Coping with Anything, Anything at All
The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.
— BERNARD M. BARUCH
In this book, you have been learning to grow by strengthening your response flexibility — rewiring your brain step by step, little and often, practicing using a variety of tools to meet challenges to your resilience that range from barely a wobble to just too much.
In the preceding chapters, I have dealt with specific intelligences — somatic, emotional, relational (both intra- and interpersonal), and reflective — as though they were separate and distinct. In truth, of course, each intelligence works with all of the others. The prefrontal cortex, which you have been learning to strengthen, integrates the functioning of all of these intelligences. And when your intelligences are working well together and integrated in their functioning, you function well, too.
This chapter offers tools for integrating all of your intelligences so that your base of resilience becomes increasingly steady and reliable. You will be able to deal with increasingly challenging difficulties more quickly and effectively.
Here’s a story of my own to illustrate what I mean by integration. I relearned these lessons about resilience just a few weeks before I sat down to write this chapter.
I had traveled to the Bahamas to teach some workshops at the Sivananda Ashram Yoga Retreat Center. It was already nighttime and dark when I arrived, and I was tired. While stepping from the dock into the boat that would take me across the bay to the ashram, I misstepped and plunged right into the water. My first reaction as I popped up to the surface and grabbed the edge of the boat was, “I’m alive! I’m alive.”
Within a second, however, I realized that my computer was in my backpack, and my backpack was still on my back. I knew there was no chance of modern electronics surviving even a brief dunking in ocean water. My computer was fritzed — and my cell phone, too.
Just one second later — yes, it really did happen that fast — I found myself thinking about the wildfires that had recently devastated a wide area just forty miles north of where I live — resulting in a hundred thousand people evacuated and five thousand homes and businesses burned to the ground. “Put this in perspective, Linda — this is a computer and your data. You’re alive; you get to deal.”
By the time the Sivananda staff pulled me back into the boat and we headed to the ashram, we were all laughing. I joked that it was so hot in the Bahamas, I just couldn’t wait to get into the water!
Sivananda is a spiritual community dedicated to service, peace, and love — a community of shared humanity reminding me of my community of friends back home who would have been supportive, too, if they had known. As soon as we arrived at the ashram, residents were offering me replacement computers and phones. But instead I chose to stay unplugged. For the four days of my visit, I stayed off the digital devices and focused instead on working with the practices I’ve been sharing here, to muster my resilience and capacity to cope.
Though I later noted a lot of practical lessons for next time (watch your step getting into any boat, put all the luggage in the boat before you get in; wrap everything electronic in watertight plastic; store computer and cell phone in separate places, much as parents of young children sometimes choose to fly on separate flights in case one plane crashes), in those first few moments of adjusting to what had happened, I very deliberately chose to focus on self-compassion and gratitude rather than shame or blame. I was alive; I was getting to deal with the problem. And I noticed that I was making that wise choice.
Twenty minutes after my dunking, eating dinner in dry clothes on dry land with the staff who had pulled me into the boat, I experienced a moment of awe. Of course at some level I knew that the resilience training I’d been teaching all of these years was valuable. I had experienced its benefits myself many times; I had seen how it helped many of my clients and workshop participants. But now I experienced a heightened awareness that, indeed, resilience can be strengthened. “I’m not reacting in the ways I would have many years ago. I’m doing way better than I even would have expected, and it’s because I’ve practiced — self-compassion, not shaming or blaming, gratitude, not catastrophizing. I’m living my resilience right now.”
Still, I’m human, and I felt a fair amount of anxiety about how I would manage my busy life when I returned home the following week. How would I finish the last two chapters of this book, or triage and respond to the two hundred emails a day that I’d missed? How long would it take to order a new computer and get it up and running? Did I really have all my files on my back-up drive at home? Could my email contacts and internet passwords be reconstructed?
What to do with all those worries? I made an elaborate, step-by-step list of everything I could do starting at 7:30 the morning after I got home. And then I parked all of my worries there. I chose not to focus any longer on what I couldn’t yet do anything about.
