$25,000 or 2,000 chocolate bars

In my last post, I wrote about attending a workshop on somatic (physical) aspects of personality.  In that post I focused on the deliterous effects of the gut-punched posture. Today I'd like to visit another dimension of somatics: the smile.  

Our instructor reported that on scans of the brain, the simple act of changing from a neutral face to a smile produces the equivalent brain response as receiving $25,000 or 2,000 chocolate bars.  All that we need to do is smile.  If you will allow a pun, this is a no-brained. 

I've been traveling for work this week, and while we had some serious laugh-out-loud moments at the destination meeting, in transit I saw very few smiles.  Now imagine that if even half the people at a boarding gate smiled, it would be like raining money...or chocolate (but that could be a messier visual.) But they don't.

I did observe though that I could create a little proverbial money magic by giving away smiles.  Without stopping or making other contact, about half of the strangers with whom I made eye contact as I smiled actually smiled back at me.

An old saying about hugs suggests, "You can't give one without getting one." While it would seem that not everyone to whom I smile also smiles back, a lot do. When I give my brain a shot of cash or chocolate with my smile, I am simultaneously able to give the same to a total stranger as they smile back. And, I get one back as well.  The possibilities are almost limitless.

Over the years that I've been writing this blog, I've encouraged readers to generate positive energy around the world by multiplying some spiritual quality, such as gratitude by saying "thank you." Today I am encouraging readers to smile.  Give smiles and get smiles.  I am certain you will feel richer at the end of your day.

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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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Knowing My Shadow

Personal growth has often been described as being like an onion: every time you complete one layer, there's another under it. The one under it is smaller but more intense, challenging the person on that journey to use everything learned in other layers to continue to progress. Often, it is so much tougher, the traveler doesn't feel like it is actually progress.

Jungians describe personal growth as a "hero's journey," also a circular sequence of lessons, but they would say that the one on the journey of growth is learning a series of successively more challenging lessons in a repeated set of archetypes, such as the lover, the warrior, or the magician.

One of my weaknesses is my appetite for books which significantly exceeds my time and energy for reading. Another is that I am easily distracted by the lure of a new book when the one I am reading ceases to fully engage me. The consequence is that, at any time, my nightstand hosts anywhere from six to ten books in some stage of reading, often overflowing to the floor beside it.

At the first of the year, while flirting with another new book, I looked at the daunting pile, and, after a deep sigh, I decided that I had to surrender to some of the ones on my nightstand before starting another. I slowly looked through them, sorting into two stacks--ones that I really wanted to finish and ones with which I'd become bored and was ready to quit. Sadly, when I finished my sort, they were all in the same stack--those that I really wanted to finish. After another deep sigh, I decided to pick one to concentrate on finishing first.

The one that I chose to start with had been a gift from friends who are also consciously on a growth journey. Falling Upward by Richard Rohr takes a different spin on the journey. He says we have one set of lessons in the first half of life and a different set for the second. His book was to be a guide for the second half.

I remember struggling with the first third of the book. I wanted to stay with it because I knew that, if my friends thought it was a fit, there must be something of value for me. Yet struggle I did. Although I was solidly in the second half of life, was my resistance to admitting so?

For whatever reason I found the book difficult, I've picked the book up a few times a year, read a page or two, and then placed it back in the stack for a few more months. And, for whatever reason that it has a different appeal to me this time, Falling Upward has completely engaged me. There is an Eastern philosophy that says, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Perhaps I had finally gotten to the place in the book that was interesting to me, or perhaps, I as the student was finally ready to hear its message.

The content that has intrigued me is about the role of exploring the shadow in the second half of life. The shadow is also a Jungian concept, but I've most often heard it described as our dark side--thus the name "shadow."

Rohr, by contrast, proposes that our shadow side is comprised as our weaknesses. Think of my overactive hunger for books and my habit of abandoning one I am reading for another. Those, who have read this blog for awhile, might also remember my addiction to sugar or my struggle to get back to my 30-year fitness regimen which was abandoned when I started working ridiculously long hours two years ago.

Suddenly, I had a whole different perspective on the shadow, and, almost as quickly, I realized much, if not all, of my posts in this blog have been an exploration of what Rohr described as my shadow side. It would seem that I have intuitively stumbled into this second half of life work without realizing what was occurring.

As I've laid my struggles with my "weaknesses" out in front of me for the whole world to see, I've often wondered why I would want to do that. Rohr says that owning our weaknesses results in a humility that is characteristic of the second half of life. I have certainly been humbled by my "weaknesses," which I prefer to call my life lessons.

While I haven't finished Falling Upward, I am near enough to know there is real truth in the shadow work. Yet on my journey, I've experienced a real sense of urgency about fully using my gifts and talents and being of service--an urgency to assure that I don't squander the precious opportunity that this life offers me to leave the world a better place--while feeling myself regularly thwarted in that resolve, often by my shadow.

A couple decades ago, someone wrote a book entitled something like The Destination is the Quality of the Journey. I never read it but I've loved the title. I have discovered that at this point in my life I am much less tolerant of goals and making things happen than I am with allowing and enjoying what wants to happen.

That change in perspective has certainly been enabled by the humility of admitting that some things are just not going to happen or at least not going to happen in my schedule. There was a time when I thought that determination and perseverance were good things. Now in my second half of life work I wonder if they weren't just part of my shadow, robbing me of the freedom to just enjoy life.








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