Using Reflection to Identify Options
Between a stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.
— VIKTOR FRANKL,
Austrian psychiatrist, survivor of Auschwitz
WHEN A BUDDY at a summer barbecue accidentally spilled a beer all over Darron’s new blue jeans, Darron didn’t react with annoyance as he might have done some months before. Instead, he deftly responded, “No worries! These jeans need a good washing anyway.” For most of us, it takes practice and rewiring of the brain to be this flexible in our responses, especially when faced with bigger troubles: To be able to say at the loss of a job, “Maybe I need to look at the direction my life is heading anyway.” Or, if the bank is threatening to foreclose on the house, “It’s time to think through our finances again.” Or, on being told about soaring blood pressure, “It’s time I learned more about taking care of my health.” Rather than remaining mired in thoughts that see such life events as disruptive — which they certainly are — or traumatic — which they certainly can be — we can choose to take them as cues to learn new responses: to find ways to respond to a trigger or a stressor with new behaviors rather than out of automatic, reactive habits, to shift perspectives, create options, and choose among them wisely.
Researchers have found that people who exhibit high degrees of response flexibility also exhibit high degrees of resilience. Flexibility in the neural circuitry of the prefrontal cortex allows them to vary their responses to life events depending on their judgment of what will work best now, not simply on what has worked before. Response flexibility is the essential neural platform from which we can choose to cope differently, more adaptively, and more resiliently. It is the neurobiological basis of resilience.
If you have practiced the skills presented in previous chapters, you have steadily created more neural flexibility in your brain. The exercises in chapters 16–18 teach you skills in reflection: noticing and naming patterns, shifting perspectives, modifying patterns and creating options. They create pathways within the brain that will allow you to greatly enhance your response flexibility.
This chapter focuses on reflection and options. You have to be able to see clearly what’s what before you can make wise choices and changes in your behaviors. Exercises in mindful empathy strengthen the prefrontal cortex in its capacities to generate steady awareness, clear reflection, and deep self-awareness, even in the face of all the issues you don’t want to look at, the things you don’t want to see as true.
Empathic self-awareness allows you to clearly identify your patterns of response as patterns of response and to take your reactivity to any moment of experience as a cue to practice rewiring your brain. Chapter 17 explains how to use the processes of new conditioning, deconditioning, and reconditioning to monitor and modify those patterns of response. The rewiring creates more flexibility in your neural circuitry so that you can shift perspectives and challenge your encoded beliefs about the absolute truth of the way things are.
From this fresh vantage point, you can discern options and choices that were invisible before. In chapter 18 you learn to disengage yourself from any conditioned neural circuitry that would automatically send you down the same old pathways and block your resilience. You cultivate the capacity of discernment — considering wisely which choices will work best in the current circumstances. The response flexibility thus created in the brain allows wiser, more creative choices and behaviors.
Using Reflection for Day-to-Day Resilience
It’s all well and good to become mindfully aware of moment-to-moment experience when sitting quietly on a meditation cushion at home or at a peaceful meditation retreat, or when we have a few moments at our desk or on the front porch to reflect on our current state of affairs. It’s not so easy to maintain that calm awareness when we’re in the throes of meeting the unexpected: when our job is suddenly outsourced or our twenty-year-old son is asking us to post bail for his arrest for petty theft.
We practice mindfulness specifically to strengthen the capacities of the prefrontal cortex to reflect and see clearly no matter what is going on. One way to begin is through the practice of noticing and naming, which keeps the prefrontal cortex engaged and allows us to stay calm as emotions flare up. This practice of noticing and naming lays the groundwork for shifting perspectives and discerning options when the going really gets tough.
Skill 1: Noticing and Naming Creates Options
Years and years ago, I was on a two-week vacation with my friend Sara in the Canadian Rockies; we were hiking, biking, and driving the Icefields Parkway through Banff and Jasper National Parks. One sunny morning, I had neglected to fasten my bike securely on the bike rack of the car; ten miles down the road, it flew off onto the highway. Hitting the road at 60 mph, the front wheel was badly skewed, making the bike unrideable. I flipped out.
