How We Become What We Practice

by Peggy La Cerra, Ph.D

The Neuroscience of Being the Change We Want to See

At dawn, midday, afternoon, sunset and evening, Muslims symbolically wash away the profane by engaging in wudu, a ritual cleansing of their face, hands and feet, before performing salat, recitations from the Qur’an. Christians fast, confess their sins and receive absolution before accepting the “body of Christ.” And Buddhists meditate, mindfully tending to the moment of experience that lives between the past and the future.

These practices are very different, but they share an attribute that most of us can agree on: they serve to make practitioner a better person. From the standpoint of neuroscience, each of these distinct practices has else something in common: they serve to modify the practitioner’s internal psychological experience for a brief period of time. According to neuroscience, it is the neural representations of our experiences that ultimately give rise to our sense of self and our sense of our place in universe.

When we engage in a practice, whether it’s religious, spiritual or secular, the experience is treated by our intelligence system in precisely the same way as any other experience. Its relevant sensory, perceptual, emotional, cognitive and physical information is transmitted to the outermost part of our brain, the neocortex, by a set of specific neurons. These neurons are structurally changed by the act of transmission in such a way that they form a network: a ‘memory’ representation. And our neural “self” representation – the sense of “I” within - arises from these activated memory networks. So, when we engage in an intentional practice, we are creating neural memory records of these special experiences and our “self” is immediately, if minimally, transformed in the process.

With repeated practice over time, these tiny nudges to our sense of self add can up to radical change. Quite simply, the more deeply we understand this self-creation process, the better selves we can create. We can create “the change we want to see.” What it takes is practice.

SIX ELEMENTS OF INTENTIONAL SELF CREATION

Here are six guidelines to use the brain’s natural “self-creation” processes to create the self that you want to be.

1. Frequent Practice

The most devout practitioners of the world’s major religions and spiritual traditions engage in a prayer or meditation practice three to five times a day – and with good reason. The higher the frequency and greater the regularity of practice, the more quickly transformation occurs. Here’s why. The practice itself generates an out-of-the ordinary experience, which is then encoded in your brain. This change in the neural substrate then effects a slight transformation in your neural representations of ‘self’, which, in turn, produces transformative changes in your perceptions, feelings, thoughts and subsequent behavior. And your transformation, minimal though it might be, influences your subsequent experience, and the cycle continues. Eventually, these “aftereffects” begin to lose strength. But if you practice at regular intervals, three to five times a day, the “you” who is engaging in each subsequent session will be further along on her path of transformation than the one that engaged in the last session. As a consequence, you’re practice aftereffect periods will increase in depth and endurance until your moments of ordinary experience are few and far between.

2. Stilling the Mind

Neural networks function associatively, which means that an activated network will, in turn, activate other networks that represent related information. This property ensures that what we are thinking or doing in one moment largely determines what we will be thinking or doing in the next moment. Although this seamless neural activity enables us to get the ordinary work of life done, it also generates our mind’s incessant processing of things on our ‘to do’ list – our ‘monkey mind’, as a yogi would say. And because our internal ‘self’ arises from whatever networks are currently activated, our sense of who we are is carried along on this run-away ride. In order to begin to change our self, we need to create an opportunity for the default activity of our brains and minds to damp down.

For many, stilling the mind through breathing exercises and meditation is the primary or sole component of their practice. By simply allowing our thought processes to become quiescent, we are allowing for a higher-order “self” – one that arises from a broader base of encoded experience – to come to the fore. Over time, stilling the mind through meditation alone will effect positive transformative change; but even if you are a practiced meditator, there are good reasons for exploring additional elements of self-transformation.

