Does a Cougar Have Your Leg?

Take a close, undistracted look at this three minute video: The Bear. Seriously. Do it. Notice the nature of the feelings that arise in your body as you view it. I’m guessing, if you’re like me, you’ll feel tension in your stomach and possibly constriction in your throat. Your breathing might slow and/or stop for a time. You’ll feel tension, then relief, then tension again. And then finally relief. This short video is definitely worth watching, for several reasons.

I like to use this video during live presentations to underscore several important lessons. The first is: it’s a wonderful, dramatic illustration of The Big Brain Question. When we are undeniably certain, as children and as adults, that there are people in our nearby environment upon whom we can unquestionably count, we’re much more willing to go out and explore and take risks, both prudent and sometimes foolish.

I’ve had long periods when I’ve had such people watching my back, and periods when I haven’t. It’s easy for me to look back at the times when those people were present and see the extraordinary growth and learning that unfolded in my life, both from the risks I took which turned out well, and from those that “failed” (It’s difficult though, to consider something a failure when great learning results).

For example, I’ve written about my fear-based, internal struggle to accept a job as a maintenance man at this Stanford Think Tank after I’d earned two Master’s degrees and a Ph.D. What was all that education for if I wasn’t going to put it to “good” use? (Well, it was for learning things that I was interested in learning, that’s what. Why does it have to be for any more than that?). I ended up staying at that think tank – a sanctuary that many high-level academics describe as the place where the single best year of their lives unfolded – for TEN years! Many more than one of them were very good years for me. I wrote and published three successful non-fiction books and two suspense novels just for fun. I also met any number of interesting people I would never have met otherwise, from Steve Levitt (Freakonomics) to Alison Gopnik (The Philosopical Baby) to K. Anders Ericcson (Developing Professional Expertise). I also got to observe how academia operates at the highest levels.

I was first exposed to neurobiology research there at that Think Tank way back in 1999. For the last 14 years since then I’ve been working on a kind of self-directed, post-doctoral research fellowship. As such, I get to follow my interests wherever they may lead, beholden to no one and nothing but my own heart of hearts.

Does a Cougar Have My Leg?

I also learned that not once – before, during and after those past 14 years – actually, in almost every moment of my life – not once has the Cougar had my leg. What I mean by that is not once in all these years has a single fearful thought generated by my bully left language brain been in response to a real, in-the-moment, in my face, bona fide threat. Such thoughts do manage to trigger a neurophysiological emotional cascade of stress hormones much as my brain would if the Cougar in that movie actually did have me by the leg, but all I have to do is look down at my leg, Cougar-free, and I can exhale. And relax. And come back to the actual safety and freedom available in the present moment – the place where all of our lives, if they’re to be lived authentically – are required to consciously unfold.

I will admit that it’s a rare day that goes by when I don’t generate at least one fearful thought or two that forces me to actually look down at my leg as a necessary reminder. Overdraft notices from the bank, dwindling winter wood stores, a muscle spasm in my back – they can all emotionally hijack me in much the same way a Cougar attack might. But a lot less often, and not for very long.

And that’s a good thing. Increasing numbers of Cougar-free days can then eventually begin to allow me to look past my leg, past my own fear-based self-concerns and begin to allow me to follow my truest heart and consider increasingly answering the Big Brain Question in the affirmative for others.

How G-Tummo Turned Me and Maynard G. Krebs into Real, Warm Human Beings

Before he became the cultural icon Willy Gilligan, shipwrecked on an uncharted island in the Pacific, the actor Bob Denver played Maynard G. Krebs, the original TV beatnik with a compulsive aversion to work. Every week all through 1959-1960 I would tune in expectantly as Maynard, Dobie Gillis, Thalia Menninger, Zelda Gilroy and Chatsworth Osborne Junior would haplessly try to resolve one class conflict after another arising from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. For Maynard, the only “real human being” on the show was Dobie’s father, played by Frank Faylen. For those of you who never caught an episode, Maynard was being facetious. What he lacked in the social graces, Mr. G. more than missed in lack of warmth. Clearly, Mr. G had never been taught g-tummo meditation.

Calif. State Senator
Zelda Gilroy (Sheila Kuehl)
Harvard Law, ’78

If he had, Dobie’s dad would have become a master at not only inter- personal warmth, developed and regulated by a massive, connective fiber highway (his anterior cingulate cortex) connecting his emotional brain centers to his prefrontal cortex, but he would also have become superb at being able to raise and lower his internal core body temperature at will. Both of these benefits seem to accrue to diligent practitioners of g-tummo meditation.

To Vase Breath or Not to Vase Breath

Now, I’m guessing you might be wonder- ing just was IS g-tummo? Well, it’s usually practiced in combination with Vase Breath Meditation. There, does that help? How about: it’s a little known sacred medita- tion technique mostly practiced in eastern Tibet and it directs the flow of energy in the brain, first to the extremities – the fingers and toes – and then to the body’s central core structures, increasing them by as much as two degrees Fahrenheit. Here’s a description of both from the actual research article hyperlinked above:

The two aspects of g-tummo meditation that lead to temperature increases are “vase breath” and concentrative visualization. “Vase breath” is a specific breathing technique which causes thermogenesis, which is a process of heat production. The other technique, concentrative visualization, involves focusing on a mental imagery of flames along the spinal cord in order to prevent heat losses. Both techniques work in conjunction leading to elevated temperatures up to the moderate fever zone.

One reason I find this research interesting is because contemporary Information Theory posits that of all the possible information we might be able to access inside and all around us in any single moment, 99% of it is taken in unconsciously. This is generally considered to be a good thing, since our waking conscious neural circuitry is already way overmatched in terms of information overload. But what this g-tummo research is suggesting is that we can actually enhance the neural networks devoted to conscious awareness by being able to intentionally control something customarily assigned to the autonomic nervous system – body temperature.

I’m Normal and I’m Fine

Why might we want to, especially when a body temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit seems to be working for most of us just peachy-dandy. Well, one question that arises is: if we can consciously control body temperature, what else might we be able to take instruction in and learn to consciously control? How about vision, visual processing? Might we be able to learn to see the coronal discharge around living creations much like Kirlian photography is apparently able to do? And might we then learn to use what we see to make unique, life-enhancing meaning from such experiences?

Or perhaps we can learn to cultivate a photographic memory in ways that make learning fast and easy? Or might we quickly acquire musical talent accompanied by perfect pitch? What about being able to intentionally amp up our immune system, that is, periodically increasing body temperature when we’re not ill the way a fever spikes to kill pathogens? No research that I know of has been done on this potential benefit of g-tummo.

Hanging Out on the Healthy Side of the Hump

Finally, there’s this central aspect of g-tummo. I’m not going to extol the wide range of benefits increasing research attributes to a regular contemplative practice. There’s plenty of evidence accruing already to support it. But what I will offer up as a point of inquiry is: what are you doing to A. recognize the stressors in your life and what they feel like in your brain and body (hint: everyone’s are unique and individual); B. effectively manage them; and C. insure that what you’re doing to manage stress is actually working to keep it on the healthy side of the hump? Perhaps it’s time to give g-tummo a try.

Will You Take the Radical Accountability Challenge?

This week’s offering I’ve purloined unabashedly from a book written by one of my favorite wisdom teachers called, Stepping Out of Self-Deception. Rodney says it all in ways I wish I had: it’s our own mind, body and brain that we must pay perpetual primary attention to …

Radical Accountability

Rodney Smith

As a child I would make rock candy by supersaturating sugar water and letting it cool. I would insert a string in the liquid, and the crystals of sugar would form around the string. The string is analogous to our suffering. The sense-of-self needs the string of our contraction to form itself around. We remain in solution with that shaping element of conflict. Selflessness requires an ongoing exploration of conflict and where we are forming around conflict moment after moment, just as the sugar water does with the string. We learn to investigate when we feel the slightest tension or resistance in the body, speech, or mind.

