Developing Somatic Intelligence
You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
— JON KABAT-ZINN
A MASTER MONK is meditating in a temple with other monks. Suddenly a fierce bandit storms into the temple, threatening to kill everybody. The other monks flee, but the master monk remains, calmly meditating. Enraged, the bandit shouts, “Don’t you understand? I could run you through with my sword and not bat an eye!” The monk calmly replies, “Don’t you understand? I could be run through by your sword and not bat an eye.”
This teaching story from the Buddhist tradition has always struck me as the epitome of how priming the brain prepares a practitioner to maintain calm in a crisis. This is one form of the somatic intelligence — wisdom of the body — we are building in order to recover our resilience. However metaphorical and however great a stretch of the practice of equanimity it represents, the story illustrates how priming can regulate our reactivity, even in the most extreme situations. The monk’s brain was primed by years of mindfulness and compassion practice to remain calm in the face of life threat; modern neuroscience might say that his prefrontal cortex could regulate any reactive response from his amygdala. While we might not strive for that level of equanimity, and hopefully we will never face such a dire situation, we can learn to use our own mindful empathy and compassionate reflection to strengthen our equanimity by learning to prime our brains, too.
Skill 1: Priming the Brain to Remain Calm in a Crisis
Priming simply means preparing the brain to feel a certain emotion or a physiological state that could be adaptive in an anticipated situation: to feel proud or confident before walking into a meeting with the boss, to boost your assertiveness when defending yourself in court, to remain grounded and open-minded when hearing your doctor discuss results of the latest lab tests.
There are many strategies for managing emotions and physiological states after they arise. Priming is different: it’s preemptive, creating an emotional or physiological state that prevents fear or anger or shame from arising. Here we set the intention to remain calm and then use priming as a tool to do so. We can effectively prime the brain to meet stressful situations by achieving a state of calm and equilibrium beforehand. We can use the oxytocin response in particular to prime the brain to be less reactive to future stress because the release of oxytocin, activated whenever we remember someone we care for or who makes us feel cared for, acts as a buffer against stress even before it occurs.
An excellent example of this kind of priming was reported in a study by James Coan at the Laboratory for Cognitive and Affective Science at the University of Wisconsin. In the study, three groups of women subjects knew they were going to be administered a slight but unpleasant electric shock on their ankles. Their brain functions were monitored using an fMRI scanner. The control group of women subjects, who were left alone in the scanner, registered anxiety before and pain during the test. Women holding the hand of a stranger (the lab technician) registered less anxiety and less pain. But the group of women holding the hands of their husbands registered the least anxiety and pain, and in some cases, no anxiety or pain at all. The pleasurable security of holding the hand of someone who loved them released oxytocin, reduced their stress, and overrode both anxiety and pain. These women instead reported experiencing peacefulness throughout the procedure. Holding hands with someone they felt safe with primed or conditioned their brains to remain in the calm and relaxed, yet engaged and alert, state of the window of tolerance. It turned off the threat switch in the brain and overrode anxiety and pain, even in a situation that was stressful to others.
Phil Shaver discovered similar benefits to priming before stress in a study at the University of California, Davis. Subjects were shown photographs of disturbing material. Those who were instructed to think of a situation in which they felt safe and loved before seeing the photographs showed far less stress reaction than subjects in the control group who were not primed in this way. Consistently, the oxytocin released in remembering someone the subjects loved or felt safe with acted as a buffer against a stressful trigger a few minutes later.
My client Claudia shared with me a dramatic example of the power of priming. Late one night she had to drive home through a pelting rainstorm. She had touched base by phone with her partner before setting out, so oxytocin was already flowing in her brain and body. As she was driving in the fast lane of the freeway, the left front tire of her car suddenly caught the shoulder of the road. The car skidded onto the shoulder. Claudia overcorrected, and the car swerved across four lanes of freeway traffic to stop in the mud off the shoulder on the other side.
