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Weekly Tidbit: The Longest Journey

4/28/2010

My clients have always been my best teachers. One of them, a man struggling to deal with his wife's addiction to prescription drugs, shared with me this thought that he had found helpful in his healing process: "the longest journey is eighteen inches... from your head to your heart". Apparently this is a well known quote attributed to that prolific writer Anon, but in 1986 it was original and meaningful to me, and it has stayed with me through the years.

According to the Heart Math Institute, the heart is the first organ to develop in the human embryo. It circulates blood through the body and is regulated by its own internal computer. It has its own brain cells, very similar to the ones found in the brain located in our head, that also produce electromagnetic energy. In addition to it being the pump muscle that moves our blood, researchers have described the heart as a storage place for emotional information with both long and short term memory, a feedback mechanism, and a sensory organ. Or, as Robert Hunter expressed it in the lyrics of a song, "the heart has its beaches, its homelands and thoughts of its own".*

Mere cognitive assertion does not make something true. It helps to start us on a path, but unless we engage the heart in the transformational process, much of our power is missing. Sometime things are clear in our minds before we come to embrace them in our heart, and sometimes our mind will lead us astray in attempt to protect us from discomforting knowledge. It is easy to rationalize and justify our positions with logic and lean heavy on the linear process while ignoring the other more intuitive parts of our internal guidance system, forgetting that it is the gestalt of our knowledge that offers the deepest wisdom. It has been said that it is only with the intercession of divine guidance, the opening to spiritual connection, that the heart can fully expand to realize its potential. One of the lines from Ephesians reads "I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened", ** acknowledging a special wisdom in that center of our being.

Keeping your heart open in the face of adversity can be challenging. Sometimes fear overwhelms love and the heart get drowned out by all the mental noise. A visual meditation to support the open flow of energy involves the imagining of a connecting device between the brain in your head and the heart in your chest. In a repose position, deepen your breath and allow your body to relax. With every breath you take, allow your mind and body to slip deeper into a relaxed state of well being. Visualize a passageway of connection between your heart and head. It might be a tube, an elevator, a stairway, a roadway, or a tunnel of light, whatever image comes to you. In your mind's eye, watch energy moving along this pathway, traveling smoothly from your heart to your head and then back again. With every breath, feel that peaceful easy feeling of relaxation deepen and your heart and mind open in harmonic convergence.

* Eyes of the World, 1973
** The Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians, 10th book of the New Testament

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Weekly Tidbit: Releasing Trauma

4/21/2010

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When I was in college, a Viet Nam vet who stayed in the apartment below would sometimes be triggered by the sound of a helicopter, and, believing himself to be back in the war, would climb up on the roof with his loaded shotgun and watch for bombers. This re-experiencing of old trauma happens pretty frequently, but thankfully not usually to this degree of emotional and behavioral overwhelm. Most of the time it shows up as an overreaction to an event, an emotional flood that echoes an old story of assault, abandonment, fear, victimhood, or other disturbing event that has not been resolved. Memories live in our cellular structure as well as in our minds, and a smell, a sound, a situation can open up pockets of stored emotion that interfere with our present functioning. A person who has been mugged in an elevator may have disturbing sensations and emotions when they enter a small space even if the attack happened decades ago. There is a survival mechanism in the reptilian part of our brains that floods our system with biochemicals when triggered. Connective tissue stiffens, the adrenals release. The body prepares for survival in one or more of three ways. We prepare to flee, to run, move away, get out of town, quit our job, pack our bags, leave now. Or perhaps we get bigger, puff ourselves up like many animals in nature when threatened, and assume an aggressive pose to fight. Or sometimes we get small, withdraw, try to hide, pull the covers over our heads, be quiet and invisible, freeze in the headlights. These reactions are not conscious; they are automatic and biochemically initiated, and sometimes they escalate into feeling as if we are in a life or death situation when is not true, as with my friend on the roof. The lingering effects of old trauma enactment interfere with our relationships, sabotage our goals, and inhibit our happiness; frequently we are not even aware of what we are doing that creates our own discomfort, and emotional blackouts are not uncommon.

So if we are powerless over the onset of these reactions, what can we do? One way is to inhibit the cycle completion and redirect our energies to a new desired experience. The first step to doing this is to recognize what is happening and take responsibility for it without judging it. Observe it with interest; notice what happens in your mind and body. It is helpful to talk with someone you know and trust about what you experience. Does your jaw get tight, your breath get shallow, your shoulders hunch, your hands clench, your neck turtle down into your shoulders? Does your mind race, do you think about a past event, relive it in your mind, get stuck on one thought in a looping pattern, want to run or fight, project the past onto the present, feel emotions that are too big or not appropriate to the current situation? Recognize that these and other symptoms are the result of a bio-chemical cascade that was very effective back in the days when our crisises involved escaping from saber toothed tigers. Know that you are just responding to a trigger that your system has identified as dangerous, and it is trying to protect you with a program that has not been adequately updated in centuries.

