I can't say anything more or better about this topic than Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, Jill Bolte Taylor does in this presentation at February, 2008's Technology, Entertainment and Design (T.E.D) Conference. Click on her name below and enjoy this profound food for non-thought ...
Jill Bolte Taylor
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Effective Neuro-Somatic Healing Modalities
Last week I promised to offer up a few of the treatment modalities I'm familiar with that seem to work in helping to access, process and integrate disorganized memories and experiences (trauma) stored in the body and brain. This list is by no means intended to be exhaustive, and it’s good to understand that I have learned of them primarily as first or second hand anecdotal accounts. Realizing that, recognize that not all modalities work on all conditions, nor do they work well with all people. Also, different practitioners possess different levels of skill. Some of these treatments have large numbers of vocal critics, and a search of the Internet will provide you with their countering viewpoints. One important factor in a successful treatment outcome often seems to be how well you resonate with a practitioner “right brain to right brain.” That is, how much you really “feel felt” by that person. This is not surprising, since right brain to right brain resonance between parent and child is theorized to be one primary driver in children's early neural development. So, with that caveat in mind, here we go (Click on the name of any treatment type and it will take you to a page that provides more descriptive detail about that modality)…
Advanced Integrative Therapy (Seemorg) - Asha Clinton
Berkal Technique - Beverly Berkal
Coherence Therapy - Bruce Ecker
Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR) - Francine Shapiro
Cranial Sacral Therapy - John Upledger
Emotional Freedom Techniques - Gary Craig
Hanna Somatics - Thomas Hanna
Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) – Jon Kabat-Zinn
Neurofeedback – Lee Gerdes
Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics – Bruce Perry
Somatic Experiencing - Peter Levine
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy - Pat Ogden
Hakomi - Ron Kurtz
Holotropic Breathwork – Stan Grof
Thought Field Therapy - Roger Callahan
City at Peace – Paul Griffin
The one modality that most resonates with my right brain from this list is the last one, City at Peace. From a social neurobiological perspective it is brilliantly conceived and masterfully integrated and applied. It provides a context that empowers kids in supporting each other to access, identify and tell the hard truths about their most painful life experiences. It then provides a structure which enlists the heart, brain, mind and body in expressing those painful experiences in physical movements - often bimodal - that result in healing, “triumphant actions.” If you ever have a chance to view the documentary that HBO did several years ago, download the iTunes short, or attend a City at Peace performance, I wholeheartedly encourage you to do so. Or better yet, gather together a bunch of friends and start a local chapter in your own nearbyhood.
The Power of Parental Forgiveness - Part 2
When I was four years old I remember standing in the bathroom staring up at my father shaving. “Watch how hard I can hit, daddy,” - my balled little fist was already headed for his private parts. He responded with a booming, painful yell that sent me scurrying out of the bathroom and downstairs to my mother. Shortly after that incident, my father left for parts unknown and I didn’t see him or hear a word from him for 20 years. This is not an optimal way to resolve the Oedipal Complex. The four year old Son is not supposed to send Father packing and precipitously assume his place as the head of the family.
Twenty years later my father initiated contact with me. I wasn’t aware of harboring any anger or resentment towards this man that I didn’t really know. As far as I was concerned, my life after he left was what it was. As we began spending time together – occasional walks around North Hollywood, outings at Santa Anita and Del Mar racetracks, an occasional dinner and a movie, I soon discovered that emotionally, this man at 55 was much younger than I was at 25. Nevertheless, I didn’t really feel like he needed to be forgiven for anything … except there began to appear increasing clues to the contrary.
One day we began playing Cribbage, a game he taught me as an adult. We started out playing for a penny a point, and on this day, the cards just seemed to magically fall my way. I got dealt hand after hand of 24, and I even remember two back-to-back 29 hands, the highest you can possibly get in Cribbage. By the end of the evening, my father owed me more than $350!! He was making a living as a professional gambler in those days, and he was beside himself at losing so much money to someone who had barely learned the game. What I noticed though was that I took excessive pleasure in this victory, and I wasn’t above letting him know it.
