Practices of Emotional Intelligence
Self-Compassion, Mindful Empathy, Positivity, Theory of Mind
Just simply living evokes emotions, and we experience one emotion or another every single moment of the day — unless we are clinically depressed and have effectively blocked feeling any emotions. We register delight in watching a sunrise, frustration at getting stalled in gridlock traffic, resentment when a coworker takes credit for an idea we came up with first, terror for the future when a spouse or a child gets a life-threatening diagnosis. Whether we like having these emotions or not, whether we trust them or know what to do with them or not, our feelings constantly filter our perceptions and guide (or sometimes misguide) our responses to all of our experiences. Thus they play an integral role in how well or poorly we bounce back from any adversity. Learning to manage our feelings, rather than let them hijack us or shut us down, is the practice of emotional intelligence you will learn throughout this chapter.
It’s very normal to be upset with yourself sometimes for even having emotions or not knowing how to manage them very well. Today, however, we can integrate data from twenty-five years of neuroscience research and twenty-five years of behavioral science research to revolutionize our thinking about what feelings are and how we can work with them. Here are some of the latest discoveries most relevant to strengthening our resilience.
1. Emotions are signals to act.
Emotions are sensations flowing up from the body to alert the brain to notice and pay attention to something. Whether it’s the first shy glimmer of falling in love or the deep heartache of losing someone you love, the emotion itself is a signal saying, “Pay attention! Something important is happening here!”
Every emotion, even the ones we deem negative, disturbing, or destructive, is also a signal to move. The very word emotion is from the Latin emovere, meaning to move or to act. We’re learning that all emotions have adaptive action tendencies. Anger may signal you to protest an injustice, a betrayal, or the sting of a humiliation; it is often the first catalyst that lifts a person out of shame or depression. Sadness signals you to reach out to others for comfort and support, or to comfort and support others. Fear signals you to move away from danger or toxicity. Guilt, when it leads to healthy remorse, may lead you to make repairs and amends. Joy can spark the urge to play, to push the limits and be creative. Interest can spark the urge to explore, take in new information and experiences, and expand the sense of self in the process. Laughter breathes some space into grief. Contentment creates the urge to savor your current life circumstances, even when they’re less than ideal. Your emotions are the catalysts of every move you make and thus are intricately woven into the fabric of your resilience.
2. Your pre-frontal cortex manages your emotions.
Through guidance from the prefrontal cortex, your CEO of resilience, you skillfully read and manage the signals of your emotions and decide what action to take. Managing the entire range of your emotional landscape, from slight whiffs of feelings to a full-on emotional cascade — keeping you not too revved up, and not shut down — is one of the most important functions of your prefrontal cortex, a task very similar to regulating your nervous system. When the self-regulating capacity of your brain is functioning well, you can inhabit or quickly recover a felt sense of centeredness, ease, and well-being. From there you can perceive clearly what’s triggering your emotions and discern what a wise response to those triggers would be, thus accessing a wellspring of resilience.
We know it’s not resilient to be hijacked by floods of emotions: you can’t think straight, and your responses may be useless or harmful. And it’s not resilient to try to repress or split off your emotions. For one thing, it takes an enormous amount of physical and psychological energy to do that, energy you would be better off using to respond to the situation or to other people wisely. Secondly, when you try to repress or split off any specific emotion (anger, grief, and shame are common targets), you can wind up damping down all of your emotions, even the helpful ones. You can go flat in your being and lose the motivation to do anything at all. So the task is to manage your emotions rather than be hijacked or shut down by them.
3. Emotional memories from the past can trigger powerful reactivity in the present.
It’s often difficult to tell whether our emotional responses are based on present or past events. Emotional memories, especially those formed in early childhood, can be deeply buried in implicit (unconscious) memory. When these implicit emotional memories come up into conscious awareness again, they carry no time stamp. There’s no sense that they are a memory from the past. These emotions feel completely real, and often you can react as though you have to deal with them right now. (That reactivity itself may be a learned conditioned response buried in implicit or unconscious memory.)
You may give up at the first sign of failure, sometimes rationalizing that you didn’t really want that job or friendship anyway. You may find yourself getting tense and irritated, then blowing your top at the slightest additional provocation, even when you really do know better. You may hang back, hesitant to embark on the new adventure you want for yourself, not because you’re shy but because deep down you believe you’re unworthy and don’t want anyone else to find out.
You may not even consciously know why you’re behaving the way you’re behaving. You just are, even if consciously you know that you want to — and know how to — act differently. There can be layers and layers of implicit memories stored in our brains, making us react in the present to some hurt or wrong from the past. The exercises in this chapter show you ways to rewire these implicit memories so they don’t trigger less-than-resilient responses.
4. Negativity bias skews our reactions.
In order to survive, as individuals and as a species, we have in our brain a built-in negativity bias, evolved over millions of years, that leads us to pay more attention to negative and dangerous experiences than to positive and safe ones. You are more likely to pay attention to and store memories of negative experiences and negative emotions — irritation, loneliness, embarrassment — than positive ones — awe, satisfaction, tranquility. As my friend and colleague Rick Hanson puts it, “We have Velcro for the negative, Teflon for the positive.”
This tendency to pay more attention to the negative than the positive, originally hardwired into your brain to protect you from physical danger, now serves to protect you from social and emotional danger: the threat of being disconnected from those you depend on for survival and well-being. This is why you are likely to pay more attention to the one negative comment made by your boss in a meeting or your lover at the dinner table than you will to the nineteen positive comments made to you that same day. The brain is a social brain, and you are a social being. This negativity bias is a permanent predisposition of your brain.
What you can do, however, is learn to work with or work around this feature by managing surges of negative emotions (finding the upside of their dark side) and by intentionally cultivating positive emotions. We practice kindness, gratitude, generosity, delight, and awe not just to feel better but to do better. Positive emotions shift the brain out of the contraction and reactivity of the negativity bias into the receptivity and openness that increase your response flexibility. The direct measurable outcome of these practices is resilience.
5. Emotions are contagious.
Through emotional contagion, we pick up the emotional signals of other people (and even pets) very easily when we’re not defensively guarding against them. You can sense your spouse’s or child’s frustrations about their day as soon as they walk in the door, without them having to say anything. You can sense the anger or loneliness of someone standing in line near you at the grocery store, even though you’re not feeling that way yourself. This is the neurological basis of empathy. Some evolutionary psychologists believe it was the need to empathize and communicate accurately with fellow members of our tribe tens of thousands of years ago that drove the development of language and thus the evolution of the higher (conscious) cortex of the human brain we have today. A well-developed theory of mind, discussed below, helps us manage emotional contagion: it helps us recognize whose emotions are whose and relate to our fellow human beings, intimately or socially, with healthy boundaries.
Four major practices of emotional intelligence allow us to manage our own emotional roller coasters and respond skillfully to other people’s emotions too. These practices are the foundation of all the tools presented in this chapter.
Emotional Intelligence Practices
Mindful self-compassion, a practice developed by Chris Germer at Harvard University and Kristin Neff at the University of Texas, Austin, simply brings awareness and acceptance to your emotional experience, no matter how upsetting or crazy-making it is. At an even deeper level in your brain, it brings awareness and acceptance of yourself as the experiencer of the experience.
It’s hard being a human being. Life tosses you about, sometimes even throwing you right out of your boat. And you are inevitably going to lose your emotional equilibrium, your inner sense of well-being, from time to time, no question. Practices of mindful self-compassion help you understand that this is true for everybody. You are not the only one. You are not alone. Mindful self-compassion is a very important and sometimes essential practice. It supports mindful empathy, which is another practice that brings you back into an emotional equilibrium.
