The knot condensed like a heavy weight in Jill’s stomach. Suddenly
gasping for air, she recognized she had been here before. Yet again,
just when she thought she had finally put it all together, something had
sabotaged the fulfilling life that she dreamed about. “Not again,” she
announced silently as she looked forlornly at her scales, “I can’t
believe I’ve gained the weight back.” Jill could feel the power to
change her life slipping through her fingers – it had not been the first
time.
Taking responsibility for her life and changing it for the better was
something Jill took seriously. She tried hard. She practiced positive
thinking, the law of attraction, visualization, goal setting, yoga –
and she prayed and meditated regularly for abundance. Yet after
enthusiastic initial successes, something unseen seemed to pull her back
into her “de-ja-vu all over again”.
“It’s not that I have a bad life”, Jill reminded herself, “It’s just
that I know there is more. And it’s right outside of my grasp. What am
I missing? Why do I keep repeating the same thing over and over again?
How do I really claim my potential?”
These four questions were about to change Jill’s life.
- What Am I Missing?
- Why Do I Keep Repeating the Same Things Over and Over Again?
- How Do I Train the Brain to Disrupt Old Limiting Patterns and Create New Empowering Ones?
- How Do I Open the Door to Claiming My Potential?
Let’s examine the first three of these questions. Why not all four?
Because until you skillfully address the first three questions,
fulfilling your potential will remain an elusive dream. The first three
questions deal with the influence your biology has over who you believe
yourself to be. The answer to the last question becomes apparent when
you learn how to better manage your body and mind.
What Am I Missing?
Your Biology and Brain Have Far More Influence Over the Course of Your Life Than You Imagine.
You may have been sleeping during high school or college biology –
particularly neuro-biology. And not understanding what you missed will
blind you to why you keep repeating the same mistakes over and over
again.
What Jill did not understand is the power of her biology and brain to
create and maintain patterns. Without learning how to work with your
biology, these patterns will overwhelm even your best intentions to
change. As an example, think about Jill’s dieting. It is common for
people to get highly motivated to lose weight. They set goals,
visualize success, use positive self talk, affirm themselves, spend a
lot of money, and reward themselves for weight loss. And they lose
weight – initially. A piece of cake, right?
Yet, 95% of people regain the weight they lost. And seriously
declared New Year’s Resolutions routinely are broken within 3 weeks.
Why, you ask? This is that pesky neuro-biological pattern in action.
Your brain and mind cannot be neatly separated. Without learning to
manage your biology’s influence over your mind, your neuro-biology will
pull you back into its historical hardwired pattern. Your mind emerges
from your brain (biology) and the brain is interested in building
perceptual maps that are organized around emotions and patterns.
It’s not that we are only our biology. However, once the brain
builds successful short term patterns, they lock in and start
replicating what we see as possible in our lives. And that causes us to
be blind to any possibility outside of the familiar pattern in which
the brain organized us.
In real life what does this look like? Let’s go back to Jill. Jill
has struggled with her weight for a number of years. Every time she
would finally get it back under control and was able to look into her
mirror and see the “true” Jill emerging, she would sabotage her efforts.
During these times of sabotage, she went on “auto-pilot” and did not
“see” herself losing her discipline – and eating too much. Then she
would wake up a couple of months later only to discover the weight had
snuck back on her. What happened?
Why Do I Keep Repeating the Same Things Over and Over Again?
Getting Stuck in the Box of Your Comfort Zone
Jill just encountered the pattern-making machinery of her brain –
which, by the way, no one had ever told her about. Until this time, she
thought that losing weight was about discipline, exercise, and
envisioning a healthier self. (No one had told her biology and her
brain about her plan!) Evidence did not match experience though. No
matter how advanced her “head game” became, somehow the weight was able
to sneak back on her body.
The brain creates patterns to adapt us to successfully survive in
whatever environment to which we are born. Once established though,
these patterns go on automatic and become highly resistant to change –
as Jill experienced as “de-ja-vu all over again”. And once established,
you do not have a pattern. Rather, the pattern has you. And until you
wake up to its power, the pattern creates your experiences in life.
