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I once spent ten days of my graduate school education out in Death Valley on a Native American Vision Quest. The school was neurologically ahead of its time, believing in the facilitation of learning by organizing safe, structured, direct experiences that had manageable stresses and risks associated with them. Clearly some profound learning took place, since many details of the experience live on in my neural network more than 25 years later. Let this descriptive account be a lesson for parents and teachers alike.
One chilly morning in early April a dozen of us loaded our gear and ourselves into three vans and headed down the I-5. Somewhere between Bad Water and Dante’s View, we parked and began the long trek out into the middle of nowhere. At the time I fully possessed a vivid personal knowledge of Death Valley and its dangers, gleaned from watching dozens of episodes on TV hosted by Ronald Reagan and his 20 Mule Team crew. Death Valley was not to be trifled with – anyone who entered it unprepared rarely came back alive.
I learned many surprising things on this excursion into the forbidden wilds of Death Valley. One was just how overrun Death Valley was in springtime with … wildflowers. Great white and yellow seas of daisies and poppies extended out as far as the eye could see in every direction. Flowers all around you tend to take away some of the hostile and forbidding aspects of an environment. The next thing we all learned was what some of the real Death Valley dangers were. Our knowledgeable guides went over them one by one. The first was sun, or more accurately sunstroke or heatstroke, with its close cousin, dehydration. To address this we each had brought along four large plastic jugs of water. Also, on the list of Death Valley dangers, as I recall, were rattlesnakes and scorpions. As someone practiced and comfortable in the wild, wooded forests of my youth, none of these things worried me particularly.
Our little group spent the greater part of the first day trekking further out into the desert, losing all site of roads or familiar landmarks. At a place picked seemingly at random, our guides instructed us to set up base camp. I remember that first night spent in sleeping bags under an expanse of more stars than I ever thought could possibly fill the sky. In the morning we all gathered for breakfast and received instructions in preparation for the Solo adventure each of us would be embarking on over the next five days. After breakfast we set out in pairs on the “Buddy Plan,” in any direction we wished. Our instructions were to separate from our buddy after establishing a contact point that one of us would return to every morning and leave some sign of our visit. The other would return to the same spot each evening and do the same. The contact point my partner and I bravely chose was the place where we saw our first rattlesnake! It saw us before we saw it, curled up and clearly ready to strike. When we slowly backed off, it uncoiled and slithered to safety inside a rocky crevice.
The first afternoon and night of my Solo went by without incident. The second morning however, the first terrifying experience of the trip unfolded. I was curiously exploring a rocky ledge when I unexpectedly came upon … fresh scat! My first thought was that it was left by a dog. But if it was, it was undoubtedly a wild dog. And if it was a wild dog, then very likely he or she was part of a pack. And if he or she was part of a pack, living in the desert, they were most likely a very hungry pack. And against a hungry pack of wild dogs, I would undoubtedly be completely overmatched. In response to this series of dread-thoughts my body immediately flooded with adrenaline and my brain began to buzz with a frantic desire to find my way to safety. I had brought a knife and a staff with me and so the first thing I did was to sit and whittle one end of the staff to a sharp point. I then cut my boot laces in half, tied the halves together, and used them to tie the knife to the other end. All the while visions of snarling, starving Cujos danced wildly in my brain.
The nights on this Solo were the most difficult. I lay awake under a rock outcropping in my sleeping bag desperately vigilant, attentive to every sound that played across the desert nightscape. By morning sun, I was exhausted, but still riding high on adrenaline, unable to eat, but also unable to think clearly. I’ve later learned that a brain in a state of fear cuts off much of the creative, higher cortical functions. On the last night of my Solo, completely exhausted by this point, far off in the distance I suddenly heard the faint bark of a single lonely coyote. At that point, I finally put the two together, coyote and scat! A great wave of relief passed through me and I remember laying in my sleeping bag crying, crying with relief, crying with joy, crying at my fear, at my Wild Mind, at the whole ordeal my brain had put me through based upon one little scrap of coyote scat. I came up with a short saying in that moment, the one that I’ve mentioned previously in this column. It has served as a great brain-calming, self-regulating mantra many times since my Death Valley adventure: “In this moment, I am perfectly safe.”
And so I am, and have been ever since.
This past Monday I received an email from a friend that saddened and surprised me. It was a copy of an Open Letter written by Jack Kornfield, Ram Dass and Sharon Salzberg. A few years ago, each of these folks had been intentionally supportive of a Handbook I put together intended for therapists and caregivers. Though I have never spent one-on-one time with any of them, they nevertheless feel familiar to me – like old, dear, trusted friends.
In the Open Letter Jack, Sharon and Ram Dass were making a public appeal on behalf of friends of theirs – Stephen and Ondrea Levine. Ondrea is suffering from leukemia and Stephen’s health is such that he is no longer able to travel and teach. In my own work and studies in dying and grief, no two people have played a more seminal role.
I attended my first workshop with Stephen and Ondrea during the week between Christmas and New Years back in 1981. It remains memorable for one primary reason: most of the people attending that weekend were parents of children who had been murdered or who had died from serious illnesses or automobile accidents. In my experience, there is no grief greater. The equanimity and grace and compassion and empathy with which Stephen and Ondrea were able to be fully present to such profound suffering as each parent painfully struggled to relate their story has stayed with me for all these years. Their ability be heartfully present to such suffering remains a model I continue to aspire to.
Though I have only spent time with them in large group settings a half dozen times at most, Stephen and Ondrea, too, feel like old friends of mine. They have consigned their money and their lives to support their beliefs in the desire to address and alleviate suffering in the world, something I deeply respect and admire. I also remember Stephen once speaking indirectly to the subject of friendship. He was talking about the inbuilt fear many of us seem to have of people we don’t know, like homeless people, and Iraqis and members of the Taliban. In response to such automatic conditioning, he asked one of Mother Teresa’s favorite questions. It was one she used to put to people who feared lepers: “What if you were simply to think of them as Jesus or Buddha in one of his most distressing disguises?”
What indeed? A wonderful question. Nevertheless, I have come to discover that, while helpful, holding such a thought is not fully sufficient for a friend of your friend to immediately and effortlessly show up and feel like my friend, too. Something more is needed. What that something more turns out to be is significantly increased connectivity between my orbital medial prefrontal cortex and the limbic structures in my brain. I need to “get my head more together.” Noted child psychiatrist, Dan Siegel, writing in his book The Mindful Brain, cites a number of recent studies that confirm this connectivity is just what the doctor ordered. So, in order for your friend to become my friend, even if your friend is a bona fide saint, I may need to first grow some additional prefrontal connecting fibers. Otherwise, at a minimum your friend might look suspiciously like someone wanting something from me, or like some huckster trying to perpetrate one scam or another – the simple result of my conditioned limbic structures doing their distorted best to look out for me.
What works to actually grow such fibers and make these crucial connections? A number of things, it turns out. If we’ve been fortunate enough to be born to parents with great OFC (Orbitofrontal cortex) connectivity, that’s a great start. If not, then an alternative option is to spend a lot of time with a teacher or mentor who has their own neural undergrowth in good integrated order. Andrew Newberg at Princeton and Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, in their work with wired-up meditating monks, have produced some empirical evidence that contemplative practices, in addition to their stress-reducing abilities, also work to increase orbitalfrontal connectivity.
These are a few of the ways that I can work on myself so that your friend might effortlessly and easily become my friend. And in the process, you and I will perhaps gain back some of the neural real estate that used to be concerned with fear and self-protection. With such internal neural abundance, we might then be able to generously devote some of it to the care of good friends like Stephen and Ondrea Levine.
