Resting in the Wisdom of Being
Wisdom tells me I am nothing.
Love tells me I am everything.
Between the two, my life flows.
— SRI NISARGADATTA
IN 1971, THE APOLLO 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell became the sixth human being to walk on the moon. On the return flight to Earth, this MIT-trained aeronautical engineer experienced a radical shift in consciousness. As Mitchell watched the Earth “rise” from behind the moon into the black emptiness of space, he suddenly saw the preciousness of this blue jewel of a planet we call home and the oneness of everything living on it. Mitchell’s epiphany about the interconnectedness of all life on Earth led to his founding the Institute of Noetic Sciences two years later to research how shifts in consciousness such as the one he experienced — the noesis, or deep inner knowing, that comes in the form of epiphanies, revelations, and sudden insights into the true nature of reality — could be cultivated.
Neuroscientists are now beginning to unlock the mystery of what happens in the brain in these moments of epiphany and what could explain the radical shifts in consciousness that they lead to. They are also beginning to see that extraordinary states of consciousness can lead to a greater neural integration, greater harmony, and greater synchrony in the physical brain. This deeper brain integration can create a platform of resilience that is almost unshakable. It gives the brain the flexibility and bandwidth to cope with anything at all.
Much remains to be learned. The neurological mapping of shifts in states of consciousness is very new. But techniques for shifting consciousness, drawn from the Buddhist contemplative tradition, have been validated through thousands of years of practitioners’ experience, and related practices are used in contemporary Western psychology. In this chapter you will learn to use tools that help create the conditions for epiphanies, allowing you to experience insights into your own true nature and to move toward the deeper brain integration that rewires the brain for maximum resilience.
First, you use the awareness you have cultivated through all the exercises in this book to notice how the five Cs of coping are being integrated into your behaviors of your personal self — resilient behaviors that you used the focusing network of your brain to condition or recondition. Then you use the defocusing network of the brain, used in the process of deconditioning, to temporarily suspend the prefrontal cortex’s guardianship of that personal self and open your awareness into a state of reverie that allows new ideas and new associations about the self to emerge. That state of reverie creates opportunities for “Aha!” moments, epiphanies or intuitive insights about yourself and your patterns of coping. Those insights can radically alter the ways you think about yourself.
You then open your awareness through the defocusing network and the process of deconditioning even further, to an experience of the unconditioned, as though you were dropping below all the layers of conditioning into what Dan Siegel calls a “plane of open possibilities.” The insights and epiphanies you experience in that plane, which many people experience as the nonself (see chapter 3), can radically rewire or recondition your established patterns of self, especially negative ones. Using the prefrontal cortex not just to switch between the focusing and defocusing networks, between the self and nonself, but also to fully integrate the experiences of self and nonself can rapidly integrate all the levels of functioning of the entire brain.
Brain scans of people who have experienced this process of neural integration confirm that radical changes take place in the specific patterns of neural firing that encode a particular response. The scans also show that neurons all over the brain fire at a higher frequency (processing signals more rapidly) and in greater synchrony (with greater coordination). The whole brain itself becomes more resilient.
Awareness of the Whole Self
We learned in chapter 3 to develop the awareness that all emotions and sensations of the body are transient, as are all contents, processes, states, and traits of mental activity. Awareness — the state of mind that observes all of that coming and going as coming and going — is itself not coming and going. Our awareness of that greater awareness may come and go; most of us lose awareness of awareness in our busy daily lives. But the awareness itself is ever present, always ready to be rediscovered any time we choose to focus our attention. When we find the space between the stimulus and the response, we alter the rhythm of our doing; we wake up and create space for being.
Awareness is the knowing, not the contents that are known. We can experience it as a vast sky that can hold all the clouds and storms moving through it. We usually pay more attention to the contents of clouds and storms than to the sky that contains them. As the Zen teaching tells us, when we are in a contracted state of mind, it’s like looking at the sky through a pipe. With mindfulness of awareness, we become adept at putting down the pipe and looking at the whole sky again.
In this chapter you will learn to alternate between the awareness of the self managed by the prefrontal cortex and the awareness of that spacious, unconditioned nonself that allows you to see the sky whole again. When the experiences of self and nonself are mindfully integrated, we enhance the integration of the whole brain and tap into the deep, intuitive wisdom of our whole self.
