What If You Could Become More Than Your Past?
Unraveling Patterns
When we repeatedly think certain thoughts, experience familiar emotions, and respond to life in familiar ways, those patterns become increasingly practiced. Over time, our familiar way of being can begin to feel like simply “who I am.”
This is one reason change can feel so uncomfortable. We aren't only asking ourselves to think a different thought. We may be asking ourselves to step outside patterns of thinking, feeling, and responding that we have rehearsed for years. The familiar can have a powerful pull, even when we consciously want something different.
Mind-Body Biology
What Are You Practicing Becoming?
But our biology is not completely fixed. Research into neuroplasticity, stress, learning, meditation, and mind-body practices shows us that experience can produce measurable changes in the brain and body. What we repeatedly practice matters.
So perhaps the question isn't simply: “How do I stop being who I've been?” Perhaps a more useful question is: “What am I practicing becoming?”
Practicing the Unfamiliar
Imagination gives us a place to begin rehearsing something that isn't familiar yet.
If much of who we are today has been shaped through experience and repetition, then change also requires experience and repetition. Imagination gives us a place to begin rehearsing something that isn't familiar yet.
