You can learn the practice of embodied mindfulness and the principles of neuroplasticity to transform your brain, enhance your perception of reality, and quiet anxiety. The knowledge is important but the practice is essential for transforming your brain, your thinking, and your perception of who you truly are.

A significant cause of anxiety is an overactive mind. The mind can tell us stories about ourselves, others, and our world that are limiting at best and often painful lies. Most of these stories are learned from our own and other’s early survival strategies that distort our perception of reality.

A significant part of the neurology behind the out-of-control mind is an overactive Default Mode Network (DMN). This is the collection of brain circuits responsible for a potentially incessant, negative inner dialogue that becomes active when we’re not actively engaged or focused on a task.

This network helps to explain why we’re often habitually motivated to stay busy and distracted. This inner, running dialogue can also make mindfulness practice difficult to impossible, especially when we’re new to the practice.

One way to begin quieting the mind is to focus on bodily sensations like your heartbeat, breathing, or the felt experience of feelings. This inner act of noticing sensations is called ‘interoception’ and gives you something to focus on rather than being trapped in thought and anxiety.

This attention on bodily felt experience activates the brain’s interoceptive cortex and helps balance an overactive Default Mode Network. This circuitry helps us shift from a survival-oriented fight, flight, or freeze state into a more heart-centered state where cooperation, compassion, and kindness become more accessible.

 Your Body is a Tuning Fork for Connecting With the Unknowable

Many of us have a sense of a larger mystery, that we name god, the divine, mother nature, or the force. By whatever name we give it, neuroscience research shows that these often mysterious and unknowable experiences are predictably reflected in the same brain circuitry.

For those of you who do share a sense of a larger mystery, your body and its felt sensations and vibrations offer you the possibility of forming a felt relationship with that larger something. Your mind can name or conceptualize that larger mystery, but can’t experience it directly.

Here’s where anxiety enters the picture. Your body is resonating or vibrating with your inner mental and emotional experience as well as input from your outer environment. Environmental input is from other people. other places, other times, the weather, nature, and more.

To the degree we can be aware of and be in relationship with those vibrations felt as sensations, our energy flows. On the other hand, to the degree that we resist, ignore, or numb out those vibrations, we tighten, we tense, contract, and limit our breathing. This contracting against the flow of life is the foundation for anxiety, chronic pain, and many other chronic, inflammatory conditions. Now, if we further deaden ourselves to this flow of felt experience we’re moving towards depression.

In this new, embodied state that’s fueled by interoceptive awareness, we feel life more vibrantly, and more intensely, yet feelings move through us more readily. This natural movement of feelings allows us to recover from stressful upsets and return to our emotional baseline more quickly. It’s as if our emotional experience becomes more like Teflon and less like Velcro. It’s not that we stop the bad feelings, but that we’re neurologically more open to letting them go, and letting experience flow.

More Interrelatedness, Less Ego, and Less Anxiety

What’s happening through the practice of embodied mindfulness is that we’re training the brain to observe or witness our experience rather than identify with it. We’re creating a safe distance from our feelings, good or not-so-good, which encourages less suffering, less emotional reactivity, less either/or black-and-white thinking, and more self-awareness, self-regulation, resilience, equanimity, and self-transcendence.

Transcendence isn’t experienced the same by everyone, but the experience is reflected in the same brain circuits consistently. One person may feel more connected to the divine, while another is awed by natural beauty, and yet another feels a deep connection with all of life. The general experience is that we feel more connected to ourselves, others, the environment and that larger mysterious something, regardless of the name we give it. As these brain circuits strengthen through repeated experience this sense of being connected and interrelated to everyone and everything is nurtured.

This emerging state of interconnectedness to all that is and transcendence of our isolated, personal ego, is reflected in a story about the Dalai Lama visiting a New York City hotdog vendor. As His Holiness approached, the vendor said, “Hey buddy, what’ll ya have?” And the Dalai Lama replied, “Make me one with everything.”