Dear Anita,

I read one of your posts and felt the need to renew our communication here. If you are uncomfortable please feel free not to reply here.

It may interest you to know, so I will share it with you: when I read your sentences, “I’ve been thinking about you… What I’m about to say..” I was filled with dread. I was expecting that what you are about to say would be something hurtful to me, something really bad. What happened is that some neuropathways were activated in me, in them the emotional memory, the fear of what my mother is about to tell me. Oh, how unpleasant those things were, what she did tell me. I felt the dread and wanted to stop reading but kept reading, and what you wrote were good things. What a relief. This activation is nothing new to me. It is interesting how we expect what we already experienced, the same old, same old from long ago.

It is so true that neuropathways get activated in this manner. Like you wanted to stop reading, I find myself wanting to run away from situations that feel uncomfortable.  With mindfulness, with awareness I am able to brave it through. How do you handle this kind of activation? For example here if instead of “what you wrote were good things” it was something unpleasant how would you have dealt with it?

As I understand it, neuropathways can probably never go away but with conscious thought they can be weakened or transmuted to more nourishing ones.