Exploring the Contents of the Personal Self
We begin the process of shifting from the focusing network to the defocusing network, and from the focusing on the self to the defocusing of nonself, by using the prefrontal cortex to focus our awareness on our experience of the moment, basic mindfulness and acceptance of what is, including our basic sense of self.
We know that all snowflakes share the same basic, six-sided crystalline structure, yet no two snowflakes are identical. We know that human thumbprints share the same basic whorl patterns, yet no two human thumbprints are identical. Human brains share the same neural structures and mechanisms for processing experience and information, yet no two human brains are identical, either. All human selves share elements of personality style, roles, identities, beliefs, and values, yet no two selves are identical, ever.
The prefrontal cortex is instrumental in maturing the sense of a unique self as the brain develops, recognizing patterns of self as “I,” even as those patterns evolve over time. With the reflective self-awareness of the prefrontal cortex, we can begin to notice and name the patterns of memory that constitute our personal history, patterns of coping that underlie our style of personality, and patterns of conditioning — some chosen, some circumstantial — that inform our identities and our values.
Exercise 1: Exploring the Contents of the Self Even as They Evolve
1. Settle into a sense of presence and stillness in your body, a sense of calm and ease in your mind. Evoke a sense of mindful empathy to create a state of awareness and acceptance of any contents of self, any pattern of conditioning, any facet of your personality that may emerge. For this exercise, you are focusing your awareness on aspects of your resilient self, but other aspects may come into consciousness as well.
2. Begin by recollecting moments when you experienced each of the five Cs of coping, in turn. Start with calm: call to mind a moment when you remained calm in a crisis or were able to return to a state of calm after a crisis. Perhaps your building was burgled or your car was stolen. You were able to connect to your resources, see the situation clearly, feel competent in how you were handling things, and return to your window of tolerance fairly quickly. Savor this moment of calm: let yourself really feel it in your body for a minute or two.
3. Next, recollect a moment of clarity, when you saw clearly what was happening and what needed to happen next. This memory could be a recent one — from this morning or this past week — or it could be a memory from last year or in your early twenties or back in the third grade. Perhaps it was a moment when you saw a disaster coming — financial or relational — and were able to see right away what needed to be done to avert it. Again, light up the networks of this moment of clarity: let yourself savor it fully in your body for a minute or two.
4. Repeat this process with each of the remaining three Cs in turn. Recall a moment of being connected to resources — either people or other resources — and calling on people who knew better than you did how to handle a situation, such as dealing with a belligerent customer. Recall a moment of competence — the sense of “Sure I can!” or “Wow, I just did!” Maybe you drew on the skills you’ve cultivated for setting boundaries and negotiating change to handle the disruptive customer yourself. Recall a moment of courage facing a difficulty while remaining anchored in calm, clarity, connection, and competence. That might mean simply showing up day after day to do what needs to be done. You always have at least one memory of each of these capacities to draw on: it doesn’t matter how small, only that it is genuine.
5. As you light up the network of each memory in turn, savor the sense of it in your body for a minute or two. For each of these memories of your resilient self, notice how the brain creates associations to additional memories on its own. You don’t have to make those associations happen: in fact, you probably can’t keep them from happening. These associations may give you even more information about yourself and how you cope.
6. If you wish, cycle through memories of your five Cs of coping a few more times. Notice how easily your brain can shift from the contents of one memory to the contents of another. Notice your awareness shifting from the contents of the self to the flow among those contents, which you experience as your “self.” Notice how the sense of self evolves: it’s fluid, not fixed. Notice how the sense of self emerges: it’s multiple, not monolithic. You can ask certain aspects of the self to step into the background and other aspects, like your wiser self, to step forward. Notice your brain’s neuroplasticity in action as you do this. You can choose how to focus your awareness; you can choose how to modify and shift your sense of self.
The Neuroscience of Exploring the Contents of the Self
The mature prefrontal cortex uses the focusing network of the brain to hold the sense of self together — the brain structures of “selfing.” A stable, secure sense of self is essential to our well-being; a neural swamp is a flimsy basis for building resilience. But with the steady practice of mindfulness, we see that experiences of self may also be fluid. The self is an ever-changing flow of patterns, none of which are, or should be, fixed forever. (Neural cement is not a good platform for building resilience, either.) As the American architect, inventor, and futurist Buckminster Fuller said, “I seem to be a verb.” That is a more accurate description of our “self.”
