you’re around her, your heart races, your jaw tightens, your face and body
are tense, you feel jittery, and you just want to jump up and leave.
Still sitting in your car, you remember those books on the philosophy of
compassion, and you think about what you learned theoretically. It occurs to
you, Maybe if I try to apply what I read in those books, I might have a new
experience of my mother-in-law. What did I learn that I can personalize to
change the outcome of this dinner?
When you contemplate applying that understanding with your MIL,
something wonderful begins to happen. You decide not to react to her with
your typical set of automatic programs. Instead, you begin to think about
who you no longer want to be, and who you want to be instead. You ask
yourself, How do I not want to feel, and how am I not going to act, when I
see her? Your frontal lobe begins to “cool off” the neural circuits that are
connected to the old you; you’re starting to unwire or prune away that old
you from functioning as an identity. You could say that because your brain
isn’t firing in the same way, you’re no longer creating the same mind.
Then you review what those books said to help you plan how you want to
think, feel, and act toward your MIL. You ask yourself, How can I modify
my behavior—my actions—and my reactions so my new experience leads to
a new feeling? So you picture yourself greeting and hugging her, asking her
questions about things you know she is interested in, and complimenting
her on her new hairdo or glasses. Over the next few days, as you mentally
rehearse your new ideal of self, you continue to install more neurological
hardware so you’ll have the proper circuits in place (in effect, a new
software program) when you actually interact with your MIL.
For most of us, to go from thinking to doing is like inspiring snails to
pick up the pace. We want to stay in the intellectual, philosophical realm of
our reality; we like to identify with the memorized, recognizable feeling of
our familiar self.
Instead, by surrendering old thought patterns, interrupting habitual
emotional reactions, and forgoing knee-jerk behaviors, then planning and
rehearsing new ways of being, you are putting yourself into the equation of
that knowledge you learned, and beginning to create a new mind—you are
reminding yourself who you want to be.
But there is another step that we must address here.
stevenselfio
(Stevenselfio)
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