The Home of Steven Barnes
Author, Teacher, Screenwriter


Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Inner Synergy

Understanding the amydalic response to fear is helping us deal with phobias, guilt, emotional pain, prejudice, and other disorders. Due to early imprinting, people have powerful aversive response to inappropriate stimulus. The usual treatments include drugs to suppress the programming, and then therapy to allow the frontal lobes to reprogram the response.

These stress responses were designed to help us escape a tiger...not to deal with the daily hammering of bills or social stress. The Limbic system is our friend, evolutionarily. And can rip us apart in modern life.

Exercise combined with powerful emotion can have a magical effect, tapping into that circuitry. Instead of long-term grinding stress, you are faced with the momentary, immediate need to perform. You brain understands this!

Instead of a cascade of corrosive hormones, you tap into fuel and burn it in the fire of your commitment. Your brain understands this!

Instead of a chorus of disparate voices, pulling you in all directions, as you work steadily and relentlessly toward a simple attainable goal, fatigue burns away everything but the need to breath, move, take one more step. Your brain understands this!

Instead of locking your pain, disappointment, anxiety, resentment and anger into a tangle of poisonous emotions, you can deal with your body's need for oxygen, a fear that dwarfs all others. Deal with this one, and you learn the secret of dealing with all of them.

Face every day as an empty canvas, presented to your mind and heart for your deepest expression. Empty your dreams onto the blank slate. Focus on the aspects you can handle today. Do what you can, and trust that as you take steps through the fog it disperses just enough to reveal what the NEXT step must be. And the next. And the next.

Mind, body, and heart were intended to be used together. Each is dependent upon the other two. Synergy is the law of the inner world.

No comments: