Brain Gardens
First Post. Being human takes practice. Practice requires attention. Our attention is divided. What we pay attention to grows.
Welcome to this new space! I recommend that you read the ABOUT section first.
Can you hail your attention here during the time of this reading? Imagine you are hailing a cab. To help with that practice, I’ll try my best to keep these letters short. No promises though since I am an Infectious Disease doctor and our brains are gluttons for information and history.
History matters. Environment matters. History and environment together matter intensely. Take for example how all of us were formed in our mother’s womb. The health of our formed parts is reliant on receipt or absence of nourishment. Some of our brains are maladapted at birth. I am one such person born with a brain disadvantage. I was marinated in the toxic amniotic fluid of a very severely bipolar mother. I was pieced together in an ecologically unhealthy environment in utero. In addition to that, like many others, I had a lifetime of after-birth trauma. My traumatized brain struggled to grow, thrive, regulate, and endure the vicissitudes of life after birth. This truth shapes my inability, at times, to make healthy life choices.
The direct and indirect trauma of COVID has impacted every single human being on the face of the planet. Many people who experience trauma of any kind, no matter where the origin, struggle with brain maladaptations. It is because our complex brain is trying to protect us. We typically know the most extreme maladaptation to be stigmatized as “mental illness.” You may see this present in a wide range of ways.
Life choices are often determined by what our brain pays attention to or doesn’t pay attention to. What we pay attention to directly impacts our stress levels. This is a psychological and physiological truth. When we are stressed we kick off a pro-inflammatory cascade that creates a perfect storm for disease as noted by Dr. Gabor Mate. Stress makes us sick. In fact, due to stress, I have collected a few autoimmune diseases along this path. In autoimmune disease, there is immune dysregulation and our body attacks itself. Origins of which are rooted in self-abandonment (literally the body attacks self).
Another hard truth is that what we don’t pay attention to (what we habitually avoid and suppress) causes a setup for disease. The great news is that our thoughts are not fixed. Our mental habit patterns are plastic which gives us the authority to redirect, rewire, restore, and reshape them. This healing practice is a touch like mental gymnastics or Jedi-mind work. It takes practice.
The invitation now is for us to believe that it is okay that our brains are tormented. We must have self-compassion to do this kind of work. We have admittedly all been through so much. Can tending to the milieu of our tormented brains actually help us see a way through difficult times ahead?
The call to action is to recognize our power to rewire traumatized brains. Facing our own darkness without judgment and our humanness with compassion is the superpower. In the landscape of our brains, we are capable of composting the old and planting new seeds. See below for the first biohack. I appreciate your attention and would love your support by sharing with others.
Biohack #1: Imagine you have found an old plot of land and the plot of land is the environment of your brain. The first step is to see what you are working with here. Are there salvageable vegetables/ flowers, rotting plants, weeds, gophers, or parasites? Imagine the various plants representing your thoughts. What is the condition of the soil? What is the weather like? Start with just observations here with no judgment. It can look like spending 1 hour or 1 day a week taking note of how much time your thoughts are spent in the past, present, and future as well as what the environment looks like.