With things that have happened in my life, I went through a deep depression.  I was on anti-depressants and had to see a psychiatrist weekly, then bi-weekly, then monthly. I would cycle back and forth with that schedule depending on what I was going through at the time.

I suppose I was a high functioning depressed person, because although there were days where I literally could not get out of bed, there were other times, that I could force myself to finish a course toward my doctorate. (I don’t know how, so please don’t ask)

So many people ask me, how do I do it, coping with my mom being sick for so long and raising a son on my own (in a marriage – and out).  I don’t know, I think I just got sick of being sick and tired.  Literally, I was so over it. I could not feel sorry for myself one more minute.  I wasn’t raised that way, so I was already on unfamiliar territory. Not with George & Marlene Leid (the parents).  I remember after a long weekend, telling my dad I wasn’t feeling well and because he got me a job as a summer student at the airport, he said, sick or no sick, you have to go.  (I bet you he was embarrassed when my supervisor had to drive me home- because I had SUN STROKE)

Well that gives you a little background on how well “feeling sorry for yourself”, worked in my household.

Which is why in retrospect, I probably wasn’t even really good at being depressed.  Well after a few years of Cognitive behaviour therapy, my doctor cut me loose and said, I don’t need him anymore- a bit harsh, but I understood what he meant. I was high functioning.  I didn’t feel better, but I suppose medically, I was no longer depressed.  I was not on anti-depressants or sleeping pills anymore and I guess by our conversations that typically turned into movie critiques toward the end, I suppose I was over that too.  (he also didn’t know how I coped) Perhaps I am an enigma.

For years after, I didn’t understand what happened for me to snap out of it.  I mean I literally would get up, have a shower, make my son breakfast, and go back to bed.  Then I would wait until he was coming home from school and get up just so that he wouldn’t know that I was in bed all day. (he would later tell me that he did, and he knew I was depressed) Even in my depression, I didn’t want to put that burden on him.  His father already was not involved, and I wanted to appear strong for him, so he didn’t have to worry. (The irony of my depression was that I was always putting others before myself) – A blessing and a curse.

Getting back to what happened, that’s the crazy thing, I don’t know.  I am really not sure, I just knew, I couldn’t live like that anymore and I didn’t want to.  No-one was going to save me, but me.  I am sure my friends tried, but this was a solo mission. I have to say, though, my son was an integral part of getting out of my depression.  He didn’t deserve two parents that decided to check out.  I had to do it, for me and for him.  (I wonder if that’s why he is looking into neuropsychiatry as a chosen field now– (it could be a my mom’s Alzhiemer diagnosis aslo) hmmmm…..

Anyhow, I had to know more, I had to research this phenomenon that happened to me.  I know, people always say, when you are negative, just be positive. And that is the worst advice you can give someone.  No self-help book, or guru is going to save you from yourself.  You really have to decide for yourself and put in a lot of work. It really is a mindset.  I did a lot of research on this topic, I had to understand it in order to break it down.  No-one will teach you this, and you really have to be open to how biologically this works.  We really are our thoughts.

Dr Joe Dispenza articulates that your thoughts are intimately connected to your future.  Out of 60-70,000 thoughts you think in one day, 90% are the same thoughts as the day before. If your thoughts are connected to your life, the same thoughts, lead you to the same choices, the same choices, lead you to the same behaviour. The same behaviour create the same experiences and the same experiences produce the same emotions and the very same emotions drive the very same thoughts and your biology, your neural circuitry, your neural hormones and even your genetic expression is equal to how you think, how you act and how you feel (Dispenza, 2019)

How you think, feel and act is your personality and your personality create your personal reality, so if you wanted to create a new personal reality, a new life, then you will have to start thinking about what you’ve been thinking about and change it. 95% of who we are by the time we are 35 years old is a memorized set of behaviours, emotional reactions, unconscious habits, hardwired attitudes, beliefs and perceptions that run like a computer program.

  A person can say with 5% of the conscious mind, “I want to be healthy, I want to be happy, I want to be free.” But the body is on a whole different program.  So, to make those changes, you have to get outside of your analytical mind- because what separates the conscious mind and the subconscious mind is the analytical mind.

 You would have to become aware of your unconscious thoughts and observe them, you would have to pay attention to automotive habits and behaviors and modify them and you would have to look at emotions you live by every single day that is connected to your past and decide if those emotions belong in your future.

Most people try to create a new personal reality with the same personality, and it doesn’t work, you literally have to become someone else.

