Our ‘Zebra’ can and does change its stripes, often!

We often distort, add, delete information to support our view of the world and experience. We have to support and uphold our ‘organism’. Our two hard wired functions are to survive and then long enough to make more of our own kind. We know this as reproduction or ‘love’. That glue that keeps us together long enough to produce offspring, clones which are not really clones at all though often they learn to wear our stripes. We were not born with the knowledge to do anything; born with over 100 billion nerve cells, potential thinking cells that branch between each other on the back of how we engage and interact with what the environment is offering as stimulus and learning. Our short term memories become coded as long term memories and become the architecture of our personality. We know that mind impacts that architecture and the functionality of the brain and the expression of neurotransmitters which impact how we feel and then, how we behave. We know the impact of mindfulness in cultivating a mind set that impacts our performance and also health. That mind can often cause disease, and mind set can provoke tremendous personal transformations. And so I say our ‘Zebra’ can and often does change its stripes through brain training, through mindfulness.

It wasn’t that long ago when under the level of Science that was available to us we were told that the adult brain was immutable, that we were stuck with a serious of learned and automatic responses that were the construct of the sort of days we were living. The gambler would always be a gambler, the thief once a thief always a thief, the angry person would always be filled with anger, the addict would remain an addict, the abuser would always abuse. Yet the last forty years in Neuroscience and with so much more peer reviewed science that affirms the brain is malleable and changeable, we are free to consider the truth should we have the desire to have another experience. Should we desire to experience more love, more connection, deeper affection and intimacy, greater kindness and compassion. These experiences are available to us, should we have the desire, the will, the due-diligence to set in place systematic thinking practices that enable us to re-wire the brain and change our stripes, so to speak.

What I have learned, from watching over 170 people once a week for twelve weeks each, ( it takes 66 days to re-wire the brain say Neuroscientists) is that it takes over ten efforts to impact or change an involuntary behaviour. When we are engaged in a thinking exercise, in that moment we become all that we have learned so far. This is what we demonstrate, automatically. Yet to be mindful of that thought, that behaviour, being ‘aware’ gives us that opportunity to not be that, in that moment, and to try another thought, another response.

This is where we make involuntary the Sam Knowledge; the 7 behaviours of peak performance, our three incantations and 42 ideologies which impact the thinking process, the feelings that are provoked and so too ‘performance’ and experience. Over the twelve weeks, through the Sam Method we make these involuntary responses and in that moment those stripes are going through a transformation because we are sampling alternative responses. If they make us feel better, then we are expressing neurotransmitters to code those new patterns as new memories and events. Now we have options, now we can choose differently. Now we feel empowered to think and behave differently. The impact of the Sam Knowledge is that these new thought processes cultivate a non-reactive level of mind, a mindful mind that is empowered in this state of ‘calm’ to make other choices.

And so I say, our ‘zebra’ can does change its stripes, this is brain plasticity in action. In the age of information where we all have access to free information on the internet, to know the facts of our creation would benefit our lives and relationships tremendously.

Anastasia Hatzivasilou