Mindful Empathy
Mindful empathy is actually a sequence of three skills — attending, attuning, and making sense — that allows emotions (your own or another person’s) to arise in your conscious awareness, alert your brain to pay attention, deliver their important message, and then subside, leaving your higher brain free to listen to the message and decide what wise action to take in response. Your emotions don’t get to drive the bus, but they play an important role in deciding where the bus is going to go.
Deliberately cultivating practices of compassion, gratitude, trust, and other positive, prosocial emotions can reverse the constricting effects of negative emotions like envy, resentment, regret, and hostility on your nervous system and your behaviors.
These practices refocus your attention away from stress and worry. They can reverse the impact of anxiety, depression, learned helplessness, and loneliness and help you feel more enthused, energetic, and alive. Experiencing more positive emotions increases your curiosity and engagement with circumstances and supports more optimistic, creative coping. These emotions strengthen the capacity to approach, rather than avoid, challenges and catastrophes. They can even help resolve traumatic memories.
Focusing on positive and prosocial emotions is not meant to bypass or suppress dark, difficult, afflictive emotions. Your experiences of angst, pain, and despair are very real. By persevering in your practices of mindful empathy, you learn to acknowledge, hold, and process those emotions. You deliberately cultivate positive, prosocial emotions as a way to broaden your habitual modes of thinking or acting, and to build enduring, resilient resources for coping. These include increasing social bonds and social support and deepening insights that help place events in a broader context. You strengthen your capacity to cope, find a way through, and come out the other side.
Theory of mind simply means an awareness that I am me, and you are you, and that I may be having an emotional experience (or a thought, belief, or plan) that you are not experiencing. We are two different people with two different experiences, and that’s okay.
As with all capacities of your brain, you develop the capacity for theory of mind by experiencing it with other people. You come to recognize that at any given moment, you may be having an emotional experience that is different from the emotional experience another person is having, and that’s okay. And you get to experience that the other person also recognizes that your experience is different from theirs, and that that’s okay with them. Experiencing theory of mind through others helps develop theory of mind in your own brain.
According to developmental psychologists, most children develop the capacity for theory of mind by the age of four. Depending on your experience with your earliest caregivers and role models, maybe you did, and maybe you didn’t. But it’s one of the essential skills of emotional intelligence. You need to be able to sense and accept what you are feeling: that’s mindful self-compassion. You need to be able to sense and accept what other people are feeling while they are feeling it: that’s mindful empathy. And you need to be able to differentiate what they are feeling from what you are feeling: that’s theory of mind.
Your brain, specifically your prefrontal cortex, develops the neurological capacities needed to attend, attune, make sense of, and respond wisely to your emotions and maintain your emotional equilibrium through the experience of having those emotions attended to and mirrored by people around you. In more technical terms, this process involves initial mirroring and validation of your emotional experience and dyadic regulation of your emotional equilibrium. That’s the neurobiology of how your brain develops these basic life skills. If your caregivers were not able to provide these experiences, you may not have learned to regulate your own emotions and recover your own emotional well-being when you were young. If that’s the case, this chapter will show you how you can develop these capacities and maintain that equilibrium now.
New Conditioning
These tools strengthen the response flexibility you need to manage your own emotions and the impact of other people’s emotions on you. Regular practice in using these tools will create the neural circuitry in your brain that will almost miraculously shift the functioning of your brain from negativity to positivity. That includes the full range of your emotions needing your attention.
These exercises strengthen your ability to simply be with your emotional experiences and those of others, deepening a sense of trust and confidence that you can do this.
This exercise focuses on paying attention to the bodily, felt sense of an emotion. You are not thinking about it but simply being with it. The goal is to develop awareness of what you are experiencing while you are experiencing it, allowing, acknowledging, and accepting that this is what’s happening.
1. Sit quietly in a place where you won’t be interrupted for at least five minutes. Come into a sense of presence, knowing you are here, in your body, in your mind, in this moment, in this place.
2. Notice whatever comes to the forefront of your conscious awareness for the next five minutes — and things spontaneously will. Whatever body sensation, feeling, or thought comes up, simply notice it, acknowledge that it has shown up on your radar, allow it to be there, and accept that it is there. At this point you’re not wondering about it or trying to figure it out, just attending to it enough to register the experience in your awareness.
This exercise can deepen your capacity to become present to and consciously aware of your own experience without needing to leave or push away that experience to maintain your emotional equilibrium.
To be present is far from trivial. It may be the hardest work in the world. And forget about the “may be.” It is the hardest work in the world — at least to sustain presence. And the most important. When you do drop into presence, you know it instantly, feel at home instantly. And being home, you can let loose, let go, rest in your being, rest in awareness, in presence itself, in your own good company.
— Jon Kabat-Zinn
3. At this stage in the exercise, you have come to a choice point.
a. You can let go of attending to the experience of the moment and to any subsequent experience that arises in your awareness, and refocus your attention on the quiet, background, spacious awareness that allows you to be aware — the “home ground” of your well-being; or
b. You can attune to the felt sense of the experience to decipher its message.
This exercise entails discerning the particular flavor of an emotion. Attuning allows you to label complex, subtly nuanced emotions, such as those of feeling lonely or suspicious. This labeling is part of the capacity of emotional literacy, your capacity to read your emotional experience, and attune to and read the emotional experience of others as well.
Two meditation teachers of mine have shared their stories about attuning to the felt sense. Guy Armstrong tells of a time when he was having great difficulty settling into a long, silent meditation retreat. Feeling restless and agitated, he was finally able to notice and name what he was experiencing: “Oh, despair!” Despair is not a pleasant emotion to feel, but as soon as Guy could name it, he was no longer embedded in it: he could observe it and begin to let it be, let it unfold, and then let it go. When you notice and name the experience of the moment, you engage your prefrontal cortex. Noticing and naming allowed Guy to reflect and come to a resolution without feeling caught or trapped.
In a different vein, Anna Douglas tells of a time she was experiencing something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Finally she realized, “Oh! This is calm!” It’s important to be able to recognize and attune to the ease of well-being in yourself, too.
Often you can sense a disturbance in the force field — a gut reaction to something, a sudden shift in the balance of your nervous system, before you have any clear idea of what you’re experiencing or what to call it. You simply notice that there is something to notice.
1. When you notice a disturbance, focus on and drop into the felt sense of the experience in your body. Begin to label the felt sense — shaky, tight, churning, bubbling, contracting, expanding. Try not to create a story about it. Just feel it and name it. From previous experience, you might already have a word for this particular feeling.
2. Sometimes it’s a challenge to put your finger on the exact nuance or flavor of the message. Try to find a “good enough” label for your emotions for now: maybe “This is contentment,” “This is aggravation,” or “This is despair.”
Whatever feeling you are attuning to, and however you choose to label it, this feeling is what it is. All you have to know at this point is that you can know what it is and label it in a way that is useful to you. (If you can name it, you can tame it.) You can trust in your ability to know and label a feeling even if you change your mind later about what it is.
Once you can name an emotion, you are on the way to making sense of it. All emotions are understandable if we put in the time and the wise effort to discern them: “Given what is happening, and given my previous conditioning, it makes perfect sense that I would feel the way I do.” For example, on your first morning at a new job, depending on your conditioning, you may feel vulnerable, or you may feel exuberant. But either way, what you feel makes sense. All emotions — the ones you dislike and dread as well as the ones you welcome and enjoy — can guide your behaviors in resilient ways, self-protecting or self-enhancing. You don’t have to be afraid of your emotions, be stuck in them, or be swept away by them. You do have to take responsibility for how you experience and express them.
1. Anchor in your own emotional equilibrium as much as possible, and sit quietly with whatever emotion you have been attending and attuning to.