Gaining Insights into the Self through Reverie
When we feel stable and secure enough in the flow of ourselves, we can safely relax the mind’s grip on the self and shift into a mode of consciousness in which the sense of selfing temporarily dissolves. We do this fairly regularly in daydreams or in a reverie, where our awareness can just float. We similarly let go when we relax and fall asleep. The state of reverie arises from the brain’s defocusing mode of processing. In this state, rather than being occupied with analysis and problem solving, the brain is free to meander and wander: to dream if we’re asleep, to play if we’re awake. The metaphorical, holistic right hemisphere of the brain in particular is free to find new associations between one idea and another, or one memory and another, to connect the dots in a new way. The state of reverie creates the conditions for new insights — “Aha!” moments — to pop up into consciousness out of the blue.
Exercise 2: Relaxing in a Reverie; Gaining Insights into the Self
1. Find a place where you can settle into a calm state of body and mind. Resting on the sofa is fine; a walk in the woods or along a beach works, too.
2. Allow your brain to let go of the constant constructing of your sense of self that we do through planning, remembering, worrying, and comparing. Let yourself relax into the awareness of simply being, into a sense of having nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to be.
3. Allow yourself to stay absorbed in this reverie for anywhere from ten to thirty minutes.
4. When you feel stable in the defocusing mode of the reverie, you may choose to bring into this reverie a mishap in coping, a moment of less-than-resilient response to a situation. Simply notice and name that moment, and then let it percolate in the reverie. Your brain is not solving problems, just playing.
5. With practice and growing trust in the process, you may suddenly gain a new insight into that mishap — a new angle, a new perspective, a new take. Notice both the content of this insight and the phenomenon of the epiphany itself. Notice the “truth sense” that accompanies it: “Oh, that’s right!” or “Of course!” It’s the intuitive rightness of the insight that lets us know an epiphany has occurred.
6. When you come out of your reverie, jot down some notes about it. Writing down the experience shifts the processing of the insight from the right hemisphere of the brain, where it was generated, to the left hemisphere, where it can be articulated in words, and helps integrate it into your circuitry.
As you relax into this state of reverie, you need not fear losing yourself completely. None of the hard work we’ve done to establish a resilient sense of self is ever lost. (Unfortunately, we can’t so easily lose an unresilient sense of self, either.) If there’s any sense of alarm, the brain will reconstitute your sense of self, resilient or unresilient, literally in a heartbeat. If your brain doesn’t generate an epiphany during your first practice reverie, be patient. Cultivating a sense of openness, curiosity, and interest, without judgment, is helpful.
The Neuroscience of Relaxing into Reverie, Gaining Insights into the Self
Neuroscientists have discovered that even when the brain is not focusing on anything at all, neural activity does not cease. Neurons are still firing all over the brain in what is called a default network. The default mode of operation of our brain seems to be to search for something new to focus on, something to play with, something to make associations to. This is why daydreaming can be such a wellspring of creativity: the defocusing creates a mental play space where new ideas and associations can link up.
By defocusing, we deflect the attention of the left hemisphere of our brain from analysis of a problem and shift into the processing mode of the right hemisphere, which specializes in creating original associations, connecting the dots in new ways. This creates the conditions for a new insight to emerge in our awareness, for our own deep knowing to come to consciousness.
Through fMRI scanning, neuroscientists have discovered that the anterior superior temporal gyrus, a small fold of brain tissue located in the same part of the right hemisphere that connects the dots, is unusually active just seconds before an epiphany. It’s possible that this activity is the neural correlate of insights occurring in the brain.
Dissolving the Self into the Nonself of Simply Being
We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
We work with being,
but nonbeing is what we use.
— LAO-TZU
Translation by Stephen Mitchell
Exercise 1 involves using our awareness to explore the contents of the personal self and how those contents can come and go, shift and evolve. Exercise 2 offers practice in coming into a state of reverie that creates a mental play space where we can “dissolve” the grip of our conditioned patterns and generate new insights into the self. The exercise below offers a technique for shifting into the defocusing mode of consciousness again, to allow our awareness to expand further, free of the limitations of any conditioning, into an experience of the unconditioned. In this state, a sense of nonself or simply being can arise. This vast, unconditioned consciousness is not a philosophical concept but an embodied experience. In the steady experience of spaciousness or formlessness, we experience the plane of open possibilities. Nothing is formed; anything can be imagined; anything can happen. The experience of nonself or simply being can catalyze powerful epiphanies about the true nature of the self. It can also generate a frequency of brain waves that can help integrate the entire brain and lead to more resilient functioning.
