Where the energy goes…

… or, where Neuro-linguistic Programming meets Qigong. (And just about everything else!)

If you’ve been hanging around a while, you may know that, once upon a time, a long time ago, I was a surgical nurse. I’ll always remember the first major brain surgery I scrubbed in on.

The surgeon, who was new in those parts, handed me a gizmo that looked like a metal tongue depressor wrapped in clear plastic. Then he said, “hold that right there and don’t touch the yellow thing or he’ll be blind in one eye!”

(Nothing like a little pressure while learning!)

I suppose that was the beginning of my fascination with how our brains work, especially when they don’t look they could do much of anything! It’s been quite a journey. For today, though, I’ll simply tell you that our patient did well and recovered fully.

And now we’ll go on to some pondering that’s more about perception and thought than it is directly about anatomy.

Here’s the best way I’ve learned to explain it:

Where the attention goes, the energy flows.

This is, I believe, the problem with with New Year’s Resolutions, at least as many of us frame them. Quit this. Lose that. Don’t do something else. All negative.

Now, I know that some of you will have learned this trick before and you can just let this be a celebration of how well you’re doing. But, just in case you haven’t, here’s how it works.

Let’s say that someone you know resolves to quit watching TV. (There is no judgement in this example!)

Because our brains don’t do negatives, the attention of quitting TV becomes energy flowing toward – you guessed it! – TV. And the outcome is pretty predictable.

If, instead, that same someone resolved to paint every day, or play the piano, or make more soup, the energy would go toward those desired things and they’d be a lot more likely to happen.

Here’s another way to look at this. With our example of quitting TV, the minute we watch TV, we’ve failed. If, instead, our attention was on painting or playing the piano or making soup, every time we followed through and did one of those things, we’d succeed!

Now I’ve admitted, before, to being a bit of a language junky. Framing things positively makes them a whole lot more likely to happen. And who do you know that doesn’t enjoy success?

So, I am hereby authorizing you to edit any resolutions you may have made into positive aspirations. And, just in case part of you already knew that resolutions weren’t your best thing so you didn’t make any, I’ll encourage you, gently, to let yourself claim your path for 2021 and set out on the journey.

ps… for the last time in this space… at least for the next little while, I’ll ask you, if you live in Georgia, to please, please vote. That’s how we move toward the positive!