Sunday, July 8, 2012
Question:Self Reflection
How do I foster my own desire to act on what I learn? How does one foster feelings of anticipation, excitement, joy to motivate? What components are important to successfully take into action what one learns? If I have not changed my live and improved the world around me, what would be the point? How do I synthesize and structure the next steps in the process of healing myself?
How can solitude today constitute the right environment for thinking, doing and feeling today but not tomorrow, in the next phase of our lives, when we are living in assisted living facilities?
What gives? Why can we loose our ability to use solitude constructively?
Relationships in Flow
"Most important, in flow, the relationship between what a person had to do and what he could do was perfect. The challenge wasn’t too easy. Nor was it too difficult. It was a notch or two beyond his current abilities, which stretched the body and mind in a way that made the effort itself a delicious reward. The balance produced a degree of focus and satisfaction that easily surpassed other, more quotidian, experiences. In flow, people lived so deeply in the moment, and felt so utterly in control, that their sense of time, place, and even self melted away.”
~ Dan Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Fact?: Lumosity
After playing Penguin Pursuit by Lumosity several times, it finally occurred to me that my fingers were behaving like they did when I was practicing the piano as a child. For a split second I could feel a naturally “measure” taking place in my fingers as my eyes read the image on the screen. One finger drew up from the key while another was ready to go. No damper pedal required.
The thought shattered the effect for me. The flow was gone the very second my brain associated the thought with the feeling.
Fact?: Barriers
Fact?: Sophisticated filter
My thoughts create reality. My thoughts function and process in my overprotective brain. How can it make meaning and process information as well as it does, being that the area it depended on to communicate was invaded by a tumor? It experienced trauma while the mass was cut out, and it was heavily drugged. Yet, it is compelled to make sense of the world around me, even in its crippled state.
It’s having to function in what feels like a semi-permanent survival mode that interferes with my ability to trust my perceptions sometimes. I try to remain aware of this. I try to acknowledge a medical crisis when I am in a medical crisis. My coworkers and family stride through these times. They really are my champions.
The more things that I do, the more variety of things I can do, and (the hardest) the less resistance I have with myself. The healthier I become. The weaker the grip of the distortions.
I know that we all have resistance to transition that everyone needs to actively manage to achieve their maximum success.
I need to hold in-focus an increased awareness of my need to manage my resistance – aggressively, especially as I age.
My plan? The first step is going to be frequently asking myself if I am feeling this resistance.
The second step is asking myself what plan I can implement that will enable me to release it (or dismiss it due to time constraint or such.)
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*** Note to self, I need to research techniques that I can use to release or dismiss the manifestation consistent with the resection of my mind that creeps in to interrupt my in-focus flow.
Initially, I think the technique should include tests of the biased or skewedness of my perception and if it can be tested in a measured way that doesn’t end up sending signals of struggle to my subconscious mind. I must take care to test my perception without sending it into a protective state. The goal is to use minimal dopamine as I move toward mental images and emotions are alignment in a solid way. A flow in a positive solid way toward a mindful awareness.
For some reason, I am thinking of the runner who runs farther the previous day than this particular day. He struggles even though the nights before he had the same quality of sleep and same types of meals. In this example, the only significant difference in his life is an increase in stress.
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What can be sources of resistance? Can I list all of them, regardless of whether I perceive them as relevant to me or not?
- My nonverbal communications sent through my body language, tone of voice, facial expression, or posture.
- My Sense-of-Self or Identity – How I see myself, what I think of myself, or how I feel about myself.
- My Values – Things that are such powerful motivators to me that they don’t require my conscious awareness to influence my choices and actions.
- My Strongly-Held Beliefs – As a literalist who lives in a world perceived in terms of metaphors. Right or wrong…good or bad…helpful can be crippling resistances.
- My Memories and Experiences
- My doing of the same thing as yesterday 90%/75%/70% of the time in what I think about, how many words I say, or how I feel.
- My Survival Needs – like seizure activity.
My self-fulfilling prophecies and self-reinforcing cycles of questioning myself with transparency and brutal honesty. The pay-off is going to be that I am going to relax into my perception of reality that is so correct enough for me.
So little Dopamine, So little Time
‘Many people fail in life, not for lack of ability or brains or even courage, but simply because they have never organized their energies around a goal.’ ~ Elbert Hubbard
My understanding of this quote has changed for me out of necessity.
I always bought the idea that good things come to those who worked. I have always worked a lot. My husband, Bear, thinks I always work, because if I don’t have work to do, I make some.
There have been days when doing this has worked against me. These days would be the ones when I crossed an exhaustion barrier. An extreme example of one of those times is when I chose to return to work 18 days after a surgeon cut a 7 inch incision in my head to remove a brain tumor.
Those days aren’t long gone. They can’t be, because I can’t not be true to myself and I truly enjoy what I choose to do because I do many things enthusiastically for many people.
Consistently, however, my days go much, much better. I am not as physically exhausted or emotionally drained. This is because I navigate my goal every day around my dopamine. I consciously choose not to feel drawn toward too much too fast because I can’t afford to cross my boundaries. I have to respect my body’s physical and my mind’s emotional limitations. I have to manage my resources.
I can choose to wait to approach a situation later, or I can grant myself an allowance for living up to a reduced standard out of necessity because I am doing the best I can.
My world is a very healthy environment where I can choose to live in harmony with myself in a mindful way.
I like that very, very much!
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