2. Let yourself acknowledge that whatever emotion you are sitting with, and whatever further emotions you might be feeling about feeling this emotion, given the circumstances and your previous conditioning around coping resiliently (or not), of course you are feeling exactly what you are feeling; it makes perfect sense.
3. Begin to engage your prefrontal cortex, the meaning-making structure of your brain. This doesn’t involve thinking per se, just opening your mind to any learning from previous experience that would make sense of your current experience. When have you experienced anything like this before? What did it mean then? How did you respond then? Did that response work? Have you ever misjudged or misinterpreted this feeling? Have you made any mistakes because of how you responded before?
4. This form of inquiry may trigger deeper feelings that are more difficult to manage. The tools of mindful self-compassion offered in later exercises will help you manage them and return to your emotional equilibrium.
5. You may want to ask friends, colleagues, mentors, teachers, therapists, or coaches to assist you with this inquiry. Learning from other people’s experiences and mistakes is a valid form of learning and can be helpful in returning you to your own emotional equilibrium.
Making sense of your experience can be an exciting process and a high art. As you increase your capacities to make sense of what’s going on and why you are responding as you are, you become more competent at choosing the wisest possible response.
The point of these exercises is not just to get you using your higher brain to manage your emotions so that they don’t get in the way of your decision-making. You’re learning to manage them so they can be included and valued in your decision-making. Simply listen, get the gist, and then use what you’ve learned from the emotions to take wise action.
1. Begin this exercise in a state of emotional equilibrium if you can, with your prefrontal cortex already online, calmly minding the store.
2. Choose one small moment of an emotion you want to work with, positive or negative. Choose something familiar in your daily life: the ripple of annoyance at dishes left overnight in the sink or tools left out in the rain, again; the “Oh no!” you feel when the tax document you’re working on disappears into cyberspace; the mounting concern when your teenager hasn’t come home and hasn’t called. For this exercise, avoid choosing the most overwhelming negative emotion you feel. Give your brain a chance to succeed and strengthen its response flexibility first.
3. Feel the emotion wherever you feel it in your body. Notice whatever thoughts and other emotions are triggered when you sense this emotion. Notice any possibilities that arise for acting in some way that will relieve this emotion (if negative) or amplify the emotion (if positive).
4. Take some time to let your mind brainstorm five other options for taking action. Let your mind play with those possibilities for a moment.
5. Imagine the possible consequences of any of these possibilities. Notice whether you are especially drawn to or repulsed by any of them.
6. You can either end the exercise now, or you can choose to follow one of the possible courses of action you’ve come up with. If you choose to act, you can notice not just what happens but whether the emotion was useful to you in asking for your attention and guiding your choices.
You can apply the principle of little and often to developing your emotional intelligence. Slow down. Take the time to anchor in your emotional equilibrium. Work on one emotion at a time, or just one little aspect of a single emotion. Practice attending, attuning, and making sense again and again until these skills become the new habits of perceiving and responding to your emotional landscape. Then you can choose your response. You’re creating the space to respond to challenges and crises in a new and more resilient way.
Ninety-three percent of all emotional communication happens through facial expressions, body language, tone, melody, and rhythm of the voice, and only 7 percent through words. Do you need words to formulate and express your understanding of your emotions and other people’s? Absolutely. But emotional intelligence emerges from the bottom up, as emotions do, and emotional literacy is based on attuning to and nonverbally reading the felt sense of your experience and that of others.
EXERCISE 3-5: Attuning to and Conveying Basic Emotions
You strengthen the capacity of the prefrontal cortex to attune to and recognize the flavors of the emotions you experience through practice, like doing reps at the gym. This exercise involves communicating with a partner without using words to strengthen the capacities of your prefrontal cortex to perceive and interpret nonverbal expressions. Practicing with five of the most basic emotions — anger, fear, sadness, joy, and disgust — builds your capacities for attunement, which can then be refined later to read more nuanced emotions such as disappointment, jealousy, guilt, or awe and wonder.
1. Recruit a partner to participate in this exercise with you. Allow thirty minutes for you each to have a turn.
2. Decide the order in which you will evoke these five emotions — anger, fear, sadness, joy, and disgust — without telling your partner. Recalling previous experiences of each emotion is a quick and easy way to experience the emotion again internally.
3. Tune in to your own experience of the first emotion you’ve chosen to work with, and then let your body wordlessly display the chosen emotion for ten seconds. Maintain eye contact with your partner. You can use gestures, facial expressions, and sounds — just not words. You may find yourself exaggerating your expressions at first; that’s okay. Your partner notes which emotion he is reading from your expression but doesn’t disclose it yet. Notice what happens inside of you — self-attunement — as you communicate your own feelings to someone else. Notice whether the felt sense of the emotion increases, decreases, or changes into something else.
4. Without discussion yet, turn your attention inward again. Release the emotion you’ve been expressing with a few gentle, deep breaths into your heart center. Evoke the next emotion on your list, and display it to your partner for ten seconds. Again, your partner notes the emotion, but the two of you don’t discuss anything.
5. Still without any discussion, refocus your attention inward, evoke the next emotion on your list, and display the feeling to your partner. Repeat the process for each emotion.
6. Before discussing anything yet, switch roles, so that your partner now displays five emotions in sequence. As you observe them, notice what signals you pay attention to — facial expressions, body language, the tone or rhythm of sounds — to distinguish one emotion from another. And notice what happens inside you as you perceive your partner’s feelings.
7. When your partner has finished, you each share your best guesses at the emotions the other person was trying to convey, and explain how you each identified each emotion.
If all the guesses were accurate, congratulations to both of you! If there were discrepancies, take the opportunity to discuss what you perceived in each other’s expression of emotion that led you to a different interpretation. This exercise strengthens the prefrontal cortex’s capacities for expressing and attuning to emotions, which are the foundation of building more competence in communicating what you need, developing the skills you need to get those needs met, and empathizing with others as they express their own needs.
EXERCISE 3-6: Feeling Empathy for Fellow Human Beings
We often have reactions or judgments about the ways others choose to behave. This exercise cultivates your capacity to empathize with the emotional experience of other people by attuning to and empathizing with the felt sense of your own experiences in similar situations.
1. Take a moment to identify a behavior you’ve observed in someone that you don’t like very much, at least in the moment. Maybe the driver in the lane next to you on the freeway is yelling at another driver who just cut her off. Your daughter puts off paying the credit card bill until she’s racking up late fees and jeopardizing her credit rating. Your best friend arrives fifteen minutes late to pick up his son from soccer practice and picks a fight with the coach to cover his chagrin.
2. Notice your own internal reaction to this behavior, including any opinions or spontaneous judgments you may have about this behavior. Set those reactions aside for the moment.
3. Begin to be curious — you’re activating your prefrontal cortex here — about what might be going on in that other person to cause them to act this way. Could they be already stressed, swamped with too many things to attend to, or acting out of inexperience, lack of skill, or low self-esteem?
4. Remember a time when you have acted similarly. I might yell at a driver who cuts me off on the freeway, too. Then I remember times when I’ve inadvertently done the same thing. I can understand and forgive the other driver if I put myself in their place and can understand and forgive myself.
5. Remember that any behavior you’re witnessing now — in yourself or others — is rooted in learned conditioned responses that originally served some survival purpose. Knowing this, you can bring some understanding, compassion, and forgiveness to the other person now.
6. If possible, communicate your empathic understanding of the other person’s experience to them — maybe not the driver on the freeway, but to your daughter or your friend — to make sure that your understanding is accurate and that the care offered in the empathy “lands” or registers with the other person. The other person’s perception of this empathy can help them rewire their encoded patterns of themselves and become receptive to changing their behavior. Your own practice of empathy can help strengthen your prefrontal cortex so that you can accomplish further rewiring, too.
