Your Emotional Hamster Wheel and How to Get Off It
Mike Reeves-McMillan
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 by Mike Reeves-McMillan
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Do you find yourself doing the same things again and again, and feel like there’s nothing you can do about it? Are you just driven to repeat patterns that don’t make any sense? It’s a common human problem, and in this ebook I want to explore one model of why it happens and what we can do to change it.
I’ve recently finished re-reading Cynthia Bourgeault’s book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening. Centering Prayer is the meditative practice I follow myself. It comes out of the 1500-year-old Benedictine spiritual tradition, one of the little-known Western spiritual paths. (It’s little-known because, until recently, you had to join a monastery to even hear about it.)
Towards the end of the book, Cynthia Bourgeault has a wonderful diagram of how our misguided “emotional programs for happiness” end up making us miserable. For copyright reasons I won’t reproduce the exact same diagram here, but I’ve adapted it into this diagram I call the Hamster Wheel:
Our compulsions, or what she calls the “emotional programs for happiness”, are the start and usual end point of the process. Thomas Keating, the founder of Centering Prayer, talks about three “energy centres”: power/control, esteem/affection, and security/survival. Deep down within our minds, we are driven or drawn towards these three centres, and early in our lives we learn specific programs for trying to achieve them, which operate very powerfully at a subconscious level to pattern our behaviour. I’ll talk about the three energy centres in more depth later on. Right now, let’s go through the seven visible spokes of the emotional hamster wheel. As we go, I’ll give you small suggestions for things to write down to give you increased insight into your own emotional process. Just write them on any spare piece of paper (or in your journal, if you keep one) to start with.
Actually writing them down helps to make them clear in your mind, and is the first step in working on them.
1. Attachments and Aversions
The emotional programs for happiness are not usually what we’re consciously aware of. They emerge into our consciousness as attachments and aversions – the things that we move towards and the things that we move away from, the things that make us feel comfortable or uncomfortable.
Attachments and aversions are not rational. They are driven by the emotional programs for happiness, which in turn are shaped by childhood experience, so we are caught in the irrational, incomplete understanding of a child in what we prefer and avoid.
“But why do you want it?”
“I don’t know, I just do.”
Or:
“So why is that such a big deal?”
“I don’t know, I just don’t like it, is all.”
Attachments and aversions are what make our impulsive decisions for us.
There are two kinds of decision-making, and they activate different areas of our brains. In the middle of your brain, buried deep, are the emotional brain areas that tie into your dopamine system, which deals with an experience of reward. This is the exact same system that is directly stimulated by nicotine, and indirectly by alcohol and other drugs. There are also behaviours that can stimulate it: “emotional eating” is exactly this, and so is problem gambling. These are the brain systems that are activated when we decide to go for a short-term, immediate reward. The more emotion, the more likely they are to fire off - impulsively.
In contrast, when we decide to delay our gratification and go for a better reward further in the future, we’re using very different parts of our brains. The prefrontal cortex – near the front of the brain, where we make rational plans and control our emotional reactions – is hard at work in these circumstances. So, interestingly, is the hippocampus, which is usually thought of as the brain area that processes memory. It seems we are referring to what happened in the past when we’re thinking about what might happen in the future, and this makes all kinds of sense. (Peters & Buechel, Neuron, 15 April 2010.)
This isn’t to say, of course, that attachments and aversions have no influence when you’re planning rationally. We’re still very much guided by emotional preferences when we are making rational plans. But the attachments and aversions are not simply making the decisions for us. It’s subtler than that.
Exercise: What are some of your strong preferences for and against things? Think about behaviours, circumstances, ideas, images, kinds of people... What gets a knee-jerk reaction from you?
Write them down. We’ll look at them later.
2. Hidden Agendas
Preferring some things, avoiding others – this creates hidden agendas which (because they are irrational) we tend not to admit to. We like to depict our behaviour as reasonable, principled, unselfish and even altruistic, and we get so good at doing so that we even believe it ourselves a lot of the time. We make after-the-fact justifications for our behaviour which fit with the values that we hold as adults, even while the emotional programs of our childhood are actually what is driving us.
