Awaken to Wonder
Excerpt from "The Art and Science of Bathology"
When we are young, we play in the tub. To relax as adults, we often turn our bathtub into a home spa, adding bath salts, scented candles, and soothing music. As parents, we fill the tub with bubbles and boats to make the tub a fun place for our children as soon as they are big enough to fit inside one. For most of us, the bathtub is a place we associate with relaxation, play, and revitalization.
When I returned home from Hawaii, one of the first things I did was to create a Hawaiian beach theme for my bath. I bought shells, plumeria scented candles, a shower curtain with deep turquoise waters over linen white sands, and towels to match. I even added Hawaiian music to my bath meditation CD collection. My Hawaiian bath and altar served as triggers to retrieve my memories of Hawaii, but more importantly, they triggered the revitalization I experienced there. These triggers, or what are sometimes referred to as anchors, help reinforce newly formed neural pathways.
Anchors are whatever we see, hear, feel, taste or touch that spontaneously evokes memories and feelings. Anchors can be neutral, negative, or positive. Using my experience as an example, my Hawaiian altar of beads, sand and shells was a positive anchor, where a negative anchor for me might be a letter from an attorney. Anchors help sustain memories and encourage habits.
All habits, whether unintentional or deliberate, are behaviors we repeat often enough that they become hard-wired into our brains. We easily recognize that positive habits, like a vigorous morning exercise routine, are hard to establish, where negative habits, like a vigorous nightly drinking routine, are hard to kick. Yet habits like reliving tired and useless stories we tell about ourselves are mostly unconscious. Neuroplasticity research suggests that left unconscious and unchecked, these daily stories shape our neurology, particularly the stories we tell ourselves when we first wake up.
The old adages "start the day off right" and "I got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning" remind us that the state in which we awaken impacts the rest of our day. Indeed, trying to change the side of bed we get up on is a very profitable industry. In the morning, all over the media are advertisements that try to shape our day with visual and auditory anchors. Just the thought of bacon sizzling or the coffee pot dripping compels us to buy.
While many of us mindlessly take in the morning media machine, some of us begin our day with more mindful morning rituals that may include a walk, jog, meditation, or yoga practice. But what about the stories we use to begin our day? Alone in the shower, negative thoughts and stories may amplify without us being consciously aware of it. We may agonize about an unimaginable future event or relive a horror from our past via the movie playing in the background of our mind. To make us feel and look younger, we buy expensive rejuvenation gels and lotions. Yet as we scrub away yesterday's grime on our bodies, we could be simultaneously allowing the buildup of emotional muck in our brains.
When I returned home from Hawaii, one of the first things I did was to create a Hawaiian beach theme for my bath. I bought shells, plumeria scented candles, a shower curtain with deep turquoise waters over linen white sands, and towels to match. I even added Hawaiian music to my bath meditation CD collection. My Hawaiian bath and altar served as triggers to retrieve my memories of Hawaii, but more importantly, they triggered the revitalization I experienced there. These triggers, or what are sometimes referred to as anchors, help reinforce newly formed neural pathways.
Anchors are whatever we see, hear, feel, taste or touch that spontaneously evokes memories and feelings. Anchors can be neutral, negative, or positive. Using my experience as an example, my Hawaiian altar of beads, sand and shells was a positive anchor, where a negative anchor for me might be a letter from an attorney. Anchors help sustain memories and encourage habits.
All habits, whether unintentional or deliberate, are behaviors we repeat often enough that they become hard-wired into our brains. We easily recognize that positive habits, like a vigorous morning exercise routine, are hard to establish, where negative habits, like a vigorous nightly drinking routine, are hard to kick. Yet habits like reliving tired and useless stories we tell about ourselves are mostly unconscious. Neuroplasticity research suggests that left unconscious and unchecked, these daily stories shape our neurology, particularly the stories we tell ourselves when we first wake up.
The old adages "start the day off right" and "I got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning" remind us that the state in which we awaken impacts the rest of our day. Indeed, trying to change the side of bed we get up on is a very profitable industry. In the morning, all over the media are advertisements that try to shape our day with visual and auditory anchors. Just the thought of bacon sizzling or the coffee pot dripping compels us to buy.
While many of us mindlessly take in the morning media machine, some of us begin our day with more mindful morning rituals that may include a walk, jog, meditation, or yoga practice. But what about the stories we use to begin our day? Alone in the shower, negative thoughts and stories may amplify without us being consciously aware of it. We may agonize about an unimaginable future event or relive a horror from our past via the movie playing in the background of our mind. To make us feel and look younger, we buy expensive rejuvenation gels and lotions. Yet as we scrub away yesterday's grime on our bodies, we could be simultaneously allowing the buildup of emotional muck in our brains.
Every day holds new possibility, and morning (or whenever you awaken from sleep and begin your day) may be an optimal time to turn that destructive habit around. Rather than regurgitating yesterday's troubles, the first moments of our waking day could be better spent refreshing our state of mind. Recent research indicates that "imaginative insights are most likely to come to us when we’re groggy and unfocused. The mental processes that inhibit distracting or irrelevant thoughts are at their weakest in these moments, allowing unexpected and sometimes inspired connections to be made."
When we first get out of bed we have a small but powerful window of opportunity to make the unconscious conscious, since when we first awaken, the unconscious mind is close enough to conscious awareness to catch it, much like recalling a dream. The time we wake up is the ultimate time to awaken; the time to catch ourselves telling ourselves a negative story so that we may replace it with a positive one. Morning primes us to push the reset button in our brain.
