Why Homeless People Freak My Brain Out

Why Homeless People Freak My Brain Out

by Mark Brady

(Note: A version of this piece appeared on page 12 of the March, 2013 issue of a homeless street paper where I write a regular monthly column).

James is a homeless man who sits rain or shine on a fire hydrant outside an eatery on the west side of the San Francisco peninsula. James looks to be about 40; he never smiles and there’s a never-changing distant look in his eyes. James scares me.

To put it in brain science terms, James’ presence activates several limbic structures (hippocampus and amygdala, among others) in my brain and arouses the neuroceptive wiring (the 10^th cranial nerve bundles) in my body in ways that result in great undeniable discomfort.

A Pattern Interrupt

One day I met my friend Jenny for lunch at the eatery. When it was time to leave, Jenny paid our bill and headed out the door closest to James before I could guide her in the opposite direction. I followed on her heels and immediately felt the tension in my body rise as she walked up to James. She smiled at him. James didn’t smile back.

“How’s it going?” Jenny asked. James only grunted. “Okay,” Jenny responded. “What’s your name?” And that’s how I found out James’ name. “James, I’m going to give you $5,” Jenny said. “I hope you’ll spend it in some special way.” She handed over the money.

Jenny’s response to James was enormously instructive to me. She felt not a whit of fear. Meanwhile, I carried an internal state of hyperarousal for several blocks. My internal fight or flight neurochemistry was in full reactivity mode. But what was it about James that was so scary?

Absolutely nothing.

What was triggering the smoke alarm in my brain (the amygdala, primarily) and regularly putting my body on red alert was not James at all. It was the thoughts that emerged in response to James that were pressing my panic buttons. In every single moment in James’ presence, I was absolutely safe from him, but not so safe from my own mind and its danger-generating thoughts.

Reining in Wild Mind

Every time in our lives growing up when we were frightened, overwhelmed or prevented from expressing our truest nature, our heart took note through the workings of the 10^th cranial nerve and something called the ventral-vagus complex. This is a process called neuroception: the unconscious detection of threat. With that neural note-taking came contraction of something called Heart Rate Variability. Repeated, immobilizing experiences unskillfully discharged, compress heart rate variability – they literally compromise strength of heart. They also tend to make our brains secrete fearful, self-protective thoughts.

Skillfully Working with Fear

As our understanding of the inner workings of brain, heart and body have expanded, an array of increasingly effective healing modalities have shown up on the therapeutic landscape.

Essentially, what these therapies do is release an increased flow of energy and information in the body and brain. Think of it in terms of your cell-phone signal. 3G phones were fine once upon a time; they could make calls and surf the web. But 4G phones allow exponential processing of energy and information. Imagine though, what 10G or 20G phones will be able to offer up in the future!

This metaphor can be applied to the body and brain. The more energy and information we are able to process, the better. One way we accomplish that is by paying close attention to “the places that scare us.” The more we heal – the more we integrate brain, mind and body – the more strength of heart we end up bringing to this party called life.

And for that, we have homeless people like James to thank.

Mark Brady is a brain educator hiding out in the safe confines of Whidbey Island in Washington State. He writes this weekly blog and he is the author of A Father’s Book of Listening and How Parents Screw Us Up (Without Really Meaning To).

Does Our DVD Brain Play Us as Human?

There was something about The Matrix movie trilogy that really resonated with me. And not just me obviously – it resonated with about 100 million other people as well (Box Office Gross Revenues for the trilogy are nearly one thousand million dollars). Mostly I suspect the resonance had to do with this sneaky, intuitive sense that what was being portrayed in the movie as fiction, really wasn’t.

Attention Must Be Paid Its Pound of Flesh

Along those Matrix lines, I’m reminded of a well-known phenomenon in quantum physics called The Observer Effect. I’m a little out of my league with this topic, so here’s a short, simple, clear Youtube illustration of it: The Observer Effect.

