Читать книгу Your Journey to Success: How to Accept the Answers You Discover Along the Way - Kenny Weiss - Страница 19

As we experience an emotion repeatedly, we create something called a neural pathway—a series of neurons that connect to send signals to other regions of our brain. A great metaphor is sledding in the winter down a hill. With freshly fallen snow, there are no tracks to follow. We can go anywhere we want, as nothing is guiding us down a particular portion of the hill. With each successive trip down that hill, the ruts and grooves become deeper and as a result we can get stuck. No matter how hard we try to steer the sled in a different direction, the ruts are too deep. From this point on, we are destined to take the same path down the hill every single time. Our brain loves this because it knows the path. It’s repeatable and familiar. As long as we are alive, we will continue to go down that same path—even if it is a horrific ride. To get unstuck, we need to go back to the top of the hill and forge a new, unfamiliar track. That’s our solution. We need to retrain our brains.

This book shares new concepts, so be patient with your brain. You may choose to read the book several times as you get your brain comfortable. That way our amygdala can quiet down, our hypothalamus can fire new chemicals, and our hippocampus can start storing new, more positive feeling memories. This will allow us access to thought and reasoning. If our life isn’t where we want it, it’s because we have experienced an emotional marker that fires repeatedly and has created a system that is working against us. Our sled has not left that track for years. Until we address that emotional marker, we cannot change. Thoughts alone will have little effect. To create a new neural pathway, we must address the emotion and rework it and the accompanying belief structures. To do that, we need to go toward that original trauma. We need to become an expert in all of it, including the resulting fear, self-victimizing shaming behaviors, and the denial we use to guard it. If we don’t do this, we are destined to ride that treacherous track the rest of our life.