Discovering Heaven

A couple weeks ago my pastor shared a Thomas Hobbs quote upon which I've been pondering.  "Hell is truth seen too late."

A few days after the pondering began I had the breakthrough I shared in my last post.  In that post I shared my focus on the negatives of my new position, and when I was able to see that was in my perception rather than objective reality, everything shifted.  

In the days since, however, I have continued to notice my posture going reflexively to one of being "gut-punched."  The truth is no one in my present world is gut-punching me, either literally or figuratively.  The "puncher" exists totally in my imagination and memory. 

Which brings me back to emotional intelligence about which I've written several times in recent years.  The first key to being emotionally intelligent is self-awareness.  Because I have been able to notice the gut-punched posture, I am at least moving toward self-awareness.  The second key is to self-manage or to choose a different behavior or response.  When I take that split second for a deep belly breath and adjust to an open, relaxed posture, I am demonstrating self-management.

...at least to a degree I am self-aware and self-management.  It seems to me that I am at the stage of needing to intentionally tell my body to shift my posture.  I look forward to the point when a natural, open, and relaxed posture will occur automatically, but I am clearly not there yet.

Over twenty years ago when I was struggling with the worst of my chronic pain, resulting from an accident, a doctor recommended a book to me.  Tom Hanna, the author of Somatics, described neuromotor amnesia.  The condition results when some part of the body forgets how it is supposed to work.  Back then, it was my hip and neck.  Now, it would seem it is my abdomen and the low back that supports it in pulling back to gut-punched. 

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend a workshop on somatic dimensions of various aspects of our personalities. During the lecture portion, the workshop leader projected an X-ray of a person in a posture similar to the gut-punch.  He related that just being in that particular posture produces the hormone cortisol, which has been nicknamed "the stress hormone."  It causes progressive shutdown of the immune system.  (Small wonder that after 20 years without one, I had a cold, including one debilitating one, each of the last three winters at my old job.)

The particularly remarkable twist is that, changing nothing else, a person can induce stress by simply going into that posture.  Conversely, I can elicit confidence and relaxation by moving out of the posture.  That's all that is necessary.

So it should also not be a shock that the morning that I noticed the gut-punch posture the first time that as soon as I changed how I held myself physically, everything else seemed to change as if flipping a switch, and in a way that is just what happened.  By opening myself to expectation of positive outcomes, I switched off the cortisol and turned on oxytocin, the hormone associated with giving birth and trust, among other functions.

Harvard professor Amy Cuddy detailed in her recent book "Presence" that body language is not necessarily a reflection of what we are feeling, but instead the reverse is true: our body determines what we feel.  (If you haven't seen her TED talk, it is the second most viewed of those popular lectures.)

There are two other aspects of emotional intelligence.  The third is our awareness of others, and the fourth is how we manage our relationships different because of that awareness. When I walked into the room the morning I made the shift, I noticed openness and hopefulness.  Because of my heightened awareness of both myself and participants in the event, I managed the relationship that I had as the facilitator with my participants differently.  I recalled earlier days before my last job when I listened deeply to my inner knowing and didn't do what I planned.  At the end of the day, the leader said I had been "masterful."

As the evolution of pondering the Hobbes quote, I've come to understand that I don't have to wait until it is too late to see my truth. I can avoid that hell by choosing to hold myself in the place of trust, openness to my inner knowing, and birthing things instead of stress.  That is discovering heaven in every magical moment.

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