's time to shake that up.

It's time to look at this on a deeper level and ask yourself,

Is this leading me towards where I want to go?

Is my current social life,

The way it's constructed,

Leading me into a world that is more magical,

More profound,

More delightful than what I'm currently experiencing?

Because if it's not,

I'm going to tell you right now,

It's okay to change it up.

And you can do that.

You might have certain karmic ties to people and things that are happening that are really intense and you think,

How could I ever get away from this person?

How could I spend enough time away from this person without them losing it or questioning me or making my life harder?

The question I ask you now is,

What is the price for your stagnancy?

For me,

When I was going through my stuff about seven years ago,

I was starting to feel like I was being poisoned every time I went to hang with my friends and to do the things that we did.

I would be on some level having fun,

Enjoying myself,

But this was like my old self that was enjoying all this stuff.

There was another part of me that was crying out for change,

That was dying for transformation to occur.

I felt it coming up.

I felt it starting to bubble up to the surface more and more and more.

And that made me angry.

That made me unsettled because it was the truth.

Can anyone relate to when you're going through some sort of shift in your life and things start coming up to the surface and you just instantly get agitated?

And this is why meditation helps so much because it allows us that time that we create,

That we cultivate within ourselves to simply observe,

To bring ourselves into such a state where we can watch things internally take place without having to react,

Without having that knee jerk reaction.

But having those knee jerk reactions,

Having those impulses,

Having those things come up is the practice.

So not to put ourselves down when this stuff happens to create that clear reflective plate between ourselves,

What we truly are and our mind between that which we truly are physically and our real self.

And those intense emotions and our real self.

So this is really part of our journey,

You know,

Recreating our social circles because this is something that once you have the ability to retrace the steps and go back in time and figure out why you are actually connected to this person,

Why you're actually attracted to this person,

Why YouTube met,

You can really see how everything has built itself up until now.

And so this is part of the wiring of our brain,

Right?

There's reasons why these things happen.

There's reasons why this person's in your life.

There's a reason why you have this social circle.

There's a reason why you have these habits.

And we don't need to dissect everything and try to understand every little single detail of our life.

But we do need to understand how we feel about what we're experiencing as a result of these factors in our life.

Because if you don't really take a close look at the things in your life,

It's going to be happening in automatic.

It's going to be happening in a way of autopilot.

So if we want to reprogram our brain,

If we want to create a new life for ourselves,

Then ultimately we have to change our perception about things.

That perception,

Our way of going through life is going to be very clumsy and it's going to be as if we are the victim,

Right?

Why is this happening to me?

I can't believe this person again has done this to me.

How could they say that about me?

What are they thinking?

Why can't anything go right for me today?

These are the sort of,

This is the sort of inner dialogue that we have with ourselves when we don't see what's actually happening in our lives and things just keep happening over and over and over again.

Something that I can definitely relate to and I'm sure many of us can relate to here,

Because that negativity that we feel,

That we sense,

You can wrap it up and dress it however you like.

But ultimately that negativity that we're sensing is our own resistance to ourselves.

That is the space,

The negative space that has been created between what we are and all of life.

And if we've allowed this space to take hold and to grow,

It takes a lot of strength and a lot of courage to close that gap,

To be able to really send yourself that love again,

Because in a sense we've turned against ourselves.

So your love for yourself is coming back and it's making waves and it's filling up that negative space with compassion.

The love inside of you is blossoming and that is necessary because if you don't love life,

Then you're not going to love yourself.

There's so much talk about self-love,

Self-belief,

Self-confidence,

Self-this,

Self-that.

And from a distance I understand this is an important concept for a lot of people to understand that they need to give love for themselves.

They need to have a solid structure of self in order to want to even care about the self and take care of the self.

But I find this a bit silly because we are life.

Your life is precious and valuable and if you know that and if you take that into your experience and you just sit down and breathe for five minutes focusing on how valuable and precious and meaningful you being alive is,

You'll naturally take care of yourself,

You'll naturally give yourself love.

You know what I'm saying?

Does that make sense?

If you understand the value of brushing your teeth,

You don't have to create a mantra to brush your teeth every day.

If you understand the value of putting good food in your body,

You won't need a thousand diets to tell you what to eat.

