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Who Is in Charge – Your Rational or Emotional Brain?
A recent NPR story speaks about how our emotional brain often makes those tough decisions – but that’s not a surprise.
If we’re to get honest, we would admit that the big or stressful decisions are often emotional decisions. In our rational culture we learn to justify that our gut feelings are correct with our logic and rhetoric.
The problem comes in our collective belief that our “brains,” or rational minds are in charge. We all have deluded ourselves in believing that as Descartes said, “I think therefore, I am.” This dualistic debate between emotions and logic or mind and body continues to go on in spite of growing research that our emotions are more often what make the decisions.
If you want to make better decisions – feel more. Go to the source. Feel what you are feeling, feel what you want. Honor your feelings. Have your brain, your rational self serve your feelings. Stop fooling yourself. Don’t serve your brain. Have your brain serve you and your feelings.
Your feelings will win out in the end. If they don’t get what they want, they’ll act out like a kid and pout or do some indirect behavior.
I’m sure you’re probably thinking you can’t just do everything you feel like doing, and you’re right – you can’t. What you can do to honor your feelings is to listen to them. Often just listening to your feelings is all that is needed for them to feel happy. If you don’t ever listen to them you will stop hearing them. Then either you will not have the skill to sense them or they will not communicate to you because they know they will not be heard.
Some call this process being mindful or being aware. It is just that – sensing and accepting what is occurring.
If you want to be smart – use all your assets, use your feelings.
Let us know how this feels for you.
Magic to miracles
Do you want miracles? Then you need magic.
Magic comes from something beyond you. For some, it is their relationship with their Creator. For others, it is their relationship with Nature, a hobby or maybe a sport. In all cases, you surrender much like you we described in the previous post where you learned to be. Here you learn to go beyond just being yourself.
Here is the rub, you may be doing this, but in a limited way. If you’re like many of us, you learned to check out. A therapist would label it disassociating. Let’s call it escaping. From a survival perspective when we can’t fight or flight, we dissociate.
When you bring in the presence of being in your body, as described in the last post, with what’s occurring around you then there is space for magic. Shamans are able to connect to the in-between space. A shaman would say he is not doing the work but the Ancestors, the Spirits he calls in from this unseen space. A shaman’s magic is his relationship to these realms. The miracles are what happen when these realms are contacted.
You might not be a shaman, so how do you create miracles? You do it with intent for something bigger to show up and a willingness to be fully present to what happens next. When you ask (pray) for something big, be prepared to be surprised. Your magic lies in your capacity to ask and to allow for something different to show up. Your miracle will happen when you accept the unexpected.
Part of what makes it a miracle is the how and what of it being different from what you expected or maybe first wanted. The higher power you surrender to may only be the innocence of your child.
Shamans use ceremonies to connect to their realms, so can you. Your daily run may be your ritual. Go from it being an escape to having it be first a connection to your experience, then a connection to what is beyond for you.
The other two elements, therapy to healing and being to doing will be a set-up for allowing you to travel beyond your normal experience. Therapy to healing clears and fixes. Being to doing gets you present and powerful. Magic to miracles opens you up to the uncontrolled, beauty and the divine.
Final notes
Any of these three elements can become a trap or an escape from life. In a desire to do it right, you might notice a tendency to be obsessive. Relax. Don’t let one of these elements be a coping mechanism. We all have seen people who read all the self-help books or go to all the trainings but are still unhappy. I’m all for education, I just want you to take the risk needed to learn it.
Over the years of working with clients and students, I learned the impact trauma has on people. It can be one major event or what I call serial micro-traumas. Either will go beyond the conscious mind’s understanding. Have compassion for not understanding and your occasional struggle.
Working with this trinity will transform your life. You will be going beyond the seen into the unseen, into the unconscious mind – the real ruler. You will be traveling beyond the traditional models of therapy, medicine, and life.
The full trinity integrates into the Whole Adventure and Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. As you travel the journey through your personal evolution to your void space and then out into your new world, you will experience all the elements. It is the Whole Adventure that calls forth in you the need to bring up these elements buried deep within you. To have a successful journey you need new skills; they lie in the trinity.
Share your thoughts and experiences with the trinity of powerful change.
Being to doing
How do you make it easy? How do you find your flow? After you healed your need to survive – then what?
In the previous post, we learned about how therapy clears out your limiting past. It isn’t necessary to clear out the past and heal to work with being; it just makes it easier. I often work all three elements simultaneously; but then I’m greedy.
Let’s talk about being. You don’t need to be a Buddhist monk to get power from being present. You just need to be mindful or aware of what is happening. Our tendency here in the United States is to focus on doing, often several things at one time. Being is first focusing on your experience. As you are doing, you are aware of your experience. For example, when you are doing the dishes, you focus on what it feels like to do the dishes rather than worrying about what you need to do tomorrow. In becoming “one with your dishes,” you allow any body or emotional experience to occur. You may also feel the physical and emotional tension of your worry.
Yes, this being thing sounds simple – it doesn’t get simpler as a concept. So why would people spend a lifetime mastering it? Because the better they get, the more they get done, the more relaxed they are and the more joy they feel. I know it sounds contradictory to experience possible discomfort to feel more joy, but it works.
