Learning to respond not react
“Causes lead to effects. When we have certain beliefs and thoughts, they create certain feelings that then turn into actions. The actions become habits, and those habits end up really creating our sense of identity. And if they’re really hardened, become our destiny.” - Tara Brach
If we don’t stop to pause and reflect, get a grip of the full picture, then what are we responding to? Are we then shooting in the dark?
This reflection is about “how we can awake from these habitual chains of thinking, feeling and then acting. This stimulus reaction cycle that we get caught into that really can bind our lives.”
Tara structures this talk around three key teachings—ways in freeing ourselves or waking up from the chain reaction:
1) Please, don’t believe your thoughts.
2) Please, just pause and come back into presence.
3) Please, remember love. In some way, whatever way, remember love.
She asks the question—“‘what happens in our brain when we’re caught in the stimulus reaction chain?’ Which is very often relational. We get triggered and we go into this chain of reactivity.”
“Bottom line, when we’re living out stimulus react looping, this unintegrated brain, we’re believing something that’s not true. We’re living in a very confined reality of a separate and limited self. A reality that has us locked into a very small sense of who we are.”- Tara Brach
(13:30) “Fear thoughts can be adaptive in terms of real danger, but they become maladaptive because they become a habit of our mind, and the more we run them, the more they become the inclination of our mind. As the neuropsychologist says, ‘neurons that fire together wire together.’ So, the habit of fear thinking fuels difficult emotions, and difficult emotions fuel more fear thinking. It’s circular. But I’ve always been struck by Jill Bolte Kahler, a neuropsychologist. She describes that it takes 1.5 minutes for an emotion to come and to go—1.5 minutes. Unless, of course, you’re having thoughts that keep on fueling the emotion, which is, of course, what we do. We keep generating stress thoughts or fear thoughts, or we keep talking about things that keep us anxious and keep the mood going.
(15:42) “The more we have the habit of the thoughts and the talking that has to do with what we’re afraid’s around the corner; what’s gonna go wrong; what’s wrong with me, the more that generates the emotions that embody those feelings in our body. And [that] leads to the very behaviors that bring about the world’s responses that reinforce our beliefs—when we’re insecure, and we have insecure thoughts. We act out of them; we create responses that then deepen our sense of insecurity. So, we’re caught in this stimulus reaction kind of a cycle, and it leads to the actions that come out of our fears. Well, either we speed up, get tense and really get our bodies sick, we also try to control others, we try to prove ourselves a lot, try to defend and present a lot, and there’s a lot of aggression. Whether it’s just our minds having judgmental thoughts, in large ways bullying, attacking, or hurting. So, this is what I mean by flipping the lid—it means that we’re no longer living from the integrated brain, which really in an energetic way means we’re no longer inhabiting our awareness in our heart. We’re not living from a more evolved, awakened sense of our being, we’re reacting out of the more primitive parts of our brain. They’ve taken over, they’ve hijacked, and we need to find our way home. We can see that in our individual life how we act out in ways, we’ll press the send button on an insensitive email, or say hurtful things or let loose our anger. We see how, in a larger society, the subcortical looping leads to the repeating cycles of war and oppression. We see what happens when the primitive brain hijacks, we’re coming from a very small fear place.”
(18:31) “Bottom line, when we’re living out stimulus react looping, this unintegrated brain, we’re believing something that’s not true. We’re living in a very confined reality of a separate and limited self. A reality that has us locked into a very small sense of who we are.”
WATCH THE FULL TALK, HERE. (53 min)
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