Review Science
I wrote a lot about this last week, but we talk about much of the same things this week, and I'm glad. There is a clear focus of "building blocks" here that starts with learning a few simple practices, learning how the stress response in the body works, and finally learning how you can put your practice in place to help in your daily life.
-- We remember our negative experiences more strongly than positive ones. There is a bit of a paleo/caveman vibe here. If you have a near death encounter with a bear, you need to remember that and learn from it for next time. If you encounter a bear again, your brain can instantly refer to that encounter and what you've learned and you can better react, increasing your survival chance.
-- With few actual life or death stresses in the modern world, the brain does similar things with emotional experiences. All of the times we are hurt or under stress are stored in our memories just like they were bear attacks to a caveman. When faced with new emotional/work/whatever stress that is absolutely not life or death, we instinctually pull from our negative memories as "learning experiences", leading to a never ending cycle of ever growing stress responses.
-- We talk about the body scan as a way to get in touch with your physical responses to stress. That by doing the body scan over and over (practicing), many people will eventually learn to recognize even very subtle ways that their bodies react to stress. By doing this repeatedly in silent, focused practice, we give ourselves at least some kind of chance to recognize the same signals when they actually happen at work, or in a relationship, or any other real world situation.
-- Starting with Mindfulness Meditation, and moving on to other things we're learning, and by practicing these things in a silent, focused environment, we'll eventually be able to implement them in real world stressful situations, or at least, will be capable of doing so, and can make choices about when to do so to try to better handle a stressful situation or to better respond to stress.
This all feels like really good stuff. The discussion of anatomy is the same as last time, its consistent, it makes a lot of sense. Even though right now this all feels like light years off, the line from all of these practices that we're learning in a very abstract sense to some sort of actual implementation options to actually make and see positive changes in one's life start to become more clear.
-- A separate discussion that is a little less focused on anatomy is had here. We talk about different layers to our minds. I don't really like the terms used here but I can't think of better.
Top layer: Chit Chat Mind - This is the mind racing, constant distractions, lots of superficial things, frequently set up intentionally so that we don't have to deal with the next layer.
Middle Layer: Emotional Mind - Raw emotions can be hard to deal with. Remove distractions and you may not always like what comes up. I've mentioned this in varying ways many times throughout the last few weeks in this thread.
Bottom Layer: Wise Mind - Behind all the distractions and emotions is a lot of wisdom, but we have to learn how to deal with the first two layers to get to this one.
This section is presented with less science and more of "yeah this is how things are." I don't buy into that as easily, but we spent some significant time talking about it, so I can't ignore it or anything