A number of years later we got together when I drove down to visit him at his apartment in San Diego. We were trying to decide on a movie to see. I told him I didn’t care, and that he should pick one. He said didn’t care either, and insisted I pick one. On the way home from the theater he complained bitterly about the waste of money, and what a stupid movie it was, and with little subtlety, how stupid anyone must be who would choose such a film. Without a word, I simply pulled my truck over to the side of the freeway and stopped. “Get out,” I said to him. He refused. I opened my truck door, walked around to his side and opened his door. Then I forcibly pulled him out. He took a swing at me. I stepped inside his swing and punched him with one hand and pushed him with the other. He went down onto the tarmac. I walked back around to the driver’s side of the truck, calmly got in and drove away. I never saw my father again. But that fistfight on the side of the San Diego freeway finally began the long process of my work to actively forgive him.
As I write this, he has long been forgiven. I have cleared his and my own trespasses out of my heart-brain-mind-body, and what I now know is that significant damage resulted to his brain from childhood beatings, life on a chain gang, and the trauma he suffered in World War II. His brain pretty much looked like this is my best guess. And what I know most strongly is that having to abandon his wife and children was unquestionably his own tragic version of Sophie’s Choice.
Yet, the question arises, why couldn’t I simply decide to forgive my father and be done with it long before the freeway incident? There are many answers to that question, but the social neuroscience answer that most matches my experience is that trauma and neglect seem to be embodied experiences, stored away in the very fabric of the body’s tissues. They don’t simply live only as words and memories in my brain. I engaged in many efforts to deal with father (and mother) and forgiveness over the years, from the Fischer-Hoffman Process to the work of Sidney Simon to A Course in Miracles to extended Christian and Buddhist contemplative retreats and practices. In all honesty, I can’t say much helped. And in fact, there is mounting evidence that when we surface traumatic experiences and memories, and don’t somatically integrate and resolve them, we actually do further damage to our bodies and brains. That research also seems to match my experience. Well then, what actually does work? In recent years, with the advent of an increasingly sophisticated collection of brain-imaging technologies and somatic processes, we are creating a variety of healing methodologies that are beginning to show significant clinical and scientific efficacy. Next week I'll provide a list of modalities that I know about from friends or colleagues or have personally experienced that have made an appreciable difference. Stay tuned.
The Power of Parental Forgiveness - Part 1
I often find myself split into many conflicted emotional and intellectual fragments when I contemplate the notion of forgiveness. An image arises of my head constructed as a multi-colored mind map filled with neural clusters (Bob Scaer’s “Dissociative Capsules?”) all representing overwhelming and painful experiences that unfolded from before birth up until the present moment. Many of them seem to be inviting me to forgive my parents.
There’s a toxic level of alcohol and nicotine present in the womb as I expand at a firestorm rate of 50,000 cells or more a minute from the moment I am conceived. That needs to be forgiven. There’s a sister, Melanie, born after me, knocking me from the throne of already inconstant mothering. That needs to be forgiven. There’s a father who flees, offering not a single shred of support for 20 years. That needs to be forgiven. There is a childhood filled with drunken disorder, tattered clothes, more beer than food in the refrigerator. That needs to be forgiven. There is the pre-adolescent shame and horror of having to witness my mother hauled off to Middletown, the Connecticut State Mental Hospital, and then having to visit her there. That needs to be forgiven. Just through my first ten years of life, the list of things that need to be forgiven feels like a long, long one.
But not any longer than anyone else’s list I’ve come to realize. When all of us, parents and children alike, have the time and space to tell the truth about what happened to us during our childhood, it turns out we have all been the witting and unwitting victims of great unfairness, suffering and ignorance – our own, our parents’ and their parents’ before them, all the way back to Adam and Eve, most likely. And telling the truth about all of this seems to be a necessary and essential requirement of us if we are to become the committed parents we wish to be. And as Stanford and transpersonal psychologist, Fred Luskin writes in his latest book, Forgive for Love, telling the truth about all of this until it no longer drives our emotional engines is a necessary aspect of forgiveness. It is a part of the journey that allows us to begin to have compassion for all living beings in the world, even our own parents.
If we don’t do the work required to come to a truly integrated place of forgiveness, in a very real neurological sense all that’s left for us is to end up becoming more and more “disorganized” as we age. Neurology never stands still. We’re either making more neurons and connections, or we’re making less. And while I mostly only know of anecdotal evidence to support it, the work of forgiveness intuitively seems like a work that would contribute profoundly to interpersonal neurobiologcal organization and integration. (How’s that for a mouthful?).