The Observer Effect describes how an observer “collapses the Wave Function” simply by observing. Without an observer with a living brain – you, me, he, she or it – what currently exists primarily as material objects in the world would revert to their “original face” – probability waves of energy. Apparently, when confronted with the activity of our neurobiological sense apparatus – eyes, ears, nose, brain, etc – those waves change their form and become “concrete” reality. Thought about another way: energy “knows” we’re looking at it. How do we know it knows? Because it’s showing up as matter – as trees, as rain, as people – rather than in its more essential state – probability waves.

Where the Observer Effect gets really weird is when an electronic measuring device counts (observes) particles (photons in most experiments) and they show up collapsed as particles, which is what is expected. But when the measuring device is unplugged, the photons show up as waves! So, the observer doesn’t even have to be human to “collapse the wave function!” Is this observer phenomenon – the process that turns energy waves into material objects in the workaday world – a constant in all of our lives all the time?

Trauma Collapses the Particle Function

My intuition and life experience tell me “No.” My sense is that traumatic experiences – those times when our neurobiology has been completely overwhelmed by people, circumstances or life events that put all our sensory systems on red alert to the point of massive overload – at those times, the observer “relocates” to some place other than in the cells of our body. Psychologists use the term dissociation in different degrees to describe it. But I think that term falls far short of many people’s actual experience.

Jill Bolte Taylor’s left hemisphere stroke experience might be viewed in terms of a particle function reversion. When the part of her brain primarily responsible for perceiving sharp edges and forms and shapes in the world was taken offline together with the object-naming function, she seemed to no be longer a “competent” observer. Her brain only intermittently possessed a perception ability sufficient for her to be able to collapse the wave function and experience the world materially. Losing her left hemisphere was sort of like an electronic measuring device with an intermittent short circuit.

So, what quantum physics seems to be telling us is that there is no objective material reality. As observers we do not observe what’s outside us; we observe what we and the probability waves all around us, collaboratively co-create – spheres of reality.

Human Beings as Spheres of Reality

In some sense it’s as if the material objects and the relationships that make up our lives are an ongoing Rashomon Effect, only we mostly fail to realize it. In moviemaking, a director who chooses a Rashomon perspective, presents an emotionally charged incident – an assault or murder, a terrorist attack – from the various viewpoints of several central characters. What the audience discovers is that each person’s take on the same experience is profoundly different, filtered as it is through personal history and a unique, dynamic neurophysiology. In our customary dealings with everyday people, we expect their experience to be much the same as ours, which is totally understandable because so often it appears close enough to be indistinguishable. Puppies and kittens and smiling babies are adorable; funny movies make many of us laugh together; most drivers stop on red and go on green. (For therapists reading this essay, there’s a wonderfully courageous account of that effect showing up in therapy in Irv Yalom’s book, Every Day Gets a Little Closer: A Twice-Told Therapy. It’s like Yalom and his client aren’t even in the same room through much of the therapy).

But when we become emotionally upset, our experiences invariably begin to diverge wildly, often with few of us realizing it.

Amping Down the Observer

But I also suspect that it’s possible for some people to increase the brain’s and body’s capacity to “process energy and information” to a sufficiently robust degree that they can consciously “relocate” the observer anywhere in the known or unknown universe at will. The observing witness (consciousness itself?) develops flexible, plastic attachment to the material body. In the sixties such a capacity used to be called Astral Projection.

Mounting evidence suggests it’s true: We don’t see the world as it is, but rather as we are. Some of us though, like MIT physicist Max Tegmark or Juergen Schmidhuber see the rest of us in the world simply as integers in a universal equation. Somehow though, in my everyday life, that just doesn’t seem to add up.

Why Your Brain is to Blame for the State of Your Life and Not You

When I was in my early 20′s a Sufi wise man from Turkey, in a teachable moment, instructed me to “provide shelter for people.” Twenty years later I finally screwed up the courage and gathered sufficient support around me to take on all the responsibilities involved in designing and building a house to sell on speculation – a typical American capitalist way of “providing shelter.” As such, I followed the Golden Rule of American Capitalism: buy low. Which I thought I did. I went out and bought the cheapest infill building lot available in Palo Alto, California at the time – a 5000 square foot plot ten blocks away from Matadero Creek. I paid $180,000 cash for it. University Bank, where I got the construction loan, estimated that the house I planned to design and build would sell for between $750,000-$800,000. More than an adequate cushion to earn myself a handsome Capitalist profit. Except for one thing. No – actually three things.

