Follow Your Myth

RATIONAL MIND

There is a phenomenon that occurs regarding the nature of the conscious mind, that is called the Split Mind.  The nature of the split mind was observed when in the 1940s doctors severed the corpus callosum in epileptics, the thick fibers connecting the left and right side of the brain, to stop debilitating seizures.

A side effect of the surgery was that consciousness seemed to split into two distinct personalities.  

Yeah weird. It brings into question the nature of consciousness – and something I am thinking about today is this experience we have.

I know that I myself when asked something specific may respond after thinking about it, as if wrestling with the two sides of my brain and I will say something like;

“I’m of two minds, on the one hand, you can do this, and on the other hand you can do the other.”   

The split in the brain I am more interested in for this article is simply the split between the rational part of our mind and the danger response of our second mind, the amygdala.

The rational mind is the over-seer that plans, and thinks, and which is what we think of as our “selves.” This rational ego-self often appears to be running the show, or at least managing the different things coming into our conscious awareness. This may include noting when we feel triggered or emotional from something and trying to understand why.

When I am in my rational mind, and I work on myself I may imagine myself as the calm center of the universe. A captain at the helm of my mind, calm but ready for danger.

THE SECOND MIND

Yeah, I do not picture myself as Captain Pike calm and ready for any scenario.

Now I am not here to try to overly simplify the mind or get into a big philosophical discussion on the mind, just to bring attention to a second place in the mind, this place that is always running and is running at an unconscious level.

The amygdala in particular is that part of our brain that is responsible for a number of things, but among them are threat detection, the fear response.  This means that our amygdala mind is always looking for threats.  These threats can come in various ways, it could be someone who cuts you off on the freeway or even a near collision.  It could be the change in tone on someone’s face, or even the subtle facial cues that indicate something.  Those visual cues can be good things that keep you relaxed, like a smile, or eye contact.  

They may also create a feeling of being threatened. Danger does not just look like an car rushing at you in traffic.

Now I had an experience like this this past week which allowed me to dig down a little more into my reaction and get curious about this reaction in myself, and consider how to discuss this with others. 

BEING MINDFUL

Being mindful, in other words, is really easy when I can go back to my studio and start the day with a meditation, work out, and then do art or work with clients.   Being mindful may be more difficult when confronted with some unexpected hostility as I experienced from a contractor, I hired to do some work on our house. 

I found myself going through stages of feeling like something wasn’t right.  Then trying to figure out what things I was observing in his work, and in his behavior that was giving me alarms and red flags.  

My intuition said something was not right. My amygdala was sending up alarms but I couldn’t understand all the information.

I stopped to listen and began to pace as I considered what happened. I felt some alarm bells, I thought they were about something else and I tried to placate the situation – but I felt unsatisfied. The contractor had been rude, and even somewhat hostile.  These seemed like definite signals that all was not okay, and I needed more information.

I went to speak to him and asked if there was a problem, and the aggression I saw came quickly. The facial cues, the body moving rapidly followed by what he said.  I was suddenly under attack and felt my red alert alarms going off.

In a short amount of time there was a heated exchange of words and we decided it best to part company.

Afterwards, I examined his work for the next day and realized the number of mistakes that I had ignored, the things I had been fixing in my own time after he left at night, and how I felt his anger was unjustified

More importantly, though I didn’t like that my mindful wall, my Star Trek shields had been breached. I felt shame, and agitation.

Because my ability to be mindful had been breeched, I spent the next 24 hours consumed with what happened, and had insomnia for the first time in a long time. Then I realized my shame about losing my cool, was getting in the way of me considering how my amygdala became activated so quickly. I had to put shame aside, and breathe into awareness of where my rough edges are. I had to also understand why I was willing to put away my red-alarms in favor of being nice to someone to begin with.

CURIOUS ABOUT THE FALLS

For Spock from Star Trek dealing with coming under attack would have been easy. After all the Vulcans have had generations to harness their minds and overcome their amgydala responses.

For us humans the takeaway, is that we are learning to be mindful, but also learning to be curious when we find our shields breeched, and the amygdala starts firing photon lasers.

What I’m talking about in the end is that this isn’t just about the low level monitoring that our amygdala does though, those of us with trauma, neglect, abuse, or who had been put in physical danger through work like in the military may find that the amygdala is reacting and we aren’t tracking.

The question is how we can track when we are feeling alarmed?  How can we track when we are being triggered into this second mind, that unconscious part that has a quick emotional reaction to danger.

Can we drill down into where we get into trouble, and when we fall into that brain fog and cannot think clearly anymore because that other mind has taken over?

I have written about how we can fold with things that come up when we are meditating, when we may find ourselves triggered, but we can also fold around and contemplate on when things go awry.

Perhaps especially when things go awry. Those are the rough edges. That is the learning opportunity for our life journey.

If we can get past the shame or other defense that we ourselves have around looking at ourselves, then we can try to understand where things may have gone wrong for us. Where might we have not taken care of ourselves? Did I ignore the red-flags and danger signals? Did I ignore my own amygdala response? Was it in a look? Was it in someone cutting me off on the highway? Maybe they cut you off in conversation.

The goal is to continue to gather data, where we let ourselves get triggered, and where our Second Mind may come in, so that we can grow, and learn to be more mindful. Being mindful and aware we get to go deeper when it happens again, and then with work perhaps we can extinguish the big responses to small crises, and sit in our captain chair and await the next big danger that we’ll be more prepared for having dealt with the little things along the way.