In 1960 an extremely promising baseball career lay wide open in front of me. I was eleven years old and had been honored with the “All-Around Athlete” award at Yale’s summer camp for disadvantaged kids (Now, past 60, I can still hit a 90 mph fastball!). In anticipation of a great 1961 season, overshadowed perhaps only by the heroics of Yankee sluggers Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle, I told my mother I wanted just one thing for Christmas: a new Wilson A-2000 baseball glove. When Christmas morning arrived, I raced downstairs before dawn. In my excitement, I “inadvertently” tore open several presents with my sister’s name on them until I came to the package that I was certain held my prize. I ripped off the wrapping in joyous anticipation, only to discover what turned out to be a funky three dollar baseball glove that I later learned had been a last minute purchase at the local Rexall pharmacy.
Needless to say, I felt heartbroken and betrayed. But more than that, I was grief-stricken, embarrassed and ashamed. I went up to my room and cried for most of the morning. In my view, limited by the constricting distortion of unfathomable pain and sorrow, my baseball career was clearly over – there was simply no way I could possibly show up on any respectable baseball diamond with a glove like that. Harvard psychiatrist, Judith Herman, would consider this a true trauma in my boyhood world, one that “overwhelms the ordinary system of care that give people a sense of control, connection and meaning.” (pg. 33).
Many of us have similar painful, traumatic memories associated with the holiday season. At some early point in our lives, the celebration of the return of the light somehow managed to take a turn for the worse, often much worse than the bit of personal tragedy I’ve related above. My cousin, for example, spent one frozen Christmas visiting his mother in Middletown, at the Connecticut State Mental Hospital. And I remember two friends who lived in the neighborhood who spent a few of their holidays among felons-in-the-making at the Cheshire Boy’s Reformatory.
These kinds of experiences often lie beneath many of the “Bah Humbugs” of the holiday season. (And in fact, Marley’s Ghost might be recast by neuropsychologists as Scrooge’s own unconscious working to effect healing resolution). But turning a deaf ear and a jaundiced eye rarely leads to any such resolution. What might lead to it then?
As with many painful and overwhelming experiences that live in us as traumatic memories, telling the truth about what happened, and how it genuinely impacted us, sometimes over and over and over again, can often help. We need to tell our stories in a setting where it’s safe to do such truth-telling, and to people who have the capacity to hear such painful recountings with compassion and kindness, of course.
There is great benefit to healing traumatic memories, and there are a number of ways we can tell if such memories from experiences in our past have been fully resolved and integrated. Psychologist Mary Harvey has identified seven touchstones we can use to guide us. The first is that thoughts about the painful experience are now able to be entertained and easily managed. The second is that we no longer feel great emotional charge about the experience. The third is we have some choice about recall of the experience – thoughts about it don’t simply intrude unpredictably at random. Fourth, the experience can be spoken about coherently with appropriate feeling. Fifth, whatever damage our self-esteem may have suffered, it has been fully restored. Sixth, important relationships that may have been breeched, have also been fully restored. And finally, seventh, we’re able to make sense and meaning of the experience, painful and unfortunate though it may have been. For example, with my baseball glove experience, the sense and meaning I’m able to make (after much emotional working-through) is simply that my mother was doing the absolute best she could, living on welfare as a single, unemployed mother of three kids.
There’s one further aspect to resolving the dark things that have happened to us in connection with the holidays. It’s one that I’m a big fan of – restorative justice. This turns out to provide great neurological benefit for perpetrators and victims alike. Somatic psychotherapist, Pat Ogden often refers to the need for some kind of “triumphant action” in connection with restorative justice. How that unfolded for me happened “serendipitously” without any conscious planning. I happened to be book-shopping one day in New Haven at the Yale Coop. I often gravitate for “no special reason” to the sports equipment areas of department stores. On this day, I managed to wander over to the Coop’s sporting goods department, when lo and behold, I spied a lone Wilson A-2000 hanging there from a hook on the wall. The price tag was $130! As I write this, that glove, with it’s Snap-action hinge and its well-oiled Grip-Tite Pocket is propped up triumphantly on a shelf here beside me in my office. And inside it sits a ball signed by the 1961 home run king, Roger Maris himself.
