Now Playing: Mental Apocalypse (but you hold the remote)

I recently heard Emma Sepällä, a well-known scientist whose research focuses on emotional intelligence, say that we humans are meant to experience extreme stress only for brief moments, in life-threatening experiences - at most a handful of times in our lives.

Shortly after that, I got to see how our threat-focused brains can induce high levels of stress even when there is no remote chance that our life in is danger. It was a powerful reminder of the importance of being aware of the accurate details of our present moment experience and of how our minds can distort them.

A dear friend was scheduled to lead a workshop via Zoom. She is a wise and grounded woman and someone I turn to when I need perspective and sage advice. When the road gets bumpy, she is a calming, hope-inspiring person who helps you believe in your strength and ability to abide. When I think of the qualities of even-mindedness and even-heartedess, she comes to mind as an exemplar. She is also incredibly generous and was offering this workshop as a gift.

As she prepared to offer the workshop, she struggled to log on to zoom. The workshop was scheduled to begin at 10AM and when she realized she couldn’t log on, she called to see if I could help. In the brief minutes between her first attempt to log on and her eventual success in doing so, I could hear her shallow breathing, could practically feel her racing heart through the phone. Her body was under extreme stress. On top of that, she repeated phrases like, “I’ve let you down. I’ve let them down.” And made other remarks disparaging her capabilities and intellect.

As an outsider to the experience, I could see that she was perfectly safe. She was in her home, all of her basic needs more than satisfied. There was a minor technical problem that would cause her to be 5 minutes late to offer an act of service to a group of people who would benefit from it whether it started on time or 5 minutes late. There was even a chance to connect with those people and share with them what had caused the delay - an experience many if not all of us can relate to and feel compassion around.

And yet it was as if her mind had taken that basic bit of footage and superimposed on top of it flames and the booming sounds of bombardment like some scene out of an apochalyptic movie; like the mind was a mischievous gremlin looking on and hurling mental Molotovs at her.

It took just a few minutes to figure out the issue and overcome it, and by 10:05 she was logged on and ready to offer her kindness to those gathered.

But I’ve carried that experience with me for days, reflecting on how often I’ve been held hostage by my own mental operating system gone awry. I’m keenly aware that millennia of evolutionary development and over five decades of mental habits have created code that isn’t easily overwritten, but I also have a deep appreciation for the potential that mindfulness offers us to become more aware of when the mind is hijacking our nervous system in error. And more than anything, I have a physical memory of the deeply felt compassion I had for my friend in that moment, and I have pledged to offer myself that same compassion when faced with a similarly artificial apocalypse. (And I’m hoping that I’ll remember the image of the gremlin hurling incendiaries and that it will make me laugh a bit and break the spell. Mindfulness and humor are potent antidotes to ancient wiring!)

May all beings feel safe when they are indeed safe, and see the humor in the mind’s mischief,

Your CMP family

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.