While going through a hard time recently, and at the prompting of a dear friend, I decided to take advantage of the free counselling services offered through my work. Now, I've previously explained my prior run-ins with psychologists, quite hilariously I might add, and it's been a bit of a mish-mash of results. This time proved no different. I went in with my somewhat snobbish sense of heightened awareness and played energetic 'bring it on' with the counsellor, challenging them to tell me something I didn't already know about myself or the origin of my inner angst. Disappointingly, yet true to previous experience, they mostly focused on their own successes and modalities, to which I listened with as much patience as I could muster. We never even got to the specific issue that landed my ass in their seat to begin with... Still, I was hopeful that talking to someone outside the situation would help me gain a different and unbiased perspective. Despite my ever-growing skeptical notions, I remained open to what this squirrely person had to say. How else am I to practice what I preach? They used a white board which appealed to my scientific mind and wrote the following:
Think – Feel – Do: We have a thought (not more than 3 words, they explained), which gives rise to a feeling, that we then act upon.
Not a novel concept to me, admittedly, as something very similar appears in Practical Yoga Psychology, but this was very simple and straight-forward. As one might guess, that simplicity is precisely what made me want to stand up and proclaim: "but it's not that #$%&-ing simple!" ...... Or is it? 🐇🐇🐇
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| This is the actual diagram the counsellor drew. My scientists' brain enjoyed the schematic. |
Think – Feel – Do: We have a thought (not more than 3 words, they explained), which gives rise to a feeling, that we then act upon.
Not a novel concept to me, admittedly, as something very similar appears in Practical Yoga Psychology, but this was very simple and straight-forward. As one might guess, that simplicity is precisely what made me want to stand up and proclaim: "but it's not that #$%&-ing simple!" ...... Or is it? 🐇🐇🐇
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| Who could forget this wee nugget of genius? But how far down the rabbit hole are we willing to go? |
As I sat there, merely pretending to listen to them, I felt a deep sense that these three simple words were about to take me for a bit of a ride and I started to play with the concept. True to my proclivity for thoughtful musings and mental analytics, over the next few weeks my brain, heart and gut worked synergistically to fill the gaps between these words. Thanks to the Universe's epic sense of irony, this idea is equal parts plain and complicated. Three straightforward black and white words that encapsulate an entire world of grey; the shades of which help us understand ourselves and each other on a deeper level, if and/or when we allow (as I've said many times, building self-awareness is not for the faint of heart). There will be plenty of future articles and podcasts to fully digest the many implications of this seemingly simple cycle. Indeed, I intentionally break up articles because awareness expansion is hard work for our fragile human egos, and therefore to be taken slowly and gently. There is a need to continually pause and reflect, process and comprehend, on deeper and deeper levels as we peel back the onion's layers of our inner psyches.
I still refused to believe it's so simple as Think-Feel-Do, however. Life is both biology and whimsy. As I sat in the counsellor's chair I saw their point, but also felt they were being a tad short-sighted. Why? Well, because of emotional dichotomy for one; and for two, it is well known that we have three, not just one, intellectual centres. Regardless, I hope the following examples will help highlight some of these grey areas.
Scenario 1: The Primal Need for Food
Our basic primal needs prompt actions to keep us alive. Our lizard brain is at work here. For example, the thought 'need food' prompts a sensation of hunger and we can find ourselves in the pantry or digging around the fridge, mystified by how the hell we got there.
'Need food' is a thought that no longer springs forth based on a purely physical need however, which gets both interesting and complicated. A prime example of this messy food dilemma includes the widely accepted notion of food guilt. Who doesn't go a bit off the rails during the Christmas/New Year festive season? I'll put my hand up for sure! Just this morning while showering I thought of what food I had in my fridge to sup on and experienced a distinct sensation of relief. An image of a head of broccoli materialised in my mind's eye and a smile spread across my lips. There were no social events this weekend and I would be able to eat my normal fare without fear of guilt or having to mitigate 'naughty' meals in the form of excessive exercise or caloric restriction.