For example, I once lived in a small apartment building where one resident was obsessed with changing the legal structure under which we owned our units. He probably could have got it changed, too, except for one thing: The way he went about it consistently alienated all but a very small minority of the owners, so he always lost the vote. Unable to accept this democratic result, he would put long, ranting letters in everyone’s letterboxes, comparing the board chairman to Adolph Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic and attributing sinister motives to every action of the board and its members. And yet when I suggested that perhaps there were faults on both sides, he replied, “Nothing could be further from the truth.” As far as he was concerned, he was principled, rational and in fact a hero fighting for the right against unfair odds. Everything he was doing was right; everything the “other side” were doing was wrong. Even when these were, to a neutral observer, exactly the same things.
I never said that hidden agendas were necessarily hidden from other people. His were hidden mostly from himself.
This isn’t a function of intelligence, either, at least not intelligence as we normally think about it. This man was a research scientist, and held a doctorate (as we all knew very well, because he insisted on being referred to with the title “Dr”). Perhaps his intelligence meant that he was even better at hiding his agendas from himself; he had more sophisticated rationalising mechanisms.
Exercise: What gets you wound up? In what circumstances do you insist vigorously and loudly that your way is the only right way? Write a little about this. We’ll look at it again later on; for now, just notice and record.
3. Triggering Events
Hidden agendas, in turn, lead inevitably to triggering events. Since everyone is running round with their own programs for happiness, and few of them mesh neatly with mine, I will always find things that other people do that trigger off my attachments and aversions, that “push my buttons”. Either their hidden agenda is the same as mine, and we’re in competition, or it’s opposite to mine, and we’re in direct conflict.
Have you ever made a passing remark, or done some simple action, and had another person suddenly explode at you? Did you think, “Where did that come from?” That was a triggering event.
For me, people interrupting me to try to sell me something is a triggering event. If someone sends me an unsolicited email, cold-calls me, puts a flyer in my letterbox (which has a sign on it that says “addressed mail only”), knocks at my door, or approaches me in the street, and what they’re about is clearly their agenda – they don’t care about me and what I want, except as a means to get what they want – I get uncharacteristically surly and rude. It’s something I’m working on. My wife gets very upset with me about it (it’s a triggering event for her).
Of course, a triggering event doesn’t always result in an outward explosion, and that’s what we’ll look at in the next section. Nor is it always about anger, of course. Fear and sadness are just as likely to be triggered by events.
Exercise: Write down a few of your recent triggering events. What got you annoyed, afraid, or downhearted? Think particularly about things where your internal (and maybe external) reaction was out of proportion to what the other person said or did.
4. Frustration
What a triggering event creates is the experience of frustration. I want to fulfil my emotional program for happiness. I want to move towards my attachments and away from my aversions. But someone or something is not letting me. I have powerful internal forces trying to move me in a certain direction, and I can’t go in that direction because of external interference.
Frustration is an experience of inner conflict, of opposing forces pushing and pulling you back and forth.
Exercise: What frustrates you? Think of three circumstances where you’re caught between opposing forces – where your desire pulls one way and the way the world is prevents movement in that direction. Write them down.
5. Afflictive Emotion
Now, the natural response, the usual response, to a situation of frustration is afflictive emotion. We usually associate frustration with anger, but sadness and fear are also common responses to frustration. There can also be guilt or shame, because my hidden agenda is being revealed by the situation of frustration: It’s harder to deny my desire to do something or avoid something when that desire is being frustrated. It draws attention, and one thing the emotional programs for happiness do not want is for attention to be paid to them. They know they won’t stand up well to close examination.
Exercise: What is your most frequent afflictive emotion? Is it anger, sadness, fear, guilt, shame – or something else? Write it down.
6. Internal Dialogue
In the grip of afflictive emotion, we start in on the internal dialogue.
“Woe is me, this always happens to me.”
“People just ain’t no good.”
“One day I’ll show
them. I’ll show them all.”
“I’m a bad person and there’s
nothing I can do about it.”
“It’s not my fault.”
“It’s
not fair.”
A pattern of feelings is accompanied by a pattern of automatic thoughts.
Exercise: Recall a recent situation where you went through the cycle up to this point: attachments and aversions, hidden agenda, triggering event, frustration, afflictive emotion. Imagine yourself back into it. Now write down the internal dialogue that automatically follows.