I slept well that first night. And when the anxiety resurfaced, I parked it again in the list of tasks I had mentally rehearsed (prewired) for the following week. For the next three days, I focused on teaching my four workshops: Resilience, Mindfulness and Self-Compassion, Brain Care as Self-Care, and Post-traumatic Growth. How synchronous. It was a skillful distraction, and I knew it. I had wanted to unplug while at the ashram anyway, and frankly, no one missed the PowerPoint slides. At breakfast one morning, the head swami remarked, “Life made this decision to unplug for you.”
Yes. I could choose to deepen into experiences of just being, recognize my overall well-being, and use that baseline equanimity to help me cope.
Because the weather forecast had been for pretty solid rain, I had brought several work projects with me in case I was indoors a lot. (In fact, it was delightfully sunny.) Without my computer, I took a work bypass, too, giving my mind something to focus on other than my computer disaster. I read three books by fellow clinicians. When do I ever take the time to read three books? I also continued writing — in longhand! Being creative in these ways was both grounding and comforting. I also found teaching and connecting with so many earnest seekers on the path very reassuring. And I had the chance to savor my friend Doug von Koss’s Gratitude Goulash: Poems and Stuff — the best medicine possible.
Eventually the bruises from my stumble emerged and I came down with a cold, but I also swam in the Caribbean and had wonderful conversations with the swamis at dinner.
I arrived home late on a Monday evening. At 7:30 on Tuesday morning, I was at North Bay Computers, a company with which I have a wonderful working relationship, intentionally nurtured over ten years. Within three hours — the time it took to do laundry and retrieve the cats from the vet — they had loaded my email and Microsoft Word onto a loaner computer; they confirmed that my book files were on my flash drive (also dunked in the Caribbean but wrapped in plastic) and uploaded them onto the loaner; and confirmed that my backup drive, which had been safe at home, did indeed have the latest data and would be uploaded to the new computer.
From all of this I learned again, in a deeply visceral way, that resilience is learnable and recoverable. It was the integration of many different practices over time that allowed me to have as much response flexibility as I did. These practices included:
• My own mindful awareness — knowing what I was experiencing and tracking shifts in those experiences, both outer and inner, moment by moment
• Prioritizing calming my nervous system (through exercises like hand on the heart, feeling the soles of my feet) so that I could function and discern options
• Choosing to acknowledge and shift my inner reactions as skillfully as I could by:
• consciously practicing my self-compassion phrases over and over to avoid sinking into feeling badly, pitying myself, or devaluing myself for my mistake
• focusing on everything there was to still be grateful for — and there was more than enough
• refusing to catastrophize (that was a minor miracle)
• dealing with my anxiety about the future by parking it in the future and practicing trusting that future
• opening to a sense of vast being and the benevolence of the universe (residing in a spiritual community for four days certainly encouraged that)
• Claiming my own resilience (which became a source of resilience itself: “I’m okay; I’m doing okay; things will work out eventually”)
• Reaching out to people for help — and by accepting the help that was so generously given, I did not feel alone in my coping. The support evoked a deep sense of safety no matter how things might turn out.
• Learning that I was learning: figuring out what to do differently next time and what to do differently right now
My mini-catastrophe was by no means the worst-case scenario. The struggles and heartache of losing a loved one, losing one’s health, losing one’s job or home, or losing a sense of direction or purpose are far more challenging to our resilience. My point here is that the integration of the tools offered in this book can prepare you to meet and recover even from those catastrophes.
Practices that Lead to Post-Traumatic Growth
Researchers in the emerging field of post-traumatic growth suggest five practices that foster that integration and that predict a person’s success at bouncing forward: dealing with, healing from, and moving beyond any potentially traumatizing event into new strengths for coping, new learning, new possibilities for discovery and growth, deeper connections with people and community, and a deeper sense of meaning and purpose for living.
You have already been learning tools to engage in these practices.
1. Accepting Reality
Whatever has happened, it’s not fair. It never should have happened, but it did. The first step, of accepting what happened, draws on all the practices of mindful awareness and compassionate self-acceptance, both of the event and of our perceptions and reactions to the event. “I’m alive! I get to deal with this.”