What might happen when we do the emotional work of forgiveness? Might our brain makes more neural connections to more neural structures, but even more importantly … to our hearts? I’m not going to traumatize you by attempting to get you to understand Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory, but in the context of Steve’s theory, I’d be willing to predict one day neuroscience researchers will find that forgiveness does actually help to connect our brains to our hearts. In The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit, child development expert Joseph Chilton Pearce argues convincingly that our current level is not the pinnacle of human development. Rather, we are all in the process of growing and expanding into our “Fifth Brain”- the neurological clusters that work to let our heart know what’s needed by all the rest of our insides. When the heart is finally sufficiently connected up neurologically to run the show, might forgiveness become a given?
There is a Wisdom Teaching that says, “You can search the whole world over and never find anyone more deserving of love than … you.” That saying also applies to our parents and to us as parents, and when we do the healing work required to be able to authentically offer it, forgiveness is one profound way to begin to express that love.
Modeling The Uncommon Power of Intelligent Gossip
I love gossip. And my best friends love it as well. I love watching Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood. I flip through all the gossip magazines at the grocery checkout, I keep up with the Kardashians; I felt excited when Beyoncé gave birth to Lucifer's Daughter, and had a horse fly named after her all in the first month of this new year. And I was sad to hear about Kobe and Vanessa, and Will and Jada, and Heidi and Seal all biting the dust. As it is so skillful in doing, apparently each of their Wild Storytelling Brains successfully seduced them into believing their own crazy-suffering thinking.
Speech Just Wants to Be Free
I have friends, of course, who do not love gossip or gossipers. They don’t think there’s any such thing as “Intelligent Gossip,” a phrase coined by Nobel Laureate, Daniel Kahneman, who thinks gossip works to improve our ability to understand errors of judgment and choice, first in others and then eventually in ourselves. But hey, what does Kahneman - considered (with Amos Tversky) one half of the dynamic duo known as "the Lewis and Clark of the Mind" - know?
Those gossip-disdainers would most often be my Christian and Buddhist friends who believe in things like the guidelines of Right Speech. Right Speech admonishes against gossip. Dedicated formal practice only allows for speaking on ten topics: discussions about modesty, contentment, seclusion, non-entanglement, arousing persistence, virtue, concentration, discernment, on release from suffering, and about the knowledge and vision of release from suffering. Truthfully, that feels a little constricting to me. I'd rather be offered ways of skillfully relating to lay people in everyday life who do gossip, who enjoy it and who use it as a tool for learning (or not). Not feeling comfortable with gossipers, it becomes easy for me to begin unconsciously seeing such people as “less than.” People with whom I shouldn’t be spending valuable time. People my mother warned me about: “Those people.”
Gossipers of the World, Unite!
If he was still around, I bet Buddha would have LOVED gossipers. Why? Because Buddha was deeply awake to and loved reality. And one reality in the world is that there are people who gossip. Always have been and always will be. Buddha would have no choice but to love them. Anything else would have shown up as dualistic separation. And Buddha wasn’t much into that.
As far as Right Speech goes, Buddha offered that up as one of eight practices any of us might want to try on in order to reduce or eliminate suffering in our own lives. He didn’t offer up the practice of Right Speech as a “should” that every gossiper in the world needs to begin practicing so that I can feel comfortable spending time with them. Rather, he offered it up to me as something to consider practicing for my own benefit. Should I so choose.
Forgiving Us Our Trespasses
Buddha also didn’t say that Right Speech means we should never talk about other people when they aren’t present, either. Ben Wong and Jock McKeen drove home the complexity of this lesson quite memorably for me one day in graduate school when they broke me and my classmates into four groups. Each group was then instructed to gossip about someone in another group. Afterwards, a few courageous souls elected to speak their gossip aloud so the person gossiped about could hear it. I stood up and spoke about how William had "confessed" to me about experiencing incestuous feelings towards his daughter. As soon as the words left my mouth, I could feel the embarrassment, shame and pain of betrayal flood my nervous system. William was at little risk for actually incesting his daughter, and in fact, erotic feelings in fathers towards children occur commonly. Healthy fathers like William, undeniably know what line not to cross.