By focusing our awareness on awareness, we are giving the brain something to do as we gently encourage it to do less and less. As awareness approaches nondoing, only being, the mind can come to rest in unconditioned awareness, with only awareness happening. Focusing attention on breathing in this exercise gives the brain an anchor in reality, even as everything else disappears. There is only being, and our awareness of being.
A note of caution: Using the process of deconditioning to dissolve the self into the realm of the unconditioned involves repeated deconsolidation and reconsolidation on a large scale. As in other exercises that use these processes, it is important to create a safe context for them. In this exercise, we first come to an awareness of our internal secure base (see chapter 8). From this inner base of resilience and security, letting go of the carefully constructed, hard-won personal self doesn’t drop us into an existential void but leads us into wholeness.
A second note of caution: The defocusing network involved in this large-scale deconditioning tends to be more active in the right hemisphere of the brain than the left. It’s important to pay attention to your experience to avoid being overwhelmed by the negativity bias of the right hemisphere.
If you do experience a sense of being dropped into a void or black hole, bring your awareness back to connecting with a true other or your true self, with your wiser self, or with your own innate goodness. Shift your attention to what is stable and supportive to bring you back into your window of tolerance; draw upon your refuges and resources, as described in chapter 5. When you feel stable in your awareness of your experience in the present moment, and reassured and comfortable, it’s safe to resume the practice.
Exercise 3: Dropping into the Unconditioned: Dissolving the Self into the Nonself
1. Sit comfortably. Allow your eyes to gently close. Focus your awareness on your breathing, gently in and out. As you follow your breathing, notice your own awareness of your breathing, the awareness that allows you to know that you are breathing.
2. When that awareness of your breathing is steady, begin to notice the breathing of any people around you, or people you imagine being around you. There’s no need to do anything; just notice or imagine other people breathing as you are breathing, and notice your awareness of that. Notice what you are aware of in your own being as you rest in this awareness.
3. Staying anchored in an awareness of your own breathing, expand your awareness of breathing to include the breathing of more people you know, who are not necessarily physically near you. Notice your awareness of your awareness of everyone breathing. Notice your awareness of your own being as you remain aware.
4. Still anchored in an awareness of your own breathing, expand your awareness further to include people you don’t know, outside the building you are in, perhaps elsewhere in the neighborhood, throughout the city, across the region. Become aware of all of them breathing together. Notice your awareness of your awareness: you are simply being, being aware.
5. Continue to expand your awareness to include people all over the country, all over the planet, all breathing. Expand your awareness to include all living creatures breathing in the parks, the forests, underground, in the lakes and rivers, in the oceans, the sky, of all sentient beings breathing together. Notice your awareness of your awareness of existence, and your awareness of simply being.
6. Expand your awareness to include all forms of existence, some breathing, some not — the air, the water, the rocks. And notice your awareness of your awareness of the breathing, and your awareness of simply being.
7. Expand your awareness beyond our planet to other planets, other stars, other galaxies, and the space between the planets and stars and galaxies. Expand your awareness as far as you can possibly imagine; notice your awareness of your awareness expanding. Rest comfortably, safely, in this vast spacious awareness, in this vast simply being, for as long as you choose. Take your time.
8. Gently bring your awareness back to your awareness of sitting in the room you are in, in this moment, breathing. Focus your awareness on simply breathing. Take a moment to shift gears and reflect more fully on your experience of simply being. You may experience a lightness, a spaciousness, or an openness in your being.
This is the spaciousness where new insights can occur spontaneously. Even if they don’t occur right away, this vast, open awareness of the unconditioned creates the conditions for revelation. We can reliably access this defocused, diffuse mode of consciousness through awareness practice. We can also refocus our attention on our immediate situation in an instant. On the human plane, it’s essential to be able to do that. As the spiritual teacher Ram Dass cautioned, even in a bliss state, it’s important not to forget your ZIP code.
The Neuroscience of Dissolving the Self into the Nonself
Scans of the brain waves of meditators adept at achieving states of transcendental awareness, such as the awareness of awareness that is possible to achieve in the exercise above, reveal a dramatic increase in gamma waves in their brains as they meditate. This is the highest brain-wave frequency, indicating high levels of concentration, a unity of consciousness, even bliss. Other researchers have observed a measurable spike in gamma waves just milliseconds before an insight breaks through into consciousness. When we concentrate our awareness on awareness, we are actually creating the conditions in the brain for revelation.
