The Weekly Reframe: Spiritual Alignment + Neuroscience =
Supporting you to free your mind so you can live from your heart!
“You’ve got to be open to the energy. If you can open your heart to the energy - that great love energy of the creation of this entire universe - good things will happen to you. But you’ve gotta believe. You’ve gotta believe in the goodness. You have to open your heart to the energy. You can’t be afraid… We’re all riders on the storm.”
— Ray Manzarek
A shout-out to my fiancé, Tom, for this week’s quote! We were watching a YouTube interview with Ray, and when he started saying these words we both stopped in our tracks and turned towards each other and Tom said, that’s what you’re going to write about this week. And he was correct. I always appreciate his feedback and interest in my writing. And a special thanks to my Dad, who edits these pieces every week! It truly takes a village and I am so grateful for their support.
Ray was the keyboardist and father figure in the very famous band, The Doors, in the 1960's and 70's. The quote above is so important because he is speaking to a universal spiritual principle - one that, when understood and practiced, can change your life. The way he expresses it might sound a little “out there,” so I wanted to translate what he’s pointing to spiritually into scientific terms. Specifically through the lens of neuroscience.
Deep in the brainstem sits something called the Reticular Activating System, or RAS. It’s the pattern-matching gatekeeper of our attention and awareness, constantly sorting through millions of bits of sensory data and deciding what makes it into consciousness.
The RAS listens for internal priority signals, clues from the higher brain that are based on:
Goals: whatever you’ve been thinking about, visualizing, or rehearsing. Repetition strengthens those neural pathways, teaching the RAS that these patterns matter.
Survival: anything resembling threat or opportunity—sounds, faces, movement, tone—gets automatic entry. That’s ancient wiring.
Emotion: charged feelings like fear, desire, love, or shame get flagged by the amygdala and moved to the front of the line.
In simple terms, the RAS responds to what your inner world tells it is important. It’s like turning a radio dial: your focus, emotions, and beliefs set the frequency, and your RAS amplifies what matches it.
A concrete example of this: you decide to buy a red car, and suddenly red cars appear everywhere. They were always there; now your brain is attuned to notice them.
So what does this have to do with Ray’s quote? So much.
Ray was clearly tuned to the “great love energy of the creation of this entire universe.” His attention was focused on love and goodness, and he lived from that frequency. It’s no surprise that good things happened to him - his brain was trained to look for and recognize them.
So the RAS ensures we get more of what we focus on and believe.
But there’s another part of the brain that works together with the RAS: the negativity bias, which is located in the amygdala. It evolved to keep us alive by scanning for danger. One hundred thousand years ago it was scanning for predators; now, disapproval, conflict, or bad news. It still alerts the RAS to anything that feels vaguely unsafe and the RAS takes the negativity bias signals very seriously.
When we let this bias run the show, we subconsciously filter for what’s wrong, lacking, or messy. And when we do that consistently, our RAS keeps delivering more of it.
The good news is, the opposite is just as true.
When you intentionally direct your focus toward what’s working - your progress, your growth, the people who support you, the small moments of beauty, the small wins - you teach your brain to highlight more of that. You open your heart, as Ray said, to “the great love energy of the creation of this entire universe.”
That’s when the goodness finds you. It's already there. you are training your brain to notice it and focus on it. After a while this new focus supports you to create "good things" in your life.
This weekend I invite you into a gentle reflection by picking one of these questions that sticks out to you to focus on:
Reflection prompts
What has your mind been scanning for lately -problems or possibilities?
If your RAS amplifies what matters to you, what frequency do you want to set today?
Where in your life could you “open your heart to the energy” instead of bracing against it?
Think of one small example of goodness that showed up this week. How might you train your awareness to spot more like it?
When you catch yourself tightening in fear or doubt, what helps you remember the “great love energy” Ray was talking about?
Step By Step,
Jessie