3. The Goal for Your Practice: A Self-Creation Model

An intentional self-creation model is a mental construction of the values and characteristics that you wish to cultivate. If you’re working within a religious and spiritual tradition, your model might be based on the founder of the tradition or another venerable practitioner such as a saint or an avatar (the Mormon query, “What would Jesus Do?” serves such a purpose). On the other hand, if you’re designing a secular practice, your model can be based on anyone whom you admire and respect. Alternatively, you can create a completely unique composite of the values and characteristics that you wish to instill in yourself. What’s important is that you have a clear picture of the ideal you’re trying to achieve. Your model should be entrained during your practice and used throughout the day as a reference for deciding which thoughts and behaviors to “accept” and which to “reject.”

4. Cultivate Your Witness

Almost all traditional practices involve the cultivation of an inner state of being that can serve as a monitor for the practitioner’s thoughts and behaviors.  Whether we call it an “inner guide,” a “conscience,” or a “witness,” this state is governed by a higher-order self representation that is cultivated in the meditative portion of a practice.  The primary function of the “witness” is simply to observe whether or not we are in alignment with our intentional self model so that we can make good decisions and adjustments when necessary.

5. Choose a Motivational Feeling

The strongest connection between memory networks is on the dimension of ‘feelings’, both physical and emotional, because they represent the immediate needs that our intelligence system is attempting to meet.  Feelings motivate us to behave – to eat when we’re hungry, visit a friend when we’re lonely and so on.  And if we want to motivate our selves to behave in particular ways, it’s very useful to be able to identify the feeling state that provides us with this motivation, and to cultivate the ability to shift into that state at will.

A good way to begin cultivating a feeling state is to search your mind for memories of times when you were distinctly experiencing your desired state.  Keep a journal in which you list these memories, and include photographs, images, symbols and writings that invoke this feeling within you.  Think for a moment about all of the various sensory, perceptual and cognitive stimuli you might find in a Roman Catholic Church that invoke a sacred state of being – statues and paintings, candles, music, and missals  – and then create a collection of stimuli that work for you.

6. Identify Intentional Behaviors

The transformational power of your practice will cause some new behaviors to emerge spontaneously.  But it’s a good idea to also consciously choose some new behaviors to engage in as well.  To get started, list at least three things that you’ve never done before that align with your intentional self, then rank order them from the easiest to the most difficult.  So, for example, if you’re trying to cultivate a charitable character, you might include foregoing lunch with friends to visit an elderly person in a nearby nursing home, volunteering at a local hospice one day per week, and spending your next vacation building homes with Habitat for Humanity rather than going to Aruba.  When the time is right, choose the easiest new behavior and, as they say, just do it.  Expanding your base of behavioral experience in this step-by-step way can produce dramatic transformational effects. Consider the young Romanian girl who was called to spread the love of Christ:  First she joined a community of nuns in Dublin, then she moved to India  to teach in a convent school, and then she left the comforts of the convent to care for the poorest outcasts on the streets of the slums of Calcutta.  And with each step, she came closer to approximating her model, Christ.

Putting it All Together

Construct the form of your practice so that it begins with a period of meditation in order to allow any residual feelings, thoughts or images to damp down, and your witness to come to the fore.  Next, invoke your chosen feeling state in order to stimulate the relevant memory networks in your mind and motivate your behavior.  Let the feeling begin to resonate within you and allow it to adjust your body posture and facial expression “from the inside out.”  Once you’re fully experiencing your desired feeling state, bring to mind your intentional self creation model.  Then align your mind and your whole being with each of the values and characteristics of your model self, one at a time, while sustaining your chosen motivational feeling state.  As a result of a practice like this, even a very brief one, you’ll shift your state of being into one that’s likely to generate more intentional experiences.  The real power of the practice is what happens when you re-enter the world at large, primed to think and behave as your intentional self, and you begin to accrue new experiences that align with your model of transformation.  It’s then that your brain’s natural self creation processes begin to creat the change that you want to see.

Peggy La Cerra, Ph.D., is director of the Center for Evolutionary Neuroscience and coauthor of The Origins of Mind: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of Self, (Harmony Books, 2002) Add: (contact: peggy@atonewiththeuniverse.org)