Neurofeedback is a powerful, yet gentle and effortless process of returning to being our best. Here’s how: Neurofeedback does three things. Within our brains, it detects problem areas, it interrupts the misapplied effort, and it invites us to a new way of being.
Neurofeedback detects within our brainwaves the mental struggle or turbulence that is the heart of what makes us uncomfortable.
There is a recognizable pattern to things like worries, performance anxiety, and the continued desire to fix something about ourselves. All of these lead to a type and level of unnecessary and unhelpful mental exertion which can disconnect us from the essence of who we are and what we are experiencing in each moment. This disconnection is what makes us feel burdened, pained. All of the time and effort spent in trying to prevent or direct change in order to make things right exhausts us. Basically, this kind of effort and the feeling that we are not quite right or safe, act like boulders in the river that is our life force, creating turbulence and stagnation. In the long term, this discomfort and depletion become symptoms, disorders, and diseases. In contrast, when we think of being in “the zone” we recognize that gifted atheletes, like LeBron James, glide, not thinking about the next move, but allowing open awareness and effortless natural ability to take over. This can be our way.
Neurofeedback interrupts mental turbulence. As the neurofeedback equipment detects the emergence of resistance or struggle, it immediately provides a cue that effortlessly redirects our attention.
During neurofeedback training, clients listen to relaxing music of their choice. Occasionally, a tiny break in the music, like a stutter, informs us that turbulence has been detected. But more importantly, that stutter interrupts and overrides what had been emerging in our minds at that moment. Like a tap on the shoulder, this interruption makes us stop, and find out what is happening, “Sorry, where was I? What did you want?” The simple act of bringing our attention and energy to the present, in time dissolves the boulders in the stream, or washes them away. While life’s challenges remain, we work through them with greater ease. At his best, LeBron is absorbed, effective, elegant. We can be, too.
Neurofeedback invites us to return to the present, to effortlessness, to our most natural and essential being, already blossoming in each moment.
As the break in the music calls us away from the creation or maintenance of mental struggle, and calls us to attention, what are we left with, what do we find when we stop and look? We are left with a mind that is receiving, rather than habitually doing; right here, a whole new world opens. We are invited into an enhanced awareness of ourselves in our bodies. While reclining in a comfortable chair, listening to beautiful music, we appreciate that the object of our worry is not present, at least not now, and perhaps realistically won’t be. We are safe from real and imagined threats. We find great relief in letting go and not having to hold up so many things, to do so much, at least for a while. By and
by, we find some new, additional energy returning to our bodies and minds, offering surprising benefits. We eventually find we are in the zone, where our problems, are -whoops!- unnoticed, our mind is clear and calm, and that a long-forgotten joy, an intrinsic joy of being that has no specific reason or content, has returned to us, revitalized us, and set us free.
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