2. Turning to Other People
When you feel vulnerable, other people — in person, in memory, in imagination — can provide safe havens where you don’t have to keep it together or take care of anyone else. This gives you a respite until you can deploy the tools you have practiced using to return to your inner equilibrium and begin healing and dealing.
People can also be resources, providing support in the form of encouragement, practical help, and safety nets. People can help you work around and work through whatever difficulty you’re facing for however long it takes.
3. Drawing On the Positive and Seeing Possibilities
The direct, measurable outcome of practicing gratitude, kindness, compassion, love, joy, tranquility, and contentment is resilience: openness to the big picture and optimism about the future. The direct, measurable outcome of choosing to approach life’s challenges from a growth mindset — seeking to learn and trusting that you can learn — is resilience. “Maintain a positive outlook” and “See the glass half full rather than half empty” are not clichés. They are commonsense wisdom backed by science.
4. Learning the Lessons
As soon as you begin to “turn a regrettable moment into a teachable moment,” as Jonah Lehrer says, the brain begins to shift how it is perceiving and responding to the event. Finding the silver lining, finding the gift in the mistake, is considered to be the turning point in the process of post-traumatic growth. Learning the lessons in the event is fundamentally useful, not just for coping better in the future but for coping better right now.
5. Creating a Coherent Narrative of the Event
You practiced using this tool in exercise 6-15. By placing a previously or potentially traumatizing event in the larger context of your life, you create a more vivid sense of past, present, and future. (The sense of continuity of self over time is one of the integrative functions of the prefrontal cortex.) You can begin to find a deeper sense of meaning and purpose for your life, not just in spite of the event but often because of the event. Your resilience begins to generate a genuine sense of thriving and flourishing.
When you can pull the practices in this book together — mindfully practicing gratitude while walking in nature with a friend, calling on your compassionate friend to soothe the distress of any inner part — your resilience becomes almost unshakeable. You will be equipped to cope with anything and everything, and to trust that you can cope.
New Conditioning
You are integrating circuits of response flexibility, the brain’s base of your resilience, so that the resilience is ready when you need it, for any level of challenge.
Level 1. Barely a Wobble
You’re creating “recipes” for practices that draw on your multiple intelligences simultaneously, creating the conditions that enable them to create more integrated circuitry in your brain.
EXERCISE 7-1: Recipes for Integration
To encourage the integration, the examples here are presented as one flow of experience rather than set out step by step:
1. Walk with a friend in some beautiful natural landscape. Notice the calming of your nervous system from being in nature — the sensations of walking on earth or grass, the smells of the fresh air, the sounds of trees rustling in the wind or dogs barking as you pass. Savor the resonance and synchrony of connecting with your friend — sharing ideas, feelings, energy. Take five minutes each to share what you are grateful for in your lives. Include any moments of appreciation for the ease of connection between you, any moments of awe inspired by the landscape you are walking through, any moments of opening to a larger view of your lives. Take a few minutes to reflect on your entire experience, including the richness of your experience when all your intelligences work together. This “recipe” becomes an inner resource. Trust that you can create these moments of integration in your brain many times over.
2. When you notice that you’re feeling out of alignment or off balance in some way, try to identify what inner part might need attention, soothing, and reassurance. Acknowledge this inner part and the legitimacy of its distress or discomfort. In your imagination, invite this inner part to visit with your compassionate friend (in your safe place, if you wish). Let a dialogue unfold between your distressed inner part and your compassionate friend, who listens receptively and empathically. Ask your inner part to reflect on its experience. Writing as your inner part, journal about the experience, noticing any insights or “aha!” moments that emerge.
3. Plan your own recipes for integration, using tools that draw on at least three different intelligences. Try out your recipes. Let them evolve based on your experience.
As you practice integrating many tools into a recipe, you’re creating and strengthening circuitry in your brain to do that integration. You’re engaging with and responding to experience in more complex ways. Becoming comfortable with that complexity becomes part of your base of resilience.
