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Jill Gets Ambushed, Again

The knot condensed like a heavy weight in Jill’s stomach. Suddenly gasping for air, she recognized she had been here before. Yet again, just when she thought she had finally put it all together, something had sabotaged the fulfilling life that she dreamed about. “Not again,” she announced silently as she looked forlornly at her scales, “I can’t believe I’ve gained the weight back.” Jill could feel the power to change her life slipping through her fingers – it had not been the first time.

Taking responsibility for her life and changing it for the better was something Jill took seriously. She tried hard. She practiced positive thinking, the law of attraction, visualization, goal setting, yoga – and she prayed and meditated regularly for abundance. Yet after enthusiastic initial successes, something unseen seemed to pull her back into her “de-ja-vu all over again”.

“It’s not that I have a bad life”, Jill reminded herself, “It’s just that I know there is more. And it’s right outside of my grasp. What am I missing? Why do I keep repeating the same thing over and over again? How do I really claim my potential?”

These four questions were about to change Jill’s life.
1. What Am I Missing?
2. Why Do I Keep Repeating the Same Things Over and Over Again?
3. How Do I Train the Brain to Disrupt Old Limiting Patterns and Create New Empowering Ones?
4. How Do I Open the Door to Claiming My Potential?

Let’s examine the first three of these questions. Why not all four? Because until you skillfully address the first three questions, fulfilling your potential will remain an elusive dream. The first three questions deal with the influence your biology has over who you believe yourself to be. The answer to the last question becomes apparent when you learn how to better manage your body and mind.

What Am I Missing?
Your Biology and Brain Have Far More Influence Over the Course of Your Life Than You Imagine.

You may have been sleeping during high school or college biology – particularly neuro-biology. And not understanding what you missed will blind you to why you keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

What Jill did not understand is the power of her biology and brain to create and maintain patterns. Without learning how to work with your biology, these patterns will overwhelm even your best intentions to change. As an example, think about Jill’s dieting. It is common for people to get highly motivated to lose weight. They set goals, visualize success, use positive self talk, affirm themselves, spend a lot of money, and reward themselves for weight loss. And they lose weight – initially. A piece of cake, right?

Yet, 95% of people regain the weight they lost. And seriously declared New Year’s Resolutions routinely are broken within 3 weeks. Why, you ask? This is that pesky neuro-biological pattern in action. Your brain and mind cannot be neatly separated. Without learning to manage your biology’s influence over your mind, your neuro-biology will pull you back into its historical hardwired pattern. Your mind emerges from your brain (biology) and the brain is interested in building perceptual maps that are organized around emotions and patterns.

It’s not that we are only our biology. However, once the brain builds successful short term patterns, they lock in and start replicating what we see as possible in our lives. And that causes us to be blind to any possibility outside of the familiar pattern in which the brain organized us.

In real life what does this look like? Let’s go back to Jill. Jill has struggled with her weight for a number of years. Every time she would finally get it back under control and was able to look into her mirror and see the “true” Jill emerging, she would sabotage her efforts. During these times of sabotage, she went on “auto-pilot” and did not “see” herself losing her discipline – and eating too much. Then she would wake up a couple of months later only to discover the weight had snuck back on her. What happened?

Why Do I Keep Repeating the Same Things Over and Over Again?
Getting Stuck in the Box of Your Comfort Zone

Jill just encountered the pattern-making machinery of her brain – which, by the way, no one had ever told her about. Until this time, she thought that losing weight was about discipline, exercise, and envisioning a healthier self. (No one had told her biology and her brain about her plan!) Evidence did not match experience though. No matter how advanced her “head game” became, somehow the weight was able to sneak back on her body.

The brain creates patterns to adapt us to successfully survive in whatever environment to which we are born. Once established though, these patterns go on automatic and become highly resistant to change – as Jill experienced as “de-ja-vu all over again”. And once established, you do not have a pattern. Rather, the pattern has you. And until you wake up to its power, the pattern creates your experiences in life. This is why you keep doing the same things over and over again. And this is why Jill kept losing and gaining her weight back.

