Hello my friends, and welcome! I am Jessie Anne, and this is a great place to be to discover tips on living a spiritually confident life.
Now I promised my newsletter friends that I had a short brain trick that BLEW MY MIND and I wanna get to that ASAP, so make sure you’re sitting down in a room somewhere. I’ll wait for you to hit the pause button real quick if you need to so you can be still for a moment; this trick just won’t have a great impact if you’re not. Waiting… waiting…
Okay.
Look around the room for me. I’ll give you 10 seconds. I want you to find everything that is brown… you only have 10 seconds to look for things that are brown and then I’m going to have you close your eyes. GO!
1…2…3…4…5…6…7…8…9…
10
Okay, close your eyes. NO PEEKING! Now name everything you saw that was red. Not everything you saw from a week ago or you think should be in the room; everything you saw TODAY, just a few seconds ago that was red.
You’re probably thinking, what!? You told me to look for brown! Open your eyes and look around to find everything was red around you that you didn’t see when you were looking for brown. Crazy, right?! I bet there is a lot of blue and yellow too. Even though red, blue, and yellow are brighter colors than brown, they just didn’t stand out.
That is because your brain has an “executive system” and sees what you ask it to see; it actually has to switch gears to multi-task, not do them both at the same time. Check out my video on “single-tasking” if you don’t believe me!
So let’s take this brain trick over to the spiritual world. If you’re a person who regularly sees the negative in people and situations, it’s actually, proven by science, to be very difficult for you to “see” the good because you’ve asked your brain repetitively to look for brown, not red. What’s more, the longer you’ve done this, the stronger the neuro-pathways are in your brain and this habit may be subconscious at this point, or what some people call “just the way I am” or “because I was raised that way”. Thanks to a Father in Heaven, your brain is malleable. For more on that subject, watch my video called Neurons and Sleep Masks.
Maybe you’re a person who always sees things as unorganized (clear throat, that possibly might be me…), I see the messes in our house and on my kids, and honestly, in my life. The beauty though, is now that I understand the “executive system” of my brain I can recognize pretty quickly when I’m doing that nonsense and ask it to switch to red, yellow, and blue: “Oh, brain,” I say lovingly. “Let’s slow down, pause for 5 minutes, and look for the things that are organized and running smoothly and going well” “GIRL” says my brain, “WHAT A RELIEF; BRING. IT. ON! And we have a little gratitude pow-wow together. And truth comes and brings with it the spirit. It’s just great you guys”
Maybe you’re a person who wonders if God is blessing you and you can’t really see that in your life. No problem! You ask your brain to start to see blessings and it will switch so fast you’ll be amazed at what He brings IMMEDIATELY to your mind and possibly amazed that you never saw all those blessings before!
A great talk to weave into your study is Decisions for Eternity by President Russell M Nelson where he talks about this very idea:
“A strong human spirit with control over appetites of the flesh is master over emotions and passions and not a slave to them. That kind of freedom is as vital to the spirit as oxygen is to the body! Freedom from self-slavery is true liberation!”
He mentions the “human spirit” controls our actions, and an emotion follows. Our emotional experience becomes the quality of our life. You stack a ton of delicious righteous habit pancakes on top of each other and your emotional life-long feast will be positive!
And said another way, Men are free to choose liberty and eternal life, or to choose captivity and death.
Okay, it’s your turn. Knowing that our brain can only see what we subconsciously ask it to, what is your two-sided coin that you want to flip ON IT’S HEAD?
Tell us in the comments below, because when you write something down it is WAY more effective than if you don’t.
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Our hope, our prayer, our work is that you find a resource or product here that magnifies your ability to connect, hear Him, and live a spiritually confident life!