Neurosculpting®: Heal Trauma, Rewrite Limiting Beliefs, And Find Wholeness With Lisa Wimberger

 

Can you imagine having your typical day, doing chores, or sitting on your couch, and suddenly your life disappeared without warning? Our guest today had that near-death experience. How did she pivot and turn that experience into transformation? In this episode, Lisa Wimberger, the Founder of the Neurosculpting® Institute, shares the structures and format of Neurosculpting to heal trauma, rewrite limiting beliefs, and find wholeness. Neurosculpting is not just for those who have a life-changing traumatic event but also for those who have gathered unmanageable stress. Join Lisa as she leads us to find our path to healing our trauma before it becomes worse. Tune in to this conversation!

—

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Neurosculpting®: Heal Trauma, Rewrite Limiting Beliefs, And Find Wholeness With Lisa Wimberger

Lisa Wimberger is the Founder of the Neurosculpting Institute and Cofounder of the NeuroPraxis app. She holds a Master’s Degree in Education, a foundation certificate in Neuroleadership, and certificates in Medical Neuroscience, Visual Perception, Brain, and Neurology. Lisa began her meditation practice at age 12, was hit by lightning at age 15, and clinically flatlined on multiple occasions.

Lisa uses her traumatic experience as a vehicle for transformation. She’s the author of seven books on neuroplasticity and stress management, including New Beliefs, New Brain: Free Yourself from Stress and Fear and Neurosculpting: A Whole-Brain Approach to Heal Trauma, Rewrite Limiting Beliefs, and Find Wholeness.

—

Lisa, thank you so much for joining us.

It’s great to be here.

I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about how you got into the work you do and what drives your passion for it.

Personal stress and trauma are the mothers of invention. I had a traumatic experience when I was fifteen that led to a seizure disorder that was not epilepsy, and it was undiagnosed for many years, but I was having grand mal vasovagal seizure. In layman’s terms, a few times a year, my whole body would shut down, and my heart rate would plummet. In fact, oftentimes it stopped and I’d have to get assistance restarting it or being resuscitated, and brain activity would go away.

I would go down like a ton of bricks, land on the grounds in some crazy positions, usually coming out of these things unable to move, speak, hold my urine or bowels, and function. I would have to either lay there for hours to recuperate or to have to somehow crawl myself back to bed or a safer space. These went on for many years. I was a meditator since I was a child, so I had what I thought were great emotional, spiritual, and mental tools. This was a thing my body was doing.

Lo and behold, in my 30s, I had one of these seizures during a doctor’s exam, which was a gift because it hadn’t been witnessed by a medical professional. I was usually waking up on the floor and people not knowing what to do. He witnessed it and what I woke up to was a needle of atropine poised at my heart. He was about to inject me with atropine, which anyone in the medical profession knows is to resuscitate.

I couldn’t speak or move. He looked at me and said, “You had a grand mal seizure. You flatlined. We couldn’t get your heart going and breathing. We were about to inject you. What in the world is this? Has this happened before?” This has happened since I was fifteen and I didn’t know I was having these seizures. I thought I was blacking out, but I didn’t know what was occurring in those blackouts until finally, this doctor witnessed one.

They tested me for epilepsy and sent me to the ER for all the tests and things. I came out with the diagnosis of, “You have vasovagal seizures and these are induced by stress.” This was the pivotal moment. “What do you mean, I have seizures from stress? I’m a meditator. I have emotional, mental, and spiritual tools. How could I possibly be short-circuiting from stress?” This was where all the light bulbs went off.

I started realizing I’m not healing anything. I’m bypassing something because I have a stress disorder. My meditation practice is maybe poorly applied and that’s user error. My mental tools are keeping me mental and not healing my body. There’s a disconnect somewhere and I need to find it. It led me to neuroscience, understand my nervous system, and create a meditation/mental rehearsal protocol that enabled me to entrain a new stress response and embed it in my nervous system so that I could automatically interrupt my seizures when they occurred.

