The cave we fear to enter holds the treasures that we seek.
Joseph Campbell
Don’t talk, don’t feel, don’t trust.
ACA characterisation of the atmosphere of the dysfunctional family
Recovery is not primarily about feeling better. It is about getting better at feeling. At times, that can be very discomforting.
Patrick Little
It takes courage…to endure the sharp pains of self discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.
Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
A big mistake many of us make is that we think we can successfully stuff down our emotions. This comes from having had to do exactly that at an early age in order to come through the threatening craziness of childhood adversity. This fear-based shift had already become the default programme for many of us before we emerged into the world as young adults.
Later in life, having established ourselves and experienced both accomplishments and setbacks, having developed the capacity for self-reflection and gained access to some of the many supportive resources for self-actualisation available today, we can identify and transcend that adopted default fearful stance, which had proven increasingly counter productive and detrimental to our well-being as life progressed.
Many people think that Mental Fitness is stuffing our emotions down, controlling our emotions. It is not. In fact, quite the opposite, it is harnessing the totality of our mental resources and capabilities to channel emotions (feelings in motion) into producing the loving, kind behaviours we yearn to experience and manifest in the world.
Why is Mental Fitness so important? The major reason has to do with the evolution and structure of our brain. Before the Stone Age, while still in the reptilian phase of evolution, our brains were originally wired to give emotions the upper hand. For primates, the environment is hostile, and survival is indispensable. Reacting to the cues of fear is given the highest priority in this scenario.
Today’s human brain is simply a later, more advanced version which still encompasses the reptilian brain. While we now have higher powers of reasoning, everything we experience still enters at the base of our brain and then travels through the limbic system where, first of all, emotions are generated.
These, in turn, manifest somatically in our gait, posture, and autonomic nervous system. A slightly crooked mouth, slanted shoulders, and an inability to maintain eye contact, and an elevated heart rate under certain conditions are some with which you may be familiar.
This systemic structure of the brain means we have an emotional reaction to the world around us before we’re able to think rationally. The emotional reaction comes before the signals travel to the prefrontal cortex, which developed in later iterations of our evolution, where rational thinking occurs. Research shows that we have several hundred emotional experiences every single day.
The dynamic of the emotional impulsive reaction becomes self-perpetuating not only because of unconscious somatic manifestations (right down to the cellular level of our bodies) but also because fear has the added effect of shutting down the prefrontal cortex, of taking it offline, making it unavailable in moments of stress.
Our brain, therefore, if stuck in autopilot, will keep flooding us with emotions. Without the ability to pause and reflect before responding, we generally get caught up in the mental reactions or even reflexes of old, of which we are not aware. And we are generally not aware that we are not aware.
Today’s world is in many ways an echo-chamber of the earliest circumstances of childhood. This impulsivity tends to get us into a lot of trouble, with ourselves and those around us, causing conflict, strife, even disease.
Positive Intelligence (PQ) is a Mental Fitness modality which I have been practising daily for over three years and in which I have become certified as a coach. PQ teaches us how the brain is structured and operates.
These insights make up 20% of the programme. Simple, frequently engaged practices which train three key mental muscles make up the remaining 80%. The strength of these muscles determines our state of Mental Fitness and, consequently, the quality of our lives.
When we address the insights, we learn that each one of us has a cast of fear-driven Saboteurs which, if not intercepted before they can hijack us, will drive impulsive reactive emotions, thoughts, and behaviours to everyday stimuli. These reactions exacerbate our day-to-day challenge of meeting, in a calm and aware manner, whatever life throws in our path. We become angry, exhausted, frustrated, and resentful.
In each of us, the lead role is played by the Judge, which has a black-and-white view of the world, sorting everything into the categories of `good´ and `bad´.
The Judge is assisted in various configurations, depending on our personalities and the circumstances of our early years, by a cast of Saboteurs which include the Avoider, Controller, Hyper-Achiever, Hyper-Rational, Hyper-Vigilant, Pleaser, Restless, Stickler, and Victim. As we learn to identify and work with these, we begin to train the Saboteur Interceptor muscle.