Empathy is one of the key skills in emotional intelligence, and emotional intelligence is more predictive of your success in life than IQ. As you become more competent in connecting to other people through understanding their struggles, you build the relational resources you can call on to deal more resiliently with your own.
Level 2. Glitches and Heartaches, Sorrows and Struggles
When you intentionally and continually evoke experiences of positive and prosocial emotions, you strengthen the parts of your brain that allow you to respond to life events with an open heart rather than a contracted one, with resilience and care rather than fear, with willingness and acceptance rather than withdrawal and shutting down. Resilience and well-being are direct, measurable outcomes.
EXERCISE 3-7: Sharing Kindness
Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of that is the beginning of wisdom.
— Theodore Rubin
Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.
— Martin Seligman
1. Invite a friend, an acquaintance, or a friendly coworker to do this exercise with you. Take two minutes each to share a moment of kindness that you have experienced — today, earlier in the week, earlier this year, even back in the third grade. It might be a moment when someone held open the door for you, picked up something you had dropped, smiled as you walked down the hallway, or sent a supportive email when you were going through a hard time — something that registered in your consciousness as support from the universe and gave you just a little lift or steadiness.
2. Then, for two minutes each, describe what it’s like for you to be sharing your story with your partner now, receiving kind attention, resonance, and support — even, or maybe especially, nonverbally. And describe what it’s like for you to hear your partner’s story, empathizing with the feelings and understanding the meaning of it for them.
3. Then pause silently to notice any effects in your body-mind from doing the exercise, such as a sense of buoyancy, comfort, or relaxation.
4. You can do this exercise with variations — recalling moments of courage, patience, or serenity — with great benefit to your brain and to your capacities for resilience. Each time you explore a quality necessary for resilience, you are inscribing that quality more deeply in your neural circuitry.
Sharing positive emotional experiences with others, in a setting of friendliness and mutual care and concern, evokes the neural synchrony Barbara Fredrickson describes in Love 2.0. The shared resonance brings warmheartedness and delight to everyone present. This practice is very self-reinforcing: you learn firsthand how cultivating positive emotions shifts the functioning of the brain.
EXERCISE 3-8: Practicing Gratitude for the Web of Life
At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by the spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.
— attributed to Albert Schweitzer
Cultivating the experience of gratitude — thankfulness for any blessings and good fortune in your life — is one of the easiest ways to bring about the shift in your brain functioning that comes from practicing positive and prosocial emotions. In this exercise, you extend your gratitude beyond the most immediate blessings to the larger web of life — people who keep your life going even though you may never have met them.
1. Take five to ten minutes to pause from the ongoing demands of your life to recall people who have helped you keep going: someone who helped you find your reading glasses when you were distracted by rushing on to the next thing; a friend who sent a supportive email when your nephew wrecked your car (though thankfully not himself); the grocery clerk who promptly swept up the jelly jars your exuberant three-year-old knocked off the shelf; a coworker who took over your duties for the day when a nasty flu simply would not let you get out of bed.
2. Take a moment to focus on any felt sense of thankfulness these recollections evoke. As you let the sensations resonate, notice where in your body you feel any sense of gratitude.
3. Expand the circle of your awareness to gratitude for the people you have not yet met who also help keep your life going. Think of the people who are staffing your local hospital right now, ready to help if you slip on a rug on the way to the bathroom, break a bone, and have to be rushed to the emergency room. You might include people staffing airports, pharmacies, fire stations, and gas stations, and those who test water quality at the municipal reservoir so that when you turn on the kitchen faucet you have safe water to drink. (For years my brother Barry was on call in his hometown to drive the snowplow at 3 AM so that folks could get to work in the morning. I know how deeply he appreciated it when people acknowledged that service.) Practice gratitude for the people growing your food and recycling your garbage, for the entire web of life that supports you.
4. Reflect on this experience of practicing gratitude and empathy for helpful people in your life and for the larger web of life. Sense the feelings your practice evokes. Notice any changes in your own emotions or thoughts about yourself as you focus on cultivating gratitude.
5. If you wish, set the intention to do a three-minute gratitude practice every day for thirty days, focusing your attention on the people, circumstances, and resources that sustain your well-being every day.
Over time, this practice will cause you to experience not only more gratitude but more of other positive emotions as well — joy, tranquility, contentment — enhancing your well-being overall.
Awe is the larger-than-life feeling we experience in the presence of something vast and extraordinary — the glory of a panoramic sunset, a star-studded night sky, a total solar eclipse, or the aurora borealis. It can also be inspired by the novelty, complexity, and harmony of a great creative work, such as the magnificence of the Taj Mahal, and by small things, such as the miraculous blooming of a flower.
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead — his eyes are closed.
— Albert Einstein
Awe is not a luxury. Experiencing awe promotes resilience by challenging our usual ways of seeing the world and our place in it. Awe promotes curiosity and exploration while simultaneously soothing the nervous system. It puts our day-to-day concerns into perspective and broadens our horizons; we feel more interconnected with others.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wildflower;
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
— William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”
1. Immerse yourself in nature — a park, a garden, a forest — and notice everything as if seeing it for the first time. Bring a wide-eyed curiosity to every tree and blade of grass, every bend in the road, every cloud in the sky.
2. Visit a good museum or art gallery, or attend a top-notch concert or play. Let the expressions of others who have experienced awe transmit that experience to you. Notice shifts in your own perspective and sense of possibilities.
3. Review your own past experiences of awe: photographs from hiking in a national park or touring one of the great cities of the world, or the birth of your first child. This review can be especially helpful when the daily grind is getting you down: it reminds you that the world is still a magical place, full of mystery and potential.
4. Find an online video of an inspiring speech or performance or describing a scientific discovery. Watch it with an attitude of openness and readiness to be inspired and uplifted, and to notice and savor the moments of awe when they happen.
Opportunities to experience awe are practically infinite. Experiencing awe creates a new habit to pay attention, shift the functioning of your brain, and nourish your spirit.
EXERCISE 3-10: Taking In the Good
1. Pause for a moment, and notice (attend to) any experiences of kindness, gratitude, or awe that you have experienced today or remember from the past. Maybe your neighbor transported you to and from work for three days while your car was in the shop, or you saw a blue heron rise up from a pond at dusk.
2. Attune to the felt sense of the goodness of this moment — a warmth in your body, a lightness in your heart, a little recognition of “Wow, this is terrific!”
3. Focus your awareness on this felt sense of goodness for ten to thirty seconds. Savor it slowly, allowing your brain the time it needs to really register the experience and store it in long-term memory.
4. Set the intention to evoke this memory five more times today. This repeats the neural firing in your brain, recording the memory so you can recollect it later, making it a resource for your own sense of emotional well-being, and thus strengthening the inner secure base of resilience.
As you experience and reexperience the moment, register that not only are you doing this, you are learning how to do this. You are becoming competent at creating new neural circuitry for resilience.
Level 3. Too Much
Too many crises or catastrophes, all at once or too close together, can trigger a cascade of overwhelming emotions, the experience of “too much.” The deepest existential fears for your future take up permanent residence. Overwhelming emotions can become self-reinforcing, triggering a relentless cycle of panic, rage, guilt, and shame. Sometimes we react by shutting down all feelings and retreating into numbness and depression. When emotions run amok or get buried six feet under, we’re vulnerable to experiencing trauma, not just from the external events but from the derailing of our emotional resilience as well.
Compassion — giving and receiving care and concern in times of pain and suffering — is a balm to a distressed heart. Being listened to compassionately activates the social engagement system in the brain and soothes the nervous system. The reassurance of being part of the human community restores a sense of emotional equilibrium. Even if the external problem or trauma is not resolved, compassion helps us feel we deserve to have it solved.
