Five Additional Practices That Accelerate Brain Change
The difference between try and triumph is a little “umph.”
— AUTHOR UNKNOWN
THERE ARE FIVE additional experiential practices that work synergistically with mindful empathy to guide and safely accelerate any process of brain change: cultivating presence, intention, perseverance, refuges, and resources. Here I describe some of the neuroscience that explains why these additional practices add a crucial momentum to the major practices of mindful empathy described in the previous two chapters. Each of these practices safely speeds up the processes of brain change we learn to use in the next chapter, allowing us to rewire our brain for resilience sooner rather than later.
Presence
To be present is far from trivial. It may be the hardest work in the world. And forget about the “may be.” It is the hardest work in the world — at least to sustain presence. And the most important. When you do drop into presence•you know it instantly, feel at home instantly. And being home, you can let loose, let go, rest in your being, rest in awareness, in presence itself, in your own good company.
— JON KABAT-ZINN
The brain learns and rewires itself best when it is calm and relaxed, yet engaged and alert. Becoming present means “showing up,” coming out of absentmindedness or distraction, out of denial or dissociation, into a mindful awareness of being here, now, in this body, and then gently sustaining this state of simply being as we rewire the brain’s conditioned patterns of coping.
Through the practice of mindful empathy, it’s possible to come into an embodied sense of presence in just a breath or two. Presence can be a momentary refuge or respite from worries and concerns: we can relax and simply breathe and be. Presence is also the gateway to neural receptivity: the brain takes a breather from doing and creates the mental play space that allows it to explore something new. Presence allows us to calmly engage with our experience in order to choose what patterns we want to rewire, and how.
Exercise 1: Coming into Presence
1. Start where you are. Orient to your environment, noticing features of your external world: the shape of the furniture in the room, the color of the art on the walls, the sound of a door opening or closing.
2. Shift your attention to your internal world, noticing and naming states of mind, feelings, and thoughts as they come to your awareness: annoyance at forgetting to answer your cousin’s email, anticipation of a company barbecue this weekend.
3. Let your awareness drop below those conscious events to a deep inner awareness of being here, in the present moment. Eyes closed or softly open, focus attention on body sensations — your feet on the floor, your back against the chair — and become aware of your awareness.
4. Shift your attention to your breathing, gently in and out. Become aware of your awareness of your breathing. As this awareness of awareness of your experience in the present moment deepens, the mind quiets and the chatter stops. You can drop into a sense of being here, now, in this moment — into a steady sense of simple presence. This moment… this breath… here.. and now. This present moment …this present breath…this precious moment…this precious breath…
5. Let your awareness come to rest in a steady inner peace of being rather than doing. Stay in this sense of steady presence as long as you can, even if it’s only for a few seconds at first: it’s delicious. A sense of spaciousness, a stillness, or a sweetness is a reliable marker that you’re present. Take a moment to notice any shifts in your consciousness as you come to that stillness, that quiet of mind, that allows you to access and listen deeply to the wisdom of your own true nature.
The practice of presence and the trust in the deep inner wisdom that arises from it can bring a new sense of assurance in your capacity for wise, resilient action.
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
— ANAÏS NIN
As chapter 1 shows, focused attention causes neurons in the brain to fire; repeated focusing on the same object or experience causes repeated neural firings; and repeated neural firings create a new and stable neural structure. When we focus our attention on cultivating a particular pattern of behavior, a character trait, or attitude or lens for filtering our experience, we incline the mind toward that objective. We notice more readily the desired trait or behavior, register it more fully in our consciousness, and direct mental activity toward it. For instance, when we formulate an intention to become more mindful, more self-accepting, and more flexible as support for becoming more resilient, the repeated focus on that intention begins to build new brain structure and circuitry that support us in achieving the intention. The brain is primed to make us more likely to act in ways that will actually manifest that particular intention. We turn a neural goat path into a freeway.
Researchers have found that, more than half the time, it’s the need to get out of an attitude or circumstance that is causing us suffering or pain gets us moving on a new course of action. The sincere intention to develop resilience and well-being can fuel a determination to persevere in rewiring the brain for more resilience.
