This Is How Anger Affects You

 The National Institute for Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine offers this vivid diagram of the effects of anger on the brain and body. Because all of us can fall victim to this powerful  emotion, understanding just how toxic anger can be to our wellbeing should encourage us to learn how to build and sustain our capacity for resilience, because our resilience is our safety net in times of anger, frustration and resentment. (Read more about resilience below the image)     

Just like tall trees bend and sway in strong winds without being uprooted, each of us has the emotional bandwidth to tolerate situations that would otherwise provoke our anger and upend our equilibrium. And that bandwidth is resilience - the capacity each of us has to prepare for, recover from and adapt to stress, challenge and adversity.          

Resilience is not a genetic thing; it's a capacity, and just like a battery depletes over time, our resilience depletes during the day, from the time we wake up until we go to bed at night. And when we become angry during the day, our capacity for resilience can take a big hit, wearing us out well before bedtime. Building and maintaining our capacity for resilience is like building up muscles at the gym - the more we practice it, the larger our capacity becomes and - here's the really good news - the larger our capacity for resilience, the more tolerant, accepting and balanced we become, not only mentally, but physiologically, as well.

The Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek, California, has done extensive, pioneering research in the area of psychophysiological coherence, which measures the synchronistic functioning of all of the body's autonomic systems. The Institute's findings, which have been extensively peer-reviewed worldwide, concluded that the greater the body's synchronicity, or coherence, the greater the capacity for resilience. 

The Institute of HeartMath went further and developed a program of breathing techniques to increase psychophysiological coherence and in turn, build a person's capacity for resilience. These techniques were then computerized into affordable software apps and programs that can be downloaded to computers and mobile phones that will coach users to increase resilience. Click in the HeartMath link, above, not only for details about its programs, but for a multitude of products that can be downloaded and utilized for personal wellness. 

You may also email me through this website or call me at (512) 765-5450 for information about HeartMath workshops and seminars in Central Texas. 

Kundalini Rising, Part 2

From ancient times to the present day, sacred esoteric Indian texts have described and revered the Kundalini, a bio-psychic energy that lies dormant, coiled three and one-half times at the base of the human spine. Until the kundalini is awakened, the individual continues to identify himself as separate from God and will continue to rely on his instincts of survival, pro-creation and willpower to get what he wants in life. These survival energies are represented by the lower three chakras – the root chakra (holding the need for survival and safety); the sacral chakra (holding the needs for sexuality and self-worth); and the solar plexus (holding passion, anger and strength).

The awakening of the Kundalini marks the beginning of an individual’s spiritual journey. In its aroused form, Kundalini is Shakti, the Divine creative energy. The Shakti rises upward through the sushumna, the body’s subtle channel that corresponds to the spinal column, and pierces the chakras as it makes its way to its ultimate destination, the Crown Charka, or Shahasra. As it pierces the lower chakras, the Shakti liberates the individual’s consciousness from the control of these survival centers, allowing the individual to engage the higher powers of the fourth through sixth chakras that bring about the ultimate merger of individual consciousness with the Divine Consciousness, or Pure Awareness. 

For centuries, seekers have engaged in austere yogic practices to awaken the Kundalini. Not only does Kundalini yoga demand extreme discipline and total commitment, it is rarely successful. Moreover, once the Shakti is aroused it can cause erratic and bizarre behavior and be terribly difficult for an inexperienced practitioner to manage without the oversight of an accomplished master.

Kashmir Shaivism, an obscure, esoteric philosophy that originated among mystics in the Himalayan valleys of northern India 1,400 years ago, informs us it is the divine function of the guru is to awaken the dormant Kundalini in the disciple. Arousal of the Kundalini by the guru is known as “Shaktipat”, and is considered an act of grace on the part of the guru.

Kashmir Shaivism teaches that the guru is the grace bestowing power of God. Shaktipat can be transmitted by the guru’s physical touch, by a thought from a distance, or through a glance. The very consciousness of the guru enters the inner self, or soul, of the disciple, bringing about an initiation to the path toward the disciple’s liberation, which is the realization that one's true self is identical with the transcendent Divine Consciousness, or Awareness. 

There are said to be few gurus on the planet at any given point in time who can bestow Shaktipat.  One such guru was Swami Muktananda, who traveled from India throughout the United States during the late 1970s.

A Chicago accountant, who is also an enrolled agent with the IRS, experienced a kundalini awakening at one of Muktananda’s public programs in Chicago in 1974, five years before I did, and wrote about it in a book he published:  

Baba had just begun delivering his discourse with his opening statement: "Today’s subject is meditation. The crux of the question is: What do we meditate upon?" Continuing his talk, Baba said: "Kundalini starts dancing when one repeats Om Namah Shivaya." Hearing this, I mentally repeated the mantra, I noticed that my breathing was getting heavier. Suddenly, I felt a great impact of a rising force within me. The intensity of this rising kundalini force was so tremendous that my body lifted up a little and fell flat into the aisle; my eyeglasses flew off. As I lay there with my eyes closed, I could see a continuous fountain of dazzling white lights erupting within me. In brilliance, these lights were brighter than the sun but possessed no heat at all. I was experiencing the thought-free state of “I am,” realizing that “I” have always been, and will continue to be, eternal. I was fully conscious and completely aware while I was experiencing the pure “I am” a state of supreme bliss. Noticing that this dramatic awakening of kundalini in me frightened some people in the audience, Baba said to the audience, "Do not be frightened. Sometimes kundalini gets awakened in this way.”

Following awakening of the Shakti, there arises an inner voice within the devotee that, over time, brings about the identification of his consciousness with Pure Awareness. Through discrimination brought about by the intelligence of the Shakti, the devotee gradually disassociates himself from the defense mechanisms and coping strategies that comprise the ego; frees himself from the ensnarement of the left brain’s compulsive categorization of all experience, which results in duality, or the experience of separation from God; and becomes detached from repetitive, negative thoughts and emotions. The result is the emergence of an open heartedness that embraces the vicissitudes of life and a loving countenance that is both accepting and forgiving of others. 

Your Circus; Your Monkeys

YOUR BRAIN IS YOUR CIRCUS; YOUR THOUGHTS ARE YOUR MONKEYS 

We supposedly have 70,00 to 80,000 thoughts per day, 80% of which are negative. Ninety-five percent of all those thoughts are said to be "rooftop chatter" - incoherent, idle thoughts that mindlessly skip across the top of the brain. For over 50% of the population, these incoherent thoughts take place even while a person is doing something. In other words, these people are not  paying attention to whatever it is they're doing.

We have no control over these thoughts, however, until they are given substance by our feelings. And theses feelings come from one of two sources - fear or love. Thoughts that are given substance by fear-based feelings (such as anger, frustration and anxiety) will become physical life events that we experience as "negative" or "bad". Thoughts given substance with love-based feelings (such as gratitude, peace and happiness) will become events we experience as "positive" and "good".

But how do we control the feelings that give our thoughts substance? We now know that the average human brain has something on the order of 100 billion neurons. Neurons are cells that are specialized to pass electrical signals (information) to other neurons; synapses are the means by which the neurons pass information to one another.  Each neuron is connected to up to 10,000 other neurons, which means that the number of synapses in the brain is between 100 trillion and 1,000 trillion; that's 100,000,000,000,000 to 1,000,000,000,000,000.

Over time, neurons "wire together", which means that synapses that repetitively fire simultaneously with each other create pathways of information that become solidified, or wired together. A neural pathway that is wired may consist of 100,000,000 neurons; when any one of the neurons in the pathway is stimulated, the information carried by the entire pathway will become activated and will produce a behavior corresponding to the dictates of the information carried by the neural pathway.

The brain is neuroplastic. This means that neural pathways can be changed or modified by behavior, environment and newly acquired neural processes. A fundamental principle underlying neuroplasticity is that individual synaptic connections are constantly being removed or recreated, largely dependent upon behavior, repetitive thinking, environment and physical trauma.

"When something difficult happens, emotion drives,” Brown told the crowd at the Smith Center. “And cognition, thought and behavior are not riding shotgun and telling emotion where to go. When something difficult happens, thought and behavior are tied up in the trunk and emotion is at the wheel.”

Who Thinks For Themselves Anymore?

If most people were asked to say what they were thinking, they’d be speechless. Who thinks for themselves anymore?

Over the last few decades, behavioral economists and evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that most human decisions are based on emotional reactions and heuristic shortcuts rather than rational analysis, and are woefully inadequate for dealing with life in the real world.

Has the idea of individual thinking become a myth? People rarely think for themselves anymore. Instead, they think in groups. Just as it takes a tribe to raise a child, it also takes a tribe to invent a tool, solve a conflict or cure a disease. No individual knows everything it takes to build a cathedral, an atom bomb or an aircraft. What gave Homo sapiens an edge over all other animals and turned us into the masters of the planet was not our individual rationality, but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups.

Today, individual humans know surprisingly little about the world. As time has gone by, they have come to know less and less. What they do is rely on the expertise of others for almost all their needs. People think they know a lot, even though individually they know very little, because they treat knowledge or information in possession of others as if it were their own.

But the real problem here is that providing people with more and better information isn’t going to change their minds. Why? Because their ideas and viewpoints are shaped by their individual thinking but by communal groupthink, and they cling to these collective views because it’s safer to be part of group dogma and be wrong than risk thinking for themselves and being wrong. So, bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance isn’t going to work; in fact, it will only make them angry. Most people don’t like a lot of facts, but they also don’t like to be made to feel they’re stupid.

 In the coming years, the world is going to become far more complex than it is today. Individuals will consequently know less and less about technological gadgets, the economic currents and the political dynamics that shape the world.

How are we to expect these people who are so ignorant and susceptible to manipulation to be intelligent voters? Providing them with more and better facts isn’t going to solve the problem.