The word "peace" comes up a lot in the EBT Community. The first reward is Sanctuary: peace and power from within. So, how do we use EBT to facilitate that elusive, internal experience in which we can feel our entire body relax and know we are home, we are safe, and we have peace from within?
You could say that every shimmering moment at One from a quick spiral up on the app delivers that peace. Or maybe it is after doing travel backs and clearing so much clutter from the depths of your brain and attaching to your joy so many times that you have a set point in joy.
The essentiality of peace from within
Yet that feeling of peace inside is so important that skills to experience it are integrated into each of the method's advanced courses. "Giving yourself a clean slate" time after time, one erasure after another, is part of the method's joy. The pathway to it is spiritual in nature, but so are the tools, so it makes sense that each of the emotions of the Cycle Tool would factor into the process.
One way to guide yourself to peace inside, sensing that you have a clean slate, where the confusion, self-blame, and general "I'm not comfortable in my own skin" experience vanishes through tender but gritty, even prickly sadness.
Tender, gritty sadness
The unwanted gift of trauma and the stress overload experience is disconnection. It has to be because stress chemicals send the prefrontal cortex on its own journey to dysfunction, and the emotional brain becomes our controller. Those reactive wires have their heyday and we're left with extreme emotions and a bad feeling inside.
The journey back to peace can be a long one because we have to put the brain back together again. That means doing a lot of Cycles, all with red hot, A+ Anger at first, as we feel so bad. Who doesn't need to protest about all that pain and self-judgment? However, in time, the guilt expression in the Cycle Tool wakes us up and tells us a thing or two about what we contributed to the problem. That's very helpful.
Self-forgiveness first
As an active EBTer, I've noticed that when I have done enough Cycles to clarify what circuits were activated (making it perfectly reasonable that I would make that error) and rewired them, I can relax and feel love for myself again. It seems that the emotional brain is pretty demanding in that way, and without clearing out the circuits that caused the problem, it would not let me be at peace.
How perfect is that? Rewiring all of them gives us neural security that we won't mess up in that particular way again. Yet only after healing to the point that we can forgive ourselves and hold ourselves "shameless" can the tender, gritty sadness show up in our inner lives.
Staying present to sober sorrow
With all those circuits cleared, we can tolerate being aware of how we impact others and the spiritual, all shame-free. Keep in mind that we are these precious, little beings who are immensely vulnerable, given that our emotional brain has no walls and that circuits land in it without our permission or awareness, and of course, we are going to fall short.
Yet the tender, gritty sadness arrives when we have the self-regulatory strength and set point to sustain our feelings when we think about how we have impacted others. My father, Jack, used to tell me to do things I didn't want to do because it would put "hair on my chest." This sorrow does that.
Catapulting to joy
What follows next from my own experience is peace. Being present to the imperfect people we are and appreciating how our every action can help or harm others lets the cosmos deliver an injection of emotional and spiritual sobriety. All the core expectations of EBT become infinitely stronger: I do exist. I am not bad. I do have power. I can do good. I can love. I am worthy. And I not only can have joy, but my essence is joy.
Why is clearing emotional clutter foundational to every errant circuit we erase? Perhaps it is because clearing it is our pathway to freedom from the past and a scientific, organized way to give ourselves the clean slate we had thought would never be ours. It can be ours through this pathway of spiraling up.
What a joy to know we have a process to rely on and that, in our connections, groups, and community, we are surrounded by others who choose to clean their own slates and celebrate the journey in doing so. I celebrate that every day, and I hope you do, too.
,