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| I aspire to be more like this cat. |
The true scientific fact is that eating too much of any food, even broccoli, can cause weight gain. There is no such thing as 'naughty' foods, just naughty quantities. I know this is true, but I don't believe it... yet. Why? Because my thought is a result of a year and a half of dieting, during which time I trained my brain to staunchly believe that broccoli helped me lose weight, and has enabled me to keep it off during the last ten years. This delves into an even more complicated aspect of think-feel-do, because between the think and feel, there is a story we tell ourselves that can change truth to fiction and fiction to gospel. I lie to myself and falsely believe I must eat healthy to keep thin, at times obsessively. In the past I've even gone so far as to completely avoid social events to keep myself from the temptation of 'unsafe' foods. Oh, well hello the type of underlying thought that drives eating disorders! My only hope of keeping such brain-driven unhealthy behaviours at bay is becoming aware of that underlying thought and constantly reminding myself it's not true. I don't have to allow it to dictate my behaviour, it's a choice. Yet it only became an active choice once I'd woken up to the emotion and belief underneath, pausing in the moment to reflect and drill down to uncover that distorted belief.
That critical pause is typically prompted by a specific situation when the behaviour/action it drives leads to some catastrophic or embarrassing event, sometimes referred to as 'rock bottom' (not bikini bottom, that's where Spongebob lives). In my case, my hair started to fall out because I wasn't eating enough, and nothing makes us stop and reconsider our health choices quite like vanity! Even then, making the choice to eat more terrified me each and every time I made it. Six years later, and I still need to call BULLSHIT! on that old false belief at times. Yes, the same false belief that makes me feel comforted by the thought of eating broccoli. When we Pause, listen to those emotions, we can hear what they have to teach us.
Scenario 2: Traditions Die Hard
Nearly four years ago I extracted myself from my birth country and moved halfway around the world, literally. Adjusting has been extremely interesting, but the most confusing part for my body is the change of seasons. Sure I've learned to write the dates a different way and drive on the left side of the road, but I'll be damned if I can wrap my head around the fact that it's freezing cold on my birthday in July despite my name sake (Summer), and it's hot as hell on Christmas. There is also no Thanksgiving here, nor any social cues to remember that now irrelevant US holiday such as orange pumpkins, colourful fall foliage or pumpkin spice lattes; so why the shit did I feel mysteriously compelled to make a traditional pumpkin pie on what seemed like a totally random Tuesday? The answer, I suspect, is thirty years of cultural conditioning. It was, in fact, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving but I wasn't aware of that until I stopped to contemplate my seeminly odd behaviour, realising that I actually love Thanksgiving and miss it. I was chasing the emotions associated with the smell of a baking pumpkin pie in the oven along with other happy mealtime memories from years-past spent with my family and friends.
Need another example? Have we ever found ourselves heading to work on a Monday, only to realise it's a public holiday when the parking lot is empty and there is a need to turn our brain on to ask why? Yup, now we're starting to get somewhere!
Scenario 3: Breaking Up His Hard to Do, But Necessary
My first relationship was a real mind-opener in this regard, quite literally. Fights about my obsessive need to vacuum made me think about why I cleaned constantly, and why I felt anyone else's cleaning practices were severely deficient. The fights were a direct result of my insistence that I be the one who clean, re-cleaning anything my partner had attempted to clean; usually sneakily so he wouldn't notice and get angry with me. Pausing to reflect after a particularly nasty spat, I came to realise that cleaning was the one and only time during my childhood when I felt a sense of order. Whether at my father's or my mother's, cleaning was a happy time. Everyone had their tasks, we'd turn the music up loud and crack into the work quite contently. Cleaning the house gave us all a feeling of control amidst the plethora of emotional issues that accompanied every member of my family, myself included. Now, in my adult life, I clean emphatically to chase that perception of orderliness because the underlying thought is something like 'I'm in control, and I'm safe.'
