Self Help Techniques: Brain Feng Shui

"I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty. I laugh when I hear people go on a pilgrimage to find God." - Kabir (15th Century) India

Leave home, leave misery. Most try it. Search the far-flung corners of the world for a new home with the "right" address, the car, the relationship, and the latest stuff. A place to escape it all, to come home too. Things, places and people are not the culprit or the solution. They can bring added pleasure, or pressure to pay for it, organize and store it, plus keep it dirt, toxin and clutter free.

When you get it all sorted out, exhausted, you sneak a moment to 'cocoon' to see what the hype is all about. You pour your favorite drink, turn on the new CD, prop your feet up, and open your new 'Home and Harmony' magazine just in time to learn you got it all wrong. No wonder it does not seem like home, you did not 'feng shui'. ("Feng what?", some may ask). Feng shui creates a positive energy flow through the arrangement of objects in a space and reverberates to all areas of your space and life to attract peace, harmony and prosperity. Ignorance might have been, well, a little better but now that you know, who wants to be blighted and miss the blessing? The sofa's the wrong color and size, your furniture has to be moved, your house is facing the wrong direction, your CD makes static energy, and the mate you brought home was born on a date that opposes yours. Nothing seems to flow so everything must go. Instead of leaving misery to find home, you found impending doom. Your first impulse - escape it all, leave again.

"No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." - Albert Einstein

You have to get past the "look" to consider the unseen. Energy is felt. You can feel the flow of positive energy in a space with the proper order and placement of light, color, furniture, live plants, and water sounds. The entire universe is composed of atoms of energy. Your space, people, things, feelings and thoughts are all energy forms of vibrations. Like attracts like. Energy has a ripple affect, for good or not. Your brain decides. What you can't see (energy) and what you think you have no control over (your brain) can be the enemy, or your power.

"You may not be what you think you are, but what you think, you are." - Jim Clark

Home is what you think it is.

Blame it on the wrong address or person, the dirt and clutter, or the ill placed furniture. You never really escape. You have two choices. Home is lost out there somewhere; or home is found wherever you are, present. Home can be closer than you think, it is what your brain thinks, it is.

"Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide." - Napoleon I Maximus 1804

Decide to Come Home Again.

Most seldom get past their surroundings to consider the power and inner workings of their own brain. You are always choosing how to arrange and use your brain space, for good or not. Your brain can only choose one. Faith or fear; love or hate; accept or blame; let go or resent; enough or deprived; needy or worthy; dreaming or striving; joy or depressed; peace or chaos; choice or trapped; fretting and regretting. Past mistakes or learning from them; striving to arrive or dreaming with no limits; present, at home wherever you are, or searching for home. Check your life to see what your brain has been up to.

"You choose, you live the consequences. Every yes, no, maybe, creates... your personal experience." - Richard Bach 1994

Most people never know they are in charge of the thoughts that fill their brain space and create their life. Every thought forms your feelings and words. These are energy forms that transmute into choices. Your life is a reflection of those thoughts. Brain feng shui, or brain space order, frees positive thought energy flow. This ripple affects peace, harmony through all the rooms of your life.

How to Feng Shui the Brain

How does your brain order space, tell the difference between the past, future and present? Nearly everyone imagines or senses these events in different locations in their brain or personal space. Location is one way your mind codes events; check where your brain stores past memory.

Close your eyes. Think of a past event like last weekend, your birthday, or a past holiday. Pick your first hunch: Where in your brain or personal space do your past memories (pictures, sounds, feelings) get stored? The past pictures often take the best brain space, behind your eyes, the back of your brain or outside your head, in front of your eyes? Either choice, your past, which does not exist, clutters and crowds out the space to live present.

Your brain also gets bored with one-perspective and moves positions. Close your eyes and think of a past event, like brushing your teeth or driving to work. You might not have noticed, but your brain replays past events in your mind's eye from different positions.

Brain Positions

1) Be the actor, be in self-position. Go through the memory, seeing from your own eyes with the toothbrush in your own hands.
2) Change seats. Be the observer with the remote control and play the memory on the movie screen in front of you. You watch you brushing your teeth in the past. You might even notice how your brain choreographs the scene. Is it clear or fuzzy, up close or far away, color or black and white, moving or still, with sounds or silent?
3) If another person was around your brain could recall the memory by being in "other" position, seeing it through their eyes, disassociated.

Brain Order

You can order your brain. The latest neurological research shows that each time you retrieve a memory you modify it in some way. Since this is so, you can modify it on purpose, to better serve your life. Here's a start.

Brain Feng Shui (left versus right)

Since most brains store the past on the left side, imagine you can take the past memory container from where it was stored, around or in your head and visually transpose it into a filing cabinet or computer you place on your left side within arms length. When past negative thoughts run rampant, see them on a movie screen in your minds eye, freeze it into one symbolic picture. Shrink your past misery picture into postage stamp size, and make it fuzzy. Label it, and file it in the bottom drawer or document file named, "Past misery memories, pending learning's". You decide when and how to retrieve them briefly for learning's only. Since you either learn from the past mistakes or repeat them, try requiring three new learning's for one unruly thought habit. These truths set your thinking free.

Brain Feng Shui (memories)

Past memories do not exist except as a rerun and you have the remote. When you choose to review a misery memory, see it as a mind's eye still photograph with you as the observer. It diminishes the negative feeling reaction. Do the opposite with your happy memories. Make them large, colorful, moving, with sound. Be the actor, in self-position to re-live the happy feelings. Re-live them as often as you like, as if you were present.

Brain Feng Shui (future)

Next, check for where your brain keeps your future clutter. Think of something that will happen next week, or next year. Pick your first picture. Where did you retrieve the picture your brain created? In front of or behind your eyes, inside your head, behind your head or to the side? Whatever you chose, the future, which does not exist, robs the mind of living present.

Since your brain innately prefers the future to be on your right side, imagine you can string your future files along a path that is one step away and meanders off to the right and disappears over the horizon. You cannot see reality on this path, it is just for dreaming with no limits.

Brain Feng Shui (choice to dream)

Your brain can only do one or the other, stew about the unknown, or create with dreams. Check your future thought habits for anxious clutter. Refuse to allow unruly fears and pictures to run unchecked. Take charge. Place changeable billboards and signposts along the future mind path. Imagine and dream and paint your shapes, colors, sounds and details of your future life with no limits. Whatever you dream, becomes a new brain habit. You get more of the same.

"To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all." - Anatole France

Notice the lightness in and around your head. You no longer have to look through the past events to see the present. Or leave the present to fret over the future. The past nor the future exist. Show up home, present, where you already are. Present is safe, the only place you can find and know God, who is perfect love.

Brain Space

All brain space is for present living. From present, open the past file to retrieve a memory for learning's only. From present, look into the future to imagine and dream with no limits only. Never leave the present, the only place your life exist. Home is where you are, present, if you think, it is.

Elizabeth Harrison, LCSW
Accord Psychological, Inc