7. Emotional Turmoil
Through our inner dialogue, we strengthen and justify the afflictive emotion we are feeling and descend into emotional turmoil.
Whatever it is we tell ourselves in the grip of afflictive emotion is itself patterned by our emotional programs for happiness, because what we are really trying to do is escape from the situation into one in which we feel happy again - and the only way we know to do that is by following the emotional program. The abuser (the emotional program for happiness that got us into this mess in the first place) comes along sympathizing and pretending to be the rescuer. Its grip over us is strengthened, because we don’t know any other way – and so the cycle begins again.
Here’s a scenario, a very common one. (Substitute your own guilty pleasure if it’s different.) You’re on a diet. You’re living on lettuce and miso soup. You’re feeling virtuous, until you make a mistake at work and somebody scolds you mildly. You feel bad. Now, what will stop you from feeling bad and make you feel good? Some chocolate will do that.
You eat some chocolate. Immediately, you feel guilty for breaking your diet. Yes, you really are a bad person, incompetent and lacking in self-discipline. You feel worse. What will help you feel better? Well, how about eating the rest of that bar of chocolate?
Not feeling good yet? You obviously need a bigger bar…
Exercise: Complete your mapping of your own emotional hamster wheel by reflecting on the emotional turmoil that comes out of automatic thoughts, and the behaviours that tend to follow for you.
Now look back over what you’ve written and transfer the key points to your Hamster Wheel reflection sheet (at the end of this ebook).
Breaking Out of the Hamster Wheel
So what (you are probably asking by this point) can we do to break out of this cycle? Is there anything? Good news: there is.
Remember back at the frustration point, where I said that the natural and usual response is afflictive emotion? This is the point where the cycle can be broken. The Centering Prayer technique for doing so is called the Welcoming Prayer (don’t get too hung up on all the “prayer” terminology, by the way, if that’s something you’re not comfortable with – it’s not, in either case, something that would usually be recognised as prayer). I’ll go into the Welcoming Prayer in more depth below, because it directly addresses the underlying issue of the three faulty emotional programs for happiness.
In brief, what the Welcoming Prayer does is defuse the afflictive emotions so that you avoid descending into internal dialogue and emotional turmoil and reinforcing your emotional programs. Over time, doing so weakens the emotional programs and enables you to respond to situations as they arise with a more authentic self, one that is actually doing what it thinks it’s doing. (Instead of falling into inadequate automatic patterns which you constructed on the fly, in another time and place, with limited understanding and probably for different circumstances than these.)
Before we get to the Welcoming Prayer, though, let’s spend some time on each of the three emotional programs for happiness.
What we think will make us happy generally won’t.
As Richard O’Connor explains in his book Happy at Last: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Finding Joy, the deep emotional programs of our minds have a bait-and-switch operation going on. Their agenda is to drive us to particular behaviours which will preserve our safety, our existence and our genetic heritage. In order to do this, they hold out the promise that those behaviours will make us happy. But if they did actually make us permanently happy, the drive would be gone and we would no longer take those actions.
It’s like the story in the Odyssey of the Lotus-Eaters, who ate a narcotic plant which made them happily apathetic, or the soma-intoxicated, sheeplike masses in Huxley’s Brave New World. In fact, this is one reason that euphoric drugs like heroin are harmful: People who have all the happiness they want from the drug have no further motivation to do anything to help themselves or others.
So, it seems as if we are faced with Hobson’s choice: Pursue the things that our deepest instincts tell us will make us happy, and we will not be happy. Pursue the things that will actually make us unconditionally happy, and we will probably die from self-neglect.
Fortunately, there is a third course, but it begins with an understanding of those happiness programs that drive us from within. Let’s look at each of them in turn.
Power and Control
Basically, power/control is the program that says, “If I can control the world around me, I will feel OK.” The problem with this program is that we can’t control the world around us, either collectively or individually. We can’t control extreme weather, for example. We can’t even collectively control the human world of economics, as the recent recession has demonstrated. The power/control agenda is subject to inevitable frustration, because ultimately we can’t control the world. (Nor would that be a good thing, in fact, if you think about it.)