My friend was calm and patient. No one was hurt; the wheel could probably be fixed; it was a beautiful day in a beautiful part of the world. Sara’s steadiness helped me notice, name, and thus manage my own anxiety about the wheel not being fixable and spoiling our trip. I put my hand on my heart; we breathed together deeply, and her steadiness helped bring me back into equanimity. That recovered equanimity helped alleviate my guilt about my carelessness spoiling our day. It also helped me surrender and accept the situation as it was.
The guy at the bike shop wasn’t as empathic. “This is just a bump on a pickle,” he told me. But he did guarantee he could fix the wheel in four hours. As Sara and I settled ourselves at a nearby lake for a leisurely picnic, I began to reflect on the event more deeply.
Maybe the bike-shop guy was right. In the bigger picture, was this really such a big deal? Would I be upset about this five years from now? Next week? By dinner? Stepping back and reflecting helped me put the whole event into perspective. What was, was just fine.
Coming to an inner peace and acceptance of what was happening allowed me to reengage with Sara. The chance to relax and talk for four hours, rather than racing each other up and down hills on our bikes, was a luxury. By the time we picked up my repaired wheel, we realized it was one of the best times of our trip.
The Neuroscience of Why Noticing and Naming Creates Options
Sara’s calm helped me come back into my own window of tolerance. Through my insula I could notice the physiological sensations of the anxiety in my body; through the connection to safety and trust in my friendship with Sara, I could activate the release of oxytocin in my brain and calm myself down. By evoking the mutual compassion in our shared resonance circuits, I could look at the episode with more kindness toward myself.
By calmly focusing my attention on my anxiety in the moment, I activated my anterior cingulate cortex, enabling it to focus on other reactions that were beginning to cascade in response to my initial reactions: the fear that the wheel might not be fixable, my guilt at spoiling our trip. My insula and anterior cingulate cortex were feeding information into my prefrontal cortex. By naming the experience, I was activating the prefrontal cortex to reflect on the meaning of the experience of this bump on a pickle, strengthening my brain’s capacity to make sense of it.
My prefrontal cortex could draw on memories explicitly encoded by my hippocampus of previous moments of coping: knowledge of what I had done or what others would do in situations similar to this. Through the shared reflection and brainstorming with Sara, I could begin to discern options and choose how we would cope with the snafu. I was strengthening my response flexibility.
Exercise 1: Noticing and Naming to Create Options
1. Imagine you’re walking down the sidewalk of a busy street in your neighborhood. You notice a friend walking toward you on the other side. You wave and call out “Hello!” but the friend does not respond. Notice your own split-second reaction to that lack of response: a contraction in your body, a drop in energy. Notice whatever thoughts might begin to cascade in response to your body’s reaction. Maybe you think, “Hmm, that’s unusual. I’d better try again.” Or, “Whew! He has a lot on his mind. I wonder if I should even bother him?” Notice any reactivity to those thoughts. “Gee, he seems a little stuck-up today.” Or “Oh, no! What have I done wrong?” Notice whether your thoughts follow a pattern that you have noticed before, such as feeling bad about yourself or wanting to reach out even more.
2. Now imagine that your friend sees you and, on his own, waves and calls out “Hello!” to you. Again, notice your own split-second reaction to his connecting with you: maybe a smile, an uplift of energy. Bring awareness to any shifts in your body, notice any shifts in your thoughts: “He noticed me!” Or “I’m glad we weren’t disconnected after all.” As you reflect on your experience, notice whether your thoughts follow a pattern that you have also noticed before, perhaps of relief or gratitude.
3. Take a moment to name the reactions and the patterns you discovered, with compassion for any reactions that may have been triggered by the noticing. With every moment of practice in noticing and naming, you are strengthening your prefrontal cortex. And by pausing to do this, you are conditioning your brain to create choice points, giving yourself the chance to respond with more flexibility and choose a different response the next time.
Deepening Our Skills in Reflection
When our awareness is steady enough, we can focus our attention on our reactivity as soon as it happens. We can begin to use mindful empathy immediately to notice patterns. This sets the stage for rewiring them, which in turn creates more response flexibility in our neural circuitry. Our brain has already encoded millions of moments of experience into thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and rules about who we are and how the world works. Those encoded beliefs and rules filter our perceptions now, moment to moment. Some of them are accurate and helpful, especially if our early learning from experience was guided toward clear seeing, taking responsibility, and making wise and skillful choices; if we had role models for facing reality without flinching; if we learned from others early on how to acknowledge and face up to our responsibilities and problems; if we saw for ourselves the value of doing one scary thing a day and developing competencies, even through mistakes.