EXERCISE 3-11: Meeting Your Compassionate Friend
This guided visualization creates a feeling of being listened to, heard, and cared about, which can become a resource for the mind and heart. Whatever upset or distress we are experiencing, we can also experience the tenderness of care.
1. Allow yourself to sit or lie down comfortably, coming into a sense of presence — being aware of being in your own body, in this moment, focusing your awareness on the gentle rhythm of your breathing, coming into a sense of relaxation and peacefulness. Then, when you’re ready, imagine that you are in your own safe place, a comfortable place where you can feel protected, at ease, and content. This may be a room in your own home, a favorite bench in a park or on a hill overlooking the beach, or in a café with a friend. Let yourself settle into the security and comfort of being in your safe place.
2. Then, let yourself know that you are going to receive a visitor, someone older, wiser, and stronger, someone who knows you well and cares about you a great deal. This figure may be someone you already know; it may be someone completely imaginary. It could be simply a sense of warm, loving presence. However this works for you, this figure wants you to be happy, and they want to visit with you for a little while.
3. As you imagine this compassionate friend coming to visit you in your safe place, imagine in detail what they look like, how they’re dressed, and how they move. Imagine what it feels like for you to be in their presence, in their energy field.
4. Imagine how you meet and greet this figure: do you stand up and shake hands, do you hug, do you bow?
5. Then imagine how you will have a conversation with this compassionate friend: sitting face to face, sitting side by side, going for a walk.
6. Begin to share with this compassionate friend some current worry, some upset, or some distress. Imagine what it feels like to share this concern with your compassionate friend. Does your energy shift or change in any way as you begin to share it ?
7. Imagine your friend listening receptively, openly, understandingly. Imagine how you feel being listened to and understood and accepted by this compassionate friend.
8. Imagine any words of acceptance or encouragement or support your compassionate friend might have to offer. If you could hear whatever you need to hear right now, what would those words be? As you imagine listening, sense what you feel as you hear these words.
9. When the conversation is complete and it’s time for your friend to depart, imagine how you say good-bye, knowing that you can visit with this compassionate friend again any time you wish to.
10. When you are in your safe place by yourself again, take a moment to pause, notice, and reflect on your experience. Reflect on any shifts in your experience of yourself or the upset you were working with, knowing that you have tapped into your own deep, intuitive wisdom.
As you evoke your compassionate friend, you are activating your own caregiving system, which calms your nervous system and restores your physiological and emotional equilibrium. As evoking your compassionate friend becomes a reliable habit in your brain, you deepen your sense that you are not alone, which can be very nurturing to your resilience.
EXERCISE 3-12: Priming the Flow of Compassion
Researchers have found it’s far and away easier for people to feel compassion for other people than for themselves. This exercise primes the flow of compassion by extending it to others first, then lets compassion for ourselves slip in almost through the back door.
1. Bring to mind a moment when it was relatively easy for you to feel caring, compassion, concern for someone else’s heartache or sorrow. Your neighbor was struggling to carry heavy bags of groceries up the driveway with a recently broken ankle. Your cousin lost his luggage before he arrived at your house for a weekend visit. Your eight-year-old came home in tears because he was late for the class picnic, and the school bus took off without him. Your cat sprained his hip jumping down from too high a kitchen counter and limped around the house for three days.
2. Imagine this person or pet sitting with you. You might imagine a child or pet sitting in your lap. Notice any warmth, concern, and goodwill arising in your own heart as you sit with them. Feel the empathy, compassion, and love flowing from your body, your heart to theirs.
3. When these feelings are steady enough, shift gears a bit and remember a moment when you were facing pain or trouble of your own. However big or small it was, let yourself feel that pain for a moment.
4. Then return to the feelings of warmth, concern, and goodwill you felt for the other person or pet. Without changing anything, simply redirect this flow of empathy, compassion, and love for them toward yourself. Accept your own care and concern, your own empathy and compassion for your own pain, for whatever has happened or whatever you’ve done or failed to do, at any age or level of your psyche that needs to receive it. You may express this feeling toward yourself in words: “May this suffering pass. . . . May things resolve for me. . . .May I feel less upset over time.”
5. Let yourself take in the feeling of being understood and nurtured. Let the self-compassion soak in and settle in your body. Let your heart relax into a more peaceful sense of understanding, compassion, and forgiveness. Let it rewire your sense of yourself in this very moment.
6. Reflect on your experience of this exercise. Notice any sense of openness or a shift in your approach to your own experiences now. Notice whether this stance opens up possibilities for change and resolution of these difficulties.
As you offer yourself genuine compassion for whatever pain you are experiencing, you shift the functioning of your brain toward more openness and engagement with the world. As you cultivate a more open “approach” stance toward experience, you are creating more response flexibility in your brain, thus creating the conditions for more resilience.
Reconditioning
You’ve learned that all emotions are cues to pay attention because something important is happening. Two of the most difficult emotions to tolerate while waiting for the message are anxiety and shame. The exercises below offer tools for rewiring anxiety into action, for rewiring shame into compassion and self-acceptance, and, finally, for rewiring any negative emotion into its opposite, including the emotional shutdown of depression and despair.
If you discover [within yourself] a very black hole, a thick shadow, be sure there is somewhere in you a great light. It is up to you to know how to use the one to realize the other.
— SRI AURIBINDO
Level 1. Barely a Wobble
Whenever you’re about to venture into something new — moving across the country, getting married again, starting a new job, finally fixing the leaky shower head — you may feel a hesitancy, a withdrawing — a somatic feeling of “Uh-oh! Strange territory! Don’t know if I should be doing this!” — even though, consciously, you might very well want to forge ahead. Your resilience goes on hold.
You 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. You can choose to “feel the fear and do it anyway,” as Susan Jeffers suggests. You can reinterpret the signal anxiety as a sign that you’re about to grow, as the meditation teacher Jack Kornfield suggests. Or you can rewire anxiety into action, as was the practice of Eleanor Roosevelt, doing “one thing every day which scares you.”
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.
— ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Practicing dealing with anxiety as a cue to act retrains your brain to respond differently to the signal and dramatically strengthens your response flexibility and resilience. And when you call to mind the moments when you did manage to rewire your anxiety, you already have a head start on dealing with the next scary thing.
EXERCISE 3-13: Doing One Scary Thing a Day
1. Start small. Start by simply identifying moments of signal anxiety as you experience them throughout the day. Maybe your normal route to work is blocked by an accident, so if you want to get to work on time you’ll have to find another way. A friend suggests trying a new ethnic restaurant or seeing an avant-garde play. You discover that doing your taxes is suddenly more appealing than meeting a potential romantic partner.
2. Choose one moment of signal anxiety as a cue to respond with action rather than stopping or pulling back. Choose to act in a way that actually involves turning your hesitancy into acting on that signal, not just avoiding what’s scary by doing something else less scary but unrelated. (Go on the date rather than doing your taxes.)
3. Notice any shift in your emotions from doing the scary activity. Notice any shift in your view of yourself for having found the courage to act.
4. Do one scary thing every day for a week. Little is fine; often is necessary for the brain to rewire its old responses and for the new behavior to take hold. Notice whether you experience new feelings about the activity or about yourself and whether those feelings take hold.
By repeatedly practicing doing small scary things, you’re laying the groundwork for the brain to choose to respond with action when bigger scary things come along. By continuing the practice, you can gradually take on the truly difficult things: having that serious conversation with your spouse or asking your boss for a raise.