It was all over in fifteen seconds. No one was hit, no one was hurt, and no damage was done. Claudia simply got back on the freeway and drove home. She felt grateful for the miracle of her life and grateful to be going home to a loved one. But she felt no trauma or stress, not even for a minute. Her brain was primed and her nervous system was buffered by the oxytocin. Sue Carter of the Chicago Psychiatric Institute, one of this country’s primary researchers on oxytocin, reports, “People under the influence of oxytocin don’t have the same stress response that others do; bad news rolls off them more easily.”
One way to prime your brain to face a challenging situation that you know is coming — such as a medical or legal procedure or confronting a difficult person or group — is to cultivate a virtual circle of support to call on in your imagination. Priming the brain in this way makes it easier for you to stay in your window of tolerance when an accident or catastrophe takes you by surprise.
Exercise 1a: Prime the Brain by Beginning the Day in Loving Connection
Beginning the day with a sense of loving care and connection is a fantastic way to build our brain’s buffers against stress. It’s as important for our emotional health as a nutritious breakfast is for our physical health. It’s great if you can wake up in the morning cuddling a sweetie, or immediately hug your children or a pet, or wrap your arms around yourself with a squeeze of self-acceptance and encouragement. The touch provides a sense of comfort and connection before you meet the challenges of the day; you’re primed to live the day from your window of tolerance.
Exercise 1b: Prime the Brain by Beginning the Day in Ease and Well-Being
If that sweet send-off is not available in the morning, it can still be an excellent practice to not get out of bed until you can evoke within yourself a sense of loving connection from the past, or even a fantasy about the future, that evokes a sense of ease, safety, and well-being. As with Sean, whose story appears in chapter 5, that may take a few breaths, or a few minutes; sometimes it can take thirty minutes or more. But it’s worth priming the brain to meet the challenges of the day from a place of calm, relaxed engagement. Set the intention to start the day in your window of tolerance, no matter what happens later.
As we practice staying in our window of tolerance to meet the challenges we anticipate throughout the day, we are priming our brain to stay calm when called upon to face challenges we don’t anticipate, as well.
Exercise 1c: Prime the Brain by Returning to Your Window of Tolerance
1. A simple introductory practice is to check in with yourself periodically to discern whether, in fact, you are in your window of tolerance. If you are, your body feels calm, relaxed, yet engaged and alert — not agitated, not shut down. You feel present, settled, and balanced. When you’re not in your window of tolerance, you notice the unease; you feel “off.” With practice, you can learn to recognize the difference instantly.
2. When you notice you’re not in a state of equanimity, stop doing what you’re doing as soon as you can — there’s not much point and some risk if you’re moving forward without being grounded in your base of resilience.
3. Breathe and place your hand on your heart to calm your body. Draw on your practices of mindfulness and self-acceptance. Hold whatever is happening in the moment with as much awareness and compassionate understanding and empathy as you can muster. Call on your relational resources. Evoke the memories of feeling safe and loved until you saturate yourself with oxytocin. You’ll probably return to your window of tolerance quite suddenly, because once the oxytocin reaches an effective level, its effect is immediate.
Doing this usually isn’t hard; it’s remembering to do it that’s hard. Perseverance teaches us that these practices do work, and when we know that they work, we’re more likely to remember to do them the next time we need them.
When I first began checking in with myself in this way, I had to stop every five minutes and intentionally return myself to a state of equanimity. But each time I did the practice, the interval of feeling calm lasted longer. As you become more successful at returning to your window of tolerance, take in the good feeling of the inner calm and peace before rushing off to do the next thing. Give your brain the thirty seconds it needs to rewire this experience of calm into its circuitry so that staying within your window of tolerance becomes a new habit, a source of new resilience.
Skill 2: Developing Current Confidence from Previous Competence
I once hiked with my friend Donn up a steep trail on Mt. Tamalpais, near my home, following many switchbacks for more than half an hour to reach a grand viewpoint. Belatedly I realized that if we were to take the same switchbacks down the mountain, I would get back to the parking lot too late to pick up my goddaughter at her gymnastics practice. Donn asked if I could bushwhack straight down the mountain. After years of backpacking in the high Sierra, my automatic response was “Sure I can!” Down the steep hillside I went, surefooted; Donn quickly followed. We arrived at the parking lot in less than fifteen minutes.