In Jill’s case, she had learned to use food to “comfort” herself during adolescence. Like many teenagers she experienced periods of feeling isolated (which produces a sense of discomfort for the brain). The way she found to calm this discomfort was by eating, which produced a sense of comfort for her. The brain seized on this successful solution to the discomfort of feeling isolated and created a hardwired neruo-pathway of eating behavior to solve a primitive survival problem. Jill got stuck with the brain’s pattern of eating to comfort her feeling of discomfort. And the battle of weight began. The brain’s short term solution produced temporary comfort in exchange for a long term problem of weight gain. But the brain only cares to produce short term problem solutions and, if successful, these will become locked in as familiar pattern.

Your Brain, Mind, and Comfort Zone
Create the Prison of Your Donut.

This is what I call being stuck in the box (prison) of your comfort zone. The brain has created a comfort zone for a survivable life – not a life in which you thrive. And the box of your comfort zone is highly resistant to change. As an example, think of a huge donut, and you are in the hole of that donut.

The donut surrounds you. And you are stuck in the donut hole. It’s safe, familiar, and pretty sweet in that donut hole – even if it does close down the possibility of exploring the adventure you would like to take. You have a desire to leave the prison that the donut hole has become, but every time you climb out of the familiarity of the donut hole something begins pulling you back. As you approach the edges of your self knowledge (that’s the edges of the donut), you begin to experience the uncertainty of the unknown. You simply do not know what exists outside the cocoon of your donut.

Your brain is wired to keep you in familiar pattern – that’s the donut and donut hole. That is how your brain (with its bias for survival) has adapted you. There is an adventurer living within you that wants to expand beyond the self imposed comfort zone, but the brain’s survival motivation wants you back in the box of your comfort zone (that is the donut hole). Suddenly thinking, possessed by the force of the comfort zone, creates a story in your mind about how sweet the donut hole really is. And it may not be what you want for growth, but it is safe. A lot safer than the uncertainty that lies beyond the comfort zone called your donut.

This is exactly what is happening to our friend Jill. She is not aware of the influence of the patterns created by her brain, but that does not stop their influence. And until she wakes up to its influence, she will continue to be swept away by the unseen forces that seem to be shaping her fate. Waking up to the power of her biology to create a self fulfilling pattern changes everything. More about that later.

By the time your psychology shows up (that’s the mind), you experience this uncertainty and shrinking of the self as fear or self doubt. Why should your biology be subjected to uncertainty? (That is exactly what it is mandated to avoid.) So you stay stuck in a particular way of being in the world called your life. This scenario is played out countless times over a lifetime. And it will stay in place until you learn how to observe, disrupt, and create new pattern as a designer of your life.

How Do I Train the Brain to Disrupt Old Limiting Patterns and Create New Empowering Ones?

This is where Jill began to wake up to the influence her biology had exerted over her mind and her ability to maintain a healthy weight. First and foremost, she had to come to a new understanding of her biology. Body, mind, and our spiritual nature cannot be separated. Central to that new understanding is the assertion that neuro-biology has given us – that mind emerges from brain.

Second, she had to learn the skills of diaphragmatic breathing as part of mindfulness training. Fear, as an emotional state, cannot be maintained as a driver of thought while breathing diaphragmatically. Herbert Benson, MD proved that our emotional state was linked to the way we breathe. Fear requires a shallow breathing style (or holding of breath) to maintain itself or to accelerate its intensity. And fear determines our state of mind (the way we think). What Dr. Benson was able to demonstrate was that fear states could be disrupted by managing breathing style and by relaxing tension in the body. He coined the term “Relaxation Response” to describe this important skill.

Jill learned how to breathe her way through “bouts” of emotional and psychological discomfort. She realized that, when she felt isolation, she stopped breathing and held her breath. By consciously breathing deeply, she was able to learn how to override the build up of anxiety that triggered her comfort eating.

SafePlace Generation:
Distinguishing Biological Fear and Psychological Discomfort

But Jill did not stop with developing the skill of breathing as a tool to manage her inherent anxiety that lead to comfort eating.