I didn’t know if this would work. I was desperate. My seizures were life-threatening at this point. I used this protocol on myself. I pieced it together from what I was learning in medical neuroscience and neurobiology. I was like, “I have to figure this out.” Western Medicine is giving me no answers. I’ve used inquiry to investigate my inner psyche and stories since I was a kid and that’s not giving me answers. Something has to work here and it has to be a bridge between mind and body.

 

I played with this protocol and after a couple of months of using it to rehearse a new stress response and embed it in my nervous system, I had a seizure halo come. In a fraction of a second, I thought I was going to go out and this script I had been rehearsing kicked in and my body interrupted the seizure. I broke through and didn’t have a seizure. It was the first time that had ever happened. The one before was the last seizure I ever had because I had broken through.

That was several years ago at this point. I’ve had seizure halos come every once in a while in the first few years after that, but my body stopped it dead in its tracks. I knew I have to teach this protocol to people with stress disorders, trauma disorders, people whose bodies are doing things they don’t know how to control, and people whose mental and emotional states or habituated to a negative cycle. This was a thing that sparked hope in me that if I could heal this, I could teach it to anyone and they could redirect their own nervous systems. That means redirecting emotions, perceptions, physical patterns, and even your spiritual relationship. All of this is in the nervous system.

I married this modality that I called neurosculpting. Several years ago, I said, “This is my mission on the planet and I’m going to share it with as many people all over the world as possible before my body gives over to something else.” That’s pretty much the story of how it came to be and why I’m so passionate about it because it saved my life. I can’t marry it, dedicate myself to it, and consecrate myself to it because if I did that, I would be ignoring the very thing that enabled me to be here right now talking. I had to dedicate myself to it, and that’s what I do.

How do people learn it? What’s the structure and format? How long does it take?

The actual practice is a fifteen-minute meditation template. People don’t have to learn how to guide themselves. You could go to the neurosculpting website, download a couple of meditations, the templates right there, press play, and it’s me guiding you. That’s a practice, but that practice, unless you know how what and why, you can’t adapt that practice for different scenarios going forward. That’s where the education piece comes in.

I’m a huge fan of empowering you to do your own work, so you don’t need me. You can press play on one of the meditations I guide, but then you’re still reliant on me guiding it. I want you to be able to do that for yourself. I want you to understand the how and the why and the structure so we have online courses. They’re self-paced and super robust. The Beginner Course gets you using the tools and template, but more importantly, understanding how and why this works in the nervous system so eventually you can adapt it to future stress scenarios that you never learned from me, but because you know the how and why. You’re now self-sufficient.

It’s like teaching a man to fish or handing him a fish. The recorded meditations, I’m handing you a fish, it’s going to feed you. I’m going to do that over and over again as long as you press play, but if you take the courses, I’m teaching you how to fish. You don’t need me anymore. In a moment of real need, you have the internal resources to do this practice for yourself. That’s the best way I feel like to get people self-sufficient.

The beautiful thing about the online courses is that I’m still in a private group with all the students, so you still get me a lot to live answer your questions and help guide and direct you. We also have a network of certified practitioners all over the country and in Europe for people who want the one-on-one support, the co-regulation that happens through a relationship. That’s quite possible for people if they want that.

There are lots of different avenues to come to the work. There are also a whole bunch of books. There are seven books on neurosculpting out there right now that you can find on Amazon or in local bookstores. I’m a hands-on girl. I want to give people practice, not theory. The books are great entry points and they do have scripts for meditations in there, but ultimately, I want people to leave feeling that I taught them to be self-sufficient. I taught them to be efficient with their nervous system so that can adapt more easily. That’s how people can come to work.

What’s the length of a course?

