Emily McDonald

training my brain for focus and developing this mindfulness practice so that I can become aware and just be the best version of myself.

And then kind of on that journey opened this other door that I maybe didn't realize was there.

And I also met people.

So I met these two people that I became really close friends with when I was an undergrad and they were huge in my journey of introducing me to spirituality and I remember them

one of them telling me to read the untethered soul.

And I read that book and it very much resonated with what I was learning in my neuroscience classes of, Oh, Hey, like, yeah, it's like when you're going to a movie and you plug in and you're watching it, it's like, that's exactly how your brain constructs reality.

That's how your visual system works.

Actually.

Like you don't even see.

Well, you don't even see the world with your eyes at all, right?

Your eyes just take in light signals and then those light signals travel through your brain where your thoughts, emotions, beliefs, memories, programming are all incorporated before the image is even constructed that you see.

Yeah.

And I remember learning even in one of my neuroscience classes about how they've actually found differences in brain activity along this pathway in people that have body dysmorphia, for example.

So their brain is literally constructing the image differently.

And so it's not just like all in their head and they just need to, you know, it's like their brain is actually constructing the image that they see differently.

And so when I, it kind of all connected and I was like, okay, yeah, this is a different world.

And then these people that I was meeting and that were very spiritual and

I remember they actually were manifesting moving to Hawaii and they had images of like Hawaii all over their apartment.

And that was sort of when I was first introduced to it.

And in the beginning, I definitely didn't, you know, think anything of it.