With increased fitness, we sense the approach of the Saboteur activity before getting hijacked and can choose alternative responses to our inner stress, eventually in real time. We recognise that solutions lie in the realm of changing our response rather than in changing other people or circumstances.
As we get to know the inner workings of the brain, we also discover more benevolent powers, the so-called Sage Powers of Compassion, Explore, Innovate, Navigate, and Activate. These Sage Powers are located in a different region of the brain, in the right hemisphere. Our raised awareness of the Saboteurs and our ability to harness their energy to re-direct us to the Sage Powers begins a process of rewiring our neural circuits, with lasting positive effect. We begin to build and strengthen the Sage Enhancer muscle.
The third mental muscle (in addition to the Saboteur Interceptor and the Sage Enhancer) is the Mind Command muscle. This muscle enables the shift from Saboteur to Sage. It is trained by the consistent, frequent, daily repetition of short, body-based exercises which develop our ability to focus on being in the present moment. By doing these so-called PQ Reps, throughout the day, every day, we build and maintain our Mental Fitness.
As we become increasingly mentally fit, our raised awareness of the realm of feelings, the ability to pause before responding to the stimulus, and the discovery of more reflective options in terms of responding, all lead to a strengthening of our capacity to respond to life’s challenges in the spirit of loving kindness.
Reactivity and impulsiveness are gradually replaced by responsibility. This term contains the word response. We begin to craft conscious responses to the stimuli we pick up as we go through each day. The fear-based reaction to life is gradually replaced by a loving response.
Until we have awareness of our mental faculties and begin establishing Mental Fitness, we expend much of our energy in trying to overcome, unbeknownst to ourselves, the internecine friction caused by our Saboteurs. This is tantamount to driving an auto mobile with the handbrake engaged.
When we begin to notice this and gradually release the handbrake, vast amounts of energy are freed up. Ironically, it is now that old feelings from the past can begin to percolate to the surface of our psyche. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, with increasing clarity we may experience heightened levels of challenge and discomfort as awareness expands while healing progresses.
This is where the support of others is a key factor. A coach, sponsor, partner, group, or tribe: these can be instrumental to our ability to keep going when times get tough, to persevere in the face of pain or confusion, and to maintain trust in the process of the unfolding healing.
We can’t turn the feelings off but when we learn to identify, acknowledge, and embrace them. We can harness them to fuel positive outcomes despite how we feel. Positive Intelligence is so important because it actually builds the neural pathways between the emotional and rational centres of the brain so when we strengthen our PQ, our brains literally get rewired, with a corresponding improvement in how we relate to life as it plays out, one day at a time.
The increased strength of our mental muscles enables us to cultivate the gap between stimulus and response. In the words of Viktor Frankl, renowned Austrian psychiatrist, and Auschwitz survivor: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
We become faster at identifying and responding to our emotions and, in turn, become more effective protagonists in our lives, both personal and professional. Our personal relationships will be so much smoother and fertile. We become adept in manifesting our aspirations in line with our deeply held values.
In situations where we do, once again, get hijacked, our recovery time grows shorter. We develop a strong degree of resilience and can make amends quickly, to self and others, where appropriate. A compassionate internal dance between the forces of fear and love ensues, with Sage increasingly taking the lead.
PQ is suitable for people who aren’t particularly psychologically minded. It can be applied for specific goals such as reducing stress in the workplace or improving our parenting skills. This may open doors for such people even if they maybe aren’t particularly self aware or haven’t given a lot of thought to why they do what they do.
The Positive Intelligence Mental Fitness modality is an approach that helps us to really understand our behavior and how we react (and later respond) to the world around us, what triggers us and how. It opens up new perspectives because it gives us a new way of seeing how the hardwiring of our brains, laid down by evolutionary forces and amplified by the coping strategies we developed in the first years of childhood, determines how we live, and how we can change the programming.
PQ feeds us the practice in which we need to engage daily in order to rewire our brains. The Mental Fitness studio is provided through an easy-to-use PQ App which facilitates this practice, making the workouts fun and our progress measurable.
The rewiring enables us to become responsible for the lives we lead and how we lead them. In that response lies our growth, our freedom, and our capacity for joy.