We try to make it bite-size because neuroplasticity works off bite-size chunks and I’m a fan of efficiency. The Beginner Course is roughly probably about six hours and that includes video instruction and a meditation library for homework, activities, and worksheets. The Intermediate Course gets a little bit bigger. That one is probably somewhere around 8 to 10 hours, and then The Advanced Course gets bigger somewhere around sixteen hours or so that people can do it self-paced and fit it into their busy lives, but all of the pieces of all of the courses are bite-size chunks. They’re little doses of learning and they give you time to integrate so you can take it at your own speed.

I am an online learning person and also an in-person learning person. I love learning. For me, a six-hour course, I’ll probably do it in 6 to 8 hours, and then metabolize it and then go back and redo it so I get a deeper layer. That’s how I like to learn, but some people like to space it out and going to do a little bit each week, “I’m going to take six weeks to do this course,” an hour a week. It’s designed to meet you where you’re at with your busy life.

When you move from the initial to the intermediate to the advanced, are you talking about somebody at the advanced level who wants to go teach it to other people, or are you talking about gaining better tools for yourself?

After someone completes the advanced, they’re eligible to enter our certification program. You can consider them tools for yourself and also consider them the prerequisites that get you eligible, but you’re not able to facilitate and create a private practice around it until you’re certified. I have the coursework as a preparation or prerequisite for this reason. This is not to ding the yoga world, but this is the only example I have from lived experience.

You don’t have to ever have been on the mat practicing yoga to enter a yoga teacher training. Therefore, not only are you learning in that training how to teach yoga, but you may be having your very first experience in your body of the practice. Those two learning curves cannot possibly get you to the depth and mastery of teaching that you need to be at because you’re still trying to digest the practice itself.

I am not a fan of churn and burn. “Let’s get people into our certification who have no experience using this modality in their bodies.” I’m a fan of what Steven Kotler calls embodied cognition. I want this to be authentic in your body. I want you to have a real experience with this transformation before I would ever want you to try to teach this out in the world because you don’t have an authentic platform to teach from.

For me, you have to use this first and know if you even like it before you jump into certification and spend your time, money, and energy and my time and energy preparing you to teach something you know nothing about. That’s the rhyme and the reason. It creates cohorts of people in a certification who are coming for the right reasons. They’re coming because they’ve experienced authenticity with this. Right out of the gate, no matter what I teach them how to facilitate, they are going to facilitate better than someone who doesn’t have any experience with this modality. It limits the pool, but it deepens the roots of the people coming into it, and that’s more important to me.

Back to the story you told of yourself initially, the idea that you’d been meditating since you were twelve years old, you thought you already had the benefits you could get from meditation, but there was a lived experience of a whole different level of depth and dimensionality that you were completely unaware of until you went back and looked at from another perspective.

Meditation is a cornerstone of my life but because it’s a practice, I view it as a tool. You’re not going to use the same tool for every situation. You’re going to use specific tools that get the job done efficiently. Here I was with a Transcendental Meditation training background and lots of metaphysical training through the BPI, the Berkeley Psychic Institute program, and I had all of these tools which were the right tools for my spiritual evolution but wrong tools for the body’s nervous system healing and re-patterning. I was using them as though they were one-size-fits-all.

A lot of people use meditation like this. They pick one meditation and it’s like, “This is supposed to solve everything,” and it doesn’t because we have the body, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs, and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all for that. At least, I haven’t found a one-size-fits-all. I was ignoring my body and my nervous system for years with my very robust spiritual and emotional meditation practice. I had to bridge that gap and find a process that allowed me to understand how my inner thoughts and patterns were affecting my body, heart, lungs, brain, locomotion, and muscles because that’s where the short circuit was.

It was the bridge between mental and physical. My other meditation tools were not helping me cross that bridge. I loved my meditation practice, but it was making me worse. It was getting me further and further away from understanding my body. It’s getting me more and more of the mindset that I’m not my body, therefore I don’t have to address it. In fact, in many meditation practices, embedded in the meditation is even the mantra, “You are not your body.” That’s true at one level. Why do I then live in one? Why am I not learning how to live comfortably, safely, and fully in this container that I exist in?

