Notes to Self

*Taken from a booklet I shared with clients when I worked with people struggling with mental health and addiction issues.

Let’s start with a fact: What you choose to think is what you will feel and what you feel is how you will act. If you think this way on a daily basis and therefore feel this way on a daily basis, eventually your body becomes addicted to this feeling and begins to crave it.
 
Knowing that your thoughts have a profound effect on your emotions is a primary ingredient to every recovery success story of people just like you and from all walks of life.  I urge you to invest yourself in this knowledge.  Read it, know it, memorize it if you must.  I can assure you that it will produce profound and amazing results in all facets of your life.

With the majority of people I have worked with, one consistent response when presenting this idea is, “But I can’t change how I think.  This is who I am, like it or leave it.”  It doesn’t matter whether or not I or anyone else likes or dislikes it.  What should matter to you is how it makes YOU feel. More importantly, you CAN change how you think. It has been proven by science to be a fact.  Here’s how it works:

Inside your brain, there is a tiny chemical factory called the hypothalamus.  It may be tiny, but it is one of the most productive chemical factories in production on the planet! The hypothalamus produces chemicals called peptides.  These peptides are created to duplicate specific emotions, such as: joy, sadness, excitement, fear, relaxation, stress, anger or depression.
 
From the hypothalamus, the peptides are sent to the pituitary gland and then out into the blood stream which contains anywhere from twenty to thirty trillion cells. Each cell has receptor sites.  The peptides dock onto the receptor sites, taking control of the cell, and eventually creating new cells with more receptor sites ready and waiting for that particular type of peptide.

Be the master of your mind rather than mastered by it.

Whatever state of mind has you calm, centered, quiet, and aware - this should be your mental posture.
Whether you are in motion or at rest, maintain your mental posture at all times, steady as she goes, regardless of the task at hand. The ineffable teaching of all teachings resides within this. -md

* Read The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

Street performer Matthew Silver is brilliant and inspiring and impossible to ignore.

The structure of the universe and the laws that govern its growth may be more similar than previously thought to the structure and growth of the human brain and other complex networks, such as the Internet or a social network of trust relationships between people, according to a new paper published in the science journal Nature’s Scientific Reports.

Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience -- and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. How does this happen? According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it "reality." Join Seth for a delightfully disorienting talk that may leave you questioning the very nature of your existence.