Emotions cue us toward that investigation. Thought is often a reaction to an emotion and is an attempt to justify the experience of an emotion. As thought attempt to explain why we are feeling what we are feeling, they further seed the emotion by tagging the emotion to someone or something responsible for giving it to us. The emotions then feeds off the explanation, which drives more emotions and eventually more thinking. These explanations and accompanying emotions compound themselves into a new tale about what we must do to get out of the emotion. These separate emotional incidents usually feed upon, and further feed, a general overall attitude contained within the story of our life. This attitude forms into a perceptual orientation to life and reinforces a conditioned way of perceiving others and ourselves.

Emotionally Circling The Circle Game

Circular thinking is a case in point. Most of us have had the experience of going around and around in our thinking without conclusion, and yet we often do not perceive that the thinking is being driven by an unnoticed emotion. The thinking is trying to solve the emotion, but the emotion is unconscious, so the thinking continues to spin out of control. An emotion is not caused by an external event; the mind assigns an emotion to an external event. The confusion is resolved with we focus on the emotions and let it be what it is, while at the same time releasing the need to think our way out of the emotion.

There is no single cause for any event. Events arise dependent upon many factors, with everything in the universe colluding to make a single incident occur. The Buddha speaks about it this way: “Just as, monks, when rain descends heavily upon some mountaintop, the water flows down along the slope, and fills the clefts, gullies, and creeks; these being filled fill up the pools; these being filled, fill up the ponds; these being filled fill up the streams; these being filled fill up the rivers; and the rivers being filled fill up the great ocean.” In this way, the Buddha states, each event is the supporting condition for the next arising.

For example, the obvious condition for snow is a particular weather pattern that holds the right composite of temperature, humidity, and air pressure. The conditions that lead to those factors are infinite, including the subtle air-currents create by each of us as we move through space. Given that, which of the infinite conditions will we blame as the causal factor? Everything influences everything else because everything is interconnected. A recent bumper sticker said it this way: “Blame it on the butterfly in Argentina.”

Desperately Seeking Pleasant

The mind becomes desperate to get away from the implications of having an unpleasant emotion. We say, “You make me angry.” Saying this, the anger does not incriminate us. In fact, if I can get rid of you, my problem with anger will be solved. Even though many of us are sophisticated enough to intellectually know “you” do not make “me” angry, our emotional intelligence operates from this premise.

When we believe, “You make me angry (or make me anything else),” the world is severed in two. This leakage of blame around every unsettling emotion creates havoc with the rest of our life. The emotional reaction is an unobserved contraction of pain that leads to further divisive interactions. When not investigated, these externalized reactions become the forerunner of all projections, hatred, prejudice, envy, jealousy and aggression.

During my time as director of a hospice program, we had a patient, Louise, who was a Holocaust survivor and the object of medical experimentation during her captivity. Louise came to us in the final stages of her liver cancer with considerable ascites, a condition where large quantities of fluid build in the abdominal area, often with significant discomfort to the patient. This requires a physician to draw the fluid out of the abdomen with a large needle, and as the needle moved toward her midsection, Louise went into post-traumatic distress from her years of imprisonment. With hospice staff on either side calling her back to the present, “Louise, you are here, come back, stay here Louise, feel my hand,” she was able to endure the episode.

Louise’s mind created its momentary reality from the pain of the past. The latent memory of her terror as a young woman was unleashed during this process. The ambiance and context of this outpatient procedure was completely different than the memory, but the emotional linkage between the two was fixed within her mind. The mind’s projection was so strong that Louise was reliving the horror of her youth. With persistence, the hospice staff was able to call her back to the present. As she oriented herself to the reality of Now, her emotional drama became less convincing.

In THIS Moment, Everything is A-OK

Everyone knows the power of projection when we are afraid. Fear is being afraid of what might happen, not of what is happening. Emotions have their own logic, distant from the truth of the moment. The here and now does not argue with the emotion’s rationale; it quiets the emotions by taking away the story line that is essential for emotional escalation.