If you understand the value of a friendship,

The meaning that that friendship holds for you when you hold it in your hand and you keep it close to you,

You don't need to be reminded to call that person up every once in a while and wish them well and ask them if they want to hang out.

So if you really know the value of your own life,

Then you don't need to be brought into this whole self-love world because you'll naturally be love.

If you appreciate life and if you enjoy the life that you have,

Then you will love yourself naturally because the love that you feel is naturally coming from inside.

It's not that you're renting it from somewhere else or you're getting it from over there.

It's within you.

You are life and therefore you will be in love with life if you're connected with it.

It's like the whole spiritual world is on the self-love kick where we have to really convince ourselves to love ourselves.

I think it's much more effective to focus on how beautiful life is and how appreciative we can feel for being alive that brings up all of this love anyways so we don't need to love ourselves because we realize we are love and if we inhabit that love fully and we appreciate life fully and we are in awe of everything that is here before us,

The self naturally springs forth like an overflowing well of love within us.

And part of what Robin says reminds us again of what neuroplasticity is because neuroplasticity builds new neural networks for anything that we do and anything that we become with repetition.

So just like my story of,

You know,

Reshaping my social life,

I distinctly remember at some point when I started to cull my friends list,

I started working from the outside in,

Yeah?

So I kind of created,

I actually created a diagram.

I find that visual diagrams help me so much with what I'm thinking and feeling and going through.

So I created three bubbles.

The core was me and then there was three layers around that and so I had my inner group,

You know,

My closest family members,

My closest friends,

A couple of my colleagues that I was working with and then I had another group,

People that were friends.

I considered friends and of course family members,

You don't have a choice there,

Right?

And then there was the acquaintances,

The outer layer,

The people that I run into every once in a while,

People that I have a connection with,

But I'm not maintaining the upkeep of that that's very low maintenance.

And I started to ask myself,

Okay,

I'm trying to do the path of least resistance here,

The middle way,

So I'm going to start to find people in that outer circle who I feel are not really adding value to my life.

People that may have some sort of energy about them that is unsettling for me and I'm going to take a look at that over the next week and what I found was the closer I got in this diagram of leaving people where they were and not engaging with them,

I had so much more energy.

I had so much more energy because they were actually psychic vampires,

Most of them.

Those were the first people that was the thing that I noticed the most about my life as I started to do this experiment was I just had so much more energy,

So much more freedom going forward.

People were sucking my energy and I've always been someone who really freely gives my time and really openly wants to help others and I make myself available for a lot of different people.

And so I always felt really busy,

You know,

I always felt really taxed out like end of the week I needed to party,

I needed to relax,

I needed to do stuff because I was spent from spending the whole week in service,

Working hard,

Giving up my all,

Never saying no to anyone.

And I started to realize these people that I first stopped engaging with in my life were actually just psychic vampires in my life.

They were picking on me whenever they needed something and they would take and they would take and they would take without giving anything in return.

So immediately I felt this liberation,

Immediately I felt this wealth of time and energy coming my way and I was like,

Wow,

This is really good.

I'm off to a good start.

I thought this is gonna be great.

I'll get all the way to the center and I'll just have cleared out everything and everything will be just so nice and clear and good and I'll just be happy.

Great.

So I just kept going and this was actually rewiring me from the beginning.

The sensory input that I was engaging with throughout this,

You know,

Experiment was changing drastically and so my brain was being rewired as I went through this calling process but it got complicated,

Right?

Because the closer I got to me,

Those layers of social spheres got more and more complex.

And so I realized the people that we bring close to us,

The people that we allow into our homes,

The people that we share our most intimate moments with,

We share a very strong bond.

We share a strong karmic bond that shows us where we are truly at in our lives.

And so I realized,

Holy moly,

Like our social spheres,

Our social life reflects actually where we are in life in some way,

In some profound deep reflective way.

Our social life shows us how we're living,

How we're prioritizing certain things in our life,

How we're prioritizing taking care of ourselves.

It reflects how we're spending our time.

Where's our free time go?

Look at your social circle.

And so I was rewiring my brain that entire time because I was ultimately using my brain in such a different way during this time.

I wasn't using it anymore to keep certain people at just a distance because I wasn't actually quite comfortable with them being around,

But I didn't want to make them feel bad.

So I didn't tell them no.

I still said yes.

