Pills of neuroscience, somatic awareness and some reflections

? Why are neuroscience and somatic awareness important for equity and inclusion?

This is the incipit of an ?? online workshop brilliantly run by Shannon and Marcia last October – two highly experienced professionals in the field of diversity, equity and inclusion.

And the answer is ?? “By understanding the brain-body process, we can interrupt patterned responses and unconscious bias and bring in more information to inform a new choice.”

Our ?? brain takes 2 hundred milliseconds to like or dislike something / someone and the output will be either a “toward response” (if we feel comfortable) or an “away response” (if what we see makes us uncomfortable).

Our brain perception is in constant movement and interconnected neuropathways create unconscious or implicit biases. If as kids we are trained to treat someone as a threat or differently, then as adults we’ll react automatically without even realizing why we behave like that – it’s imprinted in our brain cells.

However, the beauty of the human brain is such that it can be trained to unwind what was imprinted in our brain cells as kids or throughout our lives. We can learn new patterns by training our prefrontal cortex – the so called ‘higher brain’ – to manage biases and unconscious threat responses differently. It’s like a ‘mental gym’ for that part of our brain responsible for planning complex cognitive behaviors ??

But how exactly? How can we ‘reprogram’ the way we respond to diversity and what we interiorized as a probable threat? By increasing the level of our self-awareness – and here comes the BrainStates Management? model, a tool that “shows how shifting to the Higher Brain more consistently increases our ability to access higher levels of self-awareness, open-mindedness, and the ability to make more conscious choices and decisions”.

And what are the actions that we can take to shift our perception and affect our choices? By ? “cultivating the pause” and ?? exploring “different sensory worlds”, as Marcia said – by feeling and interpreting on a ‘higher brain’ level, we’ll have that awareness to decide what action to take and challenge the constructed reality that our brains built over the years and that perhaps may limit our vision and potential discoveries.

This and more were brilliantly discussed during a ?? mind-opening session held by Shannon Murphy Robinson, principal & Co-Founder of BrainSkills@Work, and Marcia Warren Edelman, somatic psychotherapist & Founding Partner at Cultural Global Labs.

?? To learn more about how they could support you or your company, you may check https://www.brainskillsatwork.com/ and https://culturalgloballabs.com/.

Initially posted at ?? https://www.luciaonewordatatime.com/post/pills-of-neuroscience-somatic-awareness-and-ideas-after-an-early-october-s-workshop