The other day I was having a walk in the street when I started to experience very disgusting feelings. During the previous couple of days or so, I had been able to calm down those negative feelings by “taming my hypothalamus” with Jill Bolte Taylor’s technique (as explained here). But that day, the technique started to fail, like a machine that steadily slows down. It was verbal technique, based on a self affirmation that worked like a charm (literally) those first days, but suddenly the sentence took too long to articulate, and its effects were slower.
With all of this brain-fu techniques, when a moment like that comes I know it is time to switch to a different model. Sometimes it is a very hard thing to do: when they work, they REALLY work, so one tends to think that they are going to work forever, that you have found your final shelter against mental riot, so you stick with it. But I have found out the hard way that none of them lasts forever. It is a simple consequence of the Law of Fatigue: any stimulus, when repeated, causes a reduction in responses (you need more of the same each time to maintain the same results). It is like gravity, you cannot avoid it, even with the most perfect trick you can apply for self peacemaking, be it a heuristic, a breathing technique, whatever.
So I was feeling bad, people looked threatening, my life was miserable, and I decided to abort the mission and go back to my home bunker. But then, on my way to the subway, my internal coach told proposed me a little game: “OK, buddy, you’re not feeling good today. I respect that. But please, before you get to the subway, why don’t you try to remark five things you haven’t been aware of before?”
That did the trick. I became an observer again, and there were lots of things to observe: the shape of certain buildings, the wall inside a shop was made of bricks, air conditioners had rusty designs on their lower face… By the time I got to the subway station, I had remarked 15 of those things, and, as I had already made the initial energy investment, which is always the hardest thing to do, it had been a stupid thing to just quit, so I kept on walking instead of taking the underground. When I finally got home, I had accumulated more than 35 things that I had never remarked before, and I felt energized, and living in a world much more complete and vivid than the one that I found when I left home.
In fact, it WAS a more complete and vivid world. One of the most amazing magics of our brain is that we use the same circuitry to think about an object and to actually see it. So maybe, when I started my walk, everything looked so dull because I was not using my perceptions, but my preconceived model. I was walking by an abstraction of the street, not by the real street. Without noticing it, I was not experiencing here-and-now, but an outline, a “mind map” made of previous experiences.
By asking myself to become aware of 5 things, as in some kind of hide-and-seek game, I forced myself, in an amusing way, to be present, here-and-now. And everything got populated with details. Setting it as a game gives the whole thing a structure, a model (”5 more things before I reach the end of the block”, “how many things am I able to notice before I reach…”, etc). It is also important to verbalize what you find (you can do it mentally): words are like the “official label” to remark that something has made it into consciousness.
Another advantage of this game is that it puts you in “observer mode”: it makes you receptive, your perception enlarges, and not only to what you intentionally seek. You really see more, experience more.
In such a state of plentifulness, the bad feelings disappeared because there were simply no place for them. I kept on using Bolte Taylor’s technique now and then, asking my hypothalamus to be nice when it tried to disturb the flow of new perceptions, bus most of the time I did not have to, because my mental time was fully engaged with the active task of looking for new things. There was no room there for inner bad feelings.
It is so plain that is easy to forget: due to the way in which our brain works, we can slip from actual, material reality, into a world of ghosts, without noticing the difference. All it takes to get back to reality is a tiny step… but we have to take that step!
Do you identify with this state of disconnection? What other exercises, games or sentences do you use to enhance conscious perception?
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