Spiraling up to come alive anew

I always resist change. It's my nature. I have the same round oak kitchen table I had in my 20s. I like to wear clothes that hug my body, the same styles over the years. I am usually pretty happy, but then life changes, and my brain circuits become out of date. That's when my brain state takes a bit of a nosedive.

I can count on feeling worse until I relent and do a Cycle. Then, there is another and another (sometimes more than I want to do). The Cycles become annoying, but my brain has been EBT-trained, and I keep digging deeper until I get to Brain State 1.

Bob Dylan said, "He who is not busy being born is busy dying."

In the Cycle Tool, the anger, sadness, fear, and guilt dismantle the old circuit. Still, that destruction doesn't come to much in terms of emotional and spiritual evolution, that is, "growing up," until we find the essential pain.

That kernel of wisdom nestled in the big ball of allostatic emotions and stuck states reveals itself. That happened to me tonight, and I saw the "essential pain" in a new way. I said to myself, "Oh, I get it. If I suppressed my emotions, distracted myself by staying busy, or used one of the thousands of external solutions that are at my fingertips, I would have died."

Maybe it would have been a socially acceptable death. I would stream more videos, let my eyes glaze over to avoid pain, or laugh when nothing was funny. I would be busy dying and surround myself with others who are busy dying. We would be in cahoots with each other.

Tonight, at the climax of doing a few deep Cycles, I discovered a new essential pain of life. I popped to Brain State 1 and felt free, alive, and at peace again in my own skin. Then, I went to an even higher Brain State 1 because I realized that spiraling up is really about clearing the chemical refuse generated by life so we do not die. Instead, we stay busy being born.

That former way of seeing life is gone ("poof"), and a new way to see how the world – and life – work takes its place. Thank you, Bob Dylan, and thank you, beautiful emotional brain. It seems the message is clear. Life is good, our genes are great, and if we just use our resiliency pathways with rigor and vigor, we can keep renewing our joyful outlook on life, day by day, cluster of spiral ups after cluster of spiral ups.

After the 5 comes the 1.