Weeds or Wildflowers: Where Does Your Attention Land?

Experiences matter. 
Experiences of worry and anxiety or happiness and love can make real changes in your neural networks. Your attention is like a combination spotlight and vacuum cleaner: It highlights what it lands on and then sucks it into your brain—for better or worse.

There’s a traditional saying that the mind takes its shape from what it rests upon. Based on what we’ve learned about experience-dependent neuroplasticity, a modern version would be that the brain takes its shape from what the mind rests upon. 

Consider two mind-focused options & outcomes:

1. Self-criticism, worries, grumbling about others, hurts, and stress = a brain shaped into greater reactivity, vulnerability to anxiety and depressed mood, a narrow focus on threats and losses, and inclinations toward anger, sadness, and guilt.

OR,
2. Resting your mind on good events and conditions (someone was nice to you, there’s a roof over your head), pleasant feelings, the things you do get done, physical pleasures, and your good intentions and qualities = over time, a brain with a different shape, one with strength and resilience hard-wired into it, as well as a realistically optimistic outlook, positive mood, and a sense of worth.

Reflect back over the past hour, day, week. Where has your mind been resting? 
Are you creating, thus experiencing a life of weeds or wildflowers?

Living mindfully,

Dana

(excerpted -with my amendments- from Dr. Rick Hanson's, Hardwiring Happiness.) 

What's Worth Doing in Your Life? Is It Worth Dying For?

Sushmita Banerjee was committed to helping poor Afghani women receive medicine they would otherwise not have access to. She also wrote about and had a movie made about escaping the Taliban. Until they caught up with her. "They had heard of the dispensary I was running from my house. I am not a qualified doctor. But I knew a little about common ailments, and since there was no medical help in the vicinity, I thought I could support myself and keep myself busy by dispensing medicines. The members of the Taliban who called on us were aghast that I, a woman, could be running a business establishment. They ordered me to close down the dispensary and branded me a woman of poor morals.

"They also listed out do's and don'ts. The burkha was a necessity. Listening to the radio or playing a tape recorder was banned. Women were not allowed to go to shops. They were even prohibited from stepping out from their houses unless accompanied by their husbands. All women had to have the names of their husbands tattooed on their left hand. Virtually all interaction between men and women outside the confines of their own homes was banned."

She was gunned down this week. 

What's worth doing in your life, despite the odds? Are you doing it? 

Passion and purpose,

Dana

Too Much or Too Little - It's Up to You

What is meaningful living if you don't take risks, 

embracing all that comes with venturing into unchartered waters? 

What life-enhancing risk is waiting to be unleashed by you?

What is holding you back? 

Ask yourself, "What will my life be if I choose not to take the plunge?" 
If your answer is, "Not well-lived," then get yourself to the cliff's edge.

Conviction trumps fear when the risk is right. 

Personally, I covet the epitaph: "This Woman Died From Living Too Much."

Supporting you to dive in...rather, to take flight,

Dana