Level 2. Glitches and Heartaches, Sorrows and Struggles
Jon Kabat-Zinn, the developer of mindfulness-based stress reduction, describes the need to strengthen our resilience this way:
We all accept that no one controls the weather. Good sailors learn to read it carefully and respect its power. They will avoid storms if possible, but when caught in one, they know when to take down the sails, batten down the hatches, drop anchor and ride things out, controlling what is controllable and letting go the rest. Training, practice, and a lot of firsthand experience in all sorts of weather are required to develop such skills so that they work for you when you need them. Developing skill in facing and effectively handling the various “weather conditions” in your life is what we mean by the art of conscious living.
EXERCISE 7-2: Expect the Unexpected
You can train for the unexpected so that your skills of resilience are there when you need them. This entails not just making a checklist for what to do but practicing ahead of time. The drill wires the behavior into your neural circuitry and installs the procedural learning of what to do into your body memory. You don’t have to think to remember. You can act quickly, automatically, following the patterns you have installed. You can train the integrative circuits of your intelligences in the same way.
1. Identify one scenario where you might have to act quickly in response to a potential catastrophe. Start small. The car won’t start and you have to drop the kids off at school, meet a client, or pick your sister up at the train station in fifteen minutes. Do you have jumper cables in the trunk? A taxicab phone number stored in your phone? A friendly relationship with a retired neighbor whose car you can borrow? Again, this is not just a checklist. You rehearse the skills ahead of time and prepare your safety nets and resources. Practice using the jumper cables, overcoming any anxiety about that. Look up the cab company number. Rehearse asking your neighbor if you can borrow the car. Once you rehearse the behaviors, you can see yourself doing them when you need to, and you can remember how to act without having to think about it.
2. Identify a more challenging scenario. Say your spouse falls over on a toy left on the stairs. You hear something crack. You rehearse ahead of time your practices to calm your nervous system. You rehearse what you’ll say when you call the ambulance, your neighbor, the network of resources you have cultivated ahead of time. You rehearse remembering your wallet or purse and any ID you need for a trip to the emergency room.
Again, you can’t control everything. If an accident occurs, there will still be much uncertainty, but preparing to the extent that you can becomes part of your resilience.
3. Identify another more difficult situation: a sudden workplace downsizing, a more serious medical emergency, a natural disaster. It’s not morbid; it’s prudent to anticipate what you can, to see yourself acting competently so that you can trust your resilience.
Creating external safety nets of resources — logistical, financial, relational — is part of strengthening your resilience. Preparing a safety net in the brain, in your procedural memory, is just as essential. Rehearsing for the many “weather conditions” of life is skillful resilience building.
Level 3. Too Much
When you feel like you’re in a full-blown hurricane, you can still find ways to respond resiliently, drawing on all your intelligences to keep your head above water.
EXERCISE 7-3: At Least I Can Still . . .
1. Identify one movement your body can still do — wake up, get up, walk, eat, pee and poop (no joke — these are signs of essential basic functioning), see, hear, distinguish warm from cold, remember how to make a pot of coffee. Little and slow, maybe, but at least you can.
2. Then add capacities from your emotional intelligence. If you get annoyed at your neighbor’s child crying in the middle of the night and know that you’re annoyed, it’s a sign that you’re alive. If you can remember that the child has an ear infection and is probably more miserable than you are, you’re stretching your muscles of mindful empathy. That’s a sign that you are more than alive — you are engaged. If you can evoke compassion for everyone around who’s losing sleep tonight, you’re activating your coping skills, opening to another point of view.
3. Then add capacities from your relational intelligence, both within yourself and with others. You could continue with the example above. The compassion evoked by your neighbor’s sick child at least reminds you of your shared humanity. You’re not the only person on the planet losing sleep tonight for one reason or another; you’re not alone in that suffering. There might be other examples, too: at least you’re not beating yourself up for feeling annoyed; at least you find a smidgen of forgiveness for the child who’s annoying you.
4. Add even reflective intelligence to this recipe by noticing any effect that this practice is having on your coping. If you can say “at least,” it may be a sign to you that you are coping, at some level. Give yourself some credit for at least this much coping.
By reflecting on the small ways in which you’re coping, you’re keeping your head above water. You’re not engaging in extravagant heroics, not even valiantly treading water — just staying afloat, and knowing that you can.
