During this stressful time, it can be hard to manage the emotional challenges of sheltering in place and facing an uncertain future.
- To steady your mind, so that you’re mindful, focused, stable, and on a solid footing.
- To warm the heart—bring compassion, kindness, and a courageous heart into your life.
- To rest in fullness, which is a poetic way to describe equanimity—a felt sense of calm strength and having enough already.
- To feel whole and not at war with parts of yourself.
- To receive “nowness”—really living in the emergent moment, in the present, not getting lost in the past or lost in the future as we so often do.
- To open into “allness”—meaning the sense that we’re connected to everything. We know that intellectually, but to feel it and to relax our sense of self, to take things less personally, to be less identified with things, less possessive, and less prickly and reactive with other people.
These are ways of being that we develop through practice, through experiencing them and turning those experiences into lasting changes in the brain. They’re accessible to all of us.
On the other hand, we recognize scientifically that the experiences of a human being—how contented you are, how fulfilled you feel in your relationships, what happens when another person mistreats you—are all based on what the body is doing, especially our neurobiology.
So, if we’re interested in disengaging from dread, fear, and helplessness and engaging in a feeling of calm strength and openheartedness, we should be interested in how the brain is making those experiences happen. And we should be interested in how we can intervene in the brain skillfully, with precision and some granularity, to help ourselves and others have beneficial experiences more often and learn from them more effectively. When you understand how the hardware works, it turbocharges your practice.
The book is full of examples where identifying underlying neural “circuitry” that underpins beneficial traits—such as present-moment awareness or grateful contentment—helps to establish them in ourselves. You can deliberately stimulate those circuits, and, as you start having those experiences, you can also help your brain heighten the conversion of those experiences into lasting changes of neural structure and function. So that’s really useful.
The second reason is that it’s motivating to bring neuroscience into account. You appreciate that your brain is being changed by your practices and also by your bad habits. A lot of people who have not typically been drawn to personal growth get really interested in it when they realize that it’s “techie”; there’s an engineering aspect here. Practice actually changes the physicality of your brain.
It can also sharpen your insight into your moment-to-moment experience if you understand it’s based on very fast ebbs and flows of neurochemical activity. Increasingly, I can watch the show in the theater of my own consciousness with an understanding of what’s actually prompting the experiences I’m having. Whether it’s a surge of anger or whether it’s a wave of calm, whether it’s some kind of a warm connection or whether there’s some feeling of being dismissed or disrespected by somebody else, I can understand what’s happening in my brain that’s generating that experience. It really helps you come home to yourself when you realize that your experience is a body-mind process.
We need to gradually cultivate the slow accumulation of practice on the path and then we may experience sudden awakenings that create qualitative shifts. We need to engage willful effort in our mind as well as be able to have a profound serene acceptance underneath it all. They’re not at odds with each other; both are necessary, and each one supports the other.
My opinion about this time is that many of us have been propped up by various activities and settings and interactions and the experiences that we had as a result. And that was fine, as long as the music was playing. But when the music stops and the storm comes as it has, and so much of that which we relied upon has fallen out from beneath our feet, we are left with what we have cultivated inside our own heart, inside our own being. This time teaches us how important it is to gradually grow the good inside oneself.
We do this for other people as well as for ourselves. As much as individuals are now facing the results of not having invested in their own practice or in self-development over time, we’re also recognizing that there has been a 40-year sustained attack on the common good—a politicized and relentless eroding of the rule of law, the social safety net, respect for science, expertise, and truth telling; and the playing of people against each other. Now, we are inheriting the consequences of that attack and that lack of investment in the common good.
When inevitably something happens, like the pandemic, it shows that our resource capability as a nation, particularly at the federal level, has been really hollowed out. We’ve been living in a house that looked all shiny and pretty from the outside with some good paint on it, but which had been hollowed out by highly motivated, politicized termites. And now a great storm is pounding on our house, and we are seeing the results.
This time calls on us to practice, as both individuals and communities, like we’ve never practiced before.
I think there are a lot of people who meditate a little here, practice a little gratitude there, and it’s good. It’s way better than the alternative. But they have hit a kind of plateau, where it’s comfortable, it’s pleasant. But, if a person is interested in next steps, whatever those might be, I want to encourage them to take those next steps. Your personal path of awakening honors that deep longing for more.