Determine how you personally best take in information and which of your senses are the strongest

 

Exercise:

You will need assistance from a trusted friend to help you do the following exercise. Please allow that person to slowly read the following to you.

 

Sit comfortably in your chair and relax. When comfortable, please close your eyes. Feel the weight of yourself rest deeply in the chair and take some slow, deep breaths and relax even more deeply with each exhalation.

Picture yourself standing barefoot in your kitchen. It is early in the morning and the floor is cold under your feet. Please walk across the room towards the refrigerator hearing your feet meet the floor. Take you dominant hand and reach for the refrigerator handle. Give the handle a tug and feel and hear the vacuum release and maybe feel the cool air rush out of the fridge and hit your face and body. Although most days you may not have a lemon in your fridge; today you do. You see a bright yellow, healthy lemon sitting right there on the shelf in the fridge. Take your non-dominant hand and reach for the lemon feeling the bumpy cool skin in your hand. Now take that lemon across the kitchen the counter where you would normally cut up fruits and vegetables. Take out your favorite cutting board and knife that you would normally cut up fruits and vegetables with. Now with your non-dominant hand hold the lemon securely on the cutting board and take the knife in your dominant hand and cut the lemon end to end. As you do this you may notice that lemon juice spills all over the counter. Pick up the half of lemon to your nose and smell that fresh lemon scent. Now put the lemon down and cut it again end to end creating a wedge. Now pick up that lemon wedge and put in in your mouth, biting into the lemon and allowing the juice to squirt all over your teeth and tongue and cheeks and when you have enough saliva in your mouth, swallow the lemon juice.

Now, open your eyes.

 

What could you see?

What could you hear?

What could you smell?

What could you feel?

What could you taste?

 

Your brain takes in information through your five senses. There is an image, feeling, scent, taste or sound stimulus from outside your body or from within which travels to your amygdala. The amygdala acts like mission control with all these sensory stimuli. As Peg Bain, faculty member at the Benson-Henry Institute of Mind Body Medicine at Mass General Hospital Boston says, the amygdala behaves like our own internal “Houston, we have a problem” mechanism. At the amygdala you either immediately react to the stimuli, ‘bottom up’, or you can pause mindfully and allow the assessment of this stimuli to thoughtfully follow a path where you can respond to the stimuli, using a ‘top down’ process engaging the pre-frontal cortex. Routinely practicing to respond to stimuli; using your power in making a decision to think in a way that has integrity to how you want to live your life, rewires your internal circuitry. This is the concept of neuroplasticity.