Reconditioning
In exercise 6-14, you learned to recondition the experience of a mistake or even disaster by reframing the event as an AFGO — another frickin’ growth opportunity — and by finding the gift in the mistake, the silver lining in a disaster. Let’s take that a few steps further.
Level 1. Barely a Wobble
In these exercises, you expand this practice of asking, “What’s right with this wrong?” by integrating elements from other intelligences, expanding the possibilities of acting more resiliently in the future.
EXERCISE 7-4: “What’s Right with This Wrong?”
1. Ask three or four trustworthy friends to do this exercise with you. Explain the purpose of the exercise, which is to help all of you develop the capacity to find the silver lining in a problematic event, to find the learning that might redeem a regrettable moment.
2. Set the ground rules for discussion at the beginning of the meeting: it can include sharing, listening, and brainstorming, but no criticism, no “fixing.” These guidelines allow members of the group to feel safe in acknowledging their vulnerability and in claiming their strengths.
3. Each person takes about ten minutes to share some mistake they made or some major bump in the road that challenged or even derailed, their resilience, at least temporarily. Each person also shares how they coped, what lessons they learned in the process of recovering their resilience, what they would do differently now. Other group members listen empathically, but without offering a lot of comment.
4. As each person shares, everyone pays mindful attention to their own experience, in sharing their own story, in hearing other people share their stories. They notice not just what they are learning from reflecting, but what they are experiencing in this moment of experiencing.
5. After each person has shared their experiences, the group members begin to explore together what they are learning and what new insights into their own experience they have gained from hearing other people’s stories.
6. Each person reflects on and takes in the support they feel from other group members. This step (which could be in the form of written journaling) allows each person to reflect on what they have learned about resilience from this exercise.
Social engagement with trustworthy people creates the neuroception of safety that primes the brain for learning and growth. The mindful attention to the process and to the experience creates a safe space in which each person can experience and acknowledge both their own vulnerability and their own strengths. Hearing other people’s stories evokes the mental play space of the default network mode in the brain, where new understandings and insights can emerge.
Level 2. Glitches and Heartaches, Sorrows and Struggles
In exercise 3-20, you learned the tool of visualizing a wished-for outcome, which can rewire a moment of shame, when an interaction between you and another person went awry, by imagining a new, more satisfactory resolution to the situation and juxtaposing it with the original negative experience. You can use the same practice to rewire any negative emotional memory, including any moment of regret, as long as the new wished-for ending evokes strong positive emotions in you.
EXERCISE 7-5: Rewiring Regret about Lack of Resilience
1. Find a safe space in real life to do this exercise, or visit your imagined safe place. You may also ask a friend to simply sit with you while you do this visualization on your own; nothing more is needed than presence and caring.
2. Anchor your awareness in your own mindful self-compassion, being aware and accepting of your experience and yourself as the experiencer.
3. Recall a moment when some disappointment, difficulty, or even disaster happened and you responded less resiliently than you would have liked — something you’ve been carrying regret about ever since.
4. As you recall the event, “light up” the networks holding that memory — the feelings of regret, where you feel that regret in your body now, any negative thoughts you have about yourself now because of what happened — or didn’t. Take care not to be overwhelmed by evoking this memory, but recall the details of your experience as vividly as you can.
5. Let go of this negative memory temporarily. Begin to create the positive resource to juxtapose with it by imagining a different ending to this scenario. Imagine how you could have responded differently and coped more resiliently, even if that never could have happened at the time.
6. Let this new ending evolve in your imagination until it feels satisfactory to you. Notice how this wished-for outcome makes you feel and where you feel those feelings in your body. Notice any thoughts you have about yourself now as you imagine yourself coping more skillfully and being more resilient. Make the experience of your feelings, sensations, and thoughts as vivid as you can.
7. Bring the original negative experience to mind again. Toggle back and forth between the old negative and the new positive several times, always refreshing the positive so that it’s strong and vivid, always touching the negative lightly and letting it go again.