The characteristic emotion driven by the program of power and control is anger. By expressing anger, we are attempting to control others and gain power over them by implying a threat: If you don’t give me what I want, I’ll hurt you. Now, anger gets abstracted away from this exact situation – you can be angry with a computer or a piece of string, which doesn’t have the capacity to be afraid – but that is the basic proposition of anger. The power and control agenda leads inevitably to bullying, subtle or overt.
My key realisation on power and control is this: The people who are able to let go of the program of controlling people and things around them are the ones who have focussed on controlling themselves. I’m talking about the mystics and the meditators – because self-will is not the path to self-control, as we’ll discuss further below. The path to self-control is to develop the authentic self which is no longer driven by the emotional programs for happiness, which doesn’t actually care about not being in total control of everything.
Although Centering Prayer arose out of the Christian tradition of the Benedictines, we can see parallels with the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. Here’s my condensed paraphrase:
1. This whole thing is all messed up.
2. The
reason is that we’re driven by our emotional programs for
happiness.
3. It’s possible to be free.
4. Freedom is
achieved through thought, understanding and practice.
I’ll have a lot more to say about this later, but here’s the main point about power and control. The thing that can free you from the control of the agenda of being in control, the thing that can actually put you in control of your own reactions and responses, is this: Letting go of being in control.
The emotional program of power/control repeats these words within us: “If I’m not the one in charge, if things aren’t going as I decide, I will be miserable”. As small children, we’re confronted all the time with a world that isn’t in our control. We’re hungry, cold, hot, sore, wet, uncomfortable, and there’s nothing we can do about it. It seems like if we can make other people do things for us to fix those problems, we are happier – but if we can’t, it’s devastating, it’s the end of the world. And sooner or later, no matter how indulgent our parents are, we are going to run up against a situation in which we are not in control and can’t make anyone else fix it, and that will be distressing.
At this point we have a choice: We can accept how the world is made and that we will not always get what we want (and sometimes will get what we don’t want), and move on with life. Or we can struggle for more power and more control so that we don’t have to feel like that again – but we always will.
I read recently about a millionaire European who came to the realisation that the five-star lifestyle he was living was bizarre and ridiculous. He’s liquidating his assets, giving most of them to charity and is going to live in a modest dwelling on a modest income. He believes he’ll be much happier, and I think he’s right. It’s not the solution for everyone, but it’s an example of what I’m talking about: Releasing the continual grasping after power and control.
You’ll notice I haven’t gone into detail about exactly how this is achieved. That’s because I’ll be talking about it much more below.
Next, let’s look at the second of the three emotional programs.
Esteem and Affection
If everyone loved you – or even if anyone loved you – you’d be OK. Right?
This is the emotional program of esteem and affection.
Jeanne Segal’s book The Language of Emotional Intelligence: The Five Essential Tools for Building Powerful and Effective Relationships has a lot to say about all of the emotional programs, though she doesn’t use that terminology specifically. Her starting point is the very early experiences of small children, and the kind of “attachment” that we establish with our mothers (or equivalent caregivers).
One of the ways that the attachment bond can go wrong is if we don’t get a secure sense of esteem and affection – if our caregivers are distant, inconsistent or negative towards us. We then tend to spend our lives attempting to complete the uncompleted bond, driven from relationship to relationship or achievement to achievement seeking the esteem and affection that we crave – quite often driving people away from us and bringing about crashing failure in the process.
Because the unfortunate paradox is that people who have a secure inner sense of worth are a lot more likely to attract affection than those who desperately crave it. Likewise, people who are confident and centred are more likely to achieve great things than those who are desperate to be applauded. My neice, who’s staying with us at the moment, is a fan of American Idol, and I’ve watched some of the auditions with her. It struck me very strongly that the people who are interviewed saying, “I’m the greatest singer in the world, I’m just the best” are often completely without talent and sing in hideous, forced voices. Meanwhile, the people who have some stability and inner strength, who have families that they care for or who have been through difficult personal experiences like major illness – who have a sense of themselves that’s not dependent on whether they can get into a singing competition or not – perform in a relaxed, appealing, natural manner and are often very good.
The besetting emotion of someone with a strong program for esteem and affection is sadness, the feeling of being alone and abandoned, of loss. Their inner dialogue is one of worthlessness, desperation and need. What they think they need, what drives them, is recognition and love, but they secretly believe they don’t deserve it. Some people even feel compelled to sabotage it if they get it, so that their inner beliefs about the way the world works can go unchallenged.