 

Ignoring the existence that is the actual interface for the spirit made me worse. It made me sick. I was dissociative and high pain threshold so I ignored all my body symptoms to the point where I had to seize in order to say, “Snap out of it.” I had to get into a seizure before I would recognize I was dysregulated. That is dissociative at the highest level. Dissociation does not enable functionality from here down. It enables functionality from here up and that has strengths. I’m a great problem solver. I’m a great and keen observer in private practice that people feel as though I can psychically read them. It’s mostly because I’m observing them with my very dissociative heady skill set.

Am I feeling? No. Am I regulated? No. Am I able to recognize dysregulation at the microlevel and adjust before it becomes a snowball effect? No. I was none of those things. I am now, but that’s because I had to cross the bridge. I could not use TM and metaphysical training for that. I had to use neuroscience for that. That was the game changer. It was befriending and understanding the container and the interface I’m using to express my spiritual self. That’s when healing happened for me and that’s what I want to offer people.

In my experience, a lot of times that is triggered by a trauma. The infant or the baby is much more in touch with all of the flow from the physical, mental, emotional, etc. All that whole energy hasn’t even been differentiated into this category and that category. Somewhere along the line, if I get traumatized, my survival response ends up doing something like you’re talking about dissociation or splitting.

I’m relying on strength to the exclusion of several other levels of skill that I have and go with my strongest, in your case, intellectual capacity. It’s about a reintegration over time in books like Waking the Tiger and you’re neurosculpting that put people back in touch with. You may not be just your body, but you do have this as a vehicle. It’s got a lot of good information for you. You can be a friend and it can be your friend if you learn to reconnect.

You mentioned Waking the Tiger. That book woke me up to, “I have a body. I don’t even know what it needs,” but as far as I want to define a little bit about trauma. Maybe this is interesting for whoever’s reading this to think about it like this, trauma doesn’t have to be the big thing. It doesn’t have to be what they call the capital T. It doesn’t have to be like the one life-changing traumatic event. We all have moments of micro stresses that are unmanageable because they’re unmanageable, they can stack up over time.

Trauma doesn't have to be that one cataclysmic event. It can be collected micro-moments of unmanageable stress that compound over time and create a track, pattern, and response mechanism that feels too big to manage over time. Click To Tweet

If we are experiencing unmanageable stress a little bit every day over time, we’ve got an accumulation of a lot of unmanageable stress. This can affect the nervous system very similar to I had a traumatic incident. The incident is the capital T. The accumulation of unmanageable stress is the lowercase T. You don’t need to think, “This isn’t for me because I haven’t had a traumatic incident.” We’ve all stored accumulated unmanageable stress and it will affect your nervous system and dysregulate it in a very similar way. This is not for the people who have had the event happen in their childhood, the car accident, or the extreme anything.

This is for every nervous system because without mitigating our stress, it will accumulate. We’re learning from it and adapting to it. If we have lots of unregulated dysregulated stress moments that we don’t resolve, then we’re learning to have more dysregulated stress moments that we don’t resolve. The nervous system is going to think, “These are not supposed to be resolved and I’m going to collect more and more.” We get to intervene and teach the nervous system adaptation at the moment so that it gets better at adapting at the moment for the rest of our lives. That’s what we want. We want to teach it to get better at adaptation and regulation.

When you have lots of moments of overwhelm or you can’t regulate your emotions or the stresses beyond what you can process completely, whatever you do to get through that becomes, “I survived.” Here’s another pattern that gets strengthened even if it’s maladaptive in the long term.

If we don’t course correct in an adaptive regulated direction and we process that stress response however best we can at the moment, which is generally not bringing us to regulation, that’s going to be the go-to approach the next time. The nervous system is ready to learn in all moments and it’s learning, “I ran away from that thing and that saved my life. I’ll continue to run away. I disassociated. That worked. I’ll keep doing that. I self-harmed that got rid of the pain for a moment. I’ll continue to do that.”