The second step is to become willing to change, willing to step outside your comfort zone to interrupt the pattern re-enactment. We need to update the program by finding a way to inhibit the old configuration and re-direct to a more helpful new response pattern. It is possible to do this at the time of the trigger or anytime afterwards, and you don't have to fully understand the process. Action follows thought, so if you allow yourself to really think about or visualize being in the traumatic situation, your body will respond, as it will respond to your instructions. This can feel a little scary if we are in emotional overwhelm, so ask for help if you need it; it is always good to have someone you trust hold the space for you. You can begin by changing thoughts that lead to actions, and your emotions will also change. Start small; choose one of your symptoms and simply tell yourself what you want to do instead. If you find that you hold or shorten your breath, tell yourself to exhale completely and breathe in slowly and deeply. If your shoulders are up against your ears, tell your body to let them relax, to widen and lengthen your shoulders and allow your neck to be forward and free. If you are looping in frantic thought, give your mind the direction to slow down and think about your breath. If your attention wanders, lovingly direct it back. If you find yourself closing down to try to protect yourself, inhibit the shut down mode and direct your heart to stay open, allowing the fear to blow past you without harm like mist in the wind. Find language, images, sounds, and sensations that invite you to a calmer place and use them as tools for re-direction and re-creation. We often 'leave our body' when we are triggered, so working with body responses is a great way to bring us back.

At times fear based emotional blockages, perhaps exacerbated with continual adrenal release, settle into chronic pain in the body rather than as reactive responses or behavioral symptoms. The back or neck pain that does not respond to treatment, fibromyalgia, severe headaches, and autoimmune disorders are believed by many to be related to unresolved trauma and fear held in the body. As we become adept at the techniques of inhibition and redirection we can find freedom from the burden of old trauma re-enactment and often release energy blockages that cause chronic pain. When we reroute the flow of energy into a different script, we create the opportunity for an alternative response. When that alternative response become familiar, it becomes a new habit. Other ways of working toward this freedom include the energy psychologies and trauma theory approaches. Using these methods we can learn to release that which no longer serves us and use that freed energy to create more of what we want in our lives.

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Weekly Tidbit: Taking Things Personally

4/14/2010

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I was talking to a friend the other day about dealing with situations that trigger our annoyance and how we respond to them. We noticed that when we interpret another person's behavior as being about us, it tends to evoke a stronger response than is usually productive. Dealing with someone who is late provides a good example of how this works. If I am sitting at a restaurant and the person I am meeting for lunch is 20 minutes late, my mood is dependent on what I tell myself about it. If I interpret the other person's behavior as being an intentional disrespect to me, I will likely be angry. If I tell myself that they might be late because they had an accident, I will probably feel worried. If I brought my knitting and tell myself how sweet it is to have a quiet 20 minutes to be still and meditate on my wool in the middle of an otherwise busy day, I will likely feel serene and grateful. It is my interpretation of the situation that creates my emotional experience, not the situation itself. Albert Ellis, of Rational Emotive Therapy fame, used a simple mathematical equation: A + B = C, with A representing the Activating Event, B being the Belief or interpretation about the event and C representing the emotional Consequence.

In the lunch scenario described above, if I have a history of feeling disrespected, or of worrying, the first place my mind goes is probably the perspective of that old familiar emotional path. I may not have a lot of control of my "knee jerk" reaction, and may start to worry or feel angry before I even know I am doing it. Once I become aware of what I am doing, my decision is whether I stay in that place and justify my position, or instead choose a different thought process and take responsibility for changing my perspective. Easier said than done. Much of our unconscious programming is based on being right in order to stay alive and has become distorted due to what author Don Miguel Ruiz refers to as our "domestication and denial". Ruiz wrote: "When someone says, "You are pushing my buttons," it is not exactly true. What is true is that you are touching a wound in his mind, and he reacts because it hurts." So perhaps it is more true, more helpful to think, "ouch, I am tender there" rather than to think someone is Intentionally Doing Something To Me. People do what they do because of who they are and how they have become in response to their beliefs about their experiences. Other people's behavior is really not about us; however, if we insist on taking it personally and act as if it is about us, that may indeed become the reality we create.

Another factor in the equation is that we are powerless to change another's actions. We can threaten, yell, make demands and criticize.... usually just creating more upset. Or we can invite, encourage, offer helpful tools and road maps, or even just simply request that someone do something differently. But either way, we can't make them change; their behavior is outside our control. What we can do is gently and lovingly disengage the ego when it loses connection with the soul self and tries to run the show. I can remind myself that my job is to deal with me and my beliefs and behaviors, that my 'responsibility' is my 'ability to respond'. I can recognize that that we all have "wounds" in our minds and notice how much easier it is to see someone else's, especially if it mirrors one of my own that I prefer not to see. And if I am unwilling to sit and wait for someone who is continually late, I can either start without them or choose to stop meeting them for lunch.

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Weekly Tidbit: The Longest Journey

Weekly Tidbit: Releasing Trauma

Weekly Tidbit: Taking Things Personally

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