What is the way out? The way out is the way in. Just as the way to deal with issues of power and control is to let go of the desire to control the world and those around you and build a sense of control within yourself, so the way to deal with issues of esteem and affection is to let go of the search for external validation and build a sense of authenticity and validity within yourself. And I know of no better way (in fact, I know of no other way) to do this than through the various forms of meditation.
As I mentioned earlier, my own meditation practice is in the Centering Prayer tradition, which is also where I’m getting the terminology of the three emotional programs for happiness. That’s not the only way to meditate by any means, or even the only one I would recommend. One thing, though, that Centering Prayer has as an emphasis which is less prominent in most other traditions is the emphasis on letting go.
The basic practice of Centering Prayer is to sit for 10 or 20 minutes and let go of each thought as it arises by returning to a preselected word or phrase. Unlike other “concentration” traditions like TM, the word or phrase is not something to focus on – in fact, the word itself is something to eventually let go of. Everything, thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, are there to notice and gently let go. Part of the charm of the method is that it’s impossible to get it wrong. Either you are successfully sinking into a state in which you have let go of your thoughts, or you are successfully encountering each successive thought and letting it go, over and over again.
My version of Herbert Benson’s Relaxation Response Practice is actually a simplified version of Centering Prayer. I’ll have much more to say about these practices later. For now, here’s something to reflect upon: When you feel a sense of sadness and loss, what is it you’re really missing?
Security and Survival
A few months ago, the upstairs hall in our house had a scary.
Our two cats, who used to lie in the middle of the hall perfectly comfortably, took to dashing through it at top speed as if something was about to jump out and eat them. We had no idea what happened, and eventually it wore off.
The emotional program for happiness that the cats were operating under was the program for security and survival, and fear is the characteristic emotion. Now, I don’t want to get too doctrinaire about the characteristic emotions of the three emotional programs – anger for power/control, sadness for esteem/affection, and fear for security/survival. They are strong tendencies rather than absolutes; indicators, diagnostic symptoms if you like. These emotions can sometimes be converted into each other – and if you think about it, the programs themselves are not necessarily separate sealed boxes either.
Humans are social creatures, so esteem and affection affect security and survival, power and control. If we are rejected and despised by our social group, we have more difficulty getting the resources we need to survive, and less control over our lives. Turning it around, having power and control is famously a generator of esteem and affection; if you don’t believe me, look at a picture of Donald Trump with one of his wives.
With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s look in more depth at the emotional program of security and survival.
Security and survival isn’t just about physical security and survival, naturally. It’s just as much about our self-image, our financial security, our security from change, and our survival unchanged. Deep down in our brains, most of us are intensely conservative – we resist personal change, because there’s always a sense in which change brings about the death of our former selves. We fear change, because change, even good change, is a risk and a small death.
And security includes feeling like we’re able to cope with life, to deal with what it throws at us. I often see anxious people in my hypnotherapy practice, and frequently what they’re anxious about is that someone, usually a parent, has given them an image of what they’re supposed to be like, and they don’t believe they can do it. They’re terrified of doing something wrong (perhaps because, at a key time in their lives, everything they did was characterised as wrong). So they try, as much as possible, not to do things.
Susan Jeffers wrote a book about this very issue, called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. I have to admit I haven’t read it, but a friend of mine did, and embarked on the amazing program of doing something that frightened him every day. Naturally, he saw huge personal growth as a result.
And here we start to touch on the secret which I’ll talk about in more depth later on. Part of the key to the Welcoming Prayer, which is a way to bypass the misdirection we get from the three emotional programs for happiness, is to connect to the emotion and then let it go. We call people “courageous” when they continue in the face of fear, when they risk their security and even survival in service of a higher goal or greater ideal. Most of us in the modern world won’t be called upon to risk our physical survival, but we all have an implicit challenge to risk what we are now in pursuit of what we can be.
Marissa Bracke has a wonderful metaphor about riding a roller coaster. Like most people, she used to ride roller coasters with her eyes closed and screaming her head off. Having studied yoga, she wondered what it would be like if she kept her eyes open, relaxed and focussed on her breath, totally aware of the experience.