Some of our thoughts, ideas, and beliefs, of course, are not so helpful. Some perceptions can be quite distorted, especially if our early learning from experience was shaped by rules, assumptions, and projections that are not, in fact, representations of who we truly are or reliable guides to how the world actually works. For example, thoughts such as the following are simply not true in any objective sense: “I never finished high school, so no one will ever hire me.” Or “My dad was right; I’ll never amount to anything.” Or “What’s the point of trying? The rich only get richer, and the poor only get poorer.”
These self-limiting thoughts can completely derail our sense of competence and resilience, leaving us caught in suffering. Negative thoughts can be so self-reinforcing that they can block any new learning, any new choices or options. Identifying our patterns of conditioning leads to the clarity and insight we need to begin to change them.
Skill 2: Naming Patterns as Patterns
Mindful empathy allows us to be present to the experience that is happening in the moment, aware of it but able to step outside it. With practice, we can notice any thought as a thought, any pattern of thoughts as a pattern. We can notice any feeling as a feeling, any cascade of feelings as a cascade. The same is true for any state of mind, even multilayered, richly complex (tortuous) states of mind; for any process of the brain — planning, organizing, evaluating, worrying — and for any story that we’ve told ourselves since we were five, or twelve, or since we got married or divorced. We can know that any view, no matter how forcefully compelling or stubbornly held in this moment, is not — does not have to be — true in all moments. We can be aware of changes and inconsistencies in ourselves: sometimes I think this way, sometimes I don’t. I’m thinking or feeling this way now, but I wasn’t ten minutes ago or yesterday. We can appreciate the power of the human brain to generate the complex, comprehensive stories that it does and still realize that what we’re seeing is not the ultimate truth but tracings, or the entrenchment, of patterns of neural firing in the brain.
Mary, a student in one of my meditation groups, told me this story. The afternoon after her first meditation retreat, she found herself getting into a very spiritually incorrect snit because all the washers in the local Laundromat were full when she wanted to do her laundry on the way home. It took less than a minute to stir herself into a full snarl of “Why can’t people do their laundry some other time!” before she remembered to pause, perceive, and reflect. She realized that all the washers were being used because a local Girl Scout troop had just come out of camp, and two of the mothers were valiantly trying to cope with two weeks’ worth of laundry for twenty-seven ten-year-olds.
Mary might have gone on home in a less cantankerous but still slightly disappointed funk, but one of the mothers graciously found her an empty washer in the back. Getting to do her laundry after all gave Mary a chance to notice her emerging chagrin at her self-absorption and the time to get curious and explore what had just happened — over nothing! On retreat she had learned a specific form of mindful empathy called the ABCs of mindfulness: to be aware, to be with, with compassion.
As Mary put her clothes in the washer, she applied these ABCs to her snit. She reflected on the response that started the chain reaction. It wasn’t even a complete thought, just an internal exclamation of “Oh no! I can’t do what I want!” She became aware of her immediate response: a flare of resentment at someone else’s laundry getting in her way. So she was able to step back and ask herself, “Since when do I have the right to get angry just because someone else has needs, too, and I might have to wait my turn? What’s this anger at feeling thwarted?”
By the time the washer started the first spin cycle, Mary was beginning to see a pattern of getting angry when she felt thwarted: road rage at stalled traffic when she was already late to work; a pissy moment when the store where she always bought fresh pasta had run out and she had to go all the way to another store to get some (as though, she thought, that’s a hardship when 10 percent of the world’s women have to walk three miles to get drinking water every day).
By the time her clothes had gone through the second rinse and spin cycle, Mary could simply be with her anger and notice that her pattern of experiencing an instant flare of anger at being thwarted was a frequent one. It was a deeply conditioned and often unconscious response by now. Nobody else even had to be involved except as a catalyst to her own reactivity.
As Mary moved her clothes from the washer to the dryer, she found the compassion to see that any pattern of response, including her pattern of responding to being thwarted with anger, is only a pattern that can be changed. By the time her clothes were dry and ready to fold, she could let go of exploring the pattern for the time being and return to the simple, calm awareness she had experienced while on retreat.