Once you grasp that your biology is organized around fear as an evolutionary force, you can appreciate how important this breathing skill is to develop. The body, your biology, cannot tell the difference between biological fear (threat to life) and psychological discomfort (something you deal with and grow from). By learning to breathe diaphragmatically, you can disrupt the power of fear to compel you to avoid conflict. This calms the body.

But that’s never enough. Fear has to be distinguished between a real biological threat and psychological discomfort. Once biological fear is separated from psychological discomfort, you will need to learn how to take fear off-line – or calm the mind. This entails creating a sense of safety for the mind to focus on. In the Ignite Your Spark work that I teach, this is called SafePlace generation. Fundamentally it is creating a highly enriched soothing memory that can be called up in your mind. The trick is in training yourself so this state of mind will trigger simultaneously as fears and self doubt emerge in the mind.

This training requires that the body and mind calm down so that conflict can be observed from a calm state of mind rather than an agitated (whether by fear or anger) state of mind. Here, conflict shifts from an object of fear to be avoided to an object beyond the comfort zone. And a natural state of calm curiosity opens to explore possibility. Conflict is no longer interpreted as a threat; rather it can now be viewed as an opportunity of growth.

This is where Jill began to flourish. Taking the discomfort off line allowed her to stop avoiding the sense of isolation that lay at the root of her brain’s organization about isolation. She could approach the internal conflict within her in a state of calm, rather than in a state of anxiousness. This made all the difference in the world. Conflict was not the problem, she discovered, it was her approach to her internal struggle that had blocked her from a more fulfilling life.

Without conflict there is no growth. And conflict is inescapable. What matters is not the avoidance of conflict, but, rather, how we approach conflict. Think about it this way. Would you rather solve a problem in a fearful state of mind, or from a calm state of mind? That’s a no-brainer.

Very different worlds open up to us depending on our emotional states. As we become more competent in managing our emotional states of mind, the greater our capacity becomes to move beyond the box of our comfort zone. It is by managing the uncertainty (fear) that keeps us a prisoner in our comfort zone that we expand the possibility of who we can be.

How Do I Open the Door to Claiming My Potential?

As you can tell from the way Jill changed the way she worked with her discomfort, transformation begins by disrupting the brain’s familiar patterns by learning how to manage the biology of our mind. She learned how to self sooth rather than reach for comfort food. But there is more possible.

Like Jill had to learn in the example at the start of this article, the first step is to learn how to manage emotional states by skillful breathing. The next essential step for creating positive change is to calm the mind through self soothing, such as SafePlace generation. That calms the body and slows down the stream of thoughts going on in your mind. Then something powerful happens. You discover that there is an internal dialogue going on in your mind to which you can become an observer.

And that internal dialogue, masquerading as thoughts in your mind, is the key to understanding self and to personal transformation. By tuning into your internal dialogue, you will discover that there is a lot going on underneath the hood of your mind. Behind your thoughts are powerful forces. It is these internal conversations within the self that determine what you see as possible in your life and what you act on.

These conversations of the internal dialogue will be explored in the future. At this moment what I hope you have learned is the importance of breathing to calm the body and generating safety as a way of taking fear off-line. It is at this moment that an entirely new way of understanding the unseen forces that create our lives becomes possible.

It is not enough to manage the body and mind. Once these skills are developed, possibility for a much more fulfilling life opens. Now Jill is ready to open the door to deeper transformation. She has learned to face her fears and push through them. Now her job is to challenge the very assumptions that have locked her into a world that has constricted the possibility of who she can be.

How about you? What happens when you are able to move beyond the box of your comfort zone and explore your deeper potential? It’s an exciting journey. My hope is that you are now motivated to learn how to manage your body and mind so that you can move beyond the limitations that your brain (and its organization of the emerging mind) has placed upon you. It is a courageous voyage of discovery.

