Metacognition time, baby!

This hasn't been the easiest breeziest past couple of months for many. There's head-scratching over how to walk our talk. I've lost count of the number of friends saying they can't wait for 2016 to end because so many crushing disappointments visited them this year.

If 2016 handed us heavy stones to carry, how do we move forward without the fatiguing weight of emotionally charged past stories? Can we stop replaying those old thought tapes and rewire our neurological hardware for something finer that serves our hearts and this world better?

Some say we can. I think their ideas are worth a listen.

I spent time this month diving deep into neuroscience and spirit and breath and meditation — punctuated by high-energy dance jams during workshop breaks — with Dr. Joe Dispenza and over 600 others in Philadelphia. I've heard a variation on this a gazillion times before from great teachers, but when Dr. Joe said that overcoming the emotional charge of the past is whatwisdom is, it landed on fertile mind terrain. He described meditation as "placing your order with the Divine" to rewire the brain's circuitry to stop cheating yourself out of the grace and possibility of the present moment.

I'm still integrating all I learned from this teacher. In the meantime, I'm revising my counsel to anyone with a busy life who decrees that their schedule precludes time for meditation. I used to say, to them and myself, "Just squeeze in what you can." Now? I'm leaning into the old Zen adage: You should sit in meditation 20 minutes a day, unless you're too busy, in which case you should sit for an hour.

Quiet dialogue with Universal Intelligence offers better answers to your questions than Siri.

More is more. Developing the skill of metacognition — the art of paying attention to what you've been thinking about — requests commitment from us. The more conscious you become of how unconscious you've been, the more conscious you become.