Living with Radical Honesty

Living With Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton
Re-posted from Charity Focus

I learned that the primary cause of most human stress, the primary cause of most conflict between couples and the primary cause of most both psychological and physical illness is being trapped in your mind and removed from your experience. What keeps you trapped in your mind and removed from your experience is lying and we all lie […] all the time. We're taught systematically to lie, to pretend, to maintain a pretense because we're taught that who we are is our performance. Our schools teach us to lie, our parents teach us to lie. We're all suffering from mistaken identity.

We think that who we are is our reputation, what the teacher thinks of us, what kind of grades we make, what kind of job we have. We're constantly spinning our presentation of self, which is a constant process of lying and being trapped in the anticipation of imagining about what other people might think. Our actual identity is as a present tense noticing being. I'm someone sitting here talking on the telephone right now and you're sitting there talking on the telephone and writing or doing whatever you're doing. That's your current identity and this is my current identity and when you start identifying with your current present-tense identity you discover all kinds of things about life that you can't even see or notice when you're trapped in the spin doctoring machine of your mind. So radical honesty is about delivering yourself from that constant worrisome preoccupation of, "Oh my god. How am I doing? How am I doing? How am I doing? How am I doing?" Then you can pay attention to what's going on in your body and in the world and even pay attention to what's going on in your mind. […]

Just look at what you notice in front of you right now, your environment, wherever you are in an office or wherever it is. Noticing is an entirely different function than thinking and what we do all the time is that we confuse thinking with noticing. When we think something we act as though it has the same validity as something that we see. I've got a bumper sticker on my truck that says, "Don't believe everything you think." It's like your thinking just goes on and on and on and on.

--Brad Blanton, Center For Radical Honesty

Developing New Habits

Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?
By JANET RAE-DUPREE

Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.

Brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

But don’t bother trying to kill off old habits; once those ruts of procedure are worn into the hippocampus, they’re there to stay. Instead, the new habits we deliberately ingrain into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads.

“The first thing needed for innovation is a fascination with wonder,” says Dawna Markova, author of “The Open Mind” and an executive change consultant for Professional Thinking Partners. “But we are taught instead to ‘decide,’ just as our president calls himself ‘the Decider.’ ” She adds, however, that “to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities.”

Researchers in the late 1960s discovered that humans are born with the capacity to approach challenges in four primary ways: analytically, procedurally, relationally (or collaboratively) and innovatively. At puberty, however, the brain shuts down half of that capacity, preserving only those modes of thought that have seemed most valuable during the first decade or so of life.

This is where developing new habits comes in. If you’re an analytical or procedural thinker, you learn in different ways than someone who is inherently innovative or collaborative. Figure out what has worked for you when you’ve learned in the past, and you can draw your own map for developing additional skills and behaviors for the future.

“I apprentice myself to someone when I want to learn something new or develop a new habit,” Ms. Ryan says. “Other people read a book about it or take a course. If you have a pathway to learning, use it because that’s going to be easier than creating an entirely new pathway in your brain.”

“Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain,” Ms. Ryan notes in her book. “If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do. The small steps in kaizen don’t set off fight or flight, but rather keep us in the thinking brain, where we have access to our creativity and playfulness.”

“Try lacing your hands together,” Ms. Markova says. “You habitually do it one way. Now try doing it with the other thumb on top. Feels awkward, doesn’t it? That’s the valuable moment we call confusion, when we fuse the old with the new.”

AFTER the churn of confusion, she says, the brain begins organizing the new input, ultimately creating new synaptic connections if the process is repeated enough.

But if, during creation of that new habit, the “Great Decider” steps in to protest against taking the unfamiliar path, “you get convergence and we keep doing the same thing over and over again,” she says.

“You cannot have innovation,” she adds, “unless you are willing and able to move through the unknown and go from curiosity to wonder.”


All of the text and image is from the New York Times article, Can You Become a Creature of New Habits? Image by Christophe Vorlet

Brain Functioning and Body Awareness

I’m currently reading The Mindful Brain by Daniel Siegel. Last night I was reading about the functions of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. I’ll share what I learned with you in case you’re curious and then below are some fo my morning reflections.

Right hemisphere functions

• better at seeing context and the whole picture
• holistic
• nonverbal
• visuospacial
• integrated map of the whole body
• autobiographical memory
• raw, spontaneous emotion
• initial empathic nonverbal response
• stress modulation
• mediate distress and uncomfortable emotions
• nonverbal imagery
  
• somatic sensations

Left hemisphere functions

• linguistics
• linearity
• logic
• literal thinking
• detail oriented, detail monitoring
• in-depth
• analytic
• problem focused
• fact accumulating process
• mediate positive affective emotions
• conceptual facts

According to Siegel, creativity is the integration of the functions of the two hemispheres.

“With the left and right hemisphere physically separated and functionally differentiated, we have the opportunity to achieve more adaptive function if we come to integrate them into a whole. This is how, I believe, creativity emerges not from one side or another, but from their integration.”

At them moment I'm curious about the interplay between my "integrated map of the whole body" and "in depth, analytic, problem focused" awareness.

From this morning’s writing: As I sense into my body right now, my attention goes to all of the places that 'aren't right'. The soreness of my neck and back from sleeping with a pillow that's too big, blemishes on my face that I don’t know how they’re forming (and it concerns me that they are), etc. As I listen deeper, I feel other areas of my body, but without judgment. I notice strongly the areas that are not in balance but I don’t seem to register with emphasis the areas that are in balance. So I wonder:

How do I invite my attention to notice and feel the places that are alive, fluid, healthy?
What does aliveness feel like in moments within my self?"

I would love to hear any personal stories that you have to share on this:
What is your sensing feeling of your body like?
Do you notice patterns around what you do or don’t register in your body?
How do you recognize health, wellness, aliveness, clarity, congruency within your self?
Is it different on the physical plane than in emotional, spiritual, social, or intellectual realms?

Thanks... curious as ever....

Left Brain/ Right Brain

Do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?

According to the article The Right Brain vs Left Brain found in the Daily Telegraph, if you see it turning clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.

What do you see?