8. Let go of the negative completely and just rest your awareness in the experience of the positive.
9. Reflect on your entire experience, noticing any shifts in your sense of yourself as a resilient person.
10. If you have asked a friend to sit with you during this exercise, you may choose to share the results of the exercise with them. You may also choose to write your experiences in a journal to reread a day or two later. Notice whether any new insights emerge.
Few exercises are more helpful than rewiring any regret you have now about not being as resilient as you wish you had been then. There may still be lessons to learn and consequences to clean up. But as you shift your focus to now, and choices you can make about how you view yourself now, those perceptions become the platform for responding more resiliently in the future.
Level 3. Too Much
In exercise 6-15, you practiced creating a coherent narrative of a traumatizing event. You placed that single event in the larger context of your life. You created a more vivid sense of past, present, and future. Here you’ll work with timelines again.
Creating a timeline of all the events of your life that have ever derailed your resilience, and your notes about how you coped with each of those events, gives you a very large overview of how your resilience has developed over time (or not — and perhaps that’s why you’re reading this book).
Part of strengthening your resilience is trusting that you are resilient. The exercise below helps you see that you are.
EXERCISE 7-6: Creating a Timeline of Resilience
1. You’ll be creating an overview of your resilience throughout your entire life. Use a roll of butcher paper or several good-sized pieces of paper taped together to give yourself plenty of room to record key events. Gather a variety of colored pens or pencils or highlighters.
2. Create a timeline on the paper from the day you were born (or even before then, if there was medical trauma in utero) up through many years beyond today (envisioning your future). Mark blocks of time for every year or every five years.
3. Begin noting down events that disrupted your resilience. Categorize them as level 1 (the least disruptive to your resilience), level 2, or level 3 (the most disruptive). You may choose to focus first on level 3 events; however, including level 1 and level 2 events gives you a fuller and more encouraging view of your resilience. Use different colors, sizes, and shapes to indicate the significance or severity of each event. Take as much time as you need for your default network mode to bring memories to awareness. You can return to this timeline over the next few days (or weeks) to add events as they come to mind.
4. On this timeline or in a separate journal, record how you coped with each event. What skills did you already know how to use well, and what skills could you have improved? You may have used tools similar to the tools in this book, or completely different tools. Notice whether there were any patterns to your coping. Record also your sense of how well you coped with each event. Did your practices return you to a baseline physiological equilibrium, emotional well-being, an inner sense of secure self, connections with people as resources, or the clarity you needed to discern options and choose wisely? Do your best to reflect on your responses given the intelligences you could draw on at the time.
5. Review this timeline again in a month. Notice any shifts in your view of yourself as resilient.
6. You may wish to share this timeline with a trustworthy friend; if you do, take in the good of their feedback to you about your resilience.
Granted, this is a large undertaking. You’re recognizing where you already were resilient, seeing clearly with compassion where you weren’t, and reflecting on these times with openness and curiosity — how could things have gone differently?
Use your timeline as a learning tool: rather than falling into judgment about yourself, discern what worked and what didn’t. What skills did you already know how to use well, and what skills could you have improved? Let the learning help you bounce forward into the next new challenge to your resilience.
There may be nothing more challenging to our resilience than facing our own mortality, especially if we’ve grown up in a family or culture that avoids talking about or planning for the end of life. Yet when we can face that eventuality with some equanimity, we are far better equipped to deal with anything disruptive along the way.
Level 1. Barely a Wobble
EXERCISE 7-7: Morning (Mourning) Pages
Many years ago, Julia Cameron, the author of The Artist’s Way, developed the tool of morning pages to help people unblock their creativity. It’s a form of stream-of-consciousness journaling that’s effective in clearing out mental and emotional debris and priming the pump to let the creative imagination flow again.
You can apply free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness journaling to any topic — should I marry? Should I divorce? Do I follow my heart and choose a course that offers no money but lots of adventure? Should I confront my brother about his drinking? Accessing the defocused mode of the default network allows your brain to play, even with very serious topics, and generate ideas and insights you didn’t know you had and might not have found any other way.
In this exercise, you focus your attention lightly on the topic of your own death and dying, open to your own intuitive wisdom, and see what insights emerge.