Cross Your I’s and Dot Your T’s

First was, my realtor. Even though I found the lot on my own, I specifically hired him to represent my interests. Yet, somehow he neglected to inform me that my super-cheap building lot was located in a Flood Zone until weeks after I signed the deal and delivered my money. Since I’d already built a house on contract closer than ten blocks to Matadero Creek that wasn’t in a flood zone, it never occurred to my brain that this lot would be. Discovering this unfortunate fact after the purchase added another $70,000 to the design and construction costs. And if I really wanted to add further to my costs, me and my brain could have hired a lawyer to sue the seller and the two realtors. I took a pass on that invitation.

The next thing that caught me and my brain by surprise is that local buying activity – even in tony Palo Alto – turns out to be significantly affected by national mortgage rates. Who knew? Carpenters have little need to be interest-rate savvy. When I bought the building lot, rates were about 9 percent. When I completed construction, national rates had ballooned to 19%! (By contrast, my current hard-won mortgage is 3.6%). A mortgage rate of 19% significantly reduces the pool of prospective home buyers, even in wealthy, real estate-crazy Silicon Valley. Interest rates at 19% can seriously take the fun out of spec-building for body and brain. (I wish that Sufi wise man had instructed: “Provide low interest-rate shelter for people, like Habitat for Humanity does”).

The third element that ended up contributing to me and my brain building a Don’t-Wanter of a spec house completely blew my mind. Prospective buyers repeatedly decided against the purchase because … they were frightened of the people who lived across the street. While my crew and I were building that house, the people across the street would often show up on hot afternoons with lemonade or iced tea. They regularly volunteered to straighten up the building site, and returned expensive tools we often left on the job after a hot, tiring day. As far as we were concerned, they were the nicest people on the block. Except for one thing.

They were black.

It took nearly 30 months for me to sell that house at nearly a quarter million dollar loss. So much for capitalism and its Golden Rules.

Muddling Towards Nirvana

But the point here isn’t that there is racism in the world still, or that commission-driven realtors can’t be trusted, or that interest rates are unpredictable and can adversely affect builders. The point is that a brain is a kludgy evolving, complex organism, and at every moment every one of us is doing the absolute best we can with the operating system we have and the surrounding world we operate in. At any point in time our connection grid may or may not be up to interacting effectively with that world, which is huge and complex beyond what few of us can accurately imagine with the brains we have. There’s a joke neuroscientists think is pretty funny: “If the brain were so simple that we could understand it, then we’d be so simple that we couldn’t.”

How disadvantaged are we? Here’s what Johns Hopkins neuroscientist David Linden has to say about it:

All the information in your brain, from the sensation of smelling a rose, to the commands moving your arm to shoot pool, to that dream about going to school naked, are encoded by spike-firing in the sea of brain neurons, densely interconnected by synapses. Now that we have gained an overall understanding of electrical signaling in the brain, let’s consider the challenges the brain must confront as it tries to create mental function using a collection of less-than-optimal parts.

Dr. David Linden

The first challenge is the limitation of the rate of spike-firing caused by the time it takes for voltage-sensitive sodium and potassium ions to open and close. As a result, individual neurons are typically limited to a maximal firing rate of about 200 spikes/ second (compared with 10 billion operations/ second for a modern desktop computer).

The second challenge is that axons are slow, leaky electrical conductors that typically propagate spikes at a relatively sedate 100 miles per hour (compared with electrical signals in a man-made electronic device moving at around 669 million miles per hour).

The third challenge is that once spikes have made it to the synaptic terminal, there is a high probability (about 70% on average) that the whole trip will have been in vain, and no neurotransmitters will be released. What a bum deal! These constraints may have been tolerable for the simple problems solved by the nervous system of a worm or a jellyfish, but for the human brain, the constraints imposed by (ancient) neuronal electrical function are considerable. The Accidental Mind, pps. 47-48

It’s this kludgy collection of parts thrown together in massive numbers through evolution that ends up with each of us doing the absolute very best that our neurobiology will allow at every moment in our lives. Unfortunately, the chaos and complexity of the world is often greater than our ability to deal; and all we can realistically do is lovably muddle. And there’s really no person, place or thing to blame. Only our brain.