In a less obvious way, the mind also contracts around pleasant emotions. The contraction due to pleasant situation is even less noticeable because we are not trying to avoid the pleasure but instead indulge it. In avoidance, we are attempting to speed time up and get over the problem, and when we indulge we are trying to slow time down and wallow a little longer. Either way we are not allowing the moment to move as it naturally does, and that is the definition of suffering.

In pleasure, as in pain, we often project the emotion outward by saying, “You make me happy,” and then hold that object accountable for maintaining “my” happiness. Meanwhile, the emotion is changing in intensity and tone, becoming something other than what it was, and at a certain point we become disenchanted with the object or person for letting us down.

Romantic love is a good example of this dynamic. During a romantic involvement we often become attached to the person because we project the loved person as the reason for the arising of love in us. We think our love is coming from him, and if we lost him we would be severed from love. Since the state of love is so compelling, we attempt to possess the person responsible for “giving us” the emotion of love, rather than allowing the love that is intrinsic to our being to blossom free of any attachment.

Radical Accountability demands sealing off any and all projections and being fully accountable for our inner life by closing down all escape routes. This is an essential understanding for a free mind. We refuse to allow the mind any leeway or option to externalize its problems. In radical accountability we say, “I pain myself I frustrate myself, and I depress myself,” because any leakage away from total accountability invalidates the Buddha’s teaching on suffering and its cause. Interconnectedness is impossible when we fight external influences because we think they are causing our emotions. The less projection, the less we suffer, and the more connected we become.

Once we seal off external blame, there is still the temptation to blame “me” for the events occurring. “I” am the responsible party; it is “my” entire fault. These thoughts will be quickly reinforced by whatever remains of our self-inadequacy. The self would love to reinforce that weakened image with this argument, but having become familiar with how the mind creates the sense-of-self from emotional reactivity, awareness refuses to rebuild this once-powerful image.

With Radical Accountability all emotions are observed as experiences only, pointing nowhere, implicating no one, and signifying nothing. Though it is no one’s fault that we have an emotion, it is still essential to hold the emotion fully within awareness without wavering. Emotions need observation and allowance, not our analysis or fixation. The story that accompanies the emotion dies with accountability. The story was never true to begin with; we needed it to provide relief from the pain of being “me.” Though we did not know it at the time, sustaining the story’s untruth through inattention was causing even greater suffering than if we had allowed the pain to express itself in awareness. Radical accountability begins to shift our focus from the horizontal plane of complaint and argument to the vertical plane of open wonderment.

~ Rodney Smith, Stepping Out of Self-Deception, Shambhala Publications, 2012. Posted with permission.

Why Must All Wars, Public and Personal, Eventually End?

Fair Warning: Data-driven mini-rant follows.

I recently listened to a British social scientist, Ben Hammersley, talk about how business executives prefer open office floor plans for their workers. In those offices the people with the most power have their backs protected by a wall – they take up positions around the perimeter of the open space usually in offices with doors. Those with the least power have their backs constantly exposed. Along with that exposure comes – it’s easy to guess – elevated levels of adrenaline and cortisol resulting in increased stress, less productivity, and more time lost from work because of illness. The companies those people work for fail to have their backs – literally. They don’t answer the Big Brain Question “Yes” in a way that could contribute substantially to their somatic bottom line as well as the company’s fiscal bottom line. To be kind, let’s call it ignorance.

Politicians are much like those corporate overlords. We elect them to have our best interests in mind, to have not only our backs, but especially our children’s backs. But when they vote for war, they don’t have our backs. In my view, wars are the result of the brains of politicians suffering from a reduced capacity to process energy and information optimally – they don’t have sufficient right brain connectivity to permit them to not only see the big picture, but to take actions to effectively deal with immensely complex, challenging circumstances in constructive ways to produce positive outcomes. Wars are a betrayal of our children by people with brains insufficiently organized for the jobs we elect them to do. There are few mothers in the world securely attached to their children who, given the free choice, would vote for wars waged with weapons rather than words.

