Finding Neutral to Create Positive Change in Your Life

Finding neutral to create positive change in your life is a way to build greater harmony and balance in your body-mind system. When you feel overwhelmed, stressed, or depleted, finding neutral benefits your ability to slow down so you can become aware and choose what you would like to experience within. By doing so, you become more conscious of sensory input, and focus on what is important to you.

Thoughts create emotions. Emotions create responses. The connection between your thoughts and emotions is tempered by internal beliefs and memories that contribute to your experience of life. In any experience, you can go through a range of feelings that allow you to process or resolve what is happening. Emotional states are different in that they can be the direction or undercurrent of what your feelings are responding to over time. It is important to know that you are not your feelings. They are not tattoos. They are expressions of what you are experiencing in the now like waves on the ocean that ebb and flow.

Emotional states are guideposts. They create opportunities for insight. Your response or reaction to any situation is influenced by your thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. They are not bad or good, however, they can offer you a map to discover what is underneath self-limiting patterns as well as what creates empowering experiences. Finding neutral allows you to choose how you respond to life comes from your ability to work with emotions by noticing their sense of heaviness or lightness, length of time, depth, repetitive thought patterns, self-talk, or feelings.

Finding Neutral to Create Choice

Like going into an automatic car wash, you go in with the intention to clean or wash your car. When you pull into the space, you are asked to place your car in neutral. The purpose of neutral is to separate the action of the engine from the wheels so that you are not idling, moving forward, or backward without choice. At the same time, you are not in park or stuck.

.For the purpose of working with this metaphor, imagine your time inside a car wash. What is your experience while you wait? Can you find neutral in this experience? Begin by bringing your attention to your breathing. What are you experiencing in this moment? What are you feeling inside? Where are you feeling these sensations?

Now bring your focus to what is happening around you. Notice what you see as the water and brushes sweep over the sides of your car. Are you able to then shift your focus to just noticing the sounds of the water on the car? Now return to focusing on your breath. Get in touch with what feels different even if slightly. Finding neutral can expand your awareness and also press reset on where and what you want to focus on next with your experience.

Dis-empowering or empowering beliefs create different perspectives of life. As an example, staying with the car analogy, let’s say two people are on a road trip. One person looks out the window and sees bad drivers, negative bumper stickers, and roadkill while the other person sees a hawk in the sky, and notices cloud formations, and a rainbow. What’s different? It’s the same road, however, it is a different view. You can imagine that the first person’s body stance and visual field are tense with shallow breathing while the second person might be breathing more fully with eyes wide to take in the beauty of the scenery. There might even be a smile on the second person’s face while there could be a grimace on the first. This illustrates how seemingly the same road trip can be completely different stimulated by particular thoughts and emotions. These, then, trigger physical responses.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”~Viktor E. Frankl

Read more about Viktor Frankl’s thoughts on this topic related to Resonance Repatterning here.

Finding Neutral by Working with Your Reticular Activating System

What if you could use finding neutral to choose your attitude and your own way? The Reticular Activating System (RAS) is scattered throughout your brain stem in the Reptilian or Survival Brain. It functions as the gatekeeper of sensory information allowed into your consciousness through selecting what is most important. This influences what you are awake, alert to, and aware of in your environment.

The RAS manages the transition between levels of consciousness and controls what is prioritized with a focus on what is important through the lens of your present reality.

The Reticular Activating System influences your fight or flight response, sleep and wake transitions, motor control, the experience of pain, muscle reflexes, focus, attention, goal-setting, and habituation. The nerve fibers of the RAS region make connections between your body and mind. For the RAS to be triggered, signal activity needs to occur in your sensory pathways, that are connected with it. Your thoughts, emotions, and chemical responses are continuously working with learned behaviors, habits, and conditioning to contribute to your interpretation of sensory input.

It turns out that your Reticular Activating System does not know the difference between what is actual, what is created by triggers from the past or new triggers you create for it. The experience of imagining being inside a car wash is a great example. Neurotransmitters and neuro-associations, the links between sensory input, your thoughts, and emotions create your experience. The fact is that you can find neutral to create new neural pathways to allow a shift in energy levels, neuro-chemicals, and brain states. This happens by using your inner software to create positive change.

Finding Neutral with What is Important to You

Like the RAS, you can consciously choose to ask yourself, “What is important to me?” “What is important to me to create a life of meaning?” “What feels like it no longer needs to have a place in my life?” “What is no longer serving my Highest Good?” “What is limiting me?” and “What lessons have I learned that is important to my life today? And tomorrow?” Consider these questions with compassion for yourself. Expanding your awareness with the narrative of your beliefs, attitudes, and thoughts will begin to shift the story your body-mind system is responding to in the present and begin the process of creating new pathways each time.

Finding Neutral in Your Body-Mind System

Your life story has evolved through different stages over time. Some of the chapters might seem more pleasant than others. However, in each chapter, there are memories that can bring happiness, sadness, hurt, grief, or wonder. Take what is most important from these pages of your life.

Some of these memories intertwine sadness with joy. That’s okay. You need these emotions to know the depth of love, caring, and needs while strengthening your values and connection to your True Self. Reframing your past experiences unlocks freedom and understanding. Take what will serve you in your life today, and create new pages with the gifts of these lessons.

Changing your triggers or cues that cause you to spiral down into negative emotions or thoughts creates proactive benefits to build new patterns. After you take inventory of your goals and positive intentions for what is important in your life, you can also look at what keeps you from moving forward with them. Many times triggers and cues from the past can keep you stuck. There might be environmental, social, or beliefs about your roles in life that contribute to guilt or shame imprinted into your belief system. Examining your roles, your beliefs, and self-limiting responses to life build awareness about what you need to move forward.

As an example, let’s consider music that you are playing on a road trip. Let’s say you are listening to music, and you hear a song that brings you back to an earlier time in your life when you felt sad because it reminds you of a person or relationship. This is a trigger. It can space you out, change your mood, and even make you cry. Negative triggers like sound, environment, smell, or seeing something associated with a painful memory can change how you feel. These triggers are different for everyone. Pain can keep you stuck in places unable to start or move forward with the next steps. So creating life-energizing cues can build a path toward more optimal positive and sustainable change.

This allows you to choose where you focus and place your attention when you feel overwhelmed or depleted. Knowing that you can count on positive actions like getting in touch with your breath, working with an empowering memory, change your body stance to change internal states is beneficial to your body-mind system.

Getting to know what works best for you to shift your focus naturally builds the pathways to positive change. Talking with someone to listen to you on the phone, eating whole foods that nourish your neurotransmitters, taking a walk in nature in the woods or the beach, dancing, or listening to music that calms or inspires you are all examples of ways to shift your focus to life-empowering emotional states, thoughts, and actions to allow you to experience more life-energizing states.

Windows to the Heart Repatterning works with holistic processes designed to re-pattern your life with Resonance Repatterning and Repattern Your Life Coaching. These processes work with natural modalities designed specifically for your body-mind system to create life-enhancing patterns that build integrity in your wellness and well-being!

Kimberly Rex, MS is a certified Advanced Resonance Repatterning® and Master Life Coach. She is also a Person-Centered Expressive Therapist. She works with clients all over the world by phone, Skype, and proxy.

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