Mind Magic

I knew I would need a lot of help to continue listening to my own inner compass and not go off track again, and so my home is full of guideposts for myself.

the negativity bias can keep us so blind to the positive that we may start to take it for granted or not catch it when it enters our lives.

in the flow state there is a diminishment of self-referential thinking, and therefore our stress levels go down because we are not self-consciously critiquing our every move.

When we are in flow, we often experience a state of self-transcendence: the inner critic’s needling voice dies away, our habitual worries and self-consciousness fade, and we feel at one with the moment, with ourselves, and with our environment.

In a sense, the flow state translates to the complete alignment of our conscious and subconscious minds in service of our intention. In flow, we have a special kind of access to the deeper resources of our subconscious and can draw upon them more directly. We can also seek this kind of VIP access to the subconscious via the techniques of hypnosis,

Researchers continue to study the neural correlates of flow, but there is a general hypothesis that periods of flow are characterized by lowered activity in the frontal lobes that produce the sense of conscious control.

Using functional magnetic imaging, which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, researchers at Stanford University monitored the brains of patients under hypnosis and observed several distinct phenomena. First, a decrease in activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate, part of the brain’s salience network, was evident. The reason

During hypnosis, this detachment of action from conscious awareness means the subject is highly susceptible to suggestion from the hypnotist or, in the case of self-hypnosis, from themselves.

hypnosis allows us to be completely absorbed in the object of our attention, gain heightened control over our bodies and feelings, and get out of our own way so that we allow the power of our subconscious to work freely. When we deliberately embed an intention in our minds through repeated visualization, we are making use of the same physiological