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”
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I had a similar experience recently, when I reacted to a creative project with such fear that I not only failed to complete it, I couldn't think until I had some distance from it. I looked back and wondered - what happened? It was fear of being judged by others, but the only one really judging me was me. The awareness that my inner critic is still powerful, especially around what I value most, will help me to stop, breathe, and refocus, so I can respond from a place of more positive energy rather than fear.
ReplyDeleteIsnt funny how strong the reaction can be? I listened to a Pema Chodren conversation with Alice Walker and it calmed me. I felt OK with the passing emotional storms. If only I can learn not to spiral down with each one.
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