Very often you can find the courage to do something scary because you know you’ve succeeded at doing it before. That feeling of confidence is a fine resource for your resilience. Researchers have found that you can also generate a sense of self-confidence from having done anything well before. The present and past accomplishments don’t have to be remotely similar. It’s the feeling of confidence and trust that carries forward into the current moment. Further, the successful accomplishment doesn’t have to be big or dramatic to create confidence for facing a new challenge. Little and often truly works well here.
1. Identify areas of your life where you would like to have more of a felt sense of “Sure I can!” Maybe you’re contemplating returning to school after thirty years in the workforce, buying into a business franchise, or facing the empty nest when your youngest child moves away.
2. Identify three moments in your life where you actually believed and felt “I can!” — a visceral sense of confidence arising from a previous moment of competence. Reflect not so much on what you did to cope, because that will change with circumstances, as 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 where to find the train station in a strange city, knowing just what to say when your child experienced a disappointment.
3. For now, don’t worry at all about the size of the success; focus on the genuine sense of mastery. How does that sense of mastery feel in your body now as you remember it? Take in the good of “I did; I can” as a body-based resource.
4. Experiment with bringing that visceral sense of “I did; I can” into the present moment and applying it to the challenges for which you are seeking confidence now.
You’re choosing to bring a sense of trust and mastery forward into a realm where you want to feel it now. Even the slightest success at doing this reconditions your brain for greater resilience.
Level 2. Glitches and Heartaches, Sorrows and Struggles
Shame is one of the most powerful emotional threats to your resilience and well-being. Practices of mindfulness and compassion, two of the most powerful agents of brain change, are among the most effective tools you can use to shift and heal from shame.
Mindfulness brings awareness and acceptance to whatever is happening right now that you wish with all your heart wasn’t happening. Self-compassion brings care and concern for yourself as the one experiencing it. When that experience is a shaming one, you may wish you weren’t reacting the way you are, even while you can’t seem to change your reaction. The acceptance and concern of mindful self-compassion help you hold and shift the entire experience of shame to something more tolerable, more workable.
EXERCISE 3-15: Giving Yourself a Self-Compassion Break
At times when any emotional upset or distress is still reasonably manageable, taking a self-compassion break helps create and strengthen the neural circuits that can steady you when things are really tough.
1. Any moment you notice (by attending and attuning) a surge of a difficult emotion — boredom, contempt, or remorse — pause and put your hand on your heart. This gesture activates the release of oxytocin, the hormone of safety and trust.
2. Empathize with your experience. Say to yourself, “This is upsetting,” “This is hard,” “This is scary,” “This is painful,” or “Ouch! This hurts,” to acknowledge and care about yourself as someone experiencing distress.
3. Repeat these phrases to yourself, or substitute words that work better for you:
May I be kind to myself in this moment.
May I accept this moment exactly as it is.
May I accept myself exactly as I am in this moment.
May I give myself all the compassion I need.
4. Continue repeating the phrases until you can feel your compassion, kindness, and care for yourself becoming stronger than the original negative emotion.
5. Pause and reflect on your experience. Notice whether any possibilities of wise action arise.
6. I often practice an expanded variation of the traditional mindful self-compassion phrases:
May I be kind to myself in this moment, in any moment, in every moment.
May I accept this moment exactly as it is, any moment, every moment.
May I accept myself exactly as I am in this moment, in any moment, in every moment.
May I give myself all the compassion and courageous action that I need.
This variation, like the traditional self-compassion break, is completely portable: it’s effective anywhere, anytime. And this variation helps extend the practice of mindful self-compassion into an ongoing way of being.
EXERCISE 3-16: Recovering from a Shame Attack
1. The instant you recognize the disturbance in the force field that is the signal of distress or upset, place your hand on your heart and begin to say the mindful self-compassion phrases to yourself: “May I be kind to myself in this moment.” Interrupt your automatic reactions to any experiences of shame you might be automatically experiencing for the reactions you are having.
2. Take a few deep, relaxing breaths. Attune to your emotional experiences as they arise, exactly as they are in this moment. Gently begin to label them: “This is fear.” “This is my shame about being a scared ninny.” “This is my anger.” “This is my shame about going ballistic (again!).” “This is my envy; this is my shame about still being vulnerable to envy after all these years.”
3. Allow any feelings to be there, just as they are, held in your kind, compassionate awareness.
4. Evoke a sense of shared humanity to help hold these feelings. “I’m a human being. These feelings are perfectly normal human feelings. I’m not the only person on the planet who has ever felt this way. Probably millions of other people are feeling this way, too, right now. I’m not alone in having these feelings. I don’t have to feel alone because I am having these feelings. I’m a work in progress, and I’m doing the best I can.”
5. See if you can locate a place in your body where you feel the shame most strongly. In your jaw? In your chest? In your belly? Focus your attention kindly, tenderly on that spot.
6. Say the mindful self-compassion phrases to this particular spot. “May I be kind to you in this moment. May I accept you exactly as you are in this moment. May I give you, and myself, all the compassion we need.”
7. Spend as much time as you need offering compassion to this feeling of shame, and to yourself for experiencing this shame, until it softens and dissolves. Focus on accepting yourself in this moment exactly as you are.
We don’t necessarily practice mindful self-compassion to feel better, though the practice may have that effect over time. We do it so that our brain functions better, with less contraction, more openness, less reactivity, more receptivity. We do better when our brains are more open to learning and to the big picture. That openness helps us respond to whatever is happening with more flexibility and wiser choices.
EXERCISE 3-17: Cultivating Compassion with Equanimity
“Empathy fatigue” is a very real concern among health care professionals and family caregivers. People who care for others can burn out, becoming depleted by the emotional overload.
Neuroscientists have discovered that the brain processes compassion in different parts of the brain than it does empathy. When you attune to other people’s emotions (or experience them through emotional contagion) and take them on, take them in, and take them home with you, without a strong enough theory of mind to distinguish the other person’s experience from your own, you can experience what scientists now call empathy fatigue. Compassion activates the sensory motor cortex of the brain as well as other structures, motivating you to move, to act on someone’s behalf. Movement, which activates the sympathetic branch of the nervous system, is energizing and actually acts as a buffer against the depletion of the overactivation of the parasympathetic branch.
This guided visualization is a practice in being with another person’s emotional pain, exactly as it is, using compassion for both of you while maintaining your own emotional equilibrium.
COMPASSION
Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don’t want it. What seems conceit,
bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign
of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on
down there where the spirit meets the bone.
— Miller Williams, The Way We Touch: Poems
1. Sit comfortably, closing your eyes, and take a few deep, relaxing breaths. Allow yourself to feel the sensations of breathing in and breathing out. Notice how your breath nourishes your body as you inhale and soothes your body as you exhale.
2. Let your breathing find its own natural rhythm. Continue feeling the sensations of breathing in and breathing out. If you like, place your hand over your heart or any other place on your body where touch feels soothing, as a reminder to bring not just awareness but loving awareness to your experience, and to yourself.
3. If you become aware of any stress you are carrying in your body, inhale fully and deeply, drawing compassion inside your body and filling every cell in your body with compassion. Let yourself be soothed by inhaling deeply, and by giving yourself the compassion you need when you experience discomfort.
4. Now focus your attention on your in-breath, letting yourself enjoy the sensations of breathing in, one breath after another, noticing how your in-breath nourishes every cell in your body, and then releasing your breath.
5. If you like, you can also carry a word or phrase on each in-breath, such as nourishing, loving, compassion and care, deep ease, or inner peace. Give yourself whatever you need in this moment. You can also imagine inhaling warmth or light — whatever works for you.
6. Now, bring to mind someone to whom you would like to send warmth, kindness, care, and goodwill, either someone you love or someone who is struggling and needs compassion. Visualize that person clearly in your mind.