Rande Howell is a guest blogger for PickTheBrain. He writes about Igniting the Spark of Your Potential and Creating a Lasting Transformation at www.randehowell.com

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Though a positive, successful, and engaging person, Pam avoided prolonged looks into her mirror. When she was brushing her hair or applying make-up, she stayed focused on the activity – but would intentionally not make eye contact with herself. Except sometimes. On those occasions a tirade of negative judgments erupted in her thoughts.

If she didn’t avoid the negative assessment machine in her mind by distraction or busyness, the stream of thoughts that flooded into Pam’s awareness would chide her, “Your nose is too crooked. Your skin is a mess. You’re getting wrinkles under your eyes. You’re too fat. Nobody would give you a second look. You need surgery to look better.” In these moments, Pam would cringe and feel the familiar black pit in her stomach suck the positive energy right out of her. And she would begin to doubt herself and her ability to create a rewarding life.

The strange part of this internal conversation going on in her mind was that Pam knew there was no truth to the accusations. Pam has a dancer’s body and is a highly accomplished dancer. In addition, she teaches dance to serious students. She also is a sought-after model due to her beauty and flawless complexion. Over the course of time, she has attempted to debate the negative voice and has tried thought stopping, positive affirmations, and positive thinking. And for awhile these techniques worked – then, like a thief in the middle of the night, the character assassinations would creep back into her thoughts and cast seeds of doubt in her mind.

Pam’s current stategy, common for many people, for dealing with this discomfort was to avoid the discomfort of this internal dialogue by busying herself with work, activities, or friends – anything to distract herself from listening to the critical Judge living within her.

The Internal Dialogue: You and Your Thoughts are Different From One Another

What Pam is experiencing in the example above is her internal dialogue masquerading as thoughts in her mind. This particular conversation is between a harsh critical voice and her self doubt. And like Pam, all of us have some variation of this internal struggle, whether we like to acknowledge it or not. The key is whether we identify with it as who we are.

If you have ever been conflicted about something and were of two minds about it, you have experienced the internal dialogue first hand. Most of us simply pay it no mind and believe that “it is only our thoughts running through our mind”. However, not being aware of it or not understanding it does not stop the force it exerts over your life. It drives our lives. It is like driving on a freeway while looking through binoculars. You are at the mercy of chance to see and understand the world you are attempting to negotiate.

The Internal Dialogue Goes Underground

Most of us are aware of this internal dialogue, but we push it away (much like Pam in the example above). We never mention it to others because of what they might think. This is our loss. Gaining a window into this internal dialogue is essential if we want to discover a deeper purpose, meaning, and joy for our lives. As we learn to observe the voices that lie beneath our thoughts, the transformation of body, mind, and Spirit becomes possible. Learning about these voices within the self is crucial for creating lasting transformation.

There is a lot at stake in this inner struggle going on within the internal dialogue. Staying mindless keeps Pam (and us) aimlessly drifting in the currents of life. Things happen repetitively that we do not understand. What is revealed in Pam’s internal dialogue is that the self is composed of a number of voices – some good, some bad. Let us explore this further.

Like Pam, many of us don’t even realize that an internal dialogue is happening in our mind. This is what I call “mindlessness”. To be blind to the internal dialogue of the mind is to be swept along on the unseen currents of life. Those who are swept along are blind to it – and to its power. Others hear an almost inaudible whisper that is moving too fast to comprehend. Still others hear the internal dialogue and it makes them uncomfortable and they do not understand it. So they avoid listening to it, and this limits their lives.

The Internal Dialogue Creates the Box of Our Comfort Zone

Instead they will distract themselves so that they are not aware of it. They busy themselves with work, conquest, exercise, drugs, sex, the latest toy, or whatever is necessary to distance themselves from the discomfort of getting out of their comfort zone. Others come to live in fear of the negative assessment machine in their mind and shrink their lives into a comfort zone so that they will not be noticed. The comfort zone locks them into familiar, habitual ways and they get stuck in old repeating patterns. This is called a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Very few people learn how to observe the internal dialogue, question it, and explore the design of its nature. It is through the exploration of these voices within the mind that we set ourselves free of their control over our lives and tap into the potential that lies buried within us. There are some negative aspects of the self that have to be observed and confronted, and there are some powerful parts of the self that we need to awaken. It is in awakening these empowering parts of the self that we change the historical script of our life and find new life.