Authorizing Homicide

Our brains often work best when we’re given hard problems to work on together with committed others. Authentic spiritual teachers in my experience often possess such good-working brains. Not a single one I’ve ever been exposed to has advised: “Killing is a wise path to travel when it’s authorized by nation-states.” I often wonder: what creative connections might the collective brains (and hearts) of the most powerful nation on earth come up with if the war option was simply taken off the table? Limited choices can often spur unexpected neuronal connections and radical creativity. The Academy-award-winning Argo story would be a recent example of wild creativity produced by being forced to operate within very narrow parameters.

The Stink of Commerce

One challenge of course, is actually taking war off the political table. There’s too much money made the world over when America goes to war. It doesn’t matter that our involvement in Iraq has now destabilized the whole Middle East region. Nor does it matter that more U.S. soldiers are dying at home by suicide than from our current overt and covert wars. And we’re not even talking about the less-than-lethal brain and body damage our soldiers and veterans have suffered.

We supposedly went to war to avenge the 2977 Americans who died in 9/11. Since the Iraq war began, according to a Lancet tally, there have been over 600,000 war-related deaths of people who had nothing directly to do with 9/11. That’s like going out and killing 200 friends and relatives of someone who you thought knew someone who murdered your brother. How crazy and criminal is that? Add to these statistics the $3.8 trillion in debt for the war the Government will secretly saddle us with (and most likely our children and their children) and the suffering begins to seem immeasurable and unfathomable. It’s difficult to connect the dots between say, tens of thousands in non-dischargeable school loan debt, and money squandered on foreign wars . It’s long been my thought/feeling, that our enemies might not be able to conquer us militarily, but they can certainly take advantage of our brains that continually function sub-optimally using moneyed and motivated reasoning. Clearly, they already have. A trillion for this war, a trillion for that war …

Why Wars End

Taking a human life results in an extreme state of neurophysiological hyperarousal. Whether it’s by sitting in a bunker and manning a drone in Afghanistan from the Las Vegas desert, firing a sniper rifle from 1000 yards away, or knifing someone through the stomach with a bayonet, with anything that is anti-life, the body keeps the score and the brain maintains a record. Contrary to the way Navy Seals make it seem – we don’t really just mount a clandestine operation to kill Osama bin Laden and then casually stop by a Taco Bell for a snack on the way home – taking a human life lives on in our neurophysiology – consciously and/or unconsciously. It’s never something done and simply forgotten, no matter how well-trained we are, how many Manhattan Projects of the Mind we create, or how powerful our sense of justice, rationalization and denial might be. The problem is Von Economo neurons are unable to distinguish between us and the people we kill. Every time someone dies at our hands, some piece of our neurophysiology dies along with them.

And the reason all wars must end is because we can only keep killing bits of our selves – displaced and projected outward – for so long before we end up ultimately destroying our actual embodied selves in one way or another. War truly is unhealthy for children and other living things – in ways few of the people who make war have any real clue about.

Since all wars must and do ultimately come to an end and post-war negotiations and reparations eventually begin, wouldn’t it be big-picture and pound-wise to simply skip the war part? Unfortunately, just like what’s required to change a scientific paradigm, the ultimate end of war will most likely only take place one political and one military funeral at a time, almost assuredly far beyond the remainder of my life and sadly, most likely beyond yours as well.

Mental Health: What Can We Do When It Vacates the Premises?

In my 30’s and 40’s (my 20’s, too, now that I think about it), I had a habit of rating my days in terms of my degree of mental illness. There were either Minor Mental Illness Days or Major Mental Illness Days, but there were few Major Mentally Healthy Days. This was because one upset or aggravation or another would inevitably surface daily and hijack my neurophysiology.

I recall with great astonishment when a friend once disclosed to me that whenever the phone rang in his house, his wife’s unwavering expectation was that it was a call from someone who genuinely loved her. I distinctly remember wondering what planet she lived on. In my house, when the phone rang, if it wasn’t from someone wanting to sell me something, it was someone needing something from me or needing my help solving a problem or multiple problems. Nobody was calling just to tell me how much they loved me.