Cameron suggests writing morning pages first thing in the morning, when you have better access to the defocused mode of processing in the brain because the mind hasn’t yet focused on the tasks of the day. You can even keep a journal and pen by your bedside so that you can start writing before you even get out of bed. If you choose to write your pages later in the day, that’s fine, too. Try to write at about the same time every day: the routine creates a cue to your unconscious to settle into the flow.
1. Write free-form, nonstop for three minutes. Don’t plan or think or censor or stop. Just let your mind play. After three minutes, close the journal and set it aside. Don’t reread what you’ve written.
2. Write your morning pages for three minutes every day for two weeks. Ever so gently, plant a seed of intention each day: “Hmm. Life and death, living and dying. I wonder what I think about that?” And then don’t think: let the intention subside into your unconscious and just continue the free-form writing. The writing may make no sense at first. (That’s why you don’t derail the process by rereading what you’ve written.) It doesn’t need to make sense yet. You’re simply clearing the pipes for clearer writing to emerge as you go along.
At some point, however, you will begin to notice that your ideas are making a lot of sense, even though you couldn’t have known or planned that ahead of time, and even though you haven’t reread the pages you’ve already written. The clarity emerges from the process.
3. After two weeks or longer, write about your reflections on the process. Notice any shift in your view of your own mortality. You may or may not have brought to awareness any insights about living and dying, but most likely you did. Notice any insights you have received about anything important to your living.
You are practicing a valuable tool for accessing your own deeper intuitive wisdom about anything. That can strengthen your response flexibility and wire your resilience for any level of challenge.
Level 2. Glitches and Heartaches, Sorrows and Struggles
Wisdom tells me I am nothing.
Love tells me I am everything.
Between the two, my life flows.
— SRI NISARGADATTA, I Am That
EXERCISE 7-8: I’m Here; I’m Not Here
Imagining your own nonexistence paradoxically helps you feel more alive now and deepens your gratitude for being alive. Your priorities can shift when you are aware that the time you have on this planet is finite and that the possibilities for your life during that time are more than enough. If you have read Stephen Levine’s A Year to Live, you will already be familiar with this exercise; it’s a practice you can do anywhere, anytime.
1. Focus your attention on your own embodiment of yourself — knowing you are in your body, walking, standing, or sitting.
2. Notice your physical surroundings: a room in your home, walking through your neighborhood, in a store.
3. Imagine everything in your surroundings still existing exactly as it is now — without you there. It still exists; you don’t.
4. Return your awareness to yourself existing in your own body right now. You do still exist — whew!
5. Play with imagining that you exist, you don’t, you do, while the landscape remains unchanged.
Playing around with being and nonbeing, developing an equanimity in the skillful flow between the two, and anchoring your resilience in that equanimity vitally strengthens your ability to cope with anything, anything at all. You experience yourself as simply one particular amazing form of that consciousness that can — does — hold everything that has ever been or will be.
Level 3. Too Much
I’ve suggested from the beginning of this book that how you respond to the issue is the issue. And I’ve also suggested that it’s the response flexibility innate in the prefrontal cortex of your brain that allows you to manage, shift, and rewire those responses.
Those various responses may be activated by the revving up, calming down, or shutting down of your nervous system, by emotions calling your attention to something important, by various inner parts that have their own strong habitual responses, by the resources available to you through other people, and from the clarity of your mindful reflection, through which you can discern options and make wise choices. The prefrontal cortex integrates all these different sources of input into skillful, coherent, resilient responses to whatever is happening, anything and everything. Here’s one last exercise to strengthen the flexibility of that integration.
This exercise is based on an image of the Russian wooden nesting dolls my grandmother kept on the mantelpiece. One tiny doll is nested inside a slightly larger one, which is nested inside another doll. Here, we imagine a set of three dolls as a metaphor for the multiple, complex layers of the whole self “nesting” inside one another, with the prefrontal cortex navigating among them from the inside out.
Inner child. This is the layer of early patterns of being, behaving, and coping that are encoded in our neural circuitry as parts, facets, aspects, and states of ourselves. Some of these early parts we now admire and are proud of; some we may not like or may even loathe; some we may be too ashamed of to identify with; some, whether they were resilient or not, may have been lost or forgotten.