Saying “Sure I can!” is an important somatic resource of resilience. Researchers have found that the greatest predictor of success — in anything — is a previous track record of success — in anything. In other words, we don’t have to have faced the same challenge before to feel confident that we can deal with what we’re facing now. We have resilience when we know that we have dealt successfully with anything before. The feeling of confidence about bushwhacking down a mountain becomes an inner resource encoded in the neural circuitry of our brain that we can call on whenever we need to bushwhack through any difficult terrain: getting an aging parent to write a will or tracking the thousands of details involved in moving overseas.
Confidence is a somatic memory of competence. Interestingly, research shows that even if we have an inflated sense of that earlier competence, it still serves as a resource of confidence now. We get through an “uh oh!” by remembering “uh oh!s” we’ve gotten through before and by evoking the visceral feeling of “Sure I can!” that came from that success. We may experience that feeling of “I can!” as a feeling of groundedness, a trust, a security. Standing tall, sensing our weight through our spine and hips and anchoring our feet on the earth can ground in the body this resource of trust and reassurance in our competence and mastery.
Research also shows that for purposes of somatic resourcing, it’s not so much the size of a previous success that matters as the genuine sense of competence or mastery that comes from it. Succeeding at something we accomplished all on our own (painting the living room, repairing a broken lawnmower, helping an athlete feel better about herself after her mistake cost the team the game) creates a sense of ownership of the success. Once encoded in the neural circuitry, that feeling can be even more effective at creating confidence (and thus resilience) than playing a small part in a larger organizational effort with no sense of ownership of the final outcome. If we’re hammering nails in a Habitat for Humanity building project, it’s the “Sure I can!” from the three walls and a door frame that we built ourselves — the sense of competence in our own work rather than the sense of accomplishment at the completion of the entire house — that becomes the somatic resource of confidence that we can draw on later when we need to rebuild a business or a marriage.
Exercise 2: Wiring In Current Confidence from Previous Competence
1. Identify areas of your life where you would like to have more of the feeling of “Sure I can!” They might include returning to school after thirty years in the workforce, buying into a franchise, or facing an empty nest when your youngest child has moved away.
2. Identify three moments in your life when you actually had that sense of “I can!” in your body — a visceral sense of confidence arising from a moment of competence. Reflect not so much on what you did, because that will change with circumstances, but on how you felt when you realized that you had done it. Remember, we’re talking moments here, not major events: opening a stuck jar lid for your mom, intuiting which way to turn to find the train station in a strange city, knowing just what to say when your child experienced a disappointment. Modest but genuine successes can mean just as much for rewiring the brain as those that are more dramatic.
3. Focus on the sense of mastery those successes brought you. How does that remembered sense of mastery feel in your body now? Take in the feeling of “I did; I can” as a body-based resource.
4. Try to bring that visceral sense of “I did; I can” into the present and apply it in the areas where you would like to feel this confidence more often. Even the slightest success at doing this reconditions your brain toward resilience.
The Neuroscience of Wiring In Confidence
Our brains begin encoding experiences of mastery into schemas or templates of “I can!” almost from the moment we’re born. A baby can typically grasp a toy at two months of age, reach for people at four months, hold its own bottle at six months, and give a hug and walk with support at twelve months. Each of these successes conditions the pattern of “I can!” into the developing brain, providing a neurological underpinning for the inner sense of trust and security that builds the base of resilience.
As we intentionally create an archive of explicit memories of successful coping, we are strengthening that base and thus our capacity for resilient coping now. Any time the prefrontal cortex accesses a memory that carries with it the somatic sense of “Sure I can!” it can send an inhibitory transmitter — GABA — to the amygdala. This inhibits the firing of the amygdala, signaling, in effect, that the prefrontal cortex is taking care of business and that the amygdala does not need to activate a survival response.
Remembering a moment of previous coping when we’re facing a daunting task or situation can help us return to our window of tolerance, where we can cope more resiliently.
Skill 3: Reframing Incompetence as Competence
One of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoons is an inspiring moment when Calvin trips and falls down the stairs and lands in a heap at the bottom, dazed and confused. Then he stands up, throws his arms up in the air as though welcoming applause, and says, “Ta da!”
My meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein tells this story of one of her own “Ta da!” moments. She had arranged to meet a friend for an evening performance at Lincoln Center in Manhattan. She didn’t want to take the subway from her hotel, but she thought the traffic was too heavy for a cab to get her there on time. She started to walk the twelve blocks. Realizing she was going to be late, she began to run. Sylvia started to feel embarrassed when she pictured herself as an old lady running down the street. Then she realized: “I’m 70 years old, and I can run down the street! In high heels! Great joy!”
You bounce back from adversity any time you discover or claim your competence within seeming incompetence, any time you reframe a potentially embarrassing moment as a moment of triumph. Your own reframing or perspective draws on a healthy sense of pride. You claim a sense of competence. “Sure I can!” “I am someone who can.”
Exercise 3: Reframing Incompetence as Competence
1. Evoke a sense of confidence in your body, perhaps by remembering a “Sure I can!” moment. Take a moment to feel the strength in your body from this memory.
2. Then call to mind a moment of incompetence that might have caused some discomfort, embarrassment, or inconvenience: leaving the tickets for the concert on your desk at home or mixing up the birthday gifts you gave your two best friends. Notice any deflation of your body energy or collapse in your body posture as you remember this moment.
3. Pairing the memory of incompetence and the accompanying sensations of deflation or collapse with the memory of competence and the sensations of energy and strength may be enough to recondition and rewire the feeling of incompetence and bring you back into your window of tolerance. If so, great. If not, evoke a sense of “Ta da!” to help reframe that moment of incompetence as simply held in the context of your many competencies overall, not enough to undermine your resilience. You can acknowledge this moment as part of being human and still stay in your window of tolerance.
The Neuroscience of Reframing Incompetence as Competence
A sense of incompetence, real or imagined, can trigger our autonomic nervous system into the survival responses of submit-collapse. (For a discussion of the role shame plays in this collapse, see chapter 14.) In response to a sense of threat to our psychological survival, the parasympathetic branch of the ANS is overactivated, and this response deactivates the normal functioning of the sympathetic branch. The body begins to immobilize, shutting down for self-protection. The energy of the psyche begins to deflate. Pushed out of our window of tolerance, we lose momentum and our capacity to act.
When we reframe our behavior and our view of ourselves as competent, or even use a gesture of “Ta da!” to recover a sense of healthy pride despite a slipup, we reactivate our nervous system, recover our energy, and move back into our window of tolerance.
Skill 4: Training Our Brains to Risk Something New
Yes, risk-taking is inherently failure-prone. Otherwise, it would be called sure thing–taking.
— TIM MCMAHON
Whenever we’re about to venture into something new — moving across the country, getting married again, taking on a new job, finally fixing the leaky showerhead — we can feel a hesitancy, a pullback within — a somatic feeling of “Uh oh! Strange territory! Don’t know if I should be doing this!” — even though, consciously, we might very well want to forge ahead. Our resilience goes on hold.
Using the skills already presented in this chapter, we can get ourselves over the fear of failure or of making a mistake. We can use the beneficial effects of oxytocin from the support of other people to help us cross the somatic threshold between the comfort of the familiar and the discomfort of the new and uncertain. But there is also another powerful neurotransmitter whose effects we can harness to cross that threshold in the brain: dopamine.
Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of pleasure and reward. With the release of dopamine in the brain stem we feel good, we feel alive and energized, and we want more. Dopamine is actually partly responsible for the way we get into ruts, doing what makes us feel comfortable, getting better at what we’ve always been good at. The neurochemical reward we get from repeating successful patterns of behavior can hold us back from trying new strategies, from discovering new ways of being and coping.
The release of dopamine can lead to addictive behaviors, too: wanting more of what made us feel good before, even if it’s not good for us. Maybe shopping makes us feel happier, so we run up charges on our credit card until our debt is out of control, or we try to relieve our stress with too much social drinking. Mindfulness is the key here — awareness that always involves discernment of the wholesome from the unwholesome and the effect of our choices on our resilience.