Does Keeping Secrets Damage Your Brain?

As a kid, I kept secrets from my older sister and most everyone else. One secret I can clearly remember involved seeing her standing bare-naked outside my bedroom listening at the stairwell to the loud argument erupting downstairs. My mother and her boyfriend were slurring their way through another drunken scream-fest. Andrea presumably thought I was sleeping, but just as the yelling had awakened her, it woke me as well. I remember staring, excited and transfixed by her naked, 16-year-old breasts. This is the first time I’ve ever disclosed that incident.

Another secret I kept from her and everyone else was how broken-hearted I was when my mother threw her out of our house and I didn’t see her again for seven years. Seven years turned out to be too much time for severed trust to transform into full repair. We were all victims. There was no one to blame.

Had I known only a few of the ways secrets impoverish the brain, especially secrets that involve a broken heart, I would certainly have disclosed those two long before now.

A Collection of Rival Territories

Your Brain on Brodmann

In 1909, Korbinian Brodmann, a German neuroanatomist took a close look at the human brain and decided that, based upon the different cell types present and the various thicknesses in different layerings visible under his microscope, he could divide the brain into 43 distinct areas. He did this and assigned numbers to each – a map we’re still using today. Like the struggle for real estate that takes place in the Middle East, these different brain areas rival one another for empire-building and expressive dominance (I’ve written at length about what a despotic bully the left hemisphere can be, for example). As many brain researchers will attest, it’s often a war zone in there. More benevolently, if a visual area goes unused for an appreciable period, it will frequently find itself peacefully annexed and appended to hearing and/or motor areas.

Your Own Private Neuro-Gaza

Much like the struggles in the Middle East, secrets operate to pit one part of the brain against others. The part of my brain that knows secrets are divisive and stress-generating – the orbitofrontal cortex – wants to have this condition resolved. Another part that realizes perhaps how messy and complicated and even more stressful disclosing the secret might be, wants to keep everything under wraps. What to do?

Dr. David Eagleman

David Eagleman, is an irrepressible assistant professor who studies brains at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX. You may have seen him on various talk shows or making the Youtube lecture circuit talking about things like neuroscience and ethics and neuroscience and law (I believe one day we will take neuroscience into the courtroom in a big way. When we do we will discover that current authoritarian courtroom procedures are cruel and unusual punishment that end up doing further damage to defendant’s already seriously compromised brains).

Anyway, Dr. David also has a lot to say about the adverse impact on our brain of keeping secrets. First of all, secrets long-kept raise the level of stress hormones in the brain and body. Since the brain greatly dislikes high stress hormone levels, one part of it will continually vote against the part of your brain that wants to keep the secret…raising stress hormone levels even higher.

Anita Kelly, a psychologist at Notre Dame has studied secret-keepers for many years. Here’s what she has to say by way of summarizing her research: “Quite simply … secretive people also tend to be sick people … I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that being secretive could be linked to being symptomatic at a biological level.” Which makes sense if we subscribe to the theory that high levels of stress hormones compromise the immune system. Considerable research makes that theory useful to subscribe to: if we want a good guideline for remaining healthy, don’t keep secrets.

Confession and Apology

The Catholic Church has long practiced the Sacrament of Penance, also known as Confession. At the level of our neurophysiology, confessing our trespasses, secrets and sins and then doing something deliberate and heartfelt as penance, can serve as an effective stress hormone reduction process (as does living human lives by the Ten Commandments, coincidentally enough). It’s a good thing.

Another good thing is The Apology Page that teachers, Stephen and Ondrea Levine have created. It’s an anonymous Internet Sanctuary where you can post anything you care to concerning regrets, guilt, fear, unkindnesses, amends, mistakes – unskillful actions of any denomination – and Ondrea has promised to read each and every one. Simply reading some of the apologies others have made on the page can soften our feelings of isolation and shame.