By marrying of what you’ve learned about neuroscience and physiology and the good side of what you got from your meditation, you’ve put together a system that you can teach people so that they can start to identify these little events within the energy system that we call a body and learn to choose a different response pattern. Is that correct?

That is correct. I love the term microdosing. It’s generally associated with the psychedelic world, but I want to associate it here with the concept of neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is this capacity in which we can learn and adapt the brain and the nervous system in all moments. It’s our gift. It’s our superpower. The way neuroplasticity works best is if we teach it in small, repeated, and manageable chunks. That’s how I define microdosing.

Think about it in terms of the gym. Everyone seems to be able to understand this particular idea. Let’s say you had four hours a month allocated out of your time to go to the gym. Would you go 1 day a month and do a 4-hour workout and expect that to work? No. Is it better to go for 1 hour a week on 1 day? It’s a little better. Is it even better to go twice a week for 30 minutes? Definitely. Is it even better to do it 3 times a week for 20 minutes? Somewhere between those last two options is optimal. That’s microdosing. Sometimes we are looking for the big revelation and we want an immersive experience.

It’s the meditation and pill form. “If I meditate for 8 hours or go to a 10-day silent retreat, then I’m all better.”

That’s not sustainable in terms of neuroplasticity law. Neuroplasticity says you want sustainable change. Don’t look for the big changes. Create the microdose repeatable change. This is the reason why neurosculpting meditations are about 15 to 20 minutes. I don’t want you to take a day on your weekend and clear your schedule, not interact with the world, and do a four-hour practice. It’s not efficient. It’s not going to get you sustainable change. It’s not repeatable very often.

Neuroplasticity says you want sustainable change. Don't look for the big changes; create the micro-dosed repeatable change. Click To Tweet

What is repeatable is a 15-minute window that you can do 2 to 3 times a week. Better yet, every day if you have fifteen minutes, but even that can be unmanageable. That is the path to sustainable change because that honors neuroplasticity rules, which the brain has. It speaks the language the nervous system is needing, which is efficiency, microdosing, repetition, and focused attention. It stacks and creates a foundation that becomes an adaptation state of being in the body. That is sustainable change.

Because of that, are you going to have the revelation, “I’m completely transformed after one meditation?” That’s not my goal for you. You want to feel like your life is transformed in an unsustainable way. Go to a motivational seminar. That’s not to say we don’t need motivation. We do, but we need the practice to anchor it. The practice is not always transformational at its face value. It’s often doing the necessary micro tweaks to position your nervous system for life-changing sustainable transformation. I’m in it for the long game.

I’m not in it for a pill. I am not giving you a pill. I don’t want you to have another pill. I don’t even want you to think you’re broken. Let’s get rid of that idea that you’re broken because that’s what leads us to want the pill. You are not broken. Your nervous system is adaptable. It’s designed to be. Does it adapt well right now? Maybe not, but because it is designed for adaptation, all you have to do is start feeding it repeatable learning moments and it will get better at adaptation. It’s the most magnificent AI that learns from itself and you are the input.

Let's get rid of that idea that you're broken because that leads us to want the pill. You are not broken. Your nervous system is adaptable. Click To Tweet

Fifteen minutes, honestly, through the neurosculpting lens is all you need, repeated over time. You then can layer that in with the magnificent motivational seminars and the retreats that take you out of your life and dive you deeply. Those are things that can now take root in a ripe nervous system. It’s your nervous system that needs to be conditioned in order for those things to stick, and we often go to those first and it’s backward.

I was flashing memories back in the ’70s and the ’80s, people would put on these seminars and even weekends where they would usher people into a peak emotional experience. I’m not talking about being on drugs. I’m talking about sitting around, doing meditation, and being in a love exchange with somebody. People would leave vibrating with all these great feelings and two days later, you’d see them in your daily life and they’d be crabbing about this or that or raging at somebody.