We have to become aware of the war being waged in our minds. Once we grasp that thinking is simply a biological activity, a powerful question can surface – who, or what, is in control of the perception and thinking apparatus of our mind? The answer will surprise you. Thought is important, but it is the voice (or aspect of the self) that controls the thought that keeps us from becoming who we were born to be and transforming the potential of our lives.

Internal Dialogue:
Conversations in the Mind that Shape Our Perception of the World

To wake up to the internal dialogue opens the door for you to become an active participant in the creation of your life. We are all born into and adapt to a world of established patterns of perception. This is how we come to know our world. These perceptual patterns govern how we understand the world and what we see as possible in our lives. These historical patterns of perception are called conversations or narratives and become our comfort zone.

These conversations become us long before we develop the capacity to become aware of them. Once established, they become the world we live in. We don’t have patterns and internal conversations that govern our perception, they have us! If you want to transform your world, you have to have to learn how to identify the conversation that controls the thinking in your mind. And you have to learn to break free from the hold the narrative has over your life.

Breaking Free of the Narrative of the Comfort Zone Creates New Possibility

Let me give you an example of how this works. I work with an attorney who is employed by a large, high powered, litigating law firm and he is very unsatisfied with his life. In fact, he has become “depressed”, and feels hopeless. Yet if he could look at depression as a conversation, rather than a condition, a new world would show up ripe for transformation.

He feels like a victim (is consumed by a conversation of victimhood where he has always had to sacrifice his needs to win approval). With his wife and kids accustomed to an affluent lifestyle, he speaks to me as if he is trapped by his job. This produces his despair. He sees no escape from his dilemma and beats himself up for even wanting to change his life. He lives all week for the weekends when he can live his dream of having a small scale farm. Yet on Saturday afternoons, he begins to despair that he will have to go to work on Monday.

As he developed the ability to observe the internal dialogue and woke up to the conversation of victimhood going on in his mind, he also began to realize that these did not have to be the thoughts that controlled his life. He was able to label the participants of this internal dialogue as the Prosecuting Attorney (who wanted conviction) and a Victim (that beat himself up for not being good enough).

Simply becoming mindful of these two different conversations in his mind – and no longer identifying with them as who he was – gave him a new freedom. In that freedom he discovered that he could awaken other voices that could contribute to his internal dialogue. He found a Courageous Self and a Confident Self that, with practice, he could invoke to be part of the internal dialogue in his mind. He also discovered a Divine Voice living within him that (to his amazement) he had never connected to even though he was a practicing Christian.

As he developed these aspects of himself (voices within the self), his internal dialogue shifted. He no longer was trapped in a “victim conversation”. Discovering he could call up courageous and confident elements of himself into the thoughts of the internal dialogue created new possibilities for his life. Now, instead of drifting mindlessly in the currents of life, he began to learn how to navigate its currents. In doing so, he became a participant in the creation of his life. And yes, he is moving from being stuck in unseen patterns (comfort zone) to consciously designing the patterns that create his life.

Transforming the Conversations of the Self

This opportunity, this choice, to become a participant in the design of your life is available to all. What is required is the motivation, skill development, and discipline needed to learn how to observe the patterns and internal conversations that drive your life, disrupt them, and begin consciously developing new patterns and conversations.

As a human being, it is the greatest gift we have been given. The criterion is to recognize that the gift was not designed to serve the Ego. Rather it is built to serve a purpose greater than the self. Our job is to accept the gift, nurture the gift, and to bring forth the light that lives within us into the world.

It is at this moment that we begin the journey to becoming fully human. In the words of Nelson Mandela from his 1984 inaugural speech:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure…. Your playing small does not serve the world…. We are born to make manifest the glory of God within us….. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. We are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Rande Howell is a guest blogger for PickTheBrain. He writes about Igniting the Spark of Your Potential and Creating a Lasting Transformation at www.randehowell.com

Don’t Forget to Follow PickTheBrain on Twitter!

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