A number of years ago some friends and I researched and trained a small group of volunteers for a local community service agency. Our desire was to provide a healing sanctuary for kids who’d lost a parent to an automobile accident or to cancer or a heart attack or to any other sad misfortune. Many of the kids who showed up for these groups came reluctantly, with stiffness in their bodies and fear and confusion in their eyes. At the end of a year or sometimes two, our weekly meetings somehow managed to fully transform and resolve that fear and confusion. What took place with and between these kids continues to provide healing lessons for me these many years later.
In some ways, fear operates in us like a Tilt-a-Whirl roller coaster, one that often squeezes us in a double bind. Stress chemicals like adrenaline and noradrenaline in the body and brain work to get us all riled up, and then Gaba-Goo (Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid) and cortisol get sent out to try to still the raging waters. These neurochemicals significantly influence and impact what we think and how we think. Stress-based thoughts rarely spring from things happening in the present moment, but they do work to produce the circular effect of re-triggering the stress chemicals; this recursive pattern turns out to leave little room for joy. This thought-generating process was clearly evident with our grieving kids: “What’s going to happen to me?” “Will I ever see my mother again” “Why do the other kids treat me weird?” “Will things ever be okay again?”
What to do? One thing we did was to help create space for the kids to learn about how grief works and how it actually felt in their bodies. In my own body, for example, in fear or grief, I often feel a familiar, uncomfortable kind of body-tension, my breathing gets very shallow and I notice a certain lack of “spaciousness” in my viscera (hollow organs – heart, lungs, stomach, etc.) and brain. It’s like I’m not totally there.
There’s some anecdotal evidence that this is part of a neuro-physiological event that takes place in the brain where the connections between limbic structures and cortical structures become temporarily reduced or turned off so as not to have the thinking brain delay instant reaction to real-world dangers. For example, we wouldn’t live too long if we had to first think about getting out of the way of a car rolling wildly towards us down the hilly Streets of San Francisco.
Another thing we did with the kids was to begin regular practices to help deliberately reduce stress. We designed and built a “Steam Room” – a place with padded walls, pillows and batakas and a heavy punching bag. It was a safe place to express Big Feelings. Lacking a Steam Room, many adults turn to things like MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) or a variety of contemplative practices, like insight meditation or prayer, which also seem to reduce the baseline levels of stress chemicals in the body and brain. I think it’s an unacknowledged benefit of attending services as part of a faith community – large groups of people in proximity experiencing significantly reduced stress have a measurable effect on one another’s neurophysiology. This “interpersonal neurobiological” effect is also, in part, why watching a movie in a theater is a very different experience than watching one at home alone. Kids helping other kids heal was also in evidence as a regular part of our pilot program.
There are other practices that can work to lower fear-based stress as well. We know that aerobic exercise works to reduce levels of neurotoxins. Lots of studies have confirmed that. So does something called 7-11 breathing, where you breathe in to a count of seven, and then breathe out to a count of 11. Doing this clears the lungs of air with a lower oxygen content, replacing it with a more oxygen-rich substitute. Increasing oxygen in the blood increases its supply to the brain, and increased oxygen to the brain is generally regarded as a good thing. Yoga has also been anecdotally found to reduce stress chemicals in the body and brain, as have the exercises associated with Smart Moves or Brain Gym. So does crying. At our children’s program, we did our best to establish a compassionate environment where it was safe to cry.
One of my own self-management practices that I have been using for years, which I find very helpful across a wide variety of fear-generating circumstances, is the repetition of a “mantra” of my own creation. A mantra is essentially a symbol or poem that works to affect neurophysiology. One that I have made up and used successfully (when I can remember to actually use it) is: “In this moment, everything’s all right.” The night our little training group first set up to receive our inaugural group of grieving kids, I remember using this mantra a lot. Turns out the kids were nothing that needed to be feared in the least. And more than twenty years later they still aren’t.
