- With regard to breathing while feeling caring
and breathing while feeling cared about,
sometimes what's most appropriate
is not to try to mobilize some particular state,
some particular emotion or intention or thought or attitude.
You know, we wanna just simply be with what's there
in a very non-interfering way.
Okay.
It's still appropriate sometimes
and certainly in the Buddhist tradition,
the one I know best, and I think we can find the same
in other traditions as well.
There is a point often in being able to evoke
or open to or encourage or stabilize
certain beneficial states of being.
Beneficial thoughts, attitudes, sensations, and so forth.
So now we have states.
And then over time, we can turn those states into traits
through helping them to leave lasting alterations
of neural structure and function.
This is the fundamental process of learning, healing,
development, cultivation over time, social, emotional,
somatic, motivational, attitudinal, spiritual learning.
We move from states to traits.
Negative states tend to become negative traits very quickly.
That's the brain's negativity bias
which makes it like Velcro for bad experiences
but Teflon for good ones, as they say.
With deliberate effort, though,
we can increase our learning curve.
We can steepen our growth curve as we move through life
by increasing the conversion of states to traits
of passing experiences to lasting changes in the brain
rather than having a momentarily enjoyable, useful,
pleasurable whatnot experience
which an hour later seems like it never happened.
If it seems like it never happened
there was no conversion from state to trait.
So, deep question is how can we help ourselves,
how can we help our students,
how can we help our clients, our patients, our children
to increase that conversion from state to trait?
Dozens of times a day.
Half a breath at a time, a breath or two or three or 10
at a time, increasing from state to traits
through an effect what I call "Taking in the good"
again and again and again.
We can help ourselves deepen our learning
which is if you think of it, the superpower of superpowers
because learning is the superpower
that grows the rest of them.
So, (clears throat)
I did that with you
and effective teachers do that with people.
They help them sustain the duration of their experiences,
keeping those neurons firing together,
so they're more likely to wire together
or they wire together more extensively and stably.
Supporting the embodied sense of experience
so the more we feel things in our bodies
the more they're gonna tend to get internalized
in lasting ways and also through sort of hinting,
focusing on what feels good about it.
Which I could have made more explicit actually.
As we have a sense of the enjoyability of our experiences
or their meaningfulness, that increases activity of dopamine
and norepinephrine in the brain, which track reward.
And as we feel more rewarded
by the experiences we're having,
they will be more protected.
Those experiences will be more protected
and their residues will be protected
as they get consolidated into long-term storage.
So when we open to feeling caring and cared about,
that itself is typically a rewarding experience.
As we feel caring and cared about,
that increases activity of oxytocin in the brain,
which reduces anxiety in terms of its activity
in the prefrontal cortex and as oxytocin levels rise
in the brain or more exactly oxytocin activity
increases in the brain,
that also serves to calm down the amygdala
'cause there are receptors for oxytocin on the amygdala
which as they receive oxytocin molecules
like little container vessels
showing up at the docking stations,
that has an inhibitory effect
that calms down amygdala activity.
And the amygdala is like the alarm bell in the brain.
Oh, that's good.
And also as we feel caring and cared about
that engages the vagus nerve complex.
You may be aware of Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory
and the most recent branch of the vagus nerve heads upward
from the brainstem.
It's involved with social engagement
and its original primary branch, ancient branch,
heads downward into the viscera, the heart, the lungs,
the internal organs and that lower branch
has a calming, soothing, containing, repairing,
protective, restorative effect.
So, as we have positive social experiences,
feeling caring and cared about
in addition to their impacts through oxytocin pathways,
by activating vagus nerve,
the most recent branch in the social engagement system,
the activation in that most recent branch ripples downward
to calm and slow the heart rate,
to help us be centered and help us be more resilient,
help us feel safer
because as our ancestors evolved on the Serengeti Plains
and prior to that in jurassic park,
certainly during the stone edge
and more recently "Game of Thrones",
feeling connected with others, flowing out and flowing in
was a primal signal of safety.
Soothing, calming, centering, grounding.