Reflections on Experiencing the Unconditioned
I am larger and better than I thought.
I did not think I held so much goodness.
— WALT WHITMAN
Neuroscientists have not yet fully mapped the brain activity that occurs in the silence and stillness of unconditioned awareness, but consciousness researchers report with consistency and accuracy the phenomenon of epiphanies, or insights into the deep meaning and nature of reality. Epiphanies carry with them the profound “truth sense” that Isaac Newton experienced when the bonk on the head by an apple led to his sudden understanding of the force of gravity, or the certainty that led the Greek mathematician Archimedes to leap from his bathtub to run through the streets of Athens crying, “Eureka!” (I’ve found it!) when he suddenly understood the physics of volume and displacement.
Epiphanies vary from person to person and from tradition to tradition. They are often characterized by a sense of awe or mystery that has been referred to by many different names in many traditions over the ages: a perception of essence, spirit, the divine, the sacred. People often describe feeling a profound sense of benevolence, or loving presence, a feeling of the self being at one with all of existence, similar to the sensation Edgar Mitchell experienced on his return trip from the moon. Of particular value for building resilience is a deeply felt realization of the innate goodness of our own true nature.
This sense of innate goodness is validated by 2,500 years of training and practice in the Buddhist wisdom tradition. There is a sense of coming home to the true nature of our being, a sense of abundant enough-ness, a profound sense of well-being — the spiritual platform of resilience. We don’t have to seek this sense of innate goodness: it comes when the mind and brain are quiet, when everything else falls away. This experience carries with it the truth sense of an epiphany. We know it to be true in the heart, in the gut, at the cellular level. It becomes a powerful resource for rewiring any conditioned patterns, including less-than-resilient patterns of coping.
If we try to skip this stage of awakening to and aligning with true nature as our true home, if we bypass simply being and escape into doing, we lose the freedom that this mental, emotional, and relational play space offers us to create something entirely new. We miss out on a huge opportunity to wake up and grow up; it’s all too easy to repeat the conditioned patterns we have learned before.
Integrating the Self and Nonself
There is a natural and inviolable tendency in things to bloom into whatever they truly are in the core of their being.
All we have to do is align ourselves with what wants to happen naturally and put in the effort that is our part in helping it happen.
— DAVID RICHO
Steadily experiencing the unconditioned, abiding in the spacious formlessness of the unconditioned, could bring a person very close to a state of ultimate enlightenment if one persevered in the practice.
Here on the human plane, the brain’s capacity to access the defocused state of mindful presence, get the big picture, be open to and comfortable with the unknown and the uncertain, and then shift between defocused and focused processing allows us to radically rewire patterns of self. This change can be described as a quantum shift in our understanding of self. It creates deeper integration in the brain: our mental activity becomes less scattered, less fragmented, more interconnected and whole. As we alternate between a very coherent, individual self and a self dissolved into the oneness of existence, we come to a deeper knowing of our own true nature as a unique individual expression of the universal energy that sustains all of existence. From this integration and alignment with our true nature we gain more mental capacity to handle the vicissitudes of life, to solve problems without hesitation or floundering, to be creative and innovative, to come to terms with a situation that may seem unresolvable. Our consciousness has opened up. We create a resilient connection with life in general, facing it with awareness, acceptance, and emergent wisdom.
Exercise 4: Integrating the Self and Nonself
When the extraordinary consciousness of the true nature of your unconditioned nonself is strong enough, you can use it to reconsolidate the ordinary consciousness of your conditioned personal self, rewiring many old, conditioned stories and beliefs about yourself. Who you understand yourself to be and how you respond to life’s events are now informed and guided by this deep knowing. In this exercise, this expanded consciousness becomes a tool you use to transform your sense of self.
1. Evoke the awareness of awareness you experienced in exercise 3. Try to evoke the sense of the true nature of your being that you might have experienced through that exercise as well. If this seems too much of a stretch at first, simply evoke your sense of your wiser self, your personal manifestation of this true nature.
2. Bring to mind a pattern, a belief, an identity of your personal self that you might like to rewire: an old sense of inadequacy, a lack of trust in your competence or creative potential. Light up the networks of this pattern by evoking all the layers of neural firing associated with it: body sensations, feelings, thoughts about yourself.
