Meditation can change your life long before you get to the thousands of hours some say you need. In fact, it offers you a chance to break free from the negative emotional patterns that were created by past experiences. The latest news suggests that it works by helping you deconstruct the predictive mind, which I’ll explain in more detail below. This month, we’ve been talking about curating a comfort apothecary, especially important for those of us who are highly sensitive. So let’s add meditation as a comfort tool for emotional self-care, for gentle healing, and the comfort-centered lifestyle you want to create. In this post, we'll take a look at how meditation rewires the brain, facilitates trauma processing, and helps to create emotional stability. What is the Predictive Mind?Let's start here: your mind thrives on prediction. It uses what it understands about your past experiences to make sense of the present and to prepare for the future. What’s good about that is that it helps us survive. The problem is that it also traps us in negative expectations, beliefs and patterns based on old emotional wounds and/or unresolved trauma. If you're a healer, this is the reason you can't seem to create the emotional healing you've been aiming for in your life. How these Predictive Patterns Develop Imagine your brain as a storyteller. From early experiences, it crafts narratives to predict and explain how the world works. That might include beliefs about relationships, safety, or feelings. And these patterns often repeat because your brain values consistency so much that it will throw you under the bus to get it. Biologically, this is about your brain's reward system and neural pathways, which are like a well-worn groove in the mind, as I understand it. Psychologically, it shows up in long-established habits, beliefs, and emotional conditioning. Over time, these predictive patterns solidify, and that’s what influences our choices and behavior. It's why we struggle to make the changes we want. And it's why we need to let go of self-blame and wrap ourselves up in compassion, instead. How Past Experiences Put the Kibosh on Your Daily LifeUnprocessed feelings and unresolved traumas influence everything—your reactions, your decisions, and everything you believe about who and how you are. For those of us who are highly sensitive, this can be especially overwhelming. We absorb the thoughts and feelings of others and carry pain from the past into the present moment, and that makes it harder to feel grounded or clear. And as I mentioned, it’s frustrating for those of us who are healers, being strongly motivated to heal ourselves but often unable to do so. That frustration, along with the feelings of failure and inadequacy, is why I focus on healers in doing the work I do. I understand that challenge from the inside. How Meditation is the Fix |
Hi, I'm JeanineI help highly sensitive, awakened healers come home to themselves & create emotional healing, comfort and joy through gentle self-tending techniques and warm, cozy rituals. Want to try one today? Just click the graphic below. Archives
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