This is why you keep doing the same things over and over again. And
this is why Jill kept losing and gaining her weight back.
In Jill’s case, she had learned to use food to “comfort” herself
during adolescence. Like many teenagers she experienced periods of
feeling isolated (which produces a sense of discomfort for the brain).
The way she found to calm this discomfort was by eating, which produced a
sense of comfort for her. The brain seized on this successful solution
to the discomfort of feeling isolated and created a hardwired
neruo-pathway of eating behavior to solve a primitive survival problem.
Jill got stuck with the brain’s pattern of eating to comfort her
feeling of discomfort. And the battle of weight began. The brain’s
short term solution produced temporary comfort in exchange for a long
term problem of weight gain. But the brain only cares to produce short
term problem solutions and, if successful, these will become locked in
as familiar pattern.
Your Brain, Mind, and Comfort Zone
Create the Prison of Your Donut.
This is what I call being stuck in the box (prison) of your comfort
zone. The brain has created a comfort zone for a survivable life – not a
life in which you thrive. And the box of your comfort zone is highly
resistant to change. As an example, think of a huge donut, and you are
in the hole of that donut.
The donut surrounds you. And you are stuck in the donut hole. It’s
safe, familiar, and pretty sweet in that donut hole – even if it does
close down the possibility of exploring the adventure you would like to
take. You have a desire to leave the prison that the donut hole has
become, but every time you climb out of the familiarity of the donut
hole something begins pulling you back. As you approach the edges of
your self knowledge (that’s the edges of the donut), you begin to
experience the uncertainty of the unknown. You simply do not know what
exists outside the cocoon of your donut.
Your brain is wired to keep you in familiar pattern – that’s the
donut and donut hole. That is how your brain (with its bias for
survival) has adapted you. There is an adventurer living within you
that wants to expand beyond the self imposed comfort zone, but the
brain’s survival motivation wants you back in the box of your comfort
zone (that is the donut hole). Suddenly thinking, possessed by the
force of the comfort zone, creates a story in your mind about how sweet
the donut hole really is. And it may not be what you want for growth,
but it is safe. A lot safer than the uncertainty that lies beyond the
comfort zone called your donut.
This is exactly what is happening to our friend Jill. She is not
aware of the influence of the patterns created by her brain, but that
does not stop their influence. And until she wakes up to its influence,
she will continue to be swept away by the unseen forces that seem to be
shaping her fate. Waking up to the power of her biology to create a
self fulfilling pattern changes everything. More about that later.
By the time your psychology shows up (that’s the mind), you
experience this uncertainty and shrinking of the self as fear or self
doubt. Why should your biology be subjected to uncertainty? (That is
exactly what it is mandated to avoid.) So you stay stuck in a
particular way of being in the world called your life. This scenario is
played out countless times over a lifetime. And it will stay in place
until you learn how to observe, disrupt, and create new pattern as a
designer of your life.
How Do I Train the Brain to Disrupt Old Limiting Patterns and Create New Empowering Ones?
This is where Jill began to wake up to the influence her biology had
exerted over her mind and her ability to maintain a healthy weight.
First and foremost, she had to come to a new understanding of her
biology. Body, mind, and our spiritual nature cannot be separated.
Central to that new understanding is the assertion that neuro-biology
has given us – that mind emerges from brain.
Second, she had to learn the skills of diaphragmatic breathing as
part of mindfulness training. Fear, as an emotional state, cannot be
maintained as a driver of thought while breathing diaphragmatically.
Herbert Benson, MD proved that our emotional state was linked to the way
we breathe. Fear requires a shallow breathing style (or holding of
breath) to maintain itself or to accelerate its intensity. And fear
determines our state of mind (the way we think). What Dr. Benson was
able to demonstrate was that fear states could be disrupted by managing
breathing style and by relaxing tension in the body. He coined the term
“Relaxation Response” to describe this important skill.
Jill learned how to breathe her way through “bouts” of emotional and
psychological discomfort. She realized that, when she felt isolation,
she stopped breathing and held her breath. By consciously breathing
deeply, she was able to learn how to override the build up of anxiety
that triggered her comfort eating.