There is one caveat to keep in mind when thinking about intentions. Adopting the stance that we should cultivate a particular behavior or trait sets us up for potential failure, whereas taking the attitude that we can cultivate it sets us up for learning. When my client Nigel wanted to overcome his fear of public speaking, he found venues where he could speak in front of a group if he chose to, but he didn’t ever have to. He resisted the temptation to feel that he should speak. The possibility of speaking without pressure to perform allowed him to build his success slowly, at his own pace, but steadily. The skillful setting of an intention is based on creating options and possibilities, not forcing ourselves into particular defined behaviors. Moving from “must” to “trust” of ourselves encourages learning and more quickly rewires our brain for flexibility and resilience.
When my client Sean was going through a particularly tough time, waking up every morning in a bit of existential panic, I suggested he set the intention to not get out of bed until he could bring his mind and body to a state of calm. Sean began noticing the state he was in when he first woke up and practiced coming into the state of presence described in exercise 1. A few weeks later, when he came in to report his progress, Sean acknowledged that he had to practice self-empathy and self-compassion, too. At first, his body and brain needed more than an hour to come to the state of ease and equilibrium from which he wanted to launch his day. But within two weeks, he was able to arrive at that state of calm in forty minutes; soon he was able to reduce the time to twenty minutes, then five minutes, then the space of just a few breaths. What a grand day it was when he woke up in that state of calm.
Because setting an intention, and following through with deliberate behaviors to fulfill that intention, sculpts neural structure in the brain, we need to choose our intentions carefully. To recover resilience, we can incline the mind in specific ways: “May I learn to stay grounded in my body when my sister-in-law picks a fight with me.” “May I be patient with myself as I learn to stay grounded.” “May I remember to breathe when I get startled or upset.” “May I pause and reflect before impulsively fixing somebody.” “May I focus on what’s right in the moment at least as often as I do on what’s wrong.” “May I have compassion for myself when I forget all of the above.” A simple yet powerful way to practice setting intentions is to set the intention to notice.
Every morning for the next week, set the intention to notice what you notice first thing as you say hello to your child, partner, or pet; as you step outside your home; as you smell your morning coffee; as you taste the flavors of your sandwich at lunch.
Noticing strengthens your mindfulness practice. Noticing your noticing strengthens your awareness. Setting an intention, and then noticing yourself carry out that intention, strengthens your confidence and your capacity to create new patterns of response to experiences. You are strengthening a neural mechanism that underlies all resilience.
Perseverance
How long should you try? Until.
— JIM ROHN
Recovering resilience in the face of challenges and changes can be difficult and painful work. Perseverance in our efforts to harness neuroplasticity is the sine qua non of rewiring our brains. By persevering in the use of new tools and techniques, we are stabilizing the new neural circuitry so that it can serve as a reliable platform of resilient behaviors, not easily overridden by the pulls of the past.
Scientists differ in their assessment of how many times a pattern of neural firing must be repeated to be reliably encoded in the brain. Some data indicate seventeen times; another study concluded fifty-six. But even if we don’t know exactly how long we must practice a habit to stabilize the new brain structure, we do know that a few moments of practice many times a day is more effective than an hour once a week. Frequent and regular repetition creates steady neural firing and rewiring and accelerates the process. We also know that a stance of willingness — focusing on possibilities — is more effective than a stance of willpower — focusing on performance. It almost doesn’t matter at first how small the increment of change is. What’s important is that we choose practices that catalyze positive change and that we persevere.
A reporter interviewing Thomas Edison asked him how he felt about failing two thousand times before he discovered how to harness electricity in a lightbulb. Edison is said to have replied, “My dear young man, I did not fail. I did invent the lightbulb. It was simply a 2,000-step process.”
Exercise 3: Strengthening Perseverance
1. Set an intention to implement a practice that will rewire your brain in a way that feels important to you, such as one of the following
(a) to cultivate an attitude you value, like gratitude;
(b) to see circumstances from a new perspective rather than responding automatically with preconceived notions;
(c) to respond to an ongoing stressor with a new behavior, breaking the cascade of automatic reactions and deliberately choosing something new.
2. Create a cue to remind yourself of your intention. There are various ways to do this:
(a) put a sticky note on your computer reminding you to notice events in the day to be grateful for;
(b) shift gears by counting to three before you answer the phone or the doorbell to give yourself time to become present and able to respond with a more open frame of mind;
(c) use a common action, like plugging in the coffeemaker or turning the key in the car’s ignition, as a cue to remember your intention for the day.
