Have a dance today
Retraining the brain with kindness
This is my latest post on Substack, and I’m pondering on something from the Mindful Self-compassion course. First I’ve had a go at a short poem using the Haiku style again, the traditional form of Japanese poetry consisting of three unrhymed lines with a 5, 7, 5 syllable structure. It’s quite challenging but here’s the outcome, and below a synopsis of the piece I recorded
You think you want fight
Maybe you could dance instead
When pain comes today
*
Could that be easy?
No it’s far from that, and yet
You could start to train
*
Until your brain learns
To take a rest from fighting
And open to dance
Last night I taught week three of the Mindful Self-compassion course, and it's the week where we turn very deliberately and consciously to self-kindness and self-compassion. It's about creating and maintaining practices where we can turn to kindness and compassion and learn to, in effect, in the longest term, rewire the brain.
Because the brain, the nervous system, is so geared up to fight/flight. The nervous system reacts so quickly, physiologically, emotionally, all of that, and what we're doing is very deliberately bringing in self-kindness and self-compassion. And hopefully the body will start to learn to turn to that (except when it needs to. If something big and dangerous is happening then, hey, we need the nervous system to really kick in) but most of the time we don't need it in that way, and this is retraining the brain to know the difference between when it needs to kick in and when it can let go of it.
The intention is to do all that, so that when the painful stuff happens - and we're not taking the painful stuff away, we're not doing that, it's still there, this is not about taking that away - but it is about creating a new way of being with the painful stuff. And the image is this that I rather like (I don’t think it's original) the image is that when the painful stuff is around it can be like a boxing match and we're trying to fight it off or it can feel overwhelming if it's bashing us back a lot. But hey, let's see if we can turn that into more of a dance.
The painful stuff is always going to be there, and we have the chance to learn, instead of running away from it, we have the chance to learn to dance with it. And you know what, all this painful stuff, sure, I wish it wasn't around, but it is around.
And it's got an awful lot to teach us. An awful lot to teach us. If we give it the chance. And remember, too, that all these different aspects of the body and the nervous system, they're all trying to help. So, we're not trying to shut it down or shut it up or close it down or ignore it. We're learning to have a new relationship with it. And hopefully we, I, you can learn a way of dancing with that painful stuff. Dancing with it.
So there are my thoughts for the morning. Take a chance when you can to have a dance today.