Finally, here’s another secret I’ve been keeping for way too long: in the 70 years my sister Andrea was alive, I never once told her how proud of her I was, and that … I loved her. Ann, I know how much you had to overcome to be the force for good you were in the world … I love you.

A Super Way to Spend Your Day – According to Your Brain

There are a lot of scientific claims by respected writers that actually don’t hold up under scrutiny. For example, in his book The Biology of Transcendence, Joseph Chilton Pearce makes the eye-opening assertion that 60-65% of the heart’s cells are actually brain neurons. Supposedly fact-checked and in print, that seemed like a pretty radical claim. When I couldn’t find any evidence to either support it or deny it, and since Pearce is a cracked cosmic egg specialist and not a cardiologist, I contacted Andrew Armour, M.D., editor of the journal Neurocardiology and asked him. What he told me is that it’s true that the heart contains brain cells, but they only number about 20,000 or so. It was his learned opinion that adding more (or subtracting), would greatly interfere with the smooth function of the heart. So-called heart-felt emotions, he further added, are primarily a neurophysiological effect that is mostly centered in the brain (Even though heart-felt emotions do have somatic components – it’s almost impossible to feel heart-felt with a hijacked limbic system, for example. Heart-felt emotions seem to require significant brainstorms of dopamine and oxytocin, rather than cortisol and noradrenaline).

So, recognizing that all scientific claims can’t simply be taken at face value – the world and we are extraordinarily complex – here’s the latest brain fact that sent me cartwheeling to the library stacks (libraries still have stacks, believe it or not): 80% of the brain’s neurons are housed in a relatively small structure at the base of the skull … in the cerebellum, Latin for “the little brain.”

80%! If I’m on the original design team and I agree to allocate 80 percent of the brain’s resources to cells performing one group of functions, I probably think they’re pretty important (Note: 80% of the brain’s connections are not found in the cerebellum).

Purkinje Rules!

The Cerebellum is mostly made up of something called Purkinje cells, named by the Czech anatomist Jan Evangelista Purkyně.

Purkinje Ninjas

These (pur-KIN-gee) cells have massive branching arbors and are primarily responsible for – guess what? – body movement coördination and motor learning – essentially learning to use skeletal muscles effectively. Like how to simultaneously walk and chew gum, or sprint with grace, or dance and not look like a dork. If you can’t do any of these things: 1. you can mostly fault your cerebellum; and 2. you have almost unlimited capacity to actually learn how to do those things and many more with grace beyond measure! Spend a season on Dancing with the Stars. Regularly moving our body would seem to be REALLY important to the brain – a great way to spend a good part of every day, as this recent research from Oz-land suggests.

And One More Thing, or Two
But the cerebellum is also radically wired into the limbic system. It’s got an undeniable reptilian ancestry. That suggests it plays an active role in the fight-flight-freeze response. Which further suggests it’s an active player in forming and retaining traumatic memories – perhaps a central command hub dictating how and where we store traumatic “body memories.”

But here’s something I find most interesting about Purkinje. He also traced fibers in the heart, where they are chiefly responsible for the pump-action that results in … a regular heart rhythm and heart rate variability. I wonder what secret signals that life-long pulsation sends through my vagus nerve bundle to its Purkinje brethren hanging out in my cerebellum when I’m 99% not paying attention?

End Note: Living Life as Art. Last call! Click HERE.

You’re Kidding Me! Claims from Brain Science

I wasn’t really looking for wonderment and surprise when I stumbled onto brain science. Mostly I expected I might occasionally come across an intriguing fact or two that would hustle me up against the short end of the believability spectrum – some wild neuroscientist or other making a deep, left-field declaration that I can’t quite fathom.

And they don’t disappoint. Instead they send me scurrying around the Internet or over to the library looking for “further confirmation” – actually more often looking for dis-confirmation.

The fact that a piece of brain tissue the size of a single sugar grain contains 100,000 neurons making nearly a billion connections was one such you’ve-got-to-be-kidding claim that turns out to be true, pretty much. Depends on what part of the brain the tissue is taken from. My wonderment: how can we even begin to accurately study something so infinitesimal?