Given my early exposure to so few people I would consider mentally healthy, this is really not so surprising. When I look back across the first 20 years of my life, the most head/heart-healthy people that come readily to mind are only two: a set of Yale Divinity School students, Dave Woods and Vic Weber. They were my camp counselors for two weeks at Yale Camp one summer.

Brain Molds You Through the Company You Keep

Most of my life has not been spent in the presence of truly joyous, loving, mentally healthy people. I once spent a year working with emotionally disturbed teens at a residential treatment center. Most of these teens had been through the treatment program for a sufficient length of time to be eligible for “entertainment furloughs.” It was part of my job to take them to the movies once a month. I distinctly recall standing in line with a half dozen residents and thinking: “These kids are magnitudes more mentally healthy than the people I’m seeing all around us here.” Sad, actually. But it pointed up the fact to me that truly mentally healthy people are not so easy to find. Genuine mental health, when you get right down to it, is not an easy, ever-present commodity to come by. It’s not like natural gas, or corn, or cotton.

Out of My Mind

UCLA psychiatrist Dan Siegel might consider the accuracy of my experience right on. He often begins his lectures telling of the thousands of helping professionals he’s polled who’ve never had a formal course in Mental Health. Teachers and students, for the most part have all managed to avoid agreeing about what mental health looks like in the world, what it feels like and how to know when it’s temporarily or permanently gone missing. They have never even considered an accurate, agreed-upon definition of mind.

Working together with a group of forty scientists in fields ranging from linguistics to genetics to computer science to developmental psychology, Dan came up with a fully-agreed-upon definition of mind: “a relational and embodied process that regulates the flow of energy and information in the brain and body.”

Ramping Up the Flow

This turns out to be a much more useful description of my state of mental health than simply thinking of myself as having Major or Minor Mental Illness Days. If I’m having a Major Mental Illness day, it’s because the flow of energy and information through the networks of cells in my body and brain are being seriously compromised, often by some very identifiable cause. I can begin to do things to help restore that flow by addressing the mind directly (go and mediate, for example, or focus my thoughts on the people, places and things right in front of me), or perhaps attempt to restore the flow relationally (talk to the person/people I might be upset with; or talk to someone else to explore even deeper reasons why I might be upset), or do something to rid my body itself of stress hormones (like aerobic exercise). And I’m not limited to only one: I can do all three to try and bring my neurophysiology back into balance. I can even devise something radically creative to restore the flow.

And the good news is: the more I directly and consistently address the restricted or compromised flow of energy and information, the greater my Flow Capacity becomes. And it doesn’t actually take that long to turn incremental increases into dynamically expanded flow. And that’s a good thing.

Spiritual Maturity: How to Know When Your Brain’s Kickin’ It New Skool

I’m a big believer in using maps to figure out where I’m going. Even, occasionally a GPS. Here’s a list I’ve compiled and adapted from Dr. David Richo’s book, Shadow Dance that in my estimation provides a pretty good map of destinations I’d like to join the world in trekking towards. It’s a useful map, depicting not only where we might be, but where our brain and body will begin to take us as it continues to grow in its capacity to process increasing amounts of life’s energy and information.

The good news about this map is that no matter where we are on the journey, if we know where we’re going, we can fake it until we make it. We can choose rehab in lieu of punishment, win-win instead of win-lose, cooperation over competition. Acting “as if” we’ve arrived, while it most certainly won’t be fully and authentically embodied initially, nor will it immediately fire up massive amounts of joy juice generated in the nucleus accumbens where extensive dopamine plantations live. But with enough practice there’s little doubt that eventually we’ll get there. Why is there little doubt? Because many others have journeyed to this heart-brain integrated destination ahead of us and brought back their joyful, telling accounts.