The footprints of consciousness are called learning which allows us to make new connections. The Nobel peace prize winner for Physiology or Medicine, laureate  Erik R Kandel in the year 2000 found that when people learned one bit of information they doubled the number of connections in their brain from 1300 connections to 26000 connections, but if they didn’t review that information, if they couldn’t repeat it, if they couldn’t remember it, those circuits pruned apart in hours or days.

If learning creates new synapse connections, remembering the information maintains and sustains those connections. If you keep using your memories of the past, you are left with the old hardware of the past in your brain. 

Neuroplasticity, is the ability of the brain to change continuously throughout an individual’s life, e.g., brain activity associated with a given function can be transferred to a different location, the proportion of grey matter can change, and synapses may strengthen or weaken over time. Through neurogenesis and neuroplasticity, there is a possiblity to carve out a fresh and unworn path for your thoughts to travel upon. This opens up the possibility to reinvent yourself and move away from the status quo. This also means that with neuroplasticity you could overcome traumas from the past that evoke anxiety and stress. Memories that are hard-wired lead to avoidance beahviors that prevent you from living your life to the fullest.

If you create new thoughts and gather new information, it should lead to new choices. New choices should lead to new behaviors and new behaviors should create new experiences and those new emotions should drive new thoughts and that’s what called evolution.  If your brain is a record of the past and you don’t have a vision of the future, then you are living in the past and you will never arrive at that new future. 

This makes sense. 

This is the old “keep doing what you’re doing, keep getting what you’re getting”

If you wake up every morning and you aren’t being defined by a vision that is bigger than you and it doesn’t get you out of bed and inspire you into possibility, you will get up living from the old hardware of the past and the old emotions stored in your body, guess what happens?

You are going to wake up and you are going to open your eyes and you’re going to see the same people and go to the same places and do the exact same thing at the exact same time and the moment you open your eyes all of a sudden now it’s your external environment that’s controlling how you think and feel because you have a neurological network in your brain.

 For every person you know, every place that you go, everything that you own, everything that you do and the moment that you open your eyes and you see the same people and go the same placed and do the exact same thing at the exact same time its your external environment that’s turning on different circuits in your brain causing you to think equal to everything that you know.  As long as you are thinking equal to your environment, you will keep creating the same life.

To change, to truly change, is to think greater than your environment, to think greater than the circumstances in your life.  To think greater that the circumstances in your world, and every great person in history knew this.

Whether it was Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, The Wright brothers, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates; They all had a vision, couldn’t see it, couldn’t smell it, they couldn’t taste it, couldn’t feel it but it was alive in their mind.  It was so alive in their mind that they began to live as if that future really was happening in the present moment.

The very moment you stop making the exact same choices that you always make, be prepared, because it’s going to be extremely uncomfortable and that is the very moment you are heading toward your NEW SELF.

You are slowly stepping into the ocean of change, 95% of who you are is your body as the MIND, when you do something enough times, that your body does it better than your brain.

Because your body does something all the time, you may actually complain unconsciously-

All of a sudden you say- no complaining

No more blaming

No more feeling sorry for myself

No more talking about other people

You know what happens, the body starts sending signals to the brain, the brain’s being conditioned that way. The action of closing your eyes and experiencing what you want and rehearsing the action of what you want to do, the action of what you want, by closing your eyes and mentally rehearsing the action of what you want, if you are truly present, the brain doesn’t know the difference, of what you are imaging or what you are experiencing in the 3d world

Then you begin to install the neurological hardware in your brain.  Now your brain is no longer a record of the past. Now it’s a map of the future. If you keep doing it, priming it in that way, the hardware becomes a software program.  And who knows, you may just start acting like a happy person.  Then the hardest part, is to teach our body emotionally, what the future will feel like, ahead of the actual experience.

It means you can’t wait for your success to feel empowered, you can’t wait for your wealth to feel abundant.  You can’t wait for your new relationship to feel love, or your healing to feel whole.

That’s the old model of reality of cause and effect, waiting for something outside of us, to change how we feel inside of us.  When we feel better inside of us, we pay attention to whatever caused it, that means from that Newtonian world, most people will spend their whole life living in lack.  We are waiting for something to change out there.  The Newtonian world is all about the predictable world. It’s all about predicting the future. The quantum model of reality is all about causing an effect.

The moment you start feeling abundant and worthy, you are generating wealth. The moment you are empowered and feel it, you are stepping toward your success. The moment you start feeling whole, your healing begins and when you love yourself, and you love all your life, you are causing an effect.  