3. Identify behaviors that help manifest that intention and experiment with implementing them. Some examples include
(a) expressing your appreciation to your partner for five generous things he or she did that day;
(b) putting yourself in the shoes of the person on the phone or at the door and trying to see the interaction between the two of you from the other person’s point of view;
(c) when encountering disappointments, mistakes, or dysfunction, asking “What’s right with this wrong?” as part of framing a skillful response to the stressor.
4. Repeat the behavior for a week, then another, then a month. You can experiment with expanding the behavior as you learn what works to manifest your intention. Here are some ways to do this:
(a) express your appreciation to your child, your sister-in-law, your coworkers, and the grocery store clerk for any generous behaviors on their part;
(b) shift your perspective, maybe by acknowledging the sincere motivation of your brother George when he surprised you by weeding your backyard for your birthday, even though he unknowingly pulled up all the daffodils along with the weeds;
(c) Keeping in mind that the Chinese written character for the word crisis is made up of the characters meaning danger and opportunity, find an opportunity in at least three crises this month.
5. Notice what changes in your brain as you persevere in your practice.
I once had a client who, after practicing for weeks to stay open-minded rather than cursing when she watched the evening news, told me she had bounded down the stairs in excitement one day, saying, “I’m growing new neurons!” The courage to persevere in rewiring our brains toward the five Cs of coping is supported when we see that our intentional rewiring is working: we see ourselves getting over the hump and establishing behaviors that are new or different from before. When we see that we are learning, changing, and growing, we keep going.
Refuges
We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us there is something valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
— E. E. CUMMINGS
Modern neuroscience confirms what we can experience on our own: safety and trust are the wellsprings of resilience, exploration, and growth. They are also essential to healthy brain development and to rewiring our brains at any age. In the earliest periods of development, a frightened child seeks safety, protection, and comfort from a parent; when soothed, he bounces up to go off and explore again. The brain is open to learning again. The same holds true all our lives. Experiencing anything within a context that helps us feel safe also helps us remain resilient and responsive. I spent all forty-five of the shaking, rocking minutes of the 1989 earthquake and its aftershocks in San Francisco huddled under a big conference table with six coworkers, all of us holding hands, offering one another reassurance, as the earth rippled underneath us. That refuge of companionship allowed us to stay calm enough to see clearly what was happening and to connect with each other as resources. When the aftershocks stopped, we went home to find further refuge in friends and family and maintain our flexibility to respond as we began to deal with the damage to homes and possessions and took steps to rebuild.
Refuge simply means a safe, supportive place to be when we are fragile or confused, a safe place to cry or rant as long as we need to, or somewhere to wait patiently until a course of action begins to emerge from the chaos. We all need refuges, safe havens, and sanctuaries, not to escape from the current demons and dreads but in order to regroup, to pull ourselves together, to “resettle our molecules,” as my friend Phyllis Kirson would say. The calm we find in those refuges helps us return to calm inside; from there, our brain can recover its capacities to see clearly and to cope in new and better ways.
We find refuge in trustworthy relationships, in the sacred spaces of home or nature, in meditative activities (which can include any activity done meditatively, like washing the dishes or gardening). We find refuge in the vitality of our own bodies, in the juiciness of our emotions, in the clarity of our consciousness, in the wisdom of our true nature. We learn to create a quiet space, a leisure of time, a retreat from the Sturm und Drang of daily living to do what I like to call REST — relax and enter into safety and trust. In this refuge, we replenish ourselves. We help our nervous systems return to, or remain in, the state of physiological calm and equanimity called the “window of tolerance” that allows us to cope with anything without resorting to our primitive survival responses.
The following sections and exercises illustrate ways to find simple refuges in people, places, and practices that can help you return to the process of harnessing your neuroplasticity to learn even more resilient ways of coping.
