The burgeoning field of mindfulness, neuroscience and psychotherapy just never gets old to me. I am on a panel with Ron Siegel, PsyD, author of The Mindfulness Solution and Ruth Buczynski, PhD, president of the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine (NICABM) talking about a recent series that explored the question, Can Mindfulness Really Rewire the Brain? The series is free to listen to.

The series includes Dan Siegel, Rick Hanson, Tara Brach, Sara Lazar and Ron Siegel on the current state of affairs of mindfulness and neuroscience. The topics included the most current neuroscience research, how we can use it with trauma, chronic pain, depression, shame and even its potential benefits for aging.

The actual science that’s continuing to come out about mindfulness and its neurological benefits is incredibly motivating.

Did you know that mindfulness practice is showing that we can grow the area of our brain that’s responsible for learning and memory (the hippocampus)? So there’ll be less of the, “Honey, did you remember where I put my keys?”

A short while ago I opened an opportunity for people to send me stories of mindfulness that can show the rest of us how it has had a practical impact on a particular event or their lives. I’m calling this column of Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, “Voices.”

A number of people wrote in with stories. If you have a story, continue to writing in and as long as there are good stories that teach the rest of us how mindfulness can work in our lives, I will choose from them from time to time to post on Mindfulness and Psychotherapy.

Of course those that get chosen can also send me a link that I’ll include in the post where people can learn more about them.

Here’s a delightful and insightful true story from Brandon Rennels about the power of acceptance in our daily lives.

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of the term “Mindful Recovery?”

Is it Addiction? Trauma? Depression? Or maybe something else?

Maybe it’s all of those things, but I’m going to pose this moment to be a time to look back on the last year and ask yourself, “What afflictions have I suffered this year that I am in recovery for?” Maybe this last year you let stress get the best of you? Maybe your relationship slipped this past year as you got roped into more television programs or Facebook addictions. Maybe you did slip into abuse with drugs, alcohol, sex, work, or overly accommodating people in life who abuse you.

What’s going to be different in the coming hours, days, weeks and months ahead?

Perhaps the simplest path is to make the intention an awareness of the moments you get sucked into these destructive behaviors that you want to change. In this space of awareness we draw a second intention which is to get curious about what the feeling is that you’re trying to escape from.

I think where we make our greatest error is when we make those resolutions that say, “I’m going to go the gym more, meditate more, start playing guitar or bring the romance back.” This jumps the gun. There are so many steps that occur before taking action with any of these things. There’s already a built up resistance to them and to skip over that is a recipe for failure.

What if these changes you wanted to make were couched in less immediacy? It’s helpful to actually understand what going on with the auto-pilot that lives within each one of us.

Here’s 7 steps to get underneath the hood and give yourself the change of making real change last:

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Sometimes you run across a story that provides a great teaching. Stan Friedman, PhD, a Psychologist in West Los Angeles, has such a story; a story that uses a metaphor to explore the possibility of breaking free from the confines of our minds and into a world of choice and freedom.

The grapevine section of highway 5 between Los Angeles and San Francisco was closed due to a rare winter snowstorm, and I had to turn around and use a different route. What would otherwise have been a 5 1/2 hour drive to complete the 400 mile journey became instead a 6 1/2 hour ordeal in heavy rain and stop-and-go traffic surrounded by the frequent honking of impatient drivers in covering only 100 of those miles. It was pretty miserable out there.

I was bemoaning my fate, realizing that there was no way out of this experience for at least the next 3 hours before reaching the motel I’d had the foresight to book along the way. Once I was mindful that I was ruminating towards the future, “When I’d be out of this mess and in a safe, warm peaceful bed.”

I asked myself a question: “If there were no way out–if I had no choice but to endure this undesirable circumstance—let’s say the world were to end at the end of those 3 hours—would I choose to be out of my misery early, to take death now? After all, there’d be no way out. Or conversely, would I rather choose to live those 3 hours?

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