SafePlace Generation:
Distinguishing Biological Fear and Psychological Discomfort
But Jill did not stop with developing the skill of breathing as a
tool to manage her inherent anxiety that lead to comfort eating.
Once you grasp that your biology is organized around fear as an
evolutionary force, you can appreciate how important this breathing
skill is to develop. The body, your biology, cannot tell the difference
between biological fear (threat to life) and psychological discomfort
(something you deal with and grow from). By learning to breathe
diaphragmatically, you can disrupt the power of fear to compel you to
avoid conflict. This calms the body.
But that’s never enough. Fear has to be distinguished between a real
biological threat and psychological discomfort. Once biological fear
is separated from psychological discomfort, you will need to learn how
to take fear off-line – or calm the mind. This entails creating a sense
of safety for the mind to focus on. In the Ignite Your Spark work that
I teach, this is called SafePlace generation. Fundamentally it is
creating a highly enriched soothing memory that can be called up in your
mind. The trick is in training yourself so this state of mind will
trigger simultaneously as fears and self doubt emerge in the mind.
This training requires that the body and mind calm down so that
conflict can be observed from a calm state of mind rather than an
agitated (whether by fear or anger) state of mind. Here, conflict
shifts from an object of fear to be avoided to an object beyond the
comfort zone. And a natural state of calm curiosity opens to explore
possibility. Conflict is no longer interpreted as a threat; rather it
can now be viewed as an opportunity of growth.
This is where Jill began to flourish. Taking the discomfort off line
allowed her to stop avoiding the sense of isolation that lay at the
root of her brain’s organization about isolation. She could approach
the internal conflict within her in a state of calm, rather than in a
state of anxiousness. This made all the difference in the world.
Conflict was not the problem, she discovered, it was her approach to her
internal struggle that had blocked her from a more fulfilling life.
Without conflict there is no growth. And conflict is inescapable.
What matters is not the avoidance of conflict, but, rather, how we
approach conflict. Think about it this way. Would you rather solve a
problem in a fearful state of mind, or from a calm state of mind?
That’s a no-brainer.
Very different worlds open up to us depending on our emotional
states. As we become more competent in managing our emotional states of
mind, the greater our capacity becomes to move beyond the box of our
comfort zone. It is by managing the uncertainty (fear) that keeps us a
prisoner in our comfort zone that we expand the possibility of who we
can be.
How Do I Open the Door to Claiming My Potential?
As you can tell from the way Jill changed the way she worked with her
discomfort, transformation begins by disrupting the brain’s familiar
patterns by learning how to manage the biology of our mind. She learned
how to self sooth rather than reach for comfort food. But there is
more possible.
Like Jill had to learn in the example at the start of this article,
the first step is to learn how to manage emotional states by skillful
breathing. The next essential step for creating positive change is to
calm the mind through self soothing, such as SafePlace generation. That
calms the body and slows down the stream of thoughts going on in your
mind. Then something powerful happens. You discover that there is an
internal dialogue going on in your mind to which you can become an
observer.
And that internal dialogue, masquerading as thoughts in your mind, is
the key to understanding self and to personal transformation. By
tuning into your internal dialogue, you will discover that there is a
lot going on underneath the hood of your mind. Behind your thoughts are
powerful forces. It is these internal conversations within the self
that determine what you see as possible in your life and what you act
on.
These conversations of the internal dialogue will be explored in the
future. At this moment what I hope you have learned is the importance
of breathing to calm the body and generating safety as a way of taking
fear off-line. It is at this moment that an entirely new way of
understanding the unseen forces that create our lives becomes possible.
It is not enough to manage the body and mind. Once these skills are
developed, possibility for a much more fulfilling life opens. Now Jill
is ready to open the door to deeper transformation. She has learned to
face her fears and push through them. Now her job is to challenge the
very assumptions that have locked her into a world that has constricted
the possibility of who she can be.
How about you? What happens when you are able to move beyond the box
of your comfort zone and explore your deeper potential? It’s an
exciting journey. My hope is that you are now motivated to learn how to
manage your body and mind so that you can move beyond the limitations
that your brain (and its organization of the emerging mind) has placed
upon you. It is a courageous voyage of discovery.
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