Becoming your Own Master Neuro-Storyteller by Anthony Sosa, CNSF

Consider, what do humans create that truly lasts and stands the tests of time?

One could say that there are at least two things: Children and Stories. Nature continuously encodes memory of itself through the flowing spatial curvature of time by creating child offspring to carry the evolutionary currents of genetics through the biologically held adaptive stories encompassing an array of generational patterns and behaviors.

Stories are quintessential to being human because memory is quintessential to what it means t =o be human down to our DNA.

It is the ever-present field of memory where we link the past to present to future. Stories weave of our sense of self through time and are how we commemorate all that which we love, those we have lost, and impacting those to come. All humans have the inherent urge to complete the story because the way we construct the stories our lives from the past profoundly influence our decisions in the present that impact our future.

This begs two important questions: Why are stories are so crucial to our brain? How do we become our own master-storytellers informed by Neuroscience?

The human brain is incredibly oriented towards story because stories are how we organize the flow of information and energy. The role of stories, narratives, and language all serve in neural integration, memory formation, and self-identity development; these are powerful functions in the creation and maintenance of our sense of self threaded throughout time. Story-telling and story-listening requires sustained attention, memory for plot, track of time and sequences, evoking emotions, reading facial expressions and movements, awareness of listeners’ reactions and more. The brain is thus, a true storyteller.

We become master storytellers by understanding how to intentionally activate these neural circuitries, which is vital because we know that stories themselves shift our physiology and our physiology can shift our stories. Here are the key points:

• Your Prefrontal Cortex (PFC), the cortical area of the forehead involved in higher complexity functions such as abstract critical thinking, planning, compassion, creativity, and self-awareness, is important to understand in how the nature of subjectivity powerfully impacts our experience.
• Your medial Prefrontal Cortex (mPFC) assigns narrative. The reason the mPFC is so important is because it sets context of everything in your life; it defines the meaning of your experience.
• The mPFC is like the master knob or dial switch that can take one experience and enable you to frame it in such a context that it creates positive health effects. An example could be you choosing to take a biting cold shower as a deliberate action and from your knowledge that you are the self-aware one making the choice by exercising your will to decide to put yourself through eustressful discomfort which can liberate positive effects in your system.
• Story follows State; most of our maladaptive stories follow dysregulated states of the nervous system-based contraction that we tend to attach stories to that ultimately become the beliefs about who we are and the nature of the world at large.

Becoming a master neuro-storyteller of your life involves the ability to NOTICE OUR (Nervous System) STATE and then SHIFT IT. This is key = specifically noticing when we are in a dysregulated state and having the skills to shift into a regulated state to access our creative ensembles of whole-brain circuitry.

Neurosculpting is one such whole-brain training process that gives you the tools to regulate your nervous system, consistently activate your PFC, engage your creative and logical storyteller brain, and anchor self-directed neuroplasticity for lasting change. This is a contemplative practice of embodied imagination that gives back your inner power to tell a new story of your volition and creation in ways that your biology will inevitably listen to when repeated overtime.

Ultimately, it is not what happens to you in the past but how you make sense of the past that matters initiated by the act of creating your greater narrative story that will have the lasting change on you now and all the current children to come.

“Anthony Sosa serves as the Neurosculpting Institute’s onsite psychotherapist with his M.A. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Naropa University, and his B.S. in Physics with research in the neuroscience of mindfulness meditation. He also is a Certified Neurosculpting Facilitator (CNSF), SOMA Breath instructor, and yoga teacher. “