Building my response-ability

In the past year I have learned a bit about how the brain works, mostly from a book called My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor, about a 37 year old brain researcher who had a stroke. From her stroke, which disabled the left hemisphere of her brain, she learned first hand some of the mysteries of the brain. In her book, she talks about how fear short circuits our ability to think – basically takes over the thinking brain. It is like, the big brain is driving you along in life, and when fear gets evoked, it pushes the big brain out of the driver seat and into the back. That can be helpful in times of immediate danger – fight or flight situations. And it can be disabling when you really need to think. Dr Taylor talks about building our response-ability. Choosing our response as opposed to having these flashes of strong emotion take over the driver seat. When we have a strong emotion, it physically takes hold of us for 90 seconds. It is like a 2 year-old having a tantrum, you can’t stop it during those 90 seconds. But after the 90 seconds we have a choice (response-ability). It was not long after reading this book, that I got to try that out. I was teaching a workshop and it was not going well – it seemed the class was bored – I certainly was. My first response was to beat myself up – why didn’t you design a better class, you have really messed up – that sort of thing. Luckily the book came to mind, and I thought “Is this way of thinking helping me?” No, of course not. So I took a deep breath, a few times… quieted down… I didn’t fight my internal dialogue, I just acknowledged my bad habit of being hard on myself and said not now. Then I started to get some thoughts about how to turn the workshop around. Lots of ideas started popping about what I could do.

Not all situations can we so easily shift out of an emotion – depression, grief, anger or other strong emotions may well take more support or need to be allowed to run their course. And yet, in our day to day life, when fear or other strong emotions get evoked, we may be able to choose our response. Not by fighting the feeling, but by acknowledging it and then focusing on something else – like what we are grateful for, or what we want to create. It is worth my time to build my ability to be “response able”

Gratitude

A few years ago, when I was going through a scary work transition, I noticed at night I would worry about what was going to happen. How would it be if things didn’t work out? How would we survive? At that point I started to remember all I was grateful for before I went to sleep. On bad days, all I could think of was a roof over my head or being warm. On better days, I was thankful for many more small and large blessings in my life. My family, friends, getting to do work I value… It was so helpful for me to calm down and be present as opposed to working myself into a frenzy about “what could happen…”

Brother David Steinl Rast put banana stickers on things he took for granted. (As a monk he did not have much, so the stickers on bananas were handy.) So he put stickers on his light switch to remember to be thankful for electricity or on the water tap to remember to be thankful for running water. I thought that was a great idea. I wonder if I could get a sticker to adhere to my husband or other loved ones I take for granted.