Fortunately, William forgave me for my demonstration of non-intelligent gossip. By that process I did learn how we might use gossip intelligently, as a gauge – discerning how what I say about other people makes me feel in my own body. If we’re speaking about others intelligently, then the chance is pretty high that we will feel perfectly fine in our body. Or at least okay. Parents or teachers talking about children and their development, or therapists talking about a client’s lack of healing progress with a supervisor are some ready examples that come to mind. Angry venting in the presence of a trusted friend about a third person is also an example of Right Speech in my view. Why? Because it can work to lower retained levels of stress chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol. It might also work to catalyze and discharge buried neurological “dissociation capsules.”
But if I'm only talking about others in disparaging or demeaning ways for the sake of idle chatter, talking in ways that might feel shameful were the people actually present, then odds are pretty good that I'll be feeling pretty poopy in my body. Not to mention that I might very likely be flooding instead of discharging adrenaline and cortisol, and impoverishing important nerve cells in my heart and brain in the process. We actually can trust our body’s response to gossip to guide us, I think. Provided we’re using our brain and body's inherent intelligence to help us pay undivided attention up close and personal-like.
Speech Just Wants to Be Free
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| The Meriwether Lewis of the Mind |
Those gossip-disdainers would most often be my Christian and Buddhist friends who believe in things like the guidelines of Right Speech. Right Speech admonishes against gossip. Dedicated formal practice only allows for speaking on ten topics: discussions about modesty, contentment, seclusion, non-entanglement, arousing persistence, virtue, concentration, discernment, on release from suffering, and about the knowledge and vision of release from suffering. Truthfully, that feels a little constricting to me. I'd rather be offered ways of skillfully relating to lay people in everyday life who do gossip, who enjoy it and who use it as a tool for learning (or not). Not feeling comfortable with gossipers, it becomes easy for me to begin unconsciously seeing such people as “less than.” People with whom I shouldn’t be spending valuable time. People my mother warned me about: “Those people.”
Gossipers of the World, Unite!
If he was still around, I bet Buddha would have LOVED gossipers. Why? Because Buddha was deeply awake to and loved reality. And one reality in the world is that there are people who gossip. Always have been and always will be. Buddha would have no choice but to love them. Anything else would have shown up as dualistic separation. And Buddha wasn’t much into that.
As far as Right Speech goes, Buddha offered that up as one of eight practices any of us might want to try on in order to reduce or eliminate suffering in our own lives. He didn’t offer up the practice of Right Speech as a “should” that every gossiper in the world needs to begin practicing so that I can feel comfortable spending time with them. Rather, he offered it up to me as something to consider practicing for my own benefit. Should I so choose.
Forgiving Us Our Trespasses
Buddha also didn’t say that Right Speech means we should never talk about other people when they aren’t present, either. Ben Wong and Jock McKeen drove home the complexity of this lesson quite memorably for me one day in graduate school when they broke me and my classmates into four groups. Each group was then instructed to gossip about someone in another group. Afterwards, a few courageous souls elected to speak their gossip aloud so the person gossiped about could hear it. I stood up and spoke about how William had "confessed" to me about experiencing incestuous feelings towards his daughter. As soon as the words left my mouth, I could feel the embarrassment, shame and pain of betrayal flood my nervous system. William was at little risk for actually incesting his daughter, and in fact, erotic feelings in fathers towards children occur commonly. Healthy fathers like William, undeniably know what line not to cross.
Fortunately, William forgave me for my demonstration of non-intelligent gossip. By that process I did learn how we might use gossip intelligently, as a gauge – discerning how what I say about other people makes me feel in my own body. If we’re speaking about others intelligently, then the chance is pretty high that we will feel perfectly fine in our body. Or at least okay. Parents or teachers talking about children and their development, or therapists talking about a client’s lack of healing progress with a supervisor are some ready examples that come to mind. Angry venting in the presence of a trusted friend about a third person is also an example of Right Speech in my view. Why? Because it can work to lower retained levels of stress chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol. It might also work to catalyze and discharge buried neurological “dissociation capsules.” But if I'm only talking about others in disparaging or demeaning ways for the sake of idle chatter, talking in ways that might feel shameful were the people actually present, then odds are pretty good that I'll be feeling pretty poopy in my body. Not to mention that I might very likely be flooding instead of discharging adrenaline and cortisol, and impoverishing important nerve cells in my heart and brain in the process. We actually can trust our body’s response to gossip to guide us, I think. Provided we’re using our brain and body's inherent intelligence to help us pay undivided attention up close and personal-like.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
The Brain's Worst Nightmare: The Four Horsemen of Neuro-Annihilation
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I often think it would be very difficult growing up a kid in today’s world, especially a teenager. There’s so much going on and change happens so quickly, it’s unquestionably much more stressful than when we were their age, struggling to make sense of the world. Things like HIV, global warming and terrorist threat levels were unheard of then. Even though we had the same raging hormones running sprint races through our bodies, neither we, nor parents, teachers or clergy realized that our brain wouldn’t come to full flower for another six to twelve years! Few teens today will reach early adulthood with instruction or practice in managing what Stanford neuro-biologist Robert Sapolsky has identified as the four primary destroyers of optimal neural growth. Probably most adults don’t know what they are, either.