Dopamine operates on the basis of expectation. When the brain experiences what it expects to experience — when we turn on the kitchen faucet and water comes out — dopamine levels stay steady. If something unexpected happens — we turn on the faucet and no water comes out — the expectation is disrupted. The disruption switches off the dopamine and generates a slight unease in the body. A mistake has been detected. The brain directs us to stop moving forward until we know things are okay.
The insula, the structure of interoception that reads what’s going on in the body, communicates this unease to the anterior cingulate cortex, the structure that focuses our attention and tracks errors internally as well as externally. Spindle cells in the anterior cingulate cortex — the fastest-transmitting neurons in our brain — pick up the unease of this disruption of dopamine release and instantly saturate the rest of the cortex with that feeling of unease. (Some neuroscientists refer to this function of dopamine as the “Oh shit!” circuit.)
Read Montague, professor of neuroscience at Baylor University, tells us, “You’re probably 99.9 percent unaware of dopamine release, but you’re probably 99.9 percent driven by the information and emotions it conveys to other parts of the brain.”
We can interpret this feeling of unease as anxiety, which can automatically lead to refusing or deferring new challenges. It feels like a risk to try something new. We might talk ourselves out of trying a new entrée at a new restaurant in a new city, visiting a foreign country, or venturing into the foreignness of a new career or a new relationship. If we want to move forward, we need to come back into our window of tolerance. We need to know how to work skillfully with our dopamine system so that we are not stopped in our tracks by warning signals from our lower brain.
Bill Bowen, the developer of psychophysical psychotherapy, has studied resilience and the creative process for thirty years. He suggests that when confronted with anything new, our responses range from the survival reactions of fight-flight-freeze, which halt any positive activation, all the way to adaptive activation and the free-flowing expression of creativity. Somewhere on that continuum there is a somatic threshold that we feel viscerally, where our body and brain chemistry stops us from going forward even though consciously — mentally, emotionally, and spiritually — we are ready to dive in. It can take the form of writer’s block; cold feet on the morning of the wedding; or the last-minute justification of “I don’t know anybody at the party, and I’m too tired anyway.” This somatic marker is the disruption of the dopamine circuit, which is telling us, “Uh-oh, this is not what was expected.” That’s true: it’s not. It’s new. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we should stop abruptly.
“Do one thing every day that scares you” was Eleanor Roosevelt’s sage advice. Wise practice from a stellar role model of resilience, who coped with the hardships of the Great Depression, the tragedies of World War II, and the infidelity of a husband who happened to be president of the United States.
When we deliberately face our fear of doing something new or risky, or confront deep doubts about ourselves as human beings, we come to the somatic threshold that might block us from moving forward. As the meditation teacher Jack Kornfield says, we can read that anxiety not as a warning to retreat to the familiar and comfortable but as a signal that means “About to grow!”
By facing the fear and intentionally crossing the threshold into action, we are deliberately choosing to evoke new experiences that recondition the anxiety in our nervous system. By pairing an old pattern of fear or block with a new, more positive pattern of courage and action, we contradict the old and rewire it. This is reconditioning at its finest.
Exercise 4: Do One Scary Thing a Day to Train Your Brain to Risk Something New
1. Identify one scary thing to do today to practice crossing that somatic threshold of anxiety and experience something new. For example, apologize to your teenager for not keeping a promise; create a realistic budget of income and expenses and then talk with your spouse about it; go up into the attic with a flashlight to see what’s scurrying around up there at night; make a doctor’s appointment to find out what’s really going on with that persistent cough; ask your boss to make good on a promise of time off for the extra time you put in last month.
2. Practice facing the fear today, and then practice doing one new, different scary thing a day every day for the next thirty days. Crossing the threshold into action at least once a day rewires into the brain a new default feeling of “Sure I can!” or “Wow! I did it!”
3. As you repeat this practice of doing one scary thing a day for several weeks, notice any shifts in the messages your body is sending you as you prepare for the scary thing and after you’ve done it. Notice any emergence of the sensation of “Sure I can!” Facing fear is ultimately easier than constantly navigating around situations that provoke it. We reset the default to honesty, courage, and resilience.
Skill 5: Wiring for Resilience by Making Mistakes
Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.