Finding Refuge in People
We may seek refuge among good friends, people we can trust to not judge or disdain us when we become emotionally unglued or our thinking becomes unhinged: people who can simply be with us until we regroup and are ready to face the world again. We saw how Joe was this kind of refuge for Dan. These are people whose own stability and calm we can borrow until we can regain our own. They may be on our short list of “go-to” people whom we can call at 2 AM, trusting that we will be held in what the psychologist Carl Rogers calls “unconditional positive regard,” that they will reassure us that we are (or will be) okay, even though our world is crashing around us. Or we may find refuge in other people who simply happen to be there when a crisis arises, as my colleagues and I turned to one another during the earthquake.
If you don’t have a lot of people in your life at the moment who can offer a refuge, don’t be discouraged. You can create a genuinely effective circle of support in your imagination. This circle can include people you trust and feel supported by, or it may be made up of imaginary people you would like to meet. Your circle may include a spiritual figure like Jesus or the Dalai Lama. It may include your own wiser self. Visualizing ourselves as encircled by real or imaginary friends who “have our back” can greatly enhance our ease and resilience as we face an unknown or frightening situation.
I experienced the power of calling on support in my imagination almost a decade ago, when I chose to have LASIK eye surgery to correct lifelong nearsightedness and astigmatism. The operation was risky, so I went into it with understandable anxiety. I had asked friends to think of me that day, at the time I was actually in surgery, so that I would feel supported and not alone during the procedure. I had to remain conscious during the operation, and focusing my eyes on the light above me so that the laser could track exactly where to reshape the cornea to give me 20/ 20 vision. While lying on the gurney, as still as I could, I thought of all my friends thinking of me; I took in the love and caring that I knew were being sent my way.
About ten minutes into the operation, quite suddenly, I lost all sense of anxiety. Instead I was flooded with an overpowering sense of love and belonging. There was nothing to be afraid of, nothing at all. I remained in that state of serenity for the remainder of the surgery (which was completely successful).
Imagined experiences can be nearly as powerful as actual events for creating new brain circuitry. Neuroscientists have discovered that the same neurons fire in our visual cortex when we imagine seeing a banana as when we see one for real. When you use the power of your imagination to repeatedly visualize people supporting you, you are installing a pattern of coping in your neural circuitry that you can use as a refuge in times of difficulty or challenge.
Exercise 4: Creating a Circle of Support
1. Identify a specific situation for which you would like support, such as going to a supervisor to discuss a complaint or a raise, preparing for an audit by the IRS, telling your brother and sister-in-law you won’t be joining them for Thanksgiving this year, or confronting your teenage son about drug paraphernalia stashed in his bedroom closet.
2. Take thirty seconds to identify several people you would like to have, in your imagination, by your side in this situation. Imagine them fully present, fully supportive. You’re not alone. Practice evoking this sense of refuge again and again until it becomes a natural habit of your brain that you can call on any time you need it.
Evoking refuges and resources in the imagination can feel as real to the brain as having them physically present. The possibilities of using imagination to rewire our brains can stretch toward the infinite. The next time you face an unexpected challenge or crisis, notice any increased sense of inner safety as you evoke your circle of support to help you act resiliently.
Finding Refuge in Places
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— WENDELL BERRY
We all need a safe place we can retreat to when the going gets rough — wilderness or a garden, a church or temple, our car or office, a friend’s home or our own snug bed — to reconnect with our wisest, most resilient self. When a place has repeatedly been used as a refuge, by ourselves or by many other people, the physical place itself reverberates with a feeling of welcome and safety. We can sense its energy and feel ourselves calm down when we enter it.
Anywhere can be a safe place of refuge if it is “ego-syntonic” — if it suits our temperament, conditioning, and life circumstances. It may be a favorite tree in a park or a rock by the ocean to sit on while we search for the way through a current dilemma. Every time we go to our safe place, we deepen our sense of being held by a compassion larger than our own small world; we can come to terms with our losses and difficulties more quickly and resiliently.
My friend Dale lost most of his retirement savings in the financial downturn of 2008. Understandably distraught, he went to his safe place, a particular bench in a city park overlooking a small lagoon. When he showed up afterward at my front door, he said simply, in his Texas drawl, “That was the most peaceful half hour I have ever spent in my entire life.” Going to his safe place didn’t solve Dale’s financial problems, but it did help him recover a relaxed flexibility in his brain so that he could remember his own capacities to deal with difficulties and begin the work of doing so. The following exercise is a guided visualization that will help you cultivate a sense of refuge in a safe place, one that you can evoke in your imagination any time you need to.
