How to Really Change Your Life, DNA, Brain and Child

Think New Thoughts. Really. It Can Be that Simple.

We know that the first three years of our lives create a blueprint for the rest of our lives. The late Dr. Mitch Gaynor has shown that while still in the womb the fetus is actually thinking about experiences happening both inside and outside of the womb. So in effect, you can take a child out of the traumatic situation, but rarely do children get out of the trauma themselves.

The blueprints formed in the earliest of days become the foundation for a particular model of the world. What we see in the form of behavior, is their idea of how the world works. This is true for children as well as adults — as we all know, there are many of us in adulthood who continue to express behaviors that appear wrong to us, yet right in the mind of the person. According to their model of the world, it is “right” — in spite of the evidence they might see in the form of authority, consequences and punishment, they continue with their view of how things work.

Reason alone does little to convince adults of their “wrong” ideas, nor does punishment even to the extent of the death penalty. If this be true of adults who “should know better”, how much more true might it be for our children, who “in truth don’t know better” to begin with?

It is the parents job to teach our children to overcome, to utilize the neuro-plasticity of the brain, by what we say, and by what we do. Our actions are the most powerful influence we can give to our children. It is also important to keep in mind that “unacceptable behavior” is driven by fear and survival instincts. Calm the fear, diminish the behavior. Don’t try to “change” the behavior. This is where behavior modification (consequences, rewards, punishment, logic, control etc) lead us. There is no healing there. There is no love there. We have the future of the world in our hands – our children. Let us not do what has been done for centuries, only to add to the fear and confusion already present in our world. How do we keep things that way they are? We think the same old thoughts over and over. We don’t question our thinking. We don’t notice our thinking. We just accept it, we leave it run on auto-pilot. We say, “That is the way I am. This is who I am.” Big mistake. You are not “any way”. You are who and what you choose. And, so are your children – bad start and all.
So how do we “change” all this? Simple, not easy. We change our thinking. We teach our children to change their thinking, and how to think in the first place.There is substantial evidence showing that thoughts have the remarkable power to change the brain, activating genes, and thus changing the landscape of our DNA. The brain’s neuro-plasticity is no longer science fiction, but a real, tangible, measurable and reproducible process that can be used by all of us consciously and intentionally. Dr. Caroline Leaf, author of Switch On Your Brain, says “Our thoughts, with their inbedded feelings, turn sets of genes on and off in complex relationships. We take facts, experiences and events of life and assign meaning to them with our thinking.”

So — change the thinking — change the brain — change the DNA you pass on to your descendants. When was the last time you changed your “thinking”?

So think, and Choose love.
— B