The Neuroscience of Naming Patterns as Patterns
When we become fully aware of any phenomenon — a feeling, a thought, a mental state, a pattern of behavior, a view, a belief — as Mary became aware of her pattern of response of anger at being thwarted, we light up the entire neural network of that phenomenon: the entire constellation of body sensations and impulses, the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the feelings, thoughts, and the beliefs about ourselves for having that experience. That awareness and lighting up of the network of the pattern allows you to rewire it if you choose. When we shift our full awareness of that integrated state to a full awareness of another integrated state, as Mary did when she shifted back to the calm she had experienced on retreat, we are shifting among entire neural networks of various states of being, not just our conscious thoughts about them. Noticing and naming the various states of being, as well as noticing and naming the shifts among them, keeps the prefrontal cortex of the brain engaged, so that we can step back and reflect on them as patterns or states that can be shifted. We no longer have to be embedded in them or wholly identified with them. When we’re not tangled in commentary, we can find a calm center, the eye of the hurricane. We use the process of deconditioning to begin to find the space among the states of being, the choice points where we can choose how we want to relate to these states of being and intentionally shift among them.
Exercise 2: Naming Patterns as Patterns
1. Take ten to fifteen minutes to identify five different states of being that inform your views or perspectives on things. Examples include being lonely, discouraged, down; being friendly, warmhearted, generous in spirit; being exuberant, energized, ready to tackle an army; being thoughtful, contemplative, in a reverie; being interested, curious, open-minded. As you identify these different states, make sure one of the five states of being is your wiser mind or your wiser self. This state of compassionate reflection can help you apply the ABCs of mindfulness to all the other states you are identifying.
When we first become compassionately aware of our habits and filters of mind, the parade of realizations can seem like one horror show after another. So many ways we’ve behaved can make us cringe now: the disappointment or hurt we’ve caused, or the failures we’ve experienced. It takes great courage and compassion to become aware of relational goof-up 173 or remorse-to-the-core episode 89. Refresh your experience of your wiser self as often as you need to in order to stay steady, able to notice and name.
2. Sometimes it’s helpful to think of people who fully embody these states of being in order to evoke them in our awareness more clearly: people we know, literary characters, historical figures, creatures in film or fantasy, ourselves at different ages and stages of development. They may be people who embody being cantankerous, grouchy, irritable; being playful, delighted, happy; being caring, compassionate, committed; being critical, judgmental, complaining; being focused, clearheaded, wise.
3. Brainstorm states of being with a friend. The relational resonance creates a mental play space between the two of you to generate more ideas. You can probably come up with at least twenty.
4. When you’ve identified at least five different states of being that could inform your views or perspectives, practice shifting among them. Just as you can walk around any piece of furniture in your home and see it from different angles, you can walk around any phenomenon or event in your life and see it, and your experience of it, from different angles, from different states of being that inform different perspectives. Focus on one of these for a few moments, then shift to another.
5. Notice that you can shift your awareness among these different views. Begin to notice different states as you shift among them throughout your day. Notice them, name them, reflect on whether they are true and useful to you, and then choose to shift to another state or view. You’re conditioning your brain to practice that shifting.
This exercise harnesses the capacity of the prefrontal cortex to see any phenomenon as a phenomenon, to help you identify any state of being that informs your perspectives and views as simply one state of being. With practice, you can identify the perspectives through which you tend to filter your experience most often and then choose to respond to life events from perspectives that are more flexible, more adaptive, and more resilient.
Skill 3: Recognizing Opportunities to Shift Old Patterns and Create Options
My client Shirley told me this story about preparing her taxes last spring. She began early in the morning, and within thirty minutes got caught in an old mind-set: “This is confusing; this is overwhelming; this isn’t workable. I don’t know what I’m doing; I never was good at numbers; I can’t do this!” Because Shirley had been practicing a form of compassionate reflection for more than a year, she noticed her state of mind. That noticing broke the automatic pattern of her reactivity. She noticed her annoyance at her state of mind. She quickly realized that being caught in this state wasn’t helpful. She also realized that she didn’t have to stay caught in the old mind-set now.