So she tried it, and it was amazing.
And then she realised after a while that she was only doing it on literal roller coasters – not on metaphorical ones…
How to be connected to your emotions without being overwhelmed
Imagine you are standing by the side of a busy road, watching the traffic go by.
Got that clear in all your senses? Close your eyes if you need to.
Now, imagine, just as vividly, that you are in one of the cars and it is taking you somewhere you don’t want to go.
It’s a very different experience, isn’t it? That’s the difference between being associated and being identified.
Let me explain those terms quickly. When you’re associated (as opposed to dissociated), you are connected to what’s going on, aware of it, paying attention to it, but from a position of being an observer – you are looking at it in the third person, if you like. On the other hand, when you’re identified, you’re immersed in the experience. It’s like the difference between being in a boat and being in a river.
I remember an interesting experience of being associated, but not identified, from an acting class I took years ago. In the class, we were partnered up, and we had to act out a scene with our partners. The script my partner and I were using was a domestic dispute between a couple, and it called for me to act angry.
Now, I wasn’t actually angry. I was pretending. But leaving the class afterwards, I felt the sensations of anger in my body, while simultaneously knowing that I wasn’t really angry. It was rather like those dreams where a place both is and isn’t your house.
The reason I took the acting class in the first place was to help me to become more comfortable about expressing emotion. I used to be very poorly connected to my emotions, which led, inevitably, to my being driven by them unconsciously. My friends would ask me if I was upset and I would honestly deny it, because I didn’t feel upset, even though they could hear it in my voice and see it on my face. I was, in fact, dissociated from my emotions a lot of the time.
The acting class was an important step in connecting to my emotions, and by a stroke of fortunate timing, I took it just before my father died unexpectedly. I was able to grieve my loss much better as a result.
Over the next couple of years, I was able to develop my first successful romantic relationship and get married. Within our marriage, I’m able to express all kinds of emotions, positive and negative, in what is usually a helpful way. (I say “usually” because, as with anything else, the learning continues.)
These are the benefits of being associated to my emotions. I recognize the emotions, I can name them, I’m aware that they’re going on, and I can express them appropriately.
Of course, sometimes I go beyond being associated into being identified. I run out into the traffic and jump into a car. I fall out of the boat and am swept away by the current.
But that happens more rarely (and briefly) these days, because I know how to use the Welcoming Prayer.
The secret of the Welcoming Prayer is that you are associated, but not identified. The basic form of the Welcoming Prayer is to pause, recognize the emotion with which you are becoming identified, and welcome it by name. You aren’t welcoming the circumstances; you’re welcoming the emotion, and that requires that you recognize it and pay attention to it and name it.
Paying attention to it and naming it sets up a process which was explored in a brain scan study published in Psychological Science by Matthew D. Lieberman and colleagues. The parts of your brain which handle emotion are conveniently located deep down inside, close to the brainstem, which connects to your spinal cord, and other very basic, well-protected parts of the brain which regulate your breathing, heartbeat, blood pressure and so forth. This is why they can so quickly and efficiently get your body ready to fight or escape danger.
Most of the time in modern life, though, the kinds of things that get us wound up are not things we can physically fight or run away from. Getting our bodies ready for physical effort that isn’t going to happen is counterproductive; it fills our bodies with chemicals that aren’t going to be used and, left unused, can cause damage over time. So what we want to do is calm this reaction down.
When we name the emotion, what it does is create a circuit from deep inside our brains out to the verbal parts of the brain, which are closely connected with rational thought and higher-level decision-making. This circuit seems to bleed off the activation of the deep, emotional brain and calm it down. Your perspective shifts, and you’re no longer identified with the emotion, feeling an experience of (for example) overwhelming anger taking control of your whole being; you are associated with the emotion, paying attention to it and being aware of it, but from the outside.
It’s extremely simple – but it works.
As I usually present it, the Welcoming Practice is simply this: When you become aware of a powerful negative emotion, you pay attention to it, allow it into your awareness, and welcome it by name. You say something like “Welcome, anger”, and then allow anger to be, and then allow anger to go. And then you go on with your life without having reinforced your usual emotional cycle.