They came around,

We spent time together,

Something happened.

I still didn't feel right.

So I still kept them at bay.

This was energy I was expelling just to manage keeping this person from coming too close or and going too far away.

And when we stop interacting with someone or a certain,

You know,

Quality of energy with people,

We start to lose those patterns.

We start to actually reshape the way that we are operating and conducting ourselves because they influence us.

So when we retire and stop reading or keeping a calendar or driving or,

You know,

The skills that we had to do our job,

Those skills start to diminish.

So it makes sense that if we stop interacting with certain people in our lives,

We start to also reprogram our brain because we're not surrounded by that energy anymore.

And we can now have that deeper reflection for us to understand what's really going on.

And what I found was a lot of these people that I had in my life that I was calling,

Especially at the start,

I was subconsciously choosing these people to keep me distracted from being able to fully focus on myself because I knew deep down inside that once I fully focused on myself,

Everything was going to change.

Everything's going to change.

And this is really at the heart of reprogramming your own brain.

Because if you want to do the work,

You're going to find results.

They may not always be the results that you were intending for.

That's okay.

Because you can refine your practice.

You can refine your approach.

You can refine your perspective.

You can build your stability as you go through a certain process.

Your intention focuses your brain on why you want to build that neural network and sustains your effort through all the mistakes that you make until you reach automatacy.

Automatacy is when something becomes clearly established in your life,

In the way that you're doing and being so that it becomes automatic.

It's no longer something that you have to strive for every single day,

Every moment.

So if you persist,

That new intention,

That new focus will become an automatic skill.

You will reinvent who you are because when you persist at doing something,

You are putting your energy into something that is going to create a change in your life.

If you just turn your head and look that way,

Instead of looking this way where your head was turned,

If you just move your head over this way,

Your reality has changed.

You're no longer looking and able to focus on stuff over there.

You're only able to now look and focus on stuff over here.

Just by turning your head,

You change your very reality.

But if you have so much nonsense and things going on in your mind that take control of everything that you see,

Then it doesn't matter where you look.

That's why people are usually feeling so trapped in life and so at an end to things because your mind has become the dominant experience in their lives.

If your mind is dominating everything that you experience and sensorily pick up in the world,

Then it doesn't matter where you look because everywhere you look,

You're going to still be seeing through these tainted lens,

This filtered lens.

And so that's why it's always really important that we focus on changing our inner perception.

Either that thought or it's going to create a desire for a new thought.

So every time we have a thought,

We're restructuring our brain in some way.

We're either reinforcing a certain neural network or we're deconstructing something.

This is where meditation really comes into play because if we meditate,

True meditation is not to go deeper and deeper and deeper inside our own psyche.

For answers,

It's to experience what's already there so that we know what we have been creating this whole time.

What are you?

Most people think that they are their job,

Their partners,

Their family,

Their money,

Their car,

All these things.

These are not you.

This is your lifestyle.

These are accessories to life.

What you are is a limitless being,

So incredibly complex that there's no other more sophisticated creature on this planet that we know of.

You are the highest form of evolution that you know of.

You can use this,

This incredible power of the body,

Mind,

Emotions to grow exponentially,

To explore your potential and to realize that you were always,

Always,

Always meant for liberation,

Meant for a meaningful,

Fulfilling,

Extraordinary life.

You were never set in stone.

You were never concretized.

You were never owned.

This is the thing about your inner space,

The place that you can develop and cultivate in meditation.

It's that no one can touch that.

No one can mess with that.

Someone might be able to dominate you physically.

Someone might be able to take control of you,

But they can never enter your personal inner space.

This is your cosmic self.

This is your space within the space.

This is your inner world.

And so to access the power of neuroplasticity to enhance the mental functions of your brain,

You really have to persist because without persistence,

Without a daily practice,

Errors will come up and we'll take those errors personally and we'll go,

Oh,

You know what?

I'm never going to actually make it.

I'm not going to be able to persist enough.

If you think in this way,

Then for sure it won't happen.

And it's okay to ask for help.

It's okay to acknowledge that some days you're not going to feel like persisting.

You know,

Ask anyone with a major injury,

Did you feel motivated every single day?

No,

They did not.

Some days the body is calling for deep,

Deep rest.

So naturally the body's going to send a signal sometimes that it just needs a rest and that's natural.

