There's a moment I come back to again and again, that comes from faciliating transformational journeys for people during intensive retreats a few years ago for a wellknown company.
Our clients (often CEO's, celebrities, writers, performers) were there to get to their next level of legacy and brain-body optimization.
I got to measure their brain and heart activity with HRV detectors and quantitative EEG, while also observing their neurophysiological activity in live time, while they were immersed in brain training and sensory deprivation pods.
A particular exercise we did is something I come back to again and again**.
You hold a marker in your hand in front of you.
Grip it tightly.
This represents our attempts to control the next thing, to be in control of what is happening.
Then you open your hand and let it drop.
You don't try to guide where it goes, you don't gently place it down (another form of control).
You simply open your hand and release.
That release, the willingness to not know or try to control what comes next... has a signature in the brain.
When we decide in advance what we'll say, how we'll convince, which point we'll drive home, the mind-brain-body tightens into a controlled type of state, marked generally by faster frequency brainwave energy*
Useful, sometimes.
But there's another state available to us:
open, receptive, attending to what's actually happening in the room moment to moment.
It can be a scary state to try to open into.
It can feel concerning to not try to control. But it also gives our brain-body system a new type of pattern that can be very helpful for regulating and receiving revelations about things we most deeply hope to find clarity about.
Researchers studying open-monitoring meditation describe it as a non-reactive awareness of whatever arises (Lutz et al., 2008), and it tends to show up with more alpha-band activity: the rhythm associated not with grabbing, but with loosening the grip enough for new information to move through (Klimesch, 2012).
This is the heart of what I call adaptive attunement.
The person in front of you arrives different than they were last week.
Something shifted in their family, their work, their body.
Grip your plan, and you'll miss the emerging data and frequencies of the most current moment.
Release that grip, let the marker drop, and you can meet life and people as they are actually showing up, right now.
*(all frequencies are running all of the time, but some can become 'louder', higher in amplitude depending on what we are doing with our attention, consciousness. The speed of the brainwave is related to how close the neurons are that are firing together for that particular task, activity, function)
Letting the marker drop is one practice.
Learning to stay in that open, receptive state on purpose.. in real rooms, with real resistance, while still reaching the person in front of you — is the whole of Reach the Resistant Brain.
Module 3, Coherent Emanation, gives you a micro-practice to check what you're broadcasting before a single word is spoken.
And Module 7, on the Science of Trust, names the conditions for how we let nervous system responses arrive on their own.
There is nothing passive about that release. It's the most sophisticated move a regulated system can make.
P.S. This week: Reach the Resistant Brain is 40% off with code RESONANCE → GRAB IT HERE
**I talk about this marker release exercise as well as a few others, and the brainwave signatures that go with all of it in the Science of Buy-In masterclass (which you get when you register for the Reach the Resistant Brain Micro-Course).
References:
Klimesch, W. (2012). Alpha-band oscillations, attention, and controlled access to stored information. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(12), 606–617.
Lutz, A., Slagter, H. A., Dunne, J. D., & Davidson, R. J. (2008). Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(4), 163–169.