Darkness, Darkness, Be My Pillow

Another similar hard-to-believe claim that seems to be true is University of Virginia’s Timothy Wilson’s assertion that 99% of what our brains apprehend in any moment, we grok below the threshold of conscious awareness. Isn’t that astonishing as well as terrifying? What are the implications for a long and happy life if we’re all spending only 1% of it awake? Might the world be better off if more of us spent even more time deeply asleep? We’d produce a lot less procreation, consumption and hydrogen sulfide (Did I mention that we already spend up to 2 hours a day functionally blind? Every time we turn our head, our eyes stop seeing – our brain simply fills in the space between the stop and start of the head turn!).

Next, John Medina’s Brain Rule No. 4 – that healthy brains have a hard time concentrating on a continuous activity for much more than 10 minutes – was a great relief for me to discover. It made it clear that it wasn’t me or ADHD that sent my body fleeing from the boredom of more high school and college classrooms than I care to remember – it was my healthy brain’s natural response to ignorant teaching methods! Big sigh of relief there.

Re-build Foundations Under Castles in the Air

One more claim I found quite compelling was Allan Schore’s assertion that because of the nature of the brain’s early architecture, the developing right hemisphere by necessity becomes the default repository for neuron assemblies retaining and storing traumatic memories. That fact has a lot of implications for any number of human arenas, especially creativity. It would be great though, if Allan would team up with a popular writer who writes aimed at my adolescent brain. Weighty titles like Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self don’t exactly set my learning neuron networks aquiver.

Louann Brizendine, MD

Probably the most confusion-clearing-up revelation for me came from Louann Brizendine. In her book, The Male Brain, she details how puberty finds my testosterone production increased 20-fold to massively toxic levels! And which areas does testosterone attack in the 15-year-old brain: Broca’s and Wernicke’s, home of speech and language production. So, I wasn’t simply a sullen teen; I was a testosterone-poisoned teen! Like many men, I’m still trying to recover from that early wipeout.

Finally, Jill Bolte Taylor’s observation of what a lying sack of bat guano our left hemispheres turn out to be more often than not, was mostly confirmation of any number of contemplative teachings that repeatedly make that claim: a mind generating painful thoughts is a terrible thing to trust. It was affirming though, to have it confirmed by a Harvard neuroanatomist using stroke-induced self-observation. It was also of great consolation to receive her warning about how devious Lefty is in all the ways it then goes about trying to make me forget that it’s constantly lying through its glial cells.

So that’s a pretty interesting collection, I think. Next week I’ll write about the most mind-boggling brain science claim I’ve come across yet. In fact, I had it here at the end of this collection, but I want to take the week to further confirm the truth of it before I post it. Stay tuned.

End Note: I research and write about social neuroscience because I believe knowing how the brain works can profoundly reduce suffering here on planet earth. It has for me. I’ve recently put together a four-session Webinar that one or two of you may find interesting: Life, Art and Neuroscience which explores suffering reduction in depth. Click HERE if you’d like to find out more information. We don’t know what we don’t know until we know it.

What to Do When You Feel One-Down

Over the years I’ve frequently found myself feeling victimized by this, that and the other little thing, often forgetting there are real victims and great suffering in the world (like the four foot snorricane New England is experiencing this weekend, fresh on the heels of Hurricane Sandy). Still, it is our own cross we each must bear.

In the Pacific Northwest I often feel victimized by the weatherperson. It pisses me off that here’s a profession that is really well-paid – averaging almost $90,000 a year (I know it’s bad karma to resent others’ good fortune) – and around here they make accurate predictions probably less than 50% percent of the time! Take yesterday for example: the KUOW weatherman predicted an 80% chance of rain. After a few light sprinkles in the dark of early morning, it was sunny the rest of the day. Or take today: partly cloudy is the forecast. It’s been raining steadily since I got up and now it’s beginning to snow. They’d be better off if they simply said, “Weather. Yes. Step outside.” I’ve cancelled my free subscription to the Weather Channel. Take that, wealthy weather doods and doodettes.