Neuro-Annihilator One: Lack of Control
The first neuro-annihilator for kids (and adults as well) is the experience of having little control in their lives. Teaching kids from an early age, how to recognize what they can and they can’t control in developmentally appropriate ways, and then taking steps to help them in doing so, goes a long way towards connecting up parts of the brain in the prefrontal cortex where executive function will come to reside. If you click on the link, you’ll be reminded of all the things prefrontal connections allow us to do, things like make plans, keep track of time, reflect on our actions and engage productively with groups.
Unlike many American mortgage bankers who thought it was a good idea to give "liar loans" to people with little hope of ever repaying them, a master at realizing the importance of structuring learning to allow people increasing, appropriate control, is Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. By forming the Grameen Bank which offers women in developing nations a series of graduated micro-loans beginning with $100, Yunus simultaneously puts them in control and manages to keep their neurophysiology from running wild. Compare and contrast this with America’s crushing personal and corporate debt burdens (U.S. debt, currently the highest in history, nearing 14 trillion dollars, is expected to more than double in the next ten years! Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury is taking in roughly six times LESS employment tax revenues. Is this a recipe for crushing national allostatic load, or what?)
Neuro-Annihilator Two: Living with Little Predictability
The healthy brain is an anticipation-prediction machine. When we operate in environments where there is little predictability and we have little idea what to anticipate from one moment to the next, chronic stress results. This allostatic load triggers the release of high levels of glucocorticoids like adrenaline, cortisol and glutamate. Glucocorticoids circulating at high levels in the blood eventually end up destroying neurons, particularly in the hippocampus, the center of memory and learning. Things like high unemployment, delinquent bills and home foreclosures are examples of unpredictability that become stressors making it literally difficult to think straight.
Neuro-Annihilator Three: Little Social Support
Recently, we brought two eight-week old kittens home to the house – Archie and Lulu. Initially they were very skittenish, keeping to themselves, dashing behind furniture the moment I walked into the room, and pretty much avoiding all contact. Within three days, though, they were eating out of my hand and napping on my lap. The combination of the rough-house play they continually do with each other and the freedom to rest when they tire, works wonderfully to grow their little brains. And my letting their natural curiosity bring them to me. I then play with them using bird feathers attached to a string on a tomato stake. I also make few loud or threatening noises, even reducing the sound of my slippers on the hardwood floor because it startles them. I am someone who “gets” them, someone who understands what scares them and refrains from doing that. So, they have each other, and they have me and my partner for effective social support. The key word being effective – able to play with and care for them and assure their safety and well-being. We do our best to answer the Big Brain Question "Yes" for Lulu and Archie.
Neuro-Annihilator Four: Having Few Outlets for Managing Stress
One question I often ask my students is: How do you know when eustress (good stress) turns into allostatic load (bad stress). I get any variety of responses, but by and large the answer is that most don’t know when that line has been crossed usually until long afterwards. They have allergic reactions, make mistakes, get sick, get into accidents, obsess, sleep poorly and displace hostility onto those closest to them, often without the slightest awareness that allostatic load might be the root cause of the difficulties.
