When you are in the moment, you are in your right brain.

Edited from Dr. Suzanne LaCombe, Ed.D, R. Psych.
Head Shrink and Editor,
MyShrink.com - Changing the way we see therapy!

"One of the fastest ways--possibly the only way--to engage the brain in changing any behavior or emotion is to stay in the present moment. Being present means being fully engaged in the moment with all your senses attuned to the here and now.

You are neither dreaming of the future nor regretting the past. You are in the moment.

You've probably had a "moment" in your life. You know, a moment of awareness, of being totally in the here and now. Well, you were in your right brain.

Our present moments are right brain based. That's because all our sensory information comes through the right brain.

Right brain-based therapy focuses on emotions and creativity. Left brain-based counseling, better known as "talk therapy" can be enhanced by bringing the emotions and body sensations into play. To optimize results, work from both the left and right sides of the brain.

It's the right brain that gives us that sense of being connected to one another. It's called the relational right brain for a good reason. The right brain regulates or influences many aspects of our behavior, often those aspects that we would like to change.

We use the terms "left brain" and "right brain" to refer to the two basic ways the brain processes information. Thus, when we say that someone is "in their right brain" it simply means that they are processing their experience in a holistic, "big picture" way.

There is no such thing as a right brain, separate and independent of a left one. They are not in conflict, nor is one "superior" to the other. For example, when you're having a conversation, your left brain will focus on the meaning of the words exchanged, while your right brain will observe whether the other person gets what you're saying.

Those things often have to do with our relations and connections with others:
• Self-awareness
• Empathy
• Identification with others
• Trust
• Emotion
• Non-conscious communication
• Attachment
• Recognition of emotions

Other right brain functioning includes visual-spatial recognition (imagery), autobiographical memory, stress modulation and holistic thinking.

The right side of the brain also has an integrative map of the body.

It is often useful to understand the role that the right brain plays. Because it's the center for processing emotion and of our sense of identity, it has a huge influence on how we feel about ourselves and how we manage our relationships.

Modifying the habitual patterns of feeling and behavior that are "encoded" in the right brain is the primary goal of all therapies, although many don't say this explicitly.

We use the term "right brain" to refer in a general way to those brain systems responsible for regulating our ability to interpret, navigate and thrive in the world.

In particular, these systems also determine the quality of our relationships with others, including the ability to form secure emotional attachments.

Technically speaking, the right brain encodes the implicit procedural memories which accumulated in the earliest years of life, well before the analytical left brain came online.

Not all areas of the brain are online when we are born.

What's significant is that areas in the right hemisphere become active in the first two years of life, whereas the left hemisphere doesn't come online fully until 18 months to two years.

Although the right brain develops first before any verbal or conceptual ability appears, an intense amount of learning happens in those first years.

We learn about ourselves and the world through direct experience, not through words.

Our experiences, especially with our caregivers, will be encoded in procedural memories that form the basis of our emotional life.

The right hemisphere is dominant in the first three years of life; it's the first to mature, before the left brain. Emotional experiences, especially those involving caregivers, are unconsciously stored and processed in the right brain during those first years.

What gets encoded is an ability to handle social relationships as well as knowledge and expectations about how others will react to our efforts to communicate and connect.

Perhaps the most important characteristic of procedural memories is their non-conscious operation.

Analysis, thought, and language are all conscious operations of the mind and are characteristic of "left brain" abilities, whereas the influence of the right brain occurs largely outside of our awareness.

The procedural memories that fundamentally condition our emotional lives are laid down long before the rational mind appears and are unaffected by intellectual efforts to change them."