7. Shift your focus now to your out-breath. Feel your body breathe out, and send warmth, kindness, care, and goodwill to this person with each exhalation. If you like, you can add a kind word or phrase with each out-breath — soothing, or ease, or an image of caring and compassion.
8. Now, feel your body breathe both in and out — breathing in for yourself and breathing out for another. Repeat a phrase like “Nourishing for me; nourishing for you,” “Soothing for me; soothing for you,” or whatever words work for you. Eventually, you can simply repeat, “One for me; one for you.” Feel the breath of kindness flowing in and flowing out.
9. As you maintain that rhythm, let these words gently roll through your mind:
Everyone is on his or her own life journey.
I am not the cause of this person’s suffering,
Nor is it entirely within my power to make it go away,
Even if I wish I could.
Moments like this are difficult to bear,
Yet I may still try to help if I can.
Still breathing in for yourself and breathing out for another, feel the breath of kindness flowing in, flowing out.
10. You can focus a little more on yourself, or a little more on the other person — whatever you need. Repeat the phrases again.
11. Gently bring your awareness back to breathing in and out, in this moment, in this place. When you are ready, open your eyes.
12. Reflect on your experience. Notice any shifts in your feelings for yourself or for the other person.
Attuning to the feelings of another person in distress or emotional pain can make you vulnerable to emotional contagion and empathy fatigue. You want to stay engaged and respond skillfully and compassionately to other people’s difficulties. This exercise allows you to use your theory of mind to take care of yourself at the same time.
Level 3. Too Much
When the pains and pressures of life events really are too much, and when the emotions that might guide you to wise action are too chaotic to be of any help, or you are too mired in depression or despair to act at all, you want to be able to shift those emotions into something more tolerable, more resilient. The exercises below are among the most powerful in the book in their capacity to rewire your brain circuitry instantly and permanently. As always, practice little and often, and practice with awareness, curiosity, and self-care.
EXERCISE 3-18: Rewiring a Negative Emotion through Movement
You can use this tool to shift any difficult negative emotion — anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and even nuance emotions such as resentment and disappointment. Here I suggest you practice with shame to experience a felt sense of recovering your emotional equilibrium and your inner secure base of well-being.
1. Stand up in a place where you have space to move. Settle into a posture of feeling comfortable and at ease in your body.
2. Let your body move into a posture that embodies or expresses shame. You might stand with head bent forward, chest collapsed, in a shrinking stance. Let yourself feel just enough shame in this posture that you can work with it to rewire it, but not so much that you become overwhelmed. This may take some experimentation to find the Goldilocks spot of just enough to feel, deal, and heal.
3. Remain in this posture for thirty seconds or so, modifying it and returning again as you need to stay regulated.
4. Now, without thinking at all, let your body move into a posture that feels the opposite of the emotion you’re examining. You don’t even have to know what this posture is or what to call it. Just let your body find its way — perhaps standing up straighter and taller, perhaps lifting your head higher, perhaps raising your arms over your head. Stay in this posture for thirty seconds or so, slightly longer than the original shame position.
5. Let your body return to the original posture. Hold that posture for twenty seconds or so, noticing any shifts in your inner feelings.
6. Let your body return to the second, opposite posture. Hold that posture again for thirty seconds or so, longer than the original posture.
7. Let your body find a posture that is somewhere in between the original posture and the second posture. Hold this intermediate posture for thirty seconds.
8. Pause and reflect on your experience of the entire exercise, noticing any shifts in your inner feelings, labeling any of the three postures you have experienced if that’s helpful to you. You may be surprised at how your higher brain now labels those experiences.
This exercise helps you shift from any problematic emotional experience to a more grounded one, creating a more secure base for your resilience.
Power posing is your self-directed neuroplasticity in action.
1. Before going into any situation that might evoke feelings of anxiety or shame — a job interview, a business meeting, a court hearing, a tax audit, a confrontation over serious misbehavior by a family member — find a quiet, private place where you can practice the power pose for at least five minutes. Stand tall and erect, feet about hip width apart, chest lifted and head held high, your arms either akimbo (like Superman or Wonder Woman) or held high over your head (the Toyota feeling, the mountain pose of yoga).
2. Let yourself feel strength and energy in your body. Experiment with different poses to learn what allows you to experience these feelings most reliably.
3. Practice embodying the difficult feelings that might derail your resilience, too. Let your body experience the anxiety or shame or anger you might actually be feeling. Then return to your power pose.
4. Practice your power pose in the moments before you enter your challenging situation, and then walk mindfully into that situation with more inner strength and energy.
With frequent practice, your power pose becomes a natural way to develop and tap into your inner strength, courage, and resilience.
EXERCISE 3-20: Creating a Wished-For Outcome
Sometimes you need to sit with your feelings and offer yourself compassion for feeling them. You can also use reconditioning to rewire challenging feelings that you still carry from difficult experiences in the past. This exercise is a powerful tool for reconditioning any feelings of regret, guilt, or shame about past events, any less-than-intelligent reactions or less-than-resilient coping. This exercise does not change what happened, but it does change your relationship to what happened. It doesn’t rewrite history, but it does rewire the brain.
Start with one small memory, so that your brain has a chance to succeed at reconditioning it and you develop a sense of competence in using this tool.
1. Find a place and time where you can sit uninterrupted for ten to fifteen minutes. Come into a sense of presence, knowing that you are in your body, in this moment, in this place. Let yourself feel energy and strength in your body, without any sense of strain.
2. Close your eyes and take three deep, relaxing breaths. Place your hand on your heart for a few moments to evoke a sense of safety, anchoring yourself in your emotional equilibrium and well-being. Bring a sense of openness, kindness, and curiosity to your experience.
3. When you are ready, bring to mind one small memory of a moment when an interaction between you and another person went awry and you wound up feeling shame, guilt, or regret about yourself or your behavior. Stay anchored in your own mindful self-compassion — your awareness and your acceptance of yourself — as you evoke this memory.
4. Start recalling all the details of this interaction: where you were, who you were with, what you said, what they said. Take your time remembering, until the feeling from that event is fully evoked. This recollection activates all the neural circuitry involved in recording the original experience.
5. See if you can locate that visceral, felt sense of the experience somewhere in your body now. Try to locate it clearly enough to feel it so that you can work with it but not so strongly that you get overwhelmed by it now.
6. Notice any negative thoughts you may have about yourself now because of what you experienced then. Make the evocation of this negative experience as vivid as you can: behaviors, words, feelings, body sensations, thoughts. You’re “lighting up” the entire memory so it can be rewired.
7. Set the negative memory aside for the moment. Now you’ll begin to create the positive resource that you will juxtapose with this negative memory to do the rewiring.
8. Begin by imagining a different, more satisfactory ending to the negative scenario, even if this wished-for ending could never have happened in real life. Remember, whatever you can imagine is real to your brain. You’ll be using this imaginary outcome to rewire the brain.
9. Imagine something different you might have said during the scenario. Imagine something different the other person might have said. Again, it doesn’t matter if this conversation could never have happened in real life. Let your brain do its own imagining and its own rewiring.
10. Imagine something different you might have done. Imagine the other person doing something differently, even if that never could have happened in real life. You can even imagine someone who wasn’t there at the time coming in and doing something helpful. Let your imagination create a more satisfying resolution of the entire event.
11. Bring this scenario to its new, wished-for conclusion. And now, notice how you feel as you imagine this ending. Notice what emotions you feel; notice where you feel those emotions in your body. Notice the visceral, felt sense of this new ending. Notice any new, more positive thoughts you have about yourself. Let these feelings, bodily sensations, and thoughts about yourself now be as vivid in your imagination as possible in order to strengthen this new experience of yourself.
