“The power of the mind – I’ve heard that all my life but we don’t get taught like this.” – Jo

Like Jo, many of us have heard about the power of our minds throughout our lives. But in this podcast, we dived into how! We talked with Jenny from Auriel Minds about rewiring the brain and the coaching program she runs that has helped many people overcome health issues using these techniques.

Originally trained as a dietitian, Jenny worked in public health before venturing into her own online business that many of us know already – Hoppers. Jenny’s own journey of work and her own health issues, coupled with her science-based curiosity, led her to find out about neuroplasticity where she works with people who struggle with chronic health conditions of all kinds. Jenny talks about how by using neuroplasticity techniques, she helps people transform the quality of their lives by elevating their health so they can live confidently, a struggle many with chronic health issues experience. Neuroplasticity can help any and all sorts of health conditions from food sensitivities to chronic fatigue.

What is Neuroplasticity?

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to rewire itself in response to stimulus. This was once thought of as impossible and it was believed that by the time you got to a certain point in your life, your neurons were set in a certain position and you couldn’t change them. Research over the last 10-15 years shows that rewiring the brain is entirely possible. A well-known book by Norman Doidge called The Brain that Changes Itself tells of amazing personal stories of triumph where people train the brain to overcome their struggles using Neuroplasticity.

Jenny has her own amazing story. She struggled with chronic fatigue where she was unable to get out of bed along with many other health issues such as food sensitivities, low tolerance to the cold, headaches, and skin rashes. She went from doing triathlons to not being able to exercise at all for 20 years. “I had to walk with orthotics. I couldn’t wear sandals. I literally had pain all the time – muscle pain and fatigue”. She went on to tell us of how she could be in a relaxed, stress-free time of her life and would start to exercise but by about 3 weeks into it, she would get sick or injured or something would happen where she would have to stop. Jenny realised that she had created a pattern where every single time, something would just happen and halt her exercise. This cycle went on for about 20 years. However, within four to five months of doing neuroplasticity work, the results have been wonderful for her. “I don’t have any pain anymore. I do whatever exercise I want. I work on a property. I can bike ride. I can ski. I don’t have any pain. It’s just gone. It seems miraculous and it kind of is.”

Where do these “patterns” come from?

We generate these patterns over our lifetime and are based on experiences we have as a child before our brain becomes fully conscious. These patterns over our life lead to issues or illnesses you can have in your life. Jenny explains how this work is about not breaking the patterns but taking the emotion out of them and keeping the wisdom. This means you can use the information you learned to take you forward but leave behind the stress or pain.

What actually do you do?

Jenny went on her own journey of learning where she found her meditations and the learning she did by pulling information from all sorts of sources to heal herself. But when she came across this particular work, she found it pulled everything she had already learned into a system and one she felt could be taught and shared. It was then she thought,  “Well hang on, I don’t actually have to be trying to fix myself. I’m not actually broken. I have the power within me to change this. Then I knew, I needed to teach it to people.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are 5 core steps that people need to go through to make neurological changes in the brain. It requires work and effort to make those changes and it’s no easy feat because the brain doesn’t want to change. Our brains are neurologically wired in a certain way where around 95% of our thoughts every day are unconscious thoughts leaving us to try to tap into the 5% of the consciousness. This is where we can identify the issues and make the changes. The 5 steps take you through that.

Step 1. Choose the end result you want. Something that you would love to have like good health for example or being able to climb that mountain. This can be a difficult task for many people as we are so used to thinking in the negative or coming at change from the angle of always having to fix something. This step is about flipping that around which can be quite hard for many of us, so that it becomes something to gain almost, rather than fix.

Step 2. Create the emotion of being in that end result as if it is already true and achieved. What is so powerful about your brain is that it doesn’t know the difference between what is in your imagination and what is a real experience. This really means that every single thought that you have is leading you in a certain direction. This can have negative or positive impacts on your life depending on the thoughts that you have. Just as negative thoughts or high stress can generate illness and disease in a body, positive emotions in the body can generate positive impacts. So by creating that emotion of the end result – the feelings of joy, bliss, freedom, achievement – those feelings that come from achieving what you want are those that transform the body by rewiring the brain. Through repetition, eventually the brain recognises the new pattern of thought and then begins the process of replacing the old thought pattern with the new one. The one that you want! It is as simple as going for the things that you want, thinking as though you already have them and the brain then takes care of the rest to make it true.