All of a sudden, you start hearing the thoughts in your head that say why don’t you start tomorrow, tomorrow is a better day, this is too hard for me, I can’t change, something is wrong with me, it’s not my fault, It’s my ex-husband fault, It’s my ex-wife’s fault. I’m this way because of this event, or that event. They made me feel this way, it’s their fault.

The moment that you respond to that thought process, it leads you right back to the same choices, which leads to the same behavior, that creates the same experience, that produces the same emotion and the person says,  this feels right. This feels familiar, like a bad habit. We have to start thinking of our past thoughts like an addiction.

• Back to my regular scheduled program!

When you switch that around you become the creator, and you start saying: My thinking and my feeling is changing an outcome in my life. Now it’s a whole different game and you start believing that we are creators of reality.

Most people when they have a thought, they think that is the truth.

One of the mind-blowing things is that just because you have a thought, doesn’t mean that it is necessarily true.

 Going from the old self to the new self, stepping into that void, stepping into that uncertainty is the biological, neurological, the chemical, hormone genetic death of the old self, and people will say, in that unknown life “I can’t predict my future” and the response is – The best way to predict your future, is to create it, not from the known, but from the unknown.

Just like a garden, when you are planting a new garden you have to get rid of the weeds. You got to take the plants from the past year and pull them out.  The rocks that are sifted to the top, that are like our emotional blocks, they have to be removed.

 The soil has to be tenderized and broken down, we have to make room to plant the new garden.  We learn most about ourselves, and others when we are uncomfortable. The moment you move into that uncomfortable state, normally a program jumps in.  That program jumps in because that person doesn’t want to be in the present moment and engage in that moment consciously. If you are not being defined by a vision of the future, then you are left with the old memories of the past and you will be predictable in your life.  

When we get comfortable in the place of the unknown, that’s where the magic happens – it never happens in the known

There you have it, broken down biologically and chemically for you. And you know what, even with all of that information, people will still not do it. 

People will stay in the same relationships that don’t work, people will stay in a job they can’t stand, and they will provide a multitude of excuses on why they are staying.  They will justify their behavior.  (They lack vision) They can’t see their future. Although they are unhappy, it’s comfortable and change is uncomfortable.

I always take stock, I always say to myself “there must be more to life than this” – I don’t say it, I believe it.  I have a list of goals that I want to accomplish, and I tackle them.  They take time, and it is laborious, there are no quick wins.  My first goal was my MBA, I needed to have that before I was 40, well I got it in before I turned 41. That wasn’t enough- I think I was expecting some big transformation for attaining that, it didn’t come.  So, I applied to do my doctorate.  My friends thought I was crazy, and No I don’t love school, so it has nothing to do with that.  I want to create a future for myself that is not dependent on someone else. I knew when I owned my first business at 24 that I didn’t want to work for anyone else. 

Along the way, several major life events would throw me off my path, the death of my fiancé, my mom’s diagnosis with Alzheimer’s, the death of my father, the ending of my marriage, my clinical depression, but deep inside, it’s so true, you can rewire your thoughts, and not live in a past, that no longer serves you.

All of those events have shaped me into who I am today and every single one of them taught me many valuable lessons, most of all it taught me resiliency.

Now it makes sense to me why people literally have to hit rock bottom for them to make a change and rock bottom is different for everyone. Perhaps that was my rock bottom, my rock bottom was uncomfortable for me, so I had to change things. You don’t have to wait until you hit rock bottom to make changes for yourself. If you want to change, stop downloading the same programs, believe that you can, envision the future that you want, believe you already have it and then start rewiring your brain. You really have nothing to lose.

As they say, “the comfort zone is a beautiful place, but nothing ever grows there.”

References

Elena W Adlaf, Ryan J Vaden, Anastasia J Niver, Allison F Manuel, Vincent C Onyilo, Matheus T Araujo, Cristina V Dieni, Hai T Vo, Gwendalyn D King, Jacques I Wadiche, Linda Overstreet-Wadiche. Adult-born neurons modify excitatory synaptic transmission to existing neurons. eLife, 2017; 6 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.19886

Dispenza, Dr. J, 2019.  Becoming Supernatural: How Common people are doing the uncommon, Hay House

Kandel E, 2000, The molecular biology of memory storage:  A dialog between genes and synapses, Nobel lecture, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Columbia University. College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York USA. https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/kandel-lecture.pdf