3. Try to bring this sense of your personal self into the spacious awareness of awareness, or into the sense of well-being or wholeness of your true nature. If that’s too much of a stretch, begin by alternating between these two modes of consciousness, always strengthening or refreshing the sense of awareness of true nature. When the sense of true nature seems stronger, let go of the sense of personal self and rest in your awareness of your true nature.
4. After a moment, reevoke the pattern or sense of personal self you were attempting to rewire. Notice any changes in that sense of personal self now that it is held, informed, and guided by your true nature.
My mentor Diana Fosha reminds us: “People have a fundamental need for transformation. We are wired for growth and healing, and we’re wired for self-righting and resuming impeded growth. We have a need for the expansion and liberation of the self, the letting down of defensive barriers, and the dismantling of the false self. [We stretch] toward maximal vitality, authenticity, and genuine contact. In the process of radical change we become more ourselves than ever before, and recognize ourselves to be so.”
Exercise 5: Experiencing the Whole Self
We can now use the integrative capacities of the prefrontal cortex to help us experience our whole self. The following exercise involves recognizing the multiple, complex layers of self we want our prefrontal cortex to integrate. Sometimes I imagine these layers of self nesting inside one another like the Russian wooden dolls my grandmother kept on the mantelpiece.
1. Go through the list of layers of self below. For each one, remember a moment or incident that exemplifies it. (Your example of the last layer, the unconditioned, may come from exercise 3 above.)
2. Allow your awareness to flow among all five layers of self. All of these layers make up your whole self and define who you are at any given moment, whether or not you are always fully conscious of them.
(a) Inner child. This is the realm of early implicit and explicit patterns of coping that become encoded as parts, facets, aspects, and states of ourselves. Some of these we admire and are proud of; some we don’t like and may even loathe; some we may be too ashamed of to identify with; some, whether they were resilient or not, may have become lost or forgotten.
(b) Adult. This is our grown-up personal self, doing the best it can to navigate the world with what it has learned about how the world works, how people work, and who the self is. The adult self is the personal self that chooses how to use the strengthened prefrontal cortex to rewire the patterns of the inner child; the stable yet flexible personal self that harnesses the neuroplasticity of the brain to experience, embody, and express the five Cs of coping; and the ever-evolving self that calls on the resources of the wiser self to inform and guide its actions.
(c) Wiser self. This is the imagined resource of our strongest, most loving, most compassionate, most generous, most resilient self, our own personal flavor of the innate goodness and well-being of universal true nature. It is the part of us that has kept persevering in our intentions and our choices to recover resilience. It guides the choices of the adult self with wise, intuitive knowing. When we align the adult self with the qualities and virtues of our wiser self, our capacities for resilience are infused with greater energy. The adult self becomes more confident about its capacities to cope.
(d) True nature. This is the realm of the sacred into which we dissolve the adult self. We experience universal qualities such as kindness, gratitude, joy, generosity, and equanimity as our true home. Our true nature is the reservoir of universal goodness and well-being expressed by the wiser self, and the gateway to the larger awareness that holds all the nouns and verbs of existence. Aligning our adult self with our true nature anchors all of our resilience in integrity and courage and gives us a moral compass to guide our course of action.
(e) The unconditioned. This is the vast spaciousness of awareness itself, the nothingness that all things arise from and pass away into. It is the realm of the mental play space we access through deconditioning, where there’s space and flow for new choices to emerge.
When we begin to skillfully flow among these five layers of self, we are free, not caught in a particular role or identity or in the patterns of response encoded at five years of age, or twelve, or twenty-seven. The flexibility of navigating these layers of self sustains flexibility in our coping. At any given moment, we can recognize which layer we are inhabiting; we can choose where we want to focus; we can change our response to life events.
The Neuroscience of Integrating the Self and Nonself
The brain operates differently with focused attention than with open, spacious awareness. The tasks are different and the outcomes are different; we carefully cultivate and integrate both to maximize our resilience. So far, neuroimaging has shown that focused attention most fully activates the ventral medial (forward and central) part of the cortex. (The prefrontal cortex is located in this region.) This is the part of the brain that constructs and holds the sense of self together. Through neuronal pathways connecting to the motor cortex of the brain, it also sends signals to take action.
When we allow our awareness to relax or dissolve into a more spacious, bare awareness, by contrast, we activate the dorsal lateral part of the cortex (toward the rear and both sides). With this increased neural receptivity, the brain can create new associations more readily. The brain organically rewires and reorganizes itself.