Step 3. Recognising where you are now. In this step, you notice the beliefs you tell yourself in your life. These beliefs and stories are what stops us from taking action to get that end result we want. They might be something like a judgement about yourself not being able to do something, or that you are not worthy of it. These stories might make you question if you are capable of this or have the skills to do that.  There are so many different beliefs and stories people have but it’s important to be able to recognise these to be able to create a sort of tension in the body of saying “This is what I want – the end result” and “This is where I am” and by recognising these it helps take you where you want to go. We collect these beliefs throughout our lives and they often come through in all sorts of ways in the way we choose to live our lives and where we stop ourselves going further. In the realm of business, we often personally see this with women either from generational beliefs of the woman’s role, or monetary blocks some people have for a variety of reasons. It is a conditioning attained through a variety of experiences and we hang on to these for whatever reason that can often stop us from achieving the things we want.

Step 4. Removing the blocks. Once we know what is holding us back and what the blocks are, we can take the action we need to, to get to the next step. Neuroplasticity techniques are then used to help take the emotion out of the belief or block so that you can move forward toward your end result. Quite often lots of different emotions come up as they come from patterns created from childhood. What then happens is as you start to go for things you want, you come up against the resistance which is all the stories in your mind and patterns. As you catch yourself saying these things to yourself, the old or negative thoughts, that’s where you use all the processes and techniques of the neuroplasticity technique to keep yourself in the emotion of the end results and keep taking the action you need to get there.

Step 5. Take action. Your action needs to be aligned with your goal and not make it feel like a chore. It needs to be an action you are going to do because you want that end result and that action is going to get you there. Part of taking action is our ability to tap into our intuition and figure out what is the best thing for us to do to move forward toward our end result. This is where meditation can help. Meditation gets your brain into a relaxed state where you can tap into your intuition and figure out what that action is. Sometimes the action might be a physical act you need to do, other times it might be more about catching the thought pattern you have and changing it over and over again. It might be a commitment to meditation every morning. Or it might be a process to help you overcome something that is stopping you. It is an action you will take to move you toward that end result. By taking the action you need to, this lets you see the results of that action and then you can celebrate the successes. This is such an important part of the process, the celebration of success, because it is showing you your hard work, or the action, works! This part of the process is you actually telling your brain that this is what you want now and each time you do that, you create another change in the pathways in your brain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meditation

The meditation Jenny uses in her work is a guided meditation that helps you go through the 5 steps. This kind of meditation helps you relax enough that you are outside your thoughts but keeps you on track. Often, this is the part of meditation some people struggle with but guided meditation helps keep you on track. It is very easy to forget that meditation takes practice, and it isn’t easy for many people and that is exactly why it is called a practice because it is hard for most people to do. But when you can quieten your brain like this, that is when your intuition kicks in. It’s the twilight zone of almost falling asleep but not quite because when you manage to relax your body enough, that’s when your brain is more suggestable to information similar to that of hypnotherapy. This is the stage where your brain is at its more programable and how it works within Jenny’s work. To use the neuroplasticity techniques, you don’t have to use meditation, it will just take a little longer without it.

You can find Jenny at www.aurielminds.com.au where you can also sign up to receive a copy of a meditation she has created to help you see the intention that you want and get into the emotion of the end result that people can use daily to start to rewire their brain.

“When I realised how powerful this was and I had an impact on myself, and my experiences in the health system, people need to know this and that is why I’m so passionate about sharing it with people because it is literally life-changing. Anyone can do it you just need to commit to it.”

Jenny runs group coaching programs so people can share their experiences, learn from, and inspire each other. The actual work that she does is a system that’s been put together that integrates all the aspects of neuroplasticity to allow a person to make the changes they want to.

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Much love,
Jo & Tracey x