12. Now begin toggling back and forth between the feelings of this new outcome and the feelings of the original event or the feelings of remembering that event now.
13. Gently recall the original, negative feelings. Touch them lightly. Then let those feelings go, and return to feeling strongly the new, more positive feelings of the wished-for ending. Rest in the new positive for a moment. Then recall the negative feelings again, just lightly; notice any shift in those feelings. Let them go again, and return to the newer, more positive feelings. Recall the negative feelings again one more time, then let them go. Rest completely in the new feelings of the new ending.
14. Take a moment to reflect on your experience of the entire exercise, noticing shifts in your view and experience of yourself now.
With frequent practice of this exercise, you will notice that the original, negative feelings about yourself are less intense, and the new, positive feelings about yourself feel more real. Repeat the exercise as many times as you need to.
This is not about being disloyal to who you were at the time of the event or dismissing what you felt at the time. It’s about rewiring your feelings about yourself for having had those feelings, being able to feel differently about yourself now about what happened then.
You can use this exercise again and again with memories of the same interaction or other interactions with this same person, or similar interactions with other people. You don’t have to rewire all 4,957 interactions that have ever gone awry in your life. Eventually your brain learns to generalize the processing of similar difficult emotions. You can use tools like this to work intelligently with any overwhelming emotion. You are learning that you can cope resiliently with all the emotional ups and downs of your life.
Deconditioning
This chapter has presented many tools of focused processing to help you attend to and make sense of your emotions, to manage and rewire difficult negative emotions, and to use positive emotions to shift the functioning of your brain and to shift your moods and states of being. You can continue using those tools whenever necessary, but now we’re going to look at a different process of brain change: deconditioning.
With deconditioning, you temporarily suspend all that (wise) effort. You use the spaciousness of the defocused default network mode to let your emotions “dissolve” into a peaceful, easy tranquility — the home base of emotional well-being that all of these practices return us to.
Level 1. Barely a Wobble
You may have experienced moments of well-being when you feel centered, grounded, at peace, and at ease. These result from the positive activation of our parasympathetic nervous system when there is no danger. We are calm and relaxed, able to REST — relax and enter into safety and trust. “God’s in his heaven; all’s right with the [inner] world.” You can deliberately evoke that sense of well-being with the exercise below and, with practice, sustain it over time.
EXERCISE 3-21: Resting in Well-Being
1. Lie down on a bed, a couch, the floor, or the ground, somewhere you feel comfortable and safe and won’t be interrupted for five minutes. Slowly let your body relax. Let the weight of your body drop, feeling supported by the surface beneath you. You don’t have to “carry” yourself for the moment.
2. Breathe slowly, gently, and deeply, taking slightly longer on the exhalations. Breathe in a sense of ease, calm, and tranquility. Breathe out, one by one, all the worries, thoughts, and feelings you might still be carrying. Breathe in and breathe out, as many times as you need to.
3. Notice a spaciousness inside your body, even inside your skull. Feel the space between any lingering tension, any lingering thoughts, any lingering feelings, like the space between notes of music. Notice the ease, the calm of the spaciousness.
4. Begin to gently focus your awareness on the presence of the spaciousness more; notice the absence, the emptiness around the feelings, thoughts, and tensions. Rest in the presence of this spaciousness for a few moments.
5. Name this feeling of spaciousness to help you evoke it later. Call it peacefulness, tranquility, calm, ease, or well-being — whatever works for you.
6. Return to your focused awareness and reflect on your experience of this exercise.
We often notice the storms of emotions in our lives, but we don’t always pay attention to the blue sky of well-being they are blowing through. Cultivating and deepening an awareness of that background equilibrium is a way of strengthening your resilience. The spaciousness allows your brain to hold bigger, more challenging, more difficult emotions as you move through your life.
Level 2. Glitches and Heartaches, Sorrows and Struggles
When my client Sean was going through a particularly tough time, waking up every morning in a state of existential panic, I suggested he set the intention to not get out of bed in the morning until he could bring his mind and body to a state of calm and come into the spaciousness of his emotional well-being. A few weeks later, when Sean came in to report his progress with this practice, he acknowledged that he had had to practice self-empathy and self-compassion, too, to keep going in the practice. At first, his body-brain needed more than an hour to come to the state of ease and emotional equilibrium from which he wanted to launch his day. But within a week, he was able to achieve that state of calm in forty minutes; soon he was able to reduce the time to twenty minutes, then five minutes, then just a few breaths. What a grand day it was when he woke up already in that state of calm. With practice, he learned that he could reliably sustain it.
EXERCISE 3-22: Holding Turbulent Emotions in the Equilibrium of Well-Being
Here’s a variation of Sean’s practice that can help you recover your well-being when difficult emotions arise.
1. First evoke a sense of your own emotional well-being as best as you can. Steady yourself in the experience of inner calm, ease, and tranquility.
2. Then practice deliberately evoking a (small!) feeling of anger, sadness, or fear — enough to recognize it, but not enough to be overwhelmed by it.
3. Let the spacious sense of well-being contain whatever feeling you have evoked, and notice that it can. The noticing helps deepen your trust in this process. The sense of well-being is larger than whatever feeling has come up.
4. Let the smaller, difficult feeling dissolve again, and simply REST in your emotional well-being.
5. Repeat this exercise as many times as necessary to deepen your trust in your own equilibrium as a resource for your resilience.
Over time, you can learn to wake up in and abide in a sense of well-being as you move through your day, always able to return to it whenever you wobble. Your prefrontal cortex is still on duty, too, to manage emotions as they arise. You can toggle back and forth between focused and defocused processing as needed to maintain your emotional equilibrium.
Chapter 2 introduced you to many tools for managing the revving up and shutting down of your nervous system and returning to a physiological equilibrium from which you could discern options and make wise choices. This chapter, too, has presented many tools to manage emotional roller coasters — the many flavors of mad, bad, sad, and glad so common in human experience — and return to an emotional equilibrium of well-being from which you can face challenges and be resilient in dealing with them.
When you’re being challenged by a flood of difficult emotions, and the tools you have practiced so far don’t seem to be working, simply stop and rest. Giving yourself the gift of rest is a form of self-compassion. Stop trying. Take refuge. Let yourself be held, soothed, and comforted by someone else, at least until you can recover your own resources to manage your emotions yourself.
1. When the feelings flooding through you seem to be more than you can handle at the moment, take time to notice what is happening. Simply noticing your experience pulls your higher brain back online a bit.
2. Find refuge in the presence of someone who is securely anchored in their own emotional well-being, who can handle being with you without wobbling themselves, and who can offer you compassion with equanimity. This can be a real person who is physically present; it can be someone you can remember or imagine being with; or it can be a resource from your imagination, like your compassionate friend (see exercise 3-11).
3. You don’t have to do anything here except be with your experience and receive the comfort of someone else. Let the calming and compassionate presence, even an imagined one, calm you.
4. Notice the calming; notice the return to your own equilibrium, or at least to the memory that this equilibrium is available to you. With practice and repetition, you’ll get there.
Emotional contagion can work in a positive direction as well as a negative one. Experiencing someone else’s emotional well-being can help you recover your own.
This chapter has introduced many tools to help you ride the waves of your own emotions and manage the effect on you of other people’s emotions, guiding you toward more resilient, flexible, skillful responses and behaviors.
As you master the use of positive emotions like compassion and gratitude to shift the functioning of your brain out of contraction and reactivity into openness and receptivity, and as you deepen your skills in practices of mindful empathy and theory of mind, you’re strengthening the stable neural circuits you need to return to your emotional equilibrium and well-being. And you are learning to trust that you can.
Working these muscles of your emotional intelligence will help you grow into a more robust relational intelligence as well.