— CARL G. JUNG
Resilience is based on learning new, more adaptive ways of coping. Researchers have found that one of the best tools for recovering resilience now is to learn from mistakes in the past. The wisdom of Mullah Nasruddin’s saying “Good judgment is based on experience; experience is based on bad judgment” can be a comfort when we’re faced with AFGO (another fricking growth opportunity) or fear of one.
Our brain rewires from the experience of making a mistake. When our choices turn out to be problematic for ourselves or others, we can learn from them by asking, “What did I not see? What could I have done differently? What can I do differently now?” As the neuroscience writer Jonah Lehrer says, “We turn a regrettable moment into a teachable moment.” We can learn to find the gift in the mistake in the form of a belief that “I am learning; I am coping.”
It helps to debrief after a mistake by talking it over with other people. Different perspectives help us discover the gift in the mistake and reduce our agony or self-condemnation over it. When we’re having to deal with consequences that we would never wish on ourselves or anyone else, we can find some equanimity in knowing we are strengthening our capacities to cope. We may not wish to have to become so bravely, tenaciously adaptive in our lives, but we can rejoice that we are.
Exercise 5: Wiring for Resilience by Finding the Gift in the Mistake
Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.
— JOHN WOODEN
1. Ask a small (safe!) group of friends to come together to “look for the gift in the mistake.”
2. Each person shares common mistakes first, the sort of mistakes that anyone might make: getting distracted and running a red light; accidentally deleting all the emails confirming travel reservations; forgetting to enroll in a health insurance plan by the deadline and now having to appeal. Find some comfort (not judgment) in the universal imperfections of being human.
3. Expand your sharing to include mistakes that had bigger external consequences — putting off going to the doctor until “just a cough” landed you in the hospital with pneumonia for a week — or internal consequences — the guilt you feel because that hospitalization caused you to miss your daughter’s graduation from college.
4. Let the compassionate reflection of others in the group, as well as your own, allow each person to “own” their mistake, discern what lesson could be learned from it, and find the gift in it, according to the following narrative:
this is what happened;
this is what I did to survive;
this has been the cost;
this is what I have learned;
this is how I can respond to life now.
Even if the gift is simply a deeper intention to pay closer attention as we careen through our days, or to be kinder to ourselves in our imperfect humanity, we have found the gift.
The Neuroscience of Finding the Gift in the Mistake
One of the major functions of the prefrontal cortex is to integrate the many messages and stories we tell about ourselves and our behaviors — who we are, how we got to be here, what we’re proud of, what we regret — into one coherent narrative. We have to come to terms with the whole shebang in order to rest easy in our window of tolerance. Reframing our mistakes as learning not only helps us learn — preparing us to cope more skillfully and resiliently the next time — but also helps us relax into the self-acceptance that contributes to our equanimity, enabling us to keep calm and carry on.
Pulling It All Together
Through the exercises in Part 4, you have learned many practical tools of somatic resourcing to regulate your survival responses and return to the window of tolerance — the physiological state of calm and ease — and to strengthen your prefrontal cortex to use somatic resources to rewire old patterns that can derail resilience. These tools include:
• ways to prime the brain to remain calm in a crisis through activating the “calm and connect” properties of oxytocin;
• ways to use previous competence (at anything) to wire in the sense of “Sure I can!” to face new challenges, to reframe a potentially embarrassing moment as a moment of triumph, to reframe potential incompetence as actual competence, and to transform a feeling of deflation or collapse from shame into a healthy pride that keeps you mobilized and able to deal;
• ways to train your brain to risk something new by doing one scary thing a day; you practice repeatedly crossing the somatic threshold that could block your taking resilient action;
• ways to find the gift in the mistake, learning the lessons of experience in order to make better judgments and choices.
As prime minister of England during World War II, Winston Churchill epitomized for many the capacities to keep calm and carry on. He taught us: “Success is not final; failure is not fatal. Success is moving from one failure to another without loss of enthusiasm. It is the courage to continue that counts.”
Through these exercises, you are creating a bona fide somatic intelligence that allows you to carry on with confidence and trust in your competence.