Your Spirit & Your Brain
Week 6:
Memory and Storage
This week’s blessing:
Assignment:
Choose one happy memory to work with for the two weeks. It can be a very simple memory.
Let your “remembrance” brush against this memory several times a day. Jot down all the ideas that may emerge about the memory. If it runs stream-of-consciousness into other ideas, write those down as well.
It’s typical that you don’t think about it for a while, then when you do, there’s a flash of a new idea. Write it down! The goal is to keep building on all the little flashes that come.
Do at least one session during the two weeks where you spend a little longer in remembrance of that memory - “re-enter” it, and see what God has planted in it for you. Ask your spirit to release truth & emotions about that memory.
In doing this, you are training your understanding to keep re-visiting this memory, to see what hidden treasure is there, in your brain & your memory sites.
Your brain is simmering in the memory and all its files in your limbic system, pulling up associations, more memory, physical memories, and connecting it to your spiritual discernment. Your spirit is also pouring into it. That looks like lots of little flashes of ideas about it. Write them down.
THIS WAS MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE IN DWELLING ON ONE SHORT MEMORY OVER THE COURSE OF TWO WEEKS:
The memory I chose was based on a photograph I have of my fifth birthday, blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. (It’s not actually the photo above, that’s just the type of picture it was!) This was not something I had thought about in literally decades, maybe not since I was a teenager.
In allowing my brain to ponder in the background my memory of my fifth birthday cake, I had the following realizations / associations about my own design:
1) I’m a Synergy person (even though I didn’t know it at age 5!) and I love lots of random pieces coming together to make a whole. This cake was very much that way, and I was very excited about all the little pieces that made up one very exciting cake!
2) The birthday candles on the cake: I love fire, and the candles on the cake were exciting to me as a child. I got to blow them out! Exciting stuff for a five-year-old! I could feel the pleasure of that.
3) My mother took time on that cake to make my birthday special. She was a nurse, and we also had another baby by that time, so the time she spent for me was special. Over the course of a few days, that became a sense of being valued by my mother.
4) I enjoyed the surprise of the cake being carried in after supper on my birthday. It was a real surprise. I remember the impact of it.
That led to a deeper realization - I felt like then I could feel the correlation with the constant surprise of good things flowing from God. That’s supposed to be normal!
5) I love things relating to life, and as a child, I loved all the animals (animal crackers) on the cake. Then that reminded me of God’s variety for Adam to explore. So many animals! And Adam met & named every one.
6) I like lots of color, especially the softer, pastel colors, that were on the cake & candles.
7) My imagination lingered over what it was like to light the five candles, blow them out, the smell of the smoky candles afterwards, probably licking the icing off the candles, the sweetness, probably laughing at my baby sister trying to eat some cake, enjoying the attention of the birthday, there were probably presents, etc. Thinking about the sensory pleasures of the birthday cake helped to anchor my emotional pleasure.
Five days into it, when the memory popped into my mind for the gazillionth time, I suddenly & unexpectedly felt a great wave of being loved. Being loved by God, and being loved by my mother. My brain had taken all the information, and had found that point of connection. I could feel the love in a whole new way. It was overwhelming.
Now the Remembrance of that memory in my brain, its place in my story, has significance that is rooted in the reality that the Holy Spirit was there, and was loving me through the cake & through my mother. I didn’t feel that part of the reality until I let the different significances of the memory soak into my brain, & let it run its way through all the different parts.
My brain was able to remember and transmit sensory input that I could recognize as emotion. Excitement. Pleasure. The feeling of being valued.
Now, as a mature memory, (i.e., one that I have been leaning into so that it has deepened & become more established as an emotional reality. This IS part of my narrative, part of my story), I am able to recognize in the memory the imprint of the Holy Spirit there, and receive it as Love.
A few weeks after I had finished with this memory, a surprising correlation popped into my mind - for about five years as an adult, I had a little home-based baking business, and I specialized in making fancy and imaginative birthday cakes. To what extent did this fifth birthday cake experience influence that part of my adult life?
I also realized that when our two daughters were growing up, literally every single birthday they had, I made some kind of amazing cake. It’s possible that the pleasure of the fifth birthday experience truly influenced my life to an extent that I had never realized until I began meditating on the memory.
For a time, I thought I wanted to be a baker and own a bakery. I did a couple of years at culinary school, and won a few prizes for cakes, like at the state fair, at one of the culinary school events, and so on. Did all that come out of my limbic system making decisions from that early experience?
It’s fun, and can be highly significant, to spend time reclaiming your good memories, even tiny ones.
You have been developing a tool kit for your brain. Keep pulling out the tools where they are useful. Practice, and let them become comfortable, so that when you really need them, they are easily available to you.