Directional Map of a Joyful Brain

Surprising Elements of the Heroine’s Journey

The journey for many of us is to become healers, to become increasingly mentally, physically and spiritually mature ourselves, to throw off the conditioning of our education, to transcend cultural prescriptions, and to risk making increasingly authentic connection (here’s a compelling role model for that, if you’re interested- Amanda Palmer); to, in essence, “heal thyself.” This is pretty much what I investigated together with a small group of intrepid explorers recently in the Living Life as Art sessions: a reorganization of brain and body that results in an expanded flow of internal energy and information, i.e. increasing spiritual, mental and physical health.

If We’re Open to Growth, We Tend to Grow

In part we examined what Pepperdine professor Lou Cozolino explores as a requirement for growing into health and maturity in his new book, The Social Neuroscience of Education. Teachers espec- ially, seem required to embark on the Healer/Heroine’s Jour- ney. Asking and answering The Two Perilous Questions can be a useful way to restart the journey if it’s been stalled, or to actually begin it consciously, if tentatively, for the first time. If you want to see the general framework that journey often takes, click HERE.

Get Thee to a Guide on Time

One challenge for many of us, perhaps therapists and teachers in particular, is to discover authentic, trustworthy guides, pathways and practices to point the way. Cozolino has some guidance to offer in that regard. He suggests that the wise among us generally are able to process more energy and information across diverse areas in the brain dedicated to social, emotional and intellectual functioning. What might that look like in actual practice?

When he asked a group of college students to list people they considered “wise,” their top ten choices included Gandhi, Confucius, Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., Socrates, Mother Teresa, Solomon, Buddha, the Pope, and Oprah Winfrey. Notably missing from that list were Einstein, Napoleon and Bill Gates. It appears that intellect and wealth are not necessarily synonymous with wisdom for these college students. Also missing were the names of presidents, generals or Wall Street tycoons. The people identified as wise were known more for their insights, compassion and courage than they were for their intellectual horsepower or their business brilliance. Notice that four of the people on the list ended up dying for their beliefs.

For each of us to grow in the capacity to do the same, we might need the insights and perspectives a wise guide or mentor of our own (or perhaps as a byproduct of Wild Therapy?). Someone operating in that capacity ideally can see far beyond our current level of development. Having made the journey themselves, they’re able to see personal potential and creative possibilities we often can’t.

Cozolino suggests that we pay attention to how it feels in our bodies when we encounter someone we suspect might be a person of wisdom. For example, he talks about how, when listening to the speeches of Martin Luther King, his breathing would begin to grow deeper and his field of vision would widen. It was as if life was becoming much sharper and clearer in the presence of Dr. King. So this is an important key: how do we feel in mind, body and spirit in a potential guide’s actual presence?

Let Our Terror Be Our Guide

Another element in the journey towards wisdom is an increasing willingness to turn towards what Pema Chodron calls “the places that scare us.” The neurophysiology of the body turns out to be a great orienting indicator for directions in which life might want to lead us (sometimes kicking and screaming).

Karl Pribram, MD

Stanford neurosurgeon Karl Pribram, one of the first scientists to identify the limbic structures in the brain and their regulatory relationship with the prefrontal cortex, once observed that “The most basic of regulatory processes is the regulation of arousal.” It is this capacity for arousal regulation that each of us must take steps to master if we are to turn towards those places that scare us and be able to manage them in any kind of mobilizing manner. Without skillful arousal regulation, in my experience, it becomes difficult to maintain the necessary resolve to stay the creative course.

In other words, we must learn to become intimate friends with and cultivate reliable ways to soothe our body, mind and spirit when its limbic structures become highjacked. We learn to notice and attend to elevated levels of adrenaline and cortisol in our bodies in a timely and effective manner either by employing reliable practices we’ve developed through discipline, or with the help of family and/or friends who have proven over time they can be counted on when dreaded “growth opportunities” show up in our lives. There’s nothing wrong with making use of the safety and soothing in numbers, or… by intentionally placing ourselves in environments conducive to safety and soothing. And along the way, continually reminding ourselves that the journey of expanding daily conscious awareness takes … practice.