Still more disturbing was a behaviour I observed when I found myself dissatisfied with my life in general. I felt a niggle that I couldn't identify or articulate. Though I 'loved' my job, it was very stressful and I'd even break out in hives from time to time as a result. I also 'loved' my partner, yet at times the thought of him sitting on the couch with me, let alone touching me, made me cringe. Some nights I'd look at jobs online across the country, dreaming of a different existence. That's normal, right? When I finally paused long enough to truly consider that rather obvious question, I realised what I was really doing by looking for those far-away jobs, and I was terrified. Emotions too scary to deal with, the fear of pain and loneliness, took a huge crap all over my longing for freedom. I persevered with a relationship I intuitively knew in my heart was doomed to fail, afraid of both being alone as well as being tethered to someone I no longer loved.
The truly sad part? I repeated this exact behaviour in my second major relationship yet, again, stubbornly persisted in lying to myself; self-affirming that it would all work out, that I could make it work, that I wouldn't be left terrified, heart-broken and alone again. All these confronting thoughts swirling around in my brain even as I sat next to him in bed looking for other flats to live in, without any intention of bringing him with me. I never paused to ask who the hell was driving the computer, because that part of me was scaring the shit out of the part of me who loved him dearly and didn't want to leave him. Two parts of myself with competing agendas threatened to rip my Spirit in two. I'd like to say my first break-up gave me strength, but it really only gave me experience and I still had a lot to learn about myself. The strength came later.
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| Tiny wise Buddha say "What you think you become. What you feel you attract. What you imagine you create." |
Pause. Take a deep belly breath. If what the tiny wise Buddha says is true, then the only hope we have for freedom and true control over our lives is becoming aware of our thoughts, resulting emotions and behaviours. In this way we can then act with intent as active participants in our lives. Pause. Observe. Listen. Reflect. Shift. 🐇🙏💖
Phew! If that's all too much to take in, no worries, stick to the simple psychology; no contemplation around multiple intellectual centres is necessary. Even from the most basic level asking ourselves what we're doing, how we feel about it, and what the underlying thought could possibly be, will expand our awareness and understanding of ourselves. Either way it takes conscious effort and courage in the form of a pause as well as a willingness to objectively view our behaviours. A pause to face parts of ourselves that we may fear or be ashamed of.... a pause to try and suss out why we feel that fear and/or shame. Yes, it takes a whole heap of courage, and practice! To start, I'd suggest teasing apart the actions that we associate with happy sensations, but to be honest they can go down a confronting rabbit hole as well, like my broccoli.
The Pause is our opportunity to notice the subconscious thoughts and emotions that drive habitual behaviours, which in turn keep us doing the same shit Every. Damn. Day. This may not be an issue! The trouble is when we feel too scared to break that cycle and change our lives in a beneficial way. The Pause is the moment wherein our consciousness can intervene, putting us back in the driver's seat of our lives; able to drive our lives instead of allowing our subconscious defaults to repeat cycles that may or may not serve us and what we want for our lives. The Pause is a chance to choose, to be different, to be new.
This is it, the start of the awareness adventure. Our tools are the Pause, our inner compassion, courage and creativity. Additionally, our willingness to accept what we discover about ourselves and lay judgment aside regardless of how ugly it appears (indeed, a key component of self-worth), one hell of a sense of humour, a journal, a safe place to scream and cry, and a trusted friend with whom to share a well-earned glass of chardonnay. At this point it's fair to ask: "Summer, you haven't exactly painted a rosey picture here. Why would I put myself through this shit?!" For those who seek, feel that stirring desire to go deeper, I don't need to explain. For everyone else, asking these questions and expanding our awareness helps us understand ourselves, our triggers and our reactions so that we can make conscious decisions. So we can act instead of react, moving out of cycles and habits that do not ultimately bring fulfilment to our lives.
Pause. Go Gently.
