WOW Brain
By Leslie Sann
Turn agitation to curiosity to wonder.
Living in Wide Open Wonder (W O W) is the antidote to Crazy Brain. Wonder opens us to creativity.
I wonder … hmmm?
Through reflection and wonder, we grow in wisdom, harvesting what has gone before, especially when we ask questions such as, How has this served me? What can I learn from this? If I want to do better, what can I do?
Wisdom is using those things that work for us as long as they work for us while letting go of what is no longer working. Wonder opens us to perceiving our reality in new ways. It assists us in accessing our ability to invent, innovate and create.
When we find ourselves in Crazy Brain, running around the Hamster Wheel of Hades, going nowhere, we have a choice. We can choose to be responsible. Responsibility is the Doorway to Heaven. It is the portal into Wonder Brain.
I love playing with words. The word responsibility is the ability to respond. If we have the ability to respond, we have the power to make a choice. This is where true freedom is. This is the Doorway to Heaven.
When we are in Crazy Brain, we are in reactivity. Reactivity is fine. Life happens, and we react—no big deal. Now make a choice. What will you choose? Choice creates.
Scramble the letters in reactivity and create the word creativity. Do you see it? Better yet, do it. Doing it requires a wonder question. A good question to ask is, Now what?
Now what shifts our focus from problem to possibility. Something happening is an opportunity to be creative thus designing something new from what has occurred. Now what opens the mind to inspiration. Now what? What am I going to do about it?
Crazy Brain is hell, the Hamster Wheel of Hades kind of hell. We just keep running around, running around, triggering ourselves into more upset, going nowhere. Until we decide to do something about it. That moment of decision is when we take responsibility. We choose to respond.
We decide to upshift by accessing our freedom of choice. This is the power we have as human beings. We have the ability to choose. There are some things we cannot control. Gravity, for example. Yet we can choose to be creative in the face of how life is designed. Think of sports. We are playing with gravity. Ball goes up, the ball comes down. Sports are an example of being creative with what is.
We have power with our choices and actions. That is freedom. Once we step through the Doorway to Heaven, we ask a wonder question, “Hmmm … now what?” — and the creative brain opens up. We don’t even have to know what to do. Just open and allow the creativity to begin to percolate.
We begin to upshift when we open the WOW brain (Wide Open Wonder.) All of a sudden, we get an idea. We are inspired. Where did that inspiration come from? Spirit. We become receptive to Divine Intelligence, the Magnificent Mystery. We bring that information through our human creativity and design new ways of being—a gift of our humanity.
There’s nothing else on the planet that does this: imagines a future, references the past, and takes action to create something new. From those actions, humans create a future that wasn’t there before. In the beginning, there were no such things as cooked food, houses, or iPhones. We created all that.
Amazing us.
What if the world is designed to be upsetting? What if, rather than giving us what we want, life challenges us to lift into who we are?
I have asked participants in my workshops, clients, friends, and neighbors if their lives turned out how they had imagined. I haven’t found a person yet who has said, “Yes.” Most have said their life has turned out even better. Not what was imagined, even better. Better because they discovered they were more than they had imagined. And so are you.
Engaging from wonder takes us to even better. Discovering that we will endure until the end, and that we can handle what life gives us shows us what we are really made of. This is the source of joy.
Imagine life getting even better.
W O W.
Blessings from Planet Joy,