I have that lived experience as well. I used to do cycle weekends with a group of monks that I was studying TM with. We would go from Friday through Sunday. Friday night, we’d have a little like debrief lesson, and then we would meditate. We’d be in meditation all day Saturday and break for meals, but it’s from sun up to bedtime. We are in meditation, breaking for meals, and not talking, and then Sunday, it’s the same thing. By Sunday night, we’re so blissed out and expanded.

It took me a while to get there. Friday night I was aggravated by traffic in my week. Saturday, I was fighting my inner doubt and criticism like, “This is BS. I can’t believe I’m spending my money and my time.” Saturday afternoon, I’m hitting this transformation. Saturday night to Sunday, I’m blissed out and I’m out of my body. My endorphins are through the roof. I am vibrating as you said. Monday morning comes and the high is there and the moment I get into my actual day, it starts chipping away. By Tuesday, I’m worse. Here’s why I’m worse. Not only am I back to normal or baseline, which was what I was before going to the weekend, but now I’m in grief because I can’t hold onto this magic.

The thought comes up, “There must be something wrong with me.”

What is wrong with me? I’m spending one weekend a month and a lot of money to have these transcendental experiences and I can’t hold them past the weekend for more than 24 hours. Tuesday through Friday is terrible. Maybe on weekend I leave my life again and try to replicate it myself, and that’s different because it’s not a group experience. Now, I got to wait a whole other month. What I was teaching myself was that in order to go to those spaces, you have to leave your life behind.

I was teaching myself that this is unmanageable. Now, my thoughts started going in the direction of, “I’m going to live in the commune.” I’m not even kidding. This particular group had a commune. After many cycle weekends, the only way for me to feel that regulated, expansive, and the actual letdown process in my nervous system were for me to think I needed to go live with them and do this all day in a container where I didn’t have to buy food, shop, and think about electric bills because my money would go into the pool of the commune and they would take care of it.

That becomes this, “I’m considering what I felt like going to join a cult.” It made perfect sense to me to think that because my nervous system can’t feel this good in regular life. That was problematic for me. It was dissociative and problematic. Now, I’m separating from functionality. I can’t function outside of a commune situation.

If you go there, you feel bliss.

You feel the bliss all the time until maybe you don’t. Now, where do you go for more bliss? You can’t concentrate any deeper than you’ve already concentrated. I had to back up and choose to find a way to get my nervous system pragmatically to that state, self-induced so that that magic was endogenous. I don’t need a pill for that magic. I don’t need a weekend for that magic. I don’t need monks for that magic. It’s right here. I want to taste it every day, function, still be able to have a job, and know that I can pay my electric bill and not have to shed my identity and take on a mythical identity that isn’t allowing me to be in the world with the people I love.

For me, neuroplasticity is the highest form of transformation based on my experience. It marries everything. It enables that magic experience to be channeled and funneled through the body that we are living in. Whether you like it or not, you are in a body right now. Emotionally and spiritually, maybe not. Physically, if you’re breathing, you have a body. If you’re reading this right now, you have one. Relative to the amount of time we’ve been here on this planet. 300,000 years for the modern human. Millions of years for humanoid species. You’re here for maybe 85 and you’re ignoring this? That makes no sense.

 

The word repetition was coming up. You want it to be something that you can repeat. What we know about skills and skill base is that in order to stay at a high level of skill, you might have muscle memory for it. What they say is, “When you learn to ride a bike, you can always ride a bike going forward.” The fact of the matter though is that if you haven’t ridden a bike in 20 or 30 years when you start, you’re not as proficient as you’re going to be after 3 or 4 weeks of riding it again. It’s this idea that if I can learn to regulate my body, nervous system, emotions, and thoughts in this congruent flow as a system or as a team, then I get distracted from it.