Exercise 5: Creating a Safe Place
1. Sit comfortably and quietly. When you are ready, imagine that you are standing in front of a gate. Imagine in rich detail how tall the gate is, how wide, how thick, what it’s made of, what color it is. Make this gate as real as you can in your mind’s eye.
2. Then imagine yourself opening the gate and walking through. When you are on the other side, visualize what lies ahead: a path, a hallway, a trail, or a street that will lead you to a place that is very special, just for you. This is your safe place.
3. Begin to walk along the path. As you walk, notice whatever you are seeing, hearing, or smelling, or anything you are simply noticing.
4. After a while, you come to a place that you know is your safe place. It may be a meadow, a cottage, a special room in a house, a beach, a garden courtyard, or anywhere that is a special place for you. Allow yourself to walk up to your safe place and enter.
5. Take time to look around: notice all the things that help you feel safe and comfortable here. Relax and enjoy being here; feel the sense of confidence and inner strength your safe place gives you.
6. If you choose to, find a place to sit down. Add anything you want to this space to help you feel safer and more at ease. Remove anything you don’t want. You can change anything you want. Then simply relax, feeling at ease, enjoying your safe place.
7. When it’s time to leave, imagine standing up, leaving the safe place the same way you came in, walking back along the same path or walkway you took to get here, eventually passing through the gate, turning around, and closing it. Your safe place is on the other side, but you know you can return any time you need to.
8. Practice evoking this safe place in ordinary, nonstressful moments so that it is available to you when the flak hits the fan. Recognize that you are using your brain’s neuroplasticity to create a new and reliable resource of coping.
Finding Refuge in Contemplative Practice
One day I was meditating in my office on a break, but I had left the phone ringer on, and when the phone rang, I answered it. My doctor was calling to say there was an abnormality in my most recent mammogram; would I schedule an appointment to come in and have another X-ray? My anxiety went right through the roof. All the stories about friends’ courses of cancer treatment started rushing through my head. But because I had been meditating and had come into a state of calm awareness before the phone rang, I could clearly see my own anxiety go through the roof, see clearly that it was going through the roof, schedule the appointment for the second mammogram (which turned out to be normal), and return to my meditating, now with a different object of awareness but still held in awareness, aware of being aware.
The Buddhist tradition emphasizes the importance of taking refuge in the practices that lead to wisdom. Practices such as meditation, yoga, and centering prayer deepen mindful empathy, the compassionate capacity to hold whatever curveballs life throws at us and take us further on the process of recovering resilience.
Exercise 6: Choosing a Practice
A path of practice is an established collection of teachings and tools that have been demonstrated over time and in different cultures and circumstances to be useful guides to developing skillful behaviors and the conscious awareness and compassion that sustain those behaviors.
1. Many practices are available in our modern Western world. The key to finding one that works for you is to approach practices from a variety of traditions with openness, curiosity, a sense of exploration and experiment, and willingness to “see for yourself,” as the Buddha taught.
2. Resonance — tuning into what feels right for you — is key to choosing a practice that will accelerate your process of brain change.
3. It’s helpful to try only one practice at a time rather than diffuse your energy by flitting from one practice to another. It is also important to give any potential practice a fair try. The focus and discipline involved in sticking with a practice allow your brain to rewire more deeply. Discernment and dedication will help you settle into a practice that can sustain your process of change over the long haul.
4. You may find it helpful to identify role models — people who seem to have the qualities of resilience you want to develop for yourself — and ask them what practices have helped them. Notice which communities of practice most resonate with you, the you that you are becoming.
All of these refuges — people, places, and practices — provide the conditions of safety and trust that make it easier to bounce back from trouble or trauma, to cope resourcefully and resiliently. And they create the conditions your brain needs to most reliably rewire itself.
Resources
Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind is bearing me across the sky.
— OJIBWA SAYING
Resources are the safety net of resilience. Connecting to resources — seeking support that will either alleviate a difficulty in concrete, practical ways or that will nourish and replenish us so that we can persevere in trying to resolve it — is one of the five Cs of coping. Resources bring strength and energy to our endeavors at the very moment we need them, shoring up our courage rather than letting us fall into depletion or despair. Resources keep us steady and balanced so that even in crisis, we can try to rewire our brains in a more resilient direction. It is important to cultivate multiple layers of resources, so that if one safety net fails we can rely on another. As you build your resource bank, remember that resources are interchangeable: a lack of one kind of resource can be compensated for by an abundance of another.
