Fun With Your New Brain

In preparing the ten-day version of the Warrior’s Journey, I’m playing with a specific framework for personal mastery, something I was exposed to some years back, but have been focusing on during Covid. And today have a clearer sense of what I need to do next to learn this specific approach to excellence. I thought I’d share my thoughts with you.

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The first step is to be able to shift my “state,” my mood and focus, in an instant. Imagine walking down the street, and a mugger appears holding a knife. You are flooded with fear. But by remembering your teacher’s voice and face and repeating the mantra “center yourself”, deliberately calming your breathing, and shifting your posture to one of relaxed readiness, you enter a place of optimal resource, from which you have the best access to your skills and awareness. Your flood of fear-based hormones makes you smarter, faster, more powerful rather than tying you into a helpless knot.

The second level is to set yourself up so that when the mugger appears he AUTOMATICALLY triggers the integrative response. You don’t even have to think about it, which is great, because when emotion takes hold, we often have less access to conscious, calculated thought. So the emotions THEMSELVES need to move us smoothly to the proper response.

The third level is when you have so many things that trigger the integrative response: (every time you pass a doorway you check your breathing. Every time you pick up the phone, stop at a red light, sit at your desk, or the…