Shirley took a walk around the block to clear her mind, came back to her desk, and took another five minutes to create a different mind-set for herself. Could she use preparing her taxes as an opportunity to practice? Shirley brought her mindful empathy to bear on the issue, noticing every moment that she stayed in her wise mind — open-minded and curious about how her mind was responding to the task of preparing her taxes. She noticed and named moments when she was learning something new — a changed rule about depreciation, a better way to categorize her expenses. She also noticed and named moments when her mind began to contract in the face of something she didn’t know. She did call her neighbor Tom, a retired accountant, for advice three times that afternoon, but she managed to finish her taxes by dinnertime. She also noticed her sense of pride in mastering the task that had threatened to overwhelm her that morning, enjoying the deepening trust in herself and her practice; she noticed her gratitude that she noticed her initial patterns of response and took them as a cue to practice. The noticing and naming kept her prefrontal cortex functioning well and brought her out of confusion into clarity.
The Neuroscience of Recognizing Opportunities to Shift Old Patterns and Create Options
By framing every moment of experience as an opportunity to practice noticing and naming, we are breaking a previously conditioned automatic pattern of response that carries us along in old automatic patterns of behavior. Creating opportunities for awareness and discerning choice points is essential to being able to choose a different response. When we recognize an opportunity to practice mindful empathy, we have activated the capacities of the prefrontal cortex to reflect, to ask, “Is what I’m feeling, thinking, or doing right now skillful or unskillful, effective or ineffective, an efficient or a costly use of resources?” We are conditioning a new habit in the brain of mindful (and compassionate) reflection that enables us to create new options going forward.
Exercise 3: Recognizing Opportunities to Shift Old Patterns and Create Options
1. Identify five situations in which you might be triggered to respond from an automatic conditioned pattern: it’s after midnight, and your spouse hasn’t called or come home; you receive a notice from the IRS in the mail; you’re due for an annual physical checkup or visit to the dentist; you just ran a red light; your boss dismissed as irrelevant a project you had worked hard on and felt was significant.
2. The next three times events like these occur, even though you might be feeling strong emotions at the same time (notice and name those, too!), use the perspective of your wise mind or wiser self to practice pausing, noticing, and naming what’s happening. Practice noticing, reflecting, and discerning what you are feeling, thinking, and doing before you decide what to do next. Notice whether viewing this event through the lens of the wiser self shifts your perspective of the event or creates any choice points for responding differently.
3. Recall the views of the different states of being you identified in exercise 2. Experiment with applying these views to the event. Notice any shifts in your view of the event caused by shifting perspectives. Notice how viewing the event from these different states of being is different from viewing it from the perspective of your wiser self.
4. Experiment with applying the different views or perspectives generated by different states of being to one particularly troubling event in your life: a child custody hearing, accidentally hitting the neighbor’s dog as it dashed in front of your car, your luggage being lost at the beginning of a two-week vacation in a foreign country, half of your savings lost in a real estate deal gone sour.
5. As you apply several different states to one particular event, notice any shift in your perceptions, interpretations, feelings, or thoughts about yourself. Notice which states allow your patterns of response to be more open and flexible. Always practice inhabiting your wise mind, or wiser self, as one of the perspectives from which you’re viewing the situation.
6. Set the intention to develop a new habit of perceiving life events, especially stressors, as opportunities to practice waking up and growing up, to notice patterns of response and states of being so that you can begin to create choice points and respond differently, more resiliently.
As the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön advises:
The Buddhist teachings are fabulous at simply working with what’s happening as your path of awakening, rather than treating your life experiences as some kind of deviation from what is supposed to be happening. The more difficulties you have, in fact, the greater opportunity there is to let them transform you. The difficult things provoke all your irritations and bring your habitual patterns to the surface. And that becomes the moment of truth. You have the choice to launch into the lousy habitual patterns you already have, or to stay with the rawness and discomfort of the situation and let it transform you, on the spot.
Your strengthened prefrontal cortex can do that transforming on the spot.
Pulling It All Together
In this chapter you have learned mindfulness skills that allow you to:
• step back and reflect on experiences that are triggering old, reactive responses. When you notice and name those responses, you are strengthening your prefrontal cortex in its function of self-awareness, which is essential to creating new options.
• recognize moments when you can shift your state of mind or behavior and practice the reflection and seeing clearly that will allow you to do so.
• develop response flexibility in your brain — the neurobiological platform of resilience.
In the next chapter you will learn how to use the capacities of your prefrontal cortex to reflect on, shift, and transform any patterns you choose.