How I wrote four chapters of my book in 100 days using neuroscience to rewire my brain

Neuroscientist James Doty's simple manifesting method helped me stop procrastinating and accomplish my goal. I'm repeating the process for the next 100-days. Join me.

Photo by Gabino de Oro Tefrv/ Unsplash

There was a moment in the hospital after my third surgery and near-death experience when I sat in my bed and had a knowing that I needed to write a book about what I was going through.

For the last five years, I’ve been writing my memoir. I’ve worked with Al Watts of LA Writers Lab and, in the last year, Anna Wharton, a writer in the U.K.

This project has been the hardest thing I have EVER done. When I started writing, I experienced trauma as a beginning student in Al Watts’ LA Writing Lab writing class. I wrote from the place of the trauma. As the years went by, I gradually began to write a little better and understood the structure he was teaching.

As a new writer, I didn’t have experience with the craft of writing. It’s been humbling, but I’ve stuck with it.

Have I procrastinated? Heck yes!

But I never quit.

I’m proud of my focus and perseverance on this goal. I’ve found that writing has helped me know myself in a way that counseling has not been able to do.

Six years ago, I asked my mother to forgive me for all the ways I hurt her with my words. She forgave me, and since 1993, we’ve had a love fest. This alone has been healing. Mom will be 99 on Halloween and is in a nursing home in Atlanta.

I’ve decided to lead a follow-up 100-day visualization project. I want company and to help more paid subscribers accomplish a goal they want to achieve, but couldn’t get off the ground.

I shared with our first group of subscribers how to use James Doty, MD, a neurosurgeon's techniques. Doty’s book that describes his story of being taught this technique when he was 12 by a woman who worked in a magic shop. She could see that he was a young boy struggling in his family of origin. This act of kindness led to a massive change in Doty’s life.

Mind Magic: The neuroscience of manifesting and how it changes everything.

“When our attention is intentionally focused on what we want and why, change is possible,” Doty said. “It’s not about the universe; it’s about you.”

Doty said that your attention can be redirected in a way that can literally change your brain.

“With the right practice, we can strengthen our brain’s gray matter, the neural tissue that helps us learn and grow and ultimately leads us to realizing our potential,” he said.

Doty defines his method as the process of embedding our intentions into our subconscious.

What manifestation does is help create new neural pathways in our brain. Some scientists call this process neuroplasticity, but Doty likens it to a “superpower.”

“This superpower, molded by experience, repetition, and intention, enables the brain to form new circuits, and to prune away old ones which no longer serve us,” Doty said.

Join as a paid subscriber and listen to the wrap-up of our 100-Day Visualization Project tomorrow (Friday, July 31) from 1–2:15 pm PT / 4–5:15 pm ET

As a paid subscriber, you get to participate in our gathering tomorrow to hear what transpired for a group of us in 100 days of visualizing: how we wrote down our goal as if it already happened, and spoke our goal out loud daily.

When we work together as a group, we gather the support and energy to do things we might not manage alone.

New subscribers are welcome. Subscribe below.

If the work here has ever met you in a hard moment — brought a little light when you needed it — I’d love to have you as a paid subscriber.

It’s how High Road to Healing keeps going, and it opens the door to more than the writing. You become part of a warm community of kindred souls — people doing their own inner work who want company for the journey. And every month I host a live workshop, free to paid subscribers, where we gather, learn, and lift each other toward the change we’re reaching for.

A subscription is $50 for the year — about $4 a month — or $5 month to month. Either way, you make this possible, and you get a seat in the room.