Material Objects as Resources
Prepare for emergencies, big or small, by keeping helpful objects at hand such as a granola bar stashed in the glove compartment in case the fatigue of a busy day starts to set in while we’re stuck in traffic; safety pins kept in a desk drawer in case a shirt button falls off ten minutes before a meeting; extra blankets stored under the bed in case a power failure means no heat for three days. They are a form of “saving for a rainy day” that is part of our intention to create more well-being in our lives.
Exercise 7: Creating Material Resources
1. Identify one potential emergency that you could be better prepared for with a little forethought: for example, a power failure that knocks out your refrigerator.
2. Create at least one material resource to prepare for that emergency, like storing bottles of water in the freezer to help keep food cold in the refrigerator when the power goes out. This preparation will make you more resilient and may save you a great deal of time and frustration later.
Seeing yourself take action to strengthen your safety nets of resilience helps develop competence, another of the five Cs of coping. Registering that increasing sense of competence in your sense of self helps strengthen your overall resilience.
People as Resources
People who serve as role models offer wisdom from their own experience, giving us keys to crack the code of how to live resiliently, whether we are observing them, talking with them, or evoking their presence in our imagination. From them we learn competencies and values to guide our actions, sometimes through direct instruction and practical suggestions, sometimes by the “contagion” of coping: the resonance from spending time with a resilient role model can call forth the same capacities for resilience in us. And because our brains can encode new patterns of coping directly from interacting with other resilient brains, identifying people as resources greatly accelerates our own brain change.
I learned the power of people as resources when I began seeing clients in graduate school, putting in the hours of clinical practice required for becoming a licensed psychotherapist. My emerging resilience was being tested every day by the chaos and confusion of my clients’ lives, but never more so than one afternoon when a client called to say that her teenage daughter had committed suicide the night before.
Nothing in my training or my life experience up to that point had equipped me to know how to stay fully resilient in that moment. I managed to schedule a time to see her that night, but I was in a state of shock — not a calm presence, certainly not yet the stalwart, skillful clinician my client needed to help her through such bewildering, devastating loss and grief.
I told my supervisor at the clinic what had happened. With two teenage daughters of her own, she wobbled a bit, too. She went to see the clinic director, who, a bit more removed and a lot more experienced, was rock solid in knowing how to handle the situation. She was able to steady my supervisor and suggest many things to do that would be helpful to me and my client. With her own equilibrium restored, my supervisor could be clear and empathic with me about how I could best support my client. I felt her steadiness, recovered my own, learned some essential skills for handling such situations, and was able to be quite helpful to my client that night.
The resources we connect to by reaching out to others can greatly accelerate the rewiring of our coping strategies. My client Doug grew up in a family that was both dysfunctionally disconnected within itself and isolated from other families. He had never even attended a birthday party until his first year of community college, and no one had ever thrown a birthday party for him. As he approached his twenty-first birthday, he decided to throw a party for himself. For Doug, this event was as significant a marker of becoming a competent adult as knowing how to buy a car or rent his own apartment.
He approached a guy he had met through pick-up basketball games who seemed to know how to get people together for social occasions. Doug’s request for advice turned into a three-week mentoring project: Neil helped Doug identify whom to invite, what sort of event to host, and when to hold it, and coached him on the details — obtaining the food and drinks and planning activities and rituals that Doug had only glimpsed from afar. Doug had a great time celebrating his twenty-first birthday, resourced by people who could help him figure out how to make his way in the world in this particular way. And he learned the value of finding a role model to help him crack the code and rewire his own brain.
Exercise 8: Discovering People as Resources
1. Identify one skill or capacity of resilience you would like to develop.
2. Identify one person you could have a conversation with — a friend, a coworker, a neighbor, a therapist — to learn that skill. Or ask these same people whom they would recommend as a role model. You can even select a role model whom you may never have a direct conversation with but from whom you can learn by observation and listening. This conversation could even be a dialogue with the intuitive wisdom of your wiser self.
