If the Buddha Got Stuck_ A Handbook for Change on a Spiritual Path - Charlotte Sophia Kasl [66]
41. Re-Circuit Your Brain by Taking Action
A thing rests by changing.
—HERACLITUS
People who are masters at getting unstuck bring a lively mind to everyday situations. When things go wrong there may be a moment of upset, but then the mind switches gears and asks, “Okay, what can I do about it?” It doesn’t become a drama or a bad luck story to repeatedly tell. It’s more like, “Here’s life right now, what am I going to do to be one with it? What actions, large or small, do I need to take to keep the flow in my body, mind, and spirit?” This doesn’t mean you fix everything the minute it’s broken; it means you are highly attuned to your inner world and when you find congestion, either in relationships or your lifestyle, you notice it and move toward action so you don’t get stuck around it. It often takes less energy to move forward than to resist change.
Unstuck thinking includes being playful, creative, willing to experiment, make changes, and bring a freshness to every day. It’s about looking outside the box for answers to little questions, being alive to all of one’s senses: seeing, hearing, attuning, questioning, and noticing what brings joy, variety, and beauty to our lives. It often includes breaking with traditional sex roles.
For example, a dear friend, Tory, who was feeling mired down with her responsibility for keeping a home for her husband and three adolescent boys, announced one day that she was retiring from food service forever. After a family discussion, they got out a calendar and everyone signed up for a night of cooking and cleaning up, rotating through the five of them on a continuing basis. They also gave up having fixed places to sit at the dinner table. As Tory said to me, “I was complaining about having to cook, then I thought, who says I have to do this! These kids can learn how to cook and so can Arnie.”
This change dramatically shifted the constellation of the family in terms of power, entitlement, responsibility, and sex roles. In a few years the boys all became excellent cooks and Tory never felt resentful or trapped in a role that didn’t work for her.
This sounds like a small thing, but is it, actually? Small changes often lie at the vortex of huge changes in one’s outlook and sense of mastery. Think of how Tory’s boys gained a new perspective on women and family responsibilities. They went from a sense of entitlement to contributing to the basic meal routines. Imagine how their mother’s self-respecting act would be carried into her sons’ marriages and passed on to the next generation. Imagine how her willingness to cast tradition aside helped them to question all habitual rituals and rules.
In talking with Tory’s husband, Arnie, he said with a laugh, “The kids were really surprised to see that I’d cook too and that we’d all pitch in. It was completely different from how I was raised and what I initially expected in a family . . . but it was great, it brought us all closer together and Tory is much happier. So are we.”
By breaking one fixed ritual, you open the door to be able to reexamine everything. You create flexibility in the mind—kind of like recircuiting old neurological habits.
In an interview on National Public Radio, Dr. Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University, and Dr. Jack Forman, a research psychiatrist at Columbia University, talked about the ability to take action and its effect on the brain and our emotional states. When Dr. LeDoux saw on videotape the pipe bomb explosion at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, he noticed how the crowd froze until one person started running, and then everyone started running. He wondered exactly what happened in the brain in that moment between freezing and taking action. Dr. LeDoux’s research revealed a fear circuit in the amygdala of the brain that commands people to freeze in response to danger or trauma. If we stay in this frozen state, however, we fall into passive helplessness, which can