But if we want something to pay off,

We need to have the vision in place and then we need to have a plan for how to execute,

How to actually do the things that we say we want to do because the persistence will pay off and the skill will get easier and stronger.

But only if you truly want it,

Only if you truly set yourself up for success.

So I've got a question for you all.

I want you to take a moment to sit in meditative posture or lie down and I want you to start focusing on your breath.

Take a few cleansing breaths in through the nose,

Out through the nose.

Focusing the natural rhythm of your breath,

What it feels like to simply sit here breathing.

You might notice some sounds,

You might notice my voice.

Any sort of sensation that comes up in your field of awareness,

We're just going to acknowledge it and then let it pass with the breath.

Every time that we exhale,

We're allowing a deeper resonance of being to take place.

Every time that we release the air from the body,

We're noticing something is allowing to happen,

A sweet surrender.

As we start to create some space between what we really are and our mind,

Thoughts start to lose their magnetism.

As we start to create some space between what we really are and our bodies,

The sensations of the body and needs of the body start to dissipate and lose shape.

When we start to create some space between what we really are and our emotional content,

We begin to start noticing what life is like as it truly is.

Take a few more deep breaths through the nose,

Out through the nose.

Just feeling how good it feels to fill up the body with fresh air and then release it to become ready for a new breath.

Now that our attention is facing a bit more inward,

I want you to reflect on this question.

How have you developed skills and reinvented yourself to be the person you are today?

How have you developed skills and reinvented yourself to be the person you are today?

Just take this question inside of yourself,

Allow it to take seat,

Create some gentle space for it to be with you and explore it gently,

Gently.

Let's take a few more deep breaths through the nose.

What you might notice is that there are layers upon layers upon layers of skills.

Traits,

Incarnations of yourself to be where you're at today.

It was no small feat.

You are the conglomeration of many,

Many different impressions,

Beliefs,

Assumptions about life,

Practical skills that it took to survive and thrive in this world.

All of these aspects that you're aware of now allowed you to rely on the neural networks that provide the action you want.

All of the skills and all of the ways that you have created what you perceive as you has created neural networks in your brain in order to make the action you want happen,

Right?

Now I want you to see yourself,

Visualize yourself with your eyes closed as you,

Just as you are,

Just as you might be sitting right now lying down.

And now I want you to layer by layer lift these aspects of yourself,

These skills,

These ways that you've created yourself.

Just want you to see them lifting off.

And with each layer that comes off might be this skill,

Might be this moment in time that shaped you.

Every time that you see this layer come off of the body,

There's a sensation that goes along with it.

With each layer that comes off,

You feel lighter.

And every time this layer comes off,

Another breath,

Another conscious breath where the exhalation feels lighter.

Layer by layer.

Layer by layer,

We get closer to what we really are.

Layer by layer,

We're becoming lighter and lighter.

Layer by layer,

We are becoming more available to grace and the natural unobstructed nature of our essence.

What are we without these skills?

What are we without all of these reinvented versions of ourself?

Do you see in yourself as you are free from all these layers?

As you get closer and closer to the core of what you are,

You notice that there's a little bird waiting to take flight at the center.

There's a part of you that is the bird.

What part of that do you identify with?

What part of yourself is the part of you that is ready to take flight and go somewhere new?

Where does this new you long to be in the world?

Unlayering,

Uncovering,

Pulling back all these layers.

The real you is starting to emerge and you now start to feel like you can start to open your wings and take flight.

Where would you go now with this liberation,

This freedom,

This lack of self holding you back?

Where would you go now?

Where would you go now?

Where would you go now?

Where would you go now?

Where would you go now?

Where would you go now?

Where would you go now?

Where would you go now?

Where would you go now?

Where would you go now?

Allow this bird spirit to enter you and guide you as you go forward into life,

Into rewiring who you are and how you perceive.

You do not stop growing after childhood.

You are in every way continually growing and changing throughout the lifespan.

You are refining your architecture,

Your intelligence and your functionality throughout every single day.

As we come to the end of this practice,

Take a nice deep cleansing breath in through the bottom of the belly,

Activating your diaphragm,

Bringing lots of fresh,

Fresh,

Fresh air into the body.

And on the exhale,

Give a little sound,

A hum,

Allow yourself to vibrate.