3. Initiate the conversation between yourself and your role model. (If this step seems challenging, you can even identify a role model who can help you learn how to initiate conversations.) Or initiate a period of observation of your role model, learning from watching and listening.
4. Notice what you’re learning from your role model about the chosen skill. Also notice what you are learning about learning from people as a resource.
Spirituality as a Resource
One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space. Millions of stars blazed in darkness, and on the far shore a few lights burned in cottages. Otherwise there was no reminder of human life. My companion and I were alone with the stars: the misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of the constellations standing out bright and clear, a blazing planet low on the horizon. It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century, this little headland would be thronged with spectators. But it can be seen many scores of night in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead; and because they could see it almost any night, perhaps they never will.
— RACHEL CARSON
I love this reminder from Rachel Carson, the noted conservationist and author of Silent Spring. Moments of awe — noticing for even one moment the beauty, harmony, and miraculousness of the life around us and the life within us — remind us of the wonder that anything exists at all. They connect us to the (re)source of all of existence. Neurologically, in moments like these, we are entering the “being” mode of brain processing that allows us to see the big picture and loosen our grip on our accustomed ways of perceiving reality. In this mode it is much easier for our brains to rewire our patterns of coping.
One workshop participant shared one of her favorite ways of opening herself to this resource. Any time Molly noticed sunlight sparkling on water — in a drop of water on a leaf, in the flashing diamonds of ripples on a small lake — she was transported into spacious awareness. Both the physical beauty of that scene (processed by the defocusing consciousness) and her awareness of the facts of the physics — that the sparkle of sunlight had just traveled 93 million miles in eight seconds to reflect off the leaf or lake onto the retina of her eye — (processed by the focusing network of the brain) left her in awe of the mystery of it all. The deep knowing that she, too, was part of that web of existence became another resource for Molly.
Exercise 9: Connecting to Spiritual Resources
1. Take a moment to follow the poet William Blake’s advice
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wildflower;
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
It doesn’t matter what object you focus your attention on: it could be the prism of colors of a drop of car oil on your driveway, the bubbles in an ice cube, the perfect arc of toenail on your child’s foot.
2. Let your perceptions open to beauty and sense the mystery hidden in the ordinary. Let your consciousness become extraordinary for a moment. Notice any shifts in your sense of possibility as you do. An expanded sense of possibility fosters flexibility and increases your brain’s capacity for resilience.
All of these resources — material, relational, and spiritual — provide the tools and support we need to cope with the unexpected, the unwanted, the apparently insurmountable. They keep us afloat in a sea of troubles. They allow us to continue to exercise choice in responding to life’s travails, deciding how we want to manage how we respond and making it more likely that we will succeed.
To be resilient, we need both the safety of refuge and the courage provided by our resources. You may notice that the same person, place, or practice can function as both refuge and resource. That’s not a problem. When we take refuge in a good night’s sleep, we also create a resource for the next day. Virginia Woolf wrote of the need for a room of one’s own — a refuge — and five hundred pounds a year — a resource — to support creative and resilient endeavors. If refuge and resource overlap, creating an integrated platform for resilience, that is just fine, even efficient.
Pulling It All Together
The five practices you have learned in this chapter — cultivation of presence, intention, perseverance, refuges, and resources — are all helpful in any process of personal growth and self-transformation.
• Presence — showing up and engaging with experience — is a gateway to neural receptivity that helps the brain more easily learn and rewire.
• Intention inclines the mind toward resilient behaviors and strengthens the neural circuitry that supports them.
• Perseverance creates new neural structure through repetition, making it easier for desired brain change to last.
• Refuges create the safety and trust that support brain change and growth.
• Resources generate the strength, energy, steadiness, and balance we need for adaptive coping.
These practices are essential for rewiring your brain for resilience. Along with mindful empathy, which helps you see clearly, the practice of presence brings you into a state of calm. When you connect to refuges and resources, you create more options for coping. When you set intentions to cultivate practical skills of resilience, and when you persevere in those intentions, you become more competent. All of these practices, and the reward of more resilient coping that comes from them, boost your courage to keep going. These practices are the foundation of the program of brain change presented in the next chapter: they help make the changes safe, efficient, and effective. You can look forward to immediate benefits from rewiring your brain for resilience.