The Welcoming Prayer
So, the Welcoming Practice (as I call it) is a simple circuit breaker, one of a number. But the Welcoming Prayer is a little bit more. It’s the creation of the late Mary Mrozowski, and came together in the context of the Centering Prayer movement, which is where I encountered it. (All of this material – the emotional programs for happiness, the cycle, and the Welcoming Prayer – is covered in Cynthia Bourgeault’s book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, chapter 13.)
There are three steps to the Welcoming Prayer. The first, which arises from Mary Mrozowski’s background with biofeedback, is to “focus and sink in”: that is, to become aware of your physical sensations connected with the experience of frustration. Bear in mind that you are using these sensations to become “associated, but not identified” – by paying attention to the physical sensations, you pull yourself out of your head and are no longer swept along helplessly inside the current of emotion, but you are also not dissociating or repressing. You are aware of the emotion.
The second step is the “welcome” itself. This is the hardest part to understand. Why are we welcoming this thing again? Don’t we want to be rid of it? And this is the secret of the welcoming prayer: It’s not about being rid of the emotion (though that is going to be the outcome). It’s about remaining conscious and present rather than fleeing to the comfort of the internal dialogue and the emotional programs for happiness, without bracing against the emotion.
It’s allowing the discomfort to exist, without letting it turn into suffering – because discomfort is a sensation, but suffering is a response to a sensation. It’s the continuation of the emotional circuit, the hamster wheel.
It also (this bears repeating and repeating, because it’s the thing that we keep getting wrong) isn’t about welcoming the context or the situation which has led to frustration. Often this context is genuinely bad and not something we should welcome – it may be abuse, cruelty or injustice. We are welcoming, not the context, but the content. We are welcoming our own reaction and owning it as a part of ourselves – and in so doing we are remaining connected to that part of ourselves and increasing our integration as people.
The first two steps are not to be rushed. The more you practice, the quicker they get, on average, but the third step comes along in its own time, sometimes after you’ve gone back and forth a few times between being aware of the physical sensations of emotion and welcoming the emotion as part of yourself.
You only need to hold this for a maximum of a few minutes, because of simple physiology. When you feel a strong emotion – particularly fear or anger – it starts a cascade of chemicals in your bloodstream. But without further encouragement, that cascade of chemicals stops, and your body takes it out of the bloodstream in a very short time.
When the emotion begins to dissolve and evaporate, as it will, you make a mental gesture of letting go of it. Clinging to it carries you right on round the circuit. Letting go of it allows you to move on without reinforcing your emotional pattern.
How do you make this mental gesture? You may open your hand, in your mind or literally, as if you were letting a small bird fly free. Or you may use words.
One form of words you can use is simply “I let go of my anger” (or whatever emotion it might be). But there’s also the litany that Mary Mrozowski used, if you dare:
I let go my desire for security and survival.
I
let go my desire for esteem and affection.
I let go my desire for
power and control.
I let go my desire to change the situation.
Boom! That’s huge. That’s really breaking the cycle in a dramatic fashion, because what you’re doing is giving a vote of no confidence to the emotional programs for happiness and acknowledging that they aren’t going to take you anywhere that is ultimately satisfying. You’re remaining present to the real situation as it is, and recognising that the really important thing is how you respond to it.
That may be at a higher level of development than where you currently find yourself (it’s higher than I currently find myself, I don’t mind admitting). But people who use it consistently become very, very remarkable people.
Conclusion and Next Steps
What we’ve looked at is the process of the Emotional Hamster Wheel, which winds us further and further into our stress reactions. By breaking it down into its parts and becoming aware of them, we can start to drive wedges of thought in between them, so that they don’t just flow on smoothly and inevitably to the next stage - we get the opportunity to interrupt, and have a different outcome.
A key part of achieving this for yourself is writing down what happens at each stage for you. Don’t skip that step. If you’ve already skipped it, go back through the stages of the Hamster Wheel and write down your reflections right now.
Then start practicing the Welcoming Practice until it becomes a habit.
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What next? Well, this ebook is part of a free course I put together on stress management. There are some videos, another ebook with some simple stress management techniques, a few MP3 audio recordings and a series of emails to talk you through the material. If you want to explore further, sign up at http://hypno.co.nz – there’s no charge.