The story I like to tell people is that I learned EFT tapping. It’s a very simple tapping technique to give yourself an acupressure treat for anything that bothers you. I would be teaching it and I spent a lot of years teaching it to people. I would teach it to anybody that came to a session. It got to the point where if I had a whole bunch of new people within a week and/or I was teaching the all-day class from 9:00 to 4:00, and then I’d have somebody come in a crisis and we’d do even more. One night, I was having a bad dream and I woke up where I was tapping on my forehead. In the middle of the dream, I thought to tap. I scared myself because I was tapping.

On the other hand, if I go for 3 or 4 weeks, I don’t have any new patients I’m teaching it to. I don’t have a class coming up. I have a night where I have a bad dream and I wake up, get up, go to the bathroom, get a drink of water, get back in bed, toss and turn for an hour, wake up the next morning and think, “Why didn’t I tap?”

If I’m not practicing it daily or if I’m not staying at that edge of performance, whether it’s bike riding, golfing, tapping, or regulating, staying aware of what this energy system is trying to teach me as I move through life then I lose that edge. That’s what I like about the idea of the 15 minutes, 10 minutes, the learning techniques that get repeated either every day or multiple times a day.

Skills acquisition takes repetition forever, as you said. What you’ve habituated when you’re younger will stay as a solid baseline much easier than what you try to habituate as an adult. This is why if you learn how to ride a bike as a kid, the baseline’s still there and you can get back to baseline as an adult within a few weeks of riding your bike.

When you talk about a new skill, learning EFT as an adult, you can habituate that with enough repetition, but it’s an active process where as children, we learn through passive habituation. It’s so much easier to learn as a kid because our neural networks haven’t allocated themselves to anything yet. We’re not fixed, but we’re a little bit more allocated as adults. It takes that active repetition.

Change and skill acquisition are totally possible. It demands regular repetition. Your example is perfect. It wasn’t automated after a couple of weeks of not using it, whereas it was automated after a couple of weeks of using it. Neural networks work on the use it or lose it principle because they’re living dynamic networks. Those networks stay networked based on input because they’re living in a dynamic.

We are constantly networking to networks like the stress network and then the tapping network, and I’m doing them at the same time. I’m connecting them. Anytime stress comes up, I’m going to tap because I’ve connected them. Our dendrites or our little outreaches of those brain cells are seeking to connect to each other, so that network as we repeat that process is thickening its volume and gray matter. It’s making more and more connections to habituate this, but then we stop for a month. The brain wants to be efficient. If you stop using a brand-new skill, the brain says, “Why would I put energy into growing those connections when you’re not using them? I’m going to put energy over here.”

 

Some of those dendritic connections are going to shrink back and prune themselves. That network is going to get a little bit more loosely tied together where before it was like this, so use it or lose it. If you repeat it, those networks stay dynamically robust and active, and current runs through them. They fire their action potentials and get better at doing that, then you take a break. They don’t fire so much because you’re using those resources elsewhere.

Repeat it to keep it.

If you don’t use it, you will lose it. Will you lose it 100%? Probably not if it’s something you learned as a child. Will you lose it more if it’s a skill you learned as an adult? Probably, but you can always get it back. This goes to some fun practices and lifestyle commitments I like to make that maybe you all would like to make. Every start of a new decade for me chronologically, I will set decade goals. These goals are for skill acquisition. I’ll usually choose a physical one, a mental one, and maybe an emotional one.

For instance, for this decade, handstands which I still don’t do yet, and learn multiple languages. I’ve got ten years, which is a nice window to course correct if you’re going in the wrong direction. You give yourself a year, and you’re going to fail because I’m not learning handstands in a year and I’m not picking up a third language in a year. You have to give yourself enough time, and then you have to choose how to microdose those skill acquisitions every day or multiple times a week over those ten years.