Victimhood as Gift Potential

But it’s in paying attention to this victim feeling and how it shows up in my body and brain I’ve found, that holds some possibility for gift potential. I often treat that feeling as … Step One. My suspicion is that victim feelings are part of the parasympathetic response of my autonomic nervous system – specifically my dorsal vagus nerve. I’ve written a lot recently about my “discovery” of the dorsal vagus and how it seems to lie at the root of so much dysfunction in my life. Feeling like a one-down victim would be one more example.

Too often I take crap sitting down. Bad idea. Better for the vagus nerve is to simply stand up. When I feel like a victim, I feel helpless and immobilized. Initially I can think of nothing to do and no way out other than turning away. I mean everyone knows weather is something to complain about and that we are helpless to gain much mastery over. Everyone of course, except for those folks who come alive at the prospect of dancing in the rain. Oh, and also the folks who invented umbrellas, gloves, skis, sunblock, snowshoes and such. They all took their complaints to the Creativity Department. And therein lies one key for transforming victimhood into victory. Paying attention in ways that take the gift in the wound – the powerlessness in the Immobilization Response – and turning them into something triumphant.

Empowering the Victim

Here’s one more example from my personal life of immobilized victimhood transformed into deliberate action.

I’ve wanted to have a book professionally published since my pre-teens. I enrolled as an English major at UCLA, mad with the desire to become a writer (big mistake – I should have enrolled in their journalism school). One day, after age 50, I decided it would be fun to contact all my spiritual heroes and invite them to contribute to an anthology on the benefits to brain, body and spirit of compassionate listening. Happily, all but Dierdre Blomfield-Brown (Pema Chödrön) readily and willingly agreed.

Next I contacted several “spiritual” publishers and pitched the project to them. Lo and behold, the fifth one I contacted got back to me immediately – Wisdom Publications. But they offered no advance and only an 8% royalty to be split between me and my 18 contributors. They also offered zero money for marketing, and when I objected to the bait and switch they tried to pull with a less costly choice for the front cover, they only agreed to address my dissatisfaction if I would personally pay for the original cover costs upfront. Such a deal!

In a not-so-assertive response, my rationalization bias quickly went into full gear: If I had the book, I wouldn’t have to spend time and money copying all the articles for the Deep Listening classes I teach. Students could buy the book instead. Plus the publication would look good on my resume – something I spend almost zero time caring about. Plus, I would get the work of people I respect and admire further out into the world. And on and on the bias went. Nothing worse than motivated reasoning for a writer wannabe.

Well, needless to say, when the first paltry royalty check showed up after a year (and only once a year thereafter), and the book consistently failed to show up in Wisdom’s annual book list catalog, and it’s almost impossible to get a full accounting of what was sold to whom, when, I began to feel just a little bit like a second-class citizen in their publishing stable. What to do?

Taking the Word to the Street

Simple – self-publish. Which I’ve now done; seven different books worth. Are they all magnificent, best-selling, great works of art? No. Have each of them sold more than the 500-copy average of the more than 328,000 new books published in the U.S. every year? Yes. Have they generated more than the 8% author royalty industry average? Yes. Way more (I just went and picked up a nice check from Anchor Books here on Whidbey Island who likes to sell the works of local authors). Have the books actually been a help to people and made a difference in their lives? Yes. Have they been fun to create and be fully responsible for? Yes and no. Some parts of the successful book creation business are less fun than others – writers typically aren’t crazy-wild about things like marketing, promotion and sales (which you have to do anyway for commercial publishers for your 8% royalty).

But the point isn’t about liking or not liking publishers and publishing. It’s about paying attention to the feelings generated in my body and brain that I typically associate with victimhood. And then stepping up over those feelings and going to work when I can to take intentional, planned creative action in response – to mobilize immobilization. As Dan Wieden likes to say, “Just do it.”

End Note: I’ve recently put together the greatest four-session Webinar in the history of the Internet (or perhaps something somewhat more subdued than that). One or two of you may find it interesting: Life, Art and Neuroscience. Click HERE if you’d like to find out more information. We don’t know what we don’t know until we know it. Just take it.