It’s a strange phenomenon, surrendering to discomfort eventually reduces it. It is as if you were grasping your right forearm with your left hand and squeezing hard. After a while, you begin to be numb to the pain. The tension is still there, possible damage is still occurring, yet there is no pain. If you were to bring your focus back to you right arm, you would feel the pain. Then with that awareness, you would say to yourself, “Why the hell am I hurting myself?”
Being present to what is occurring not only frees you from pain; it can free other resources to be more available. Most people don’t know how much effort they put into sustaining their “normal” existence. When those resources are free, they are more available for pleasure and for performance.
When I had a clinic in Scottsdale back in the ’90s, we ran Mindfulness Stress Reduction Programs for hospital systems, corporations and the public. I remember one of the many Type A executives we had in our program. She was a senior VP in the city. Her life sucked. She was stressed, in pain and getting less effective even though she was working more. Half way through the 8-week course, she came in to the class to report she removed her second phone, started taking lunches and worked only 40 hours the previous week. She was amazed that not only was her pain gone, she was more productive with less work.
She learned to just be present. She got there by focusing on her body through simple exercises we taught such as a body scan where she experienced her body and focusing on the breath. When you focus on what is happening in the present all your resources are present. The distractions of the past and future are not there. You are just there in your body in the present moment. This state is the same state a top athlete achieves when he is experiencing a “runner’s high.” When I worked with these athletes and they came back reporting more of these highs, I told them it was due to them being more relaxed and balanced.
Being present also is a set up for creativity. My artistic clients had the same experience as my athletes – relaxation lead to being more present, which lead to increased production – for artists this showed up as more creativity. Relaxing into being allows more to show up. Your essence starts to show up.
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Why can existing be so hard? Why does it feel like you are fighting the inertia of the entire universe to have the life you want?
I doubt you are using your innate capacity to fully live. In previous posts, I’ve written about the Whole Adventure or Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as being an unconscious movement to evolve.
If the Whole Adventure is your evolutional process and the river you travel to your new self – what is the power that will propel your down the river? Beyond the desire for this journey, you have the means to facilitate the needed change. If you are to take this journey, and you are – you need help traveling it. Help comes in three forms as you change and grow. Knowing how to use these instinctual processes will greatly improve your journey.
The Trinity – three ways to achieve graceful and powerful change:
- Therapy to healing
- Being to doing
- Magic to miracles
Over the years these three aspects of development consistently show up in those who have a rich life. I suspect these people instinctually tapped into their deep power. You can do it intentionally by understanding what these three assets are and how to utilize them.
Therapy to healing
These aspects are not necessarily stages, but if they were, this would be the first for some. Here, the limitations that prevent life and movement are removed. This is particularly true if the stress or trauma occurred during childhood and we were unable to experience and release it so the event becomes lodged in our body/mind. Our world tells us that either what occurred didn’t occur or we can’t speak about it in an honest way – so we distort our worldview and ourselves to fit the world that exists. Over time, we grow to consciously and unconsciously accept this new worldview.
Therapy, as a change agent, becomes the catalyst for this change. Be it psychotherapy or body therapy, or even shamanic work when the stress is released and understood for what it was, you are free to begin to experience life fully. Life stops being about survival. You stop being at the effect of stress and trauma, for example you move beyond the Drama Triangle which I wrote about in previous posts.
Therapy is the part of the trinity that deals with fixing. It removes the limiting past, beliefs, pain,
tension and toxins. It gets the crap out of you and your life. Therapy sets up your body/mind to do what it wants to do – heal. Healing can’t occur in a state of survival. Stress, even if it is from the past, is a form of survival. To the extent you have stress in you; you are limiting your mind and body to heal.
Examples of therapies
Therapy can also include holistic therapies such as acupuncture, herbology or homeopathy. Standard allopathic medicine doesn’t foster healing, but it is great at dealing with emergencies. Support groups when focused not on a problem, but towards sponsoring change, can get you out of your past. So can trainings that not only teach a new way of being, but also activate your deeper instincts for change.
As Americans, we like to fix things including ourselves. This is great until it becomes a distraction or obsession. My warning here is don’t use these processes to develop a better coping mechanism. I see people learn a better way to be, but they still aren’t being themselves. They may overtly be functioning better. They could be getting in less trouble. They aren’t happier.
It’s not why
Believing you need to understand the why to heal is a misnomer. True understanding comes from the wisdom of experience, not from someone else telling you to be different. In other words, be less concerned about why and more focused on the how of change.
Agents of change
Your body and its cycles have its own agents of change. For women, puberty and menopause are two examples of how all parts of a woman are forced to change as she passes through her rites of passage into another stage of life.
All these agents of change will produce chaos. Releasing, completing and healing will shake up the past; it is their purpose. The fixing nature of therapy brings you back to a neutral place, a place more available for the second element being to doing which I will discuss in the next post.
What are your agents of change that you use to move your life forward?
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I couldn’t agree more about what Andrew Cohen is call Creative Fiction in his recent post. So often I see people attempting to be politically correct, new age or just safe in their conversations. I love it when someone is willing to risk it and possibly mess it up to speak her truth. Speaking it is different that forcing it on someone.
Andrew writes about, in relationship there needs to be a space for the “fiction” to show up. It is there. If not expressed it comes out indirectly, i.e., passive aggressively or goes in to your body to produce tension and resistance.
For me practicing mindfulness is expressing, allowing for the unspoken tension to be spoken. What are your thoughts about this tension – Creative Fiction?
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