In a group training I ran recently, I started with a mindful moment.
Some people in that room needed to slow down. Others needed the opposite. A little lethargic, a little foggy, and what would actually help them was to perk up. Focusing on the temperature of their tea, or something in front of them that brought a bit of gratitude, was going to be more helpful for them than slowing down further.
Same room. Same three minutes. Two very different needs.
From years of measuring and mapping brain waves, I see this as a pattern.
Many of the people who feel like they need to slow down are showing a lot of higher frequency, always-problem-solving activity.
The ones who feel foggy or heavy are often showing an overabundance of the slower waves.
Different activities will help them shift their brainwaves in different ways.
Not everybody needs everything in the exact same way, and not everybody has the same starting point.
There is no golden ticket
You can write a recipe for a cake. A cake is a simple system.
You can control the exact amount of every ingredient, and you can predict fairly well what will arise from those amounts.
A human being is a complex system. Self-organizing, emergent, and not fully predictable no matter how carefully you plan.
Things organize, fluctuate, move and unfold inside that being, in every micro-moment and every terrain they cross, that are out of your ability to control.
If we interact with Planet Earth, and with other humans,
we are working with complex systems.
So when we hand people a protocol and tell them this is the state you should aim for, or this is thing that regulates you, we are not always addressing their complex-system-ness.*
*this is not to say that offering tools isn't helpful.. they are a powerful way to give someone something to experiment with. It's just that it can also be helpful to have the added perspective that a tool that is helpful for one person, might not work as well for another. And a tool that is helpful for one person in one context, might not help them as much in another, or at a different time of day, different blood sugar level, different amount of sleep the night prior, different personal relationship dynamic (eg., someone who triggers an authority figure type of submission response, vs someone who triggers something else entirely... These are all things I have seen affect people as I map brainwaves and heart rhythms, while people try out various regulation strategies.
There is no magic state.
We're not all striving to slow down OR speed up at the same time, in the same way.
We are striving to be adaptive and attuned to what might be most adaptive in different contexts.
Range, not calm
So the question I keep encouraging is not 'how do we get calm'.
It's..
'how do we become this creature that can shift at will?'
Where:
- I can focus when I want to focus
- I can relax when I want to relax.
- I can be playful and engaged when that is what the moment asks for, and
- I can have boundaries and move away when I need to.
All of it matters. The range is the skill.
When we treat one state as the destination, we sometimes end up teaching people to chase a state that might not actually be the one they truly need.
We do this instead of building capacity to shift-at-will-into-desired-experiences.
Reflection:
when you notice someone (or yourself) in a state that seems undesirable.. are you able to nuance if this is because they truly need more calm, or is there openness to the idea that they need more range, expansion, exploration of aliveness, purpose? Or do you often go the other way.. and often think a person needs more purpose or action.. when in fact what might serve them best (temporarily) is rest, release, surrender, repose...
Wishing you the kind of range that helps you meet each moment in ways that serve you best...
Stefanie
P.S. Part of what makes this hard in practice is that many of us were handed a very linear idea of nervous system states, or categories that are too narrow to describe what is actually happening in front of us. The more nuance and subtle distinction we can hold when we explore these states, the better our ability to recognize what we are seeing and test out a variety of strategies for it.
That is exactly what Teach the Nervous System builds.