Allostatic load damages the brain by suppressing the release of “trophic factors.” (Trophe comes from the Greek word meaning “nourishment.” What sunlight and water do for tomatoes and roses, trophic factors do for brain cells). Learning to preemptively predict and effectively address such stress shifts might be the greatest nourishing gifts we can offer our children, and ourselves as well. Since the evidence is overwhelming that allostatic load significantly damages the brain, if we don’t help one another learn to effectively manage it, then unwittingly, we risk damaging all our brains.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Correcting Attribution Errors of the Heart
It wasn’t until my early thirties, after my brain (according to neuroscientists) had supposedly maxed out its neuron count, that I met the first real love of my life, my soul mate, the woman I just knew would mother my children and I would be spending the rest of my life with. Every moment after meeting her was glorious. Big Magic flowed through every dimension of our lives. Miraculous healings took place; strangers smiled at me on the street; children crowded around us in the shopping malls; every song on the radio was “our song;” when I was away from her I could hear her heart beating everywhere. It was Kismet, a divine love fully ordained in heaven. Ha!
I’ve already briefly written “the rest of the story” here. Suffice it to say that when the poo hit the loo, neither one of us had acquired any tools whatsoever to allow us to skillfully navigate safely through each other's raging psychic storms, or to clean up the mess in the aftermath. All either of us could do was hit the Bail Trail. Decades later, hindsight shows up offering great compassion and understanding and reminds me that 30 years old is SO very young.
Darika and I made one fundamental mistake in our relationship - a mistake quantum physicists, neuroscientists and I call an Attribution Error of the Heart. The brain is first and foremost an association organ. Anything that happens in close sequence or proximity, the brain tends to make meaningful connections with - often an attribution error. The error with such meaning-making is that we attribute and assign false cause in ways that make us often believe things that are fundamentally not true, i.e. that the love energy we feel for our children or our partner originates from and is dependent upon them being in our life and keeping us well-supplied. Jill Bolte Taylor describes the brain's subtle and very skillful ability with misattribution wonderfully in her book, My Stroke of Insight.
Being a brain neuro-anatomist able to bear witness for eight years as her left hemisphere slowly came back online provided Jill (and us) with some really useful information. The experience of love's energies residing primarily in a minimally traumatized right brain, instantly came to the fore once Jill's left brain logic circuitry went offline. She sounds a lot like people sound after they return from an entheogen adventure or a Near-Death experience (They can rarely find adequate words. Which makes total sense, since it was the left brain's word-generating capacity that worked to suppress the awareness of love's ever-presence in the first place!). As Jill's left brain circuitry began to return, it began to dominate and overshadow the energy experience we label "love" all over again. Except that Jill was now hip to Left Brain's workings. She could no longer be fooled into making the attribution error that love lives anywhere else but inside and all around each of us. So, might our own work as parents and people be to experiment with and practice finding ways to get left brain to relax and quiet down and allow us entry into love's always present right brain abode from time to time?
In order to get back in touch with the love energy that the left brain overshadows and dominates so powerfully, similar to Byron Katie, Jill realized we might be best served by starting from the point of not believing what we think! Better might be to feel our way through what we think, especially when what we think by itself catalyzes great suffering. Not believing what we think seems a necessary first step for avoiding attribution errors of the heart. Turning towards painful things that we would ordinarily turn away from and doing deep, compassionate inquiry into them, allows us to uncover love where it actually resides. Hint: it's NOT in some other person, place or thing.
Loving Our Enemies
Leah Green, founder of The Compassionate Listening Project has observed that, "An enemy is someone whose story we haven't fully heard." I would tweak her observation just a wee bit: "An 'other' is someone whose story we haven't fully heard" (Especially teenaged children?). And one reason we haven't heard it is due most often to what Einstein recognized as our conditioned left brain being trained to view people as "something separate, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness," an attribution error of the heart. This error quickly gets corrected in times of profound trauma, deep grief, experiences with entheogens, and often in the presence of young children. Healthy, well-cared for children are born with and then naturally strengthen a compassionate heart. Their immature neurological development and undefended, innocent ways of being in the world naturally resonates with that remembered experience in our own lives. But few children escape childhood wholly unscathed.
How to Get There From Here
Goethe realized that love does not dominate, grasp or demand, it cultivates. Love works to build the capacity for being loving. It cultivates patience, works to quell fear, and operates in the service of compassion and kindness. Love works by practicing doing small things with great love, as Mother Theresa instructed. It is in such doing and in such being that the barriers to the direct experience of love’s right brain energy often begins to emerge; that “metaphysical gravity” becomes thinner and thinner, eventually dissolving many of our dozen defense mechanisms, leaving us raw, vulnerable and wide open to the mystery.