What happens is that your brain stays resilient, and your prefrontal cortex stays excited with novelty and activation. You are learning and gaining skills. You are teaching your nervous system that it can continue to learn skills. By the end of the decade, you’ve accomplished things you never thought possible. In the next decade, pick two other things. It’s a way for you to play with neuroplasticity practices outside of stress regulation. It’s just fun neuroplasticity practices over enough time to keep yourself resilient and adaptable and engaged in life. It’s very engaging when the brain starts learning. You feel alive.

It's very engaging when the brain starts learning. You feel alive. Click To Tweet

Thank you so much. I will be looking into the Neurosculpting Beginners Program for myself. It’s Neurosculpting.com. I greatly appreciate you, being willing to share with us. Thank you so much.

It was great talking to you. I love how you engage in the conversation, so I appreciated it.

Please be blessed and I will follow your work. We’ll talk to you again maybe in about a year and see if we can get you back on the show.

That sounds great.

Thank you.

—

Lisa Wimberger is the Founder of the Neurosculpting Institute and Cofounder of the NeuroPraxis app. She holds a Master’s Degree in Education, a Foundation Certificate in Neuroleadership, and Certificates in Medical Neuroscience, Visual Perception, Brain, and Neurology. Lisa began her meditation practice at age 12, was hit by lightning at age 15, and clinically flatlined on multiple occasions.

Lisa uses her traumatic experience as a vehicle for transformation. She’s the author of seven books on neuroplasticity and stress management, including New Beliefs, New Brain: Free Yourself from Stress and Fear and Neurosculpting: A Whole-Brain Approach to Heal Trauma, Rewrite Limiting Beliefs, and Find Wholeness.

Lisa runs multiple companies and has over 60 international franchises. She still runs a private meditation coaching practice, teaching clients who suffer from emotional blocks, stress disorders, and self-imposed limitations. She has a keynote speaker and a faculty member of Kripalu Yoga and Meditation Center, Law Enforcement Survival Omega Institute, and 1440 Multiversity. Lisa teaches audiences ranging from corporate leaders to the FBI and Secret Service. To date, Lisa has taught the tools of emotional regulation to thousands of law enforcement personnel and first responders across the country.

 

Important Links

• Neurosculpting Institute
• NeuroPraxis
• New Beliefs, New Brain: Free Yourself from Stress and Fear
• Neurosculpting: A Whole-Brain Approach to Heal Trauma, Rewrite Limiting Beliefs, and Find Wholeness
• Kripalu Yoga and Meditation Center
• Law Enforcement Survival Omega Institute
• 1440 Multiversity

 

About Lisa Wimberger

Lisa Wimberger is the founder of the Neurosculpting® Institute and co-founder of the NeuroPraxis App. She holds a Master’s Degree in Education, a Foundations Certification in NeuroLeadership, and Certificates in Medical Neuroscience, Visual Perception, and the Brain, and Neurobiology. She is the author of seven books on neuroplasticity and stress management, including NEW BELIEFS, NEW BRAIN: Free Yourself from Stress and Fear, and NEUROSCULPTING: A Whole-Brain Approach to Heal Trauma, Rewrite Limiting Beliefs, and Find Wholeness.

She runs multiple companies, and has over 60 international franchises. Lisa still runs a private meditation coaching practice teaching clients who suffer from emotional blocks, stress disorders, and self-imposed limitations. She is a keynote speaker and a faculty member of Kripalu Yoga and Meditation Center, the Law Enforcement Survival Institute, Omega Institute, and 1440 Multiversity.

Lisa began her meditation practice at age 12. Hit by lightning at age 15, and clinically flatlined on multiple occasions, Lisa uses her traumatic experience as a vehicle for transformation. Lisa studied Ascension training for four years with Ishaya monks, completed four years of psychic awareness training, applying the tools of the Berkeley Psychic Institute, and is trained in Autogenic Hypnosis.

Lisa teaches audiences ranging from corporate leaders to FBI and Secret Service. To date, Lisa has taught the tools of emotional regulation to thousands of law enforcement personnel and first responders across the country.

 

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

• Here’s How »

• journeysdream.org
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Facebook
• YouTube