Attunement and Your Mind

An excerpt from my recent book, Your Mind Is What Your Brain Does for a Living, now available at Amazon.

Whether it’s procrastination or some other habitual behavior that you feel doesn’t serve you, once you’ve identified your pattern it’s easier to make mindful choices that will help you stop automatically following your old default programming and commit to creating new neural pathways for more effective behavior.

Getty Images

Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. points out that once mindful awareness awakens within you, a natural progression takes place and you become reflective about your own mental processes and patterns, and this is what enables you to make new, healthier choices and to change. With mindfulness, you become more attuned to yourself, and you become more attuned to others. “Our minds connect with one another via neural circuitry in our bodies that is hard-wired to take in others’ signals,” he explains. The more attuned we are to other people, the better our relationships will be.
Yet, despite knowing the many benefits of mindfulness, some of us habitually let our hardwiring—our machinery’s default programming—run us on automatic pilot instead of practicing mindful awareness. This causes us to be stuck in old patterns that constantly prevent us from getting what we truly want: connection and attunement with ourselves, with others, and with the Universe. This is why it’s crucial for us to choose to live more and more in the state of mindfulness that allows us to be present in our own lives and to make choices that create more aliveness and joy. In other words, to be in the moment, in the now.