We have been reconditioning patterns of response in the brain, or conditioning new patterns, through the focused (self ) mode of processing; we have approached the experience of the unconditioned or nonself through the defocused mode of processing and deconditioning. We can switch between these two networks of processing and two modes of consciousness. As we become more grounded, more centered in the unconditioned true nature of who we are, we can learn to return to this state of awareness whenever we lose our way, when we become hijacked by an unresolved trauma or befuddled by the new territory we’re moving into. The more familiar we become with this sense of loving presence as our true home, the sooner we can notice when we’re off course and bring ourselves back. Eventually we become so attuned to the state of our inner state that we can do this in the space of a breath.
Deeper Brain Integration
When we integrate the patterns of neural firing we use in the focusing network with the patterns of neural firing we experience in the defocusing network, we set in motion a radical process of transformation within the brain.
Using the defocusing network to access the unconditioned helps the brain fire at its highest frequency of brain waves — gamma waves. Gamma waves are produced when many parts of the brain are firing rapidly and in synchrony. This activity creates new, complex neural networks and greater neural harmony in the brain.
We have learned to use tools to harness the brain’s neuroplasticity to strengthen the prefrontal cortex to manage our emotions and calm our nervous system when we’re startled or frightened, quelling the fear response of the amygdala; to tune into the inner experience of others and ourselves; to see clearly our reactions to any experience, internal or external; to generate options of response; and to choose wisely and flexibly among them. Through this learning process, the brain productively rewires old, conditioned patterns of response to stress and trauma. New experiences in relationships, in our body, in our emotions, and in our thoughts and perceptions can increase the flexibility of our responses to stressors and traumas. As we rewire old patterns, those patterns become more adaptive and resilient; therefore, we experience greater health and well-being.
This neural harmony supports increased integration by the prefrontal cortex at all levels of the brain. The prefrontal cortex integrates our bodily sensations and emotions with our thoughts, reflections, and conscious decisions about them; it also integrates the right hemisphere’s felt sense of our emotions with the left hemisphere’s rational assessment of them. It integrates our conscious and unconscious memories; it integrates various ego states or parts of the personal self to create a coherent narrative of the self that supports our resilience.
What Deeper Brain Integration Makes Possible
Mastering the art of resilience does much more than restore you to who you once thought you were. Rather, you emerge from the experience transformed into a truer expression of who you were really meant to be.
— CAROL ORSBORN
As we learn to navigate between the spaciousness of simply being (nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to be) and our sense of self (I have things to do! I’m expected to show up and be responsible! I am somebody!), we continue to let go of habitual patterns of coping that simply don’t work well, and we intentionally practice skills that will help us create the life we want for ourselves and our loved ones, with many, many repetitions so that they do actually create new brain circuitry. As we continue to rewire internally, we can generate more authentic, creative, wholesome options for ourselves and develop the internal integrity and alignment that will help us realize our dreams.
Pulling It All Together
Learning to work skillfully with the brain’s defocusing mode allows you to:
• experience the awareness that holds all the constructs of the self as stable and coherent, yet ever changing and ever evolving;
• create the conditions of reverie — the mental play space of deconditioning — and an expanded awareness in which epiphanies, insights, and revelations can occur;
• use that expanded awareness to enter a mental “plane of open possibilities” where you can more easily experience the phenomenon known as nonself — the unconditioned nature of reality prior to any conditioning;
• recognize this state of simply being as your true home;
• integrate the experiences of nonself or true nature into a sense of whole self, experiencing a flow among the inner child, the adult self, the wiser self, your true nature, and unconditioned awareness. This integration can create greater neural integration, harmony, and synchrony within the brain itself, strengthening the resilience you need to handle all the vicissitudes of life.
Take a deep breath and acknowledge to yourself how much good work you’ve done to recover your birthright capacities of resilience and well-being. Completing the experiential exercises in parts 3–7 helps you develop a brain better prepared to respond well to life’s ongoing stressors. These practices can help you rewire a variety of old, conditioned responses to trouble and trauma and strengthen your prefrontal cortex. They can help you boost your relational, somatic, emotional, and reflective intelligence and recover the innate capacities of your brain to respond skillfully and adaptively to life’s storms and struggles. You can now reliably experience more calm, more clarity, stronger connections to resources, increased competence, and greater courage, all of which will allow you to cope with anything, anything at all.