Adult. This is our grown-up personal manager, navigating the world as best it can with what it has learned about how the world works, how people work, and who the personal self is. This adult self chooses how to use the strengthened prefrontal cortex to rewire those patterns of the inner child; to the extent that it is stable yet flexible, it can harness the neuroplasticity of the brain to strengthen its resilience. It can also call on the resources of the wiser self to inform and guide its actions.
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 guides the choices of the adult self with wise, intuitive knowing.
(My own schema also includes the realm of higher consciousness that infuses all of these layers of self because it is embodied in all of existence. That works for me. In this exercise you’ll focus on just three layers: inner child, adult, and wiser self.)
1. Identify moments when you have experienced each of these layers of self. You might recall the elation of your inner child when you hit a baseball out of the park or its pissy grief at having the measles and missing out on a class field trip to the beach. You might remember the pride of your adult self on completing a marathon or making a successful career move, or its worry when the paycheck couldn’t cover all of the bills. You may have experienced the patience of your wiser self navigating a decision about whether to have another child or to retire early. Even if you find yourself spending more time in one layer than the others, try to identify moments of experience in each layer to recover a felt sense of these different layers of experience and different capacities in different phases of your life.
2. Notice moments of shifting from one layer to another. (Your adult self noticed some reactivity by some part of your inner child, identified it as not so helpful, and chose another course of action, perhaps guided by the deeper wisdom of your wise self; or your wiser self noticed that your adult self had gone offline, that you were reacting only from survival responses, and brought that to the attention of your adult self.) Notice the fluidity of these shifts.
3. Bring to mind a specific issue of concern for you right now. Notice how you might perceive this issue differently from each of these layers. For example, maybe your adult self has noticed an abrupt downturn in your widowed father’s health and is debating whether to move him to live with you and your family, move him to an assisted living facility or nursing home, or adopt a wait-and-see attitude while he remains in his own home.
Besides your dad and other members of your family who have opinions on the matter, your layers of self will have opinions, too. Your inner child may remember playing chess with your dad growing up and feel excited about playing chess with him again if he moves in with you. But another inner child part remembers that years ago, your dad became so busy he couldn’t even come to your high school graduation; it still harbors resentment about that and would rather bar the door. One adult part of you anticipates more decline in your father’s health down the road and would like him to move to assisted living now, to avoid more upheaval later; another adult part feels loyal to the part of your dad that treasures his independence and wants to support that. Your wiser self weighs in, offering patience with the process, trust in the process, and compassionate acceptance of all of the parts and all of the inner messages.
The practice of intentionally shifting from the perspective of one layer to the others helps you know which parts of you are responding in which ways. Knowing who is responding to the issue could be the issue.
4. Take a moment to reflect on your entire experience of this exercise, especially on the role that the major player in this exercise — your prefrontal cortex — plays in managing the shifting.
This practice of shifting and attending to the needs, worries, and concerns of all of the layers may not bring you to a resolution of the issue. There may be other people and external factors to consider. It is your prefrontal cortex that will integrate the perspectives of all of these facets of yourself into a final or evolving decision. Decision-making is one of the major functions of the prefrontal cortex, and by attending to all of these perspectives of many parts of yourself, you are strengthening the response flexibility and resilience that allow you to make the wisest possible choices.
Throughout this book I’ve emphasized using the individual tools of brain change little and often to give your brain a chance to succeed. The confidence you gain with these small successes reinforces the recovery and strengthening of your resilience.
You can apply the same principle when creating recipes for integration: they can consist of small practices woven together, repeated many times. Even when reviewing all the times your resilience has been derailed (and then recovered) in your lifetime, or facing the inevitability of the end of your life, you can still experience success by practicing little and often, giving your brain’s neuroplasticity a chance to integrate its learning and strengthen its response flexibility to cope with anything, anything at all.
The complexity of this process of integration underlies learning something new — one of the seven lifestyle choices presented in the next chapter to help you care for the physical brain that does all of this magnificent rewiring and healing. You will experience success here, too, little and often.