I have sat for hundreds of hours, simply present with people in the midst of agonizing grief, their customary, conditioned psychological defenses completely shredded. In doing so I am no longer surprised when suddenly the barriers to the subtle energies of love dissolve and I find myself immersed once again in their warm and tender glow. At those times the heart makes no attribution error. It is simply and fully available to love’s ever-present reality. At such times I find myself blessed and sitting in state of grace.
I’ve already briefly written “the rest of the story” here. Suffice it to say that when the poo hit the loo, neither one of us had acquired any tools whatsoever to allow us to skillfully navigate safely through each other's raging psychic storms, or to clean up the mess in the aftermath. All either of us could do was hit the Bail Trail. Decades later, hindsight shows up offering great compassion and understanding and reminds me that 30 years old is SO very young.
Darika and I made one fundamental mistake in our relationship - a mistake quantum physicists, neuroscientists and I call an Attribution Error of the Heart. The brain is first and foremost an association organ. Anything that happens in close sequence or proximity, the brain tends to make meaningful connections with - often an attribution error. The error with such meaning-making is that we attribute and assign false cause in ways that make us often believe things that are fundamentally not true, i.e. that the love energy we feel for our children or our partner originates from and is dependent upon them being in our life and keeping us well-supplied. Jill Bolte Taylor describes the brain's subtle and very skillful ability with misattribution wonderfully in her book, My Stroke of Insight. Being a brain neuro-anatomist able to bear witness for eight years as her left hemisphere slowly came back online provided Jill (and us) with some really useful information. The experience of love's energies residing primarily in a minimally traumatized right brain, instantly came to the fore once Jill's left brain logic circuitry went offline. She sounds a lot like people sound after they return from an entheogen adventure or a Near-Death experience (They can rarely find adequate words. Which makes total sense, since it was the left brain's word-generating capacity that worked to suppress the awareness of love's ever-presence in the first place!). As Jill's left brain circuitry began to return, it began to dominate and overshadow the energy experience we label "love" all over again. Except that Jill was now hip to Left Brain's workings. She could no longer be fooled into making the attribution error that love lives anywhere else but inside and all around each of us. So, might our own work as parents and people be to experiment with and practice finding ways to get left brain to relax and quiet down and allow us entry into love's always present right brain abode from time to time?
In order to get back in touch with the love energy that the left brain overshadows and dominates so powerfully, similar to Byron Katie, Jill realized we might be best served by starting from the point of not believing what we think! Better might be to feel our way through what we think, especially when what we think by itself catalyzes great suffering. Not believing what we think seems a necessary first step for avoiding attribution errors of the heart. Turning towards painful things that we would ordinarily turn away from and doing deep, compassionate inquiry into them, allows us to uncover love where it actually resides. Hint: it's NOT in some other person, place or thing.
Loving Our Enemies
Leah Green, founder of The Compassionate Listening Project has observed that, "An enemy is someone whose story we haven't fully heard." I would tweak her observation just a wee bit: "An 'other' is someone whose story we haven't fully heard" (Especially teenaged children?). And one reason we haven't heard it is due most often to what Einstein recognized as our conditioned left brain being trained to view people as "something separate, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness," an attribution error of the heart. This error quickly gets corrected in times of profound trauma, deep grief, experiences with entheogens, and often in the presence of young children. Healthy, well-cared for children are born with and then naturally strengthen a compassionate heart. Their immature neurological development and undefended, innocent ways of being in the world naturally resonates with that remembered experience in our own lives. But few children escape childhood wholly unscathed. How to Get There From Here
Goethe realized that love does not dominate, grasp or demand, it cultivates. Love works to build the capacity for being loving. It cultivates patience, works to quell fear, and operates in the service of compassion and kindness. Love works by practicing doing small things with great love, as Mother Theresa instructed. It is in such doing and in such being that the barriers to the direct experience of love’s right brain energy often begins to emerge; that “metaphysical gravity” becomes thinner and thinner, eventually dissolving many of our dozen defense mechanisms, leaving us raw, vulnerable and wide open to the mystery.
I have sat for hundreds of hours, simply present with people in the midst of agonizing grief, their customary, conditioned psychological defenses completely shredded. In doing so I am no longer surprised when suddenly the barriers to the subtle energies of love dissolve and I find myself immersed once again in their warm and tender glow. At those times the heart makes no attribution error. It is simply and fully available to love’s ever-present reality. At such times I find myself blessed and sitting in state of grace.
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