Who are you to decide?

In my previous post I was talking about Peter Levine's amazing book called "In an Unspoken Voice". It summarises what Levine has found over a career of over 40 years in the field of stress and trauma. Specifically I was talking about a section of the book from near the end where he discusses emotions and embodiment.

In this post I'm going to take another aspect from this same section of the book where he talks about change, and the concept of free will.

Free will

As I mentioned in the previous post, at the turn of 19th century psychologist William James concluded that rather than acting because we feel an emotion, we feel the emotion because we are (re)acting.

In his book, Levine discusses how this realisation highlights the illusory nature of perception. He says "We commonly think that when we touch something hot, we draw our hand away because of the pain. However, the reality is that if we waited until we experienced the pain, our hand might be damaged beyond repair. First there is a reflex, then comes the sensation of pain." Makes sense when you think about it...

There have now been many experiments that show that when you "decide" to do something, seemingly of free will, the activity in the brain starts about 1/2 sec (or more even) before you’re consciously aware of making that decision (the first experiment to show this was done in 1985). The brain starts by unconsciously preparing the motor action (springing to life as it were), then the awareness of the decision to move comes, then the action is made.

“Your decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity. By the time consciousness kicks in, most of the work has already been done." – Dr. John-Dylan Haynes (a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences)

William James argued that a person’s passing states of consciousness create a false sense of I or "ego" that runs the show – like a little man (or alien) inside our heads controlling things!

A little man in the head controlling things. From "Men in Black"

When we look at the reality of things, we see this is simply an illusion. The idea that we have a separate self that needs nurturing and protecting is simply not true.

Premovement

Levine suggests that instead of "I think therefore I am" it should be "I prepare to move, I act, I sense, I feel, I perceive, I reflect, I think and therefore I am". (This sounds remarkably like the Buddha's 12-linked chain of causation.)

It's this unconscious preparation for action (or pre movement as he calls it) that's so interesting. Levine suggests that it's "because we are unaware of our environmentally triggered premovement that we falsely believe we are consciously initiating and constructing the movement. Furthermore, when the (unacknowledged) premovement drive is strong, we may feel compelled to fully enact the entire movement sequence." He then gives two examples:

Interrupting the premovement

The first is about his dog, who has a strong instinctual urge to chase other animals (don't they all!). He found that breaking his "habit" by reprimanding him after the chase never worked. However, "if at the very moment his posture changed as he noticed an animal up ahead (hinting at his readiness to leap forward), I would firmly but gently say "No, heel" then he would calmly continue on his walk." So he interrupted his dog in the premovement stage so the action was never carried out.

The other example is a Zen story.

A young, brash samurai swordsman confronted a venerated Zen master with the following demand: "I want you to tell me the truth about the existence of heaven and hell." The master replied gently and with delicate curiosity, "How is it that such an ugly and untalented man as you can become a samurai?" Immediately, the wrathful young samurai pulled out his sword and raised it above his head, ready to strike the old man and cut him in half. Without fear, and in complete calm, the Zen master gazed upward and spoke softly: "This is hell." The samurai paused, sword held above his head. His arms fell like leaves to his side, while his face softened from its angry glare. He quietly reflected. Placing his sword back into its sheath, he bowed to the teacher in reverence. "And this," the master replied again with equal calm, "is heaven."

Transformation

Here the Zen master showed the samurai how to become aware and restrain his rage at the peak of feeling (just as this mind and body were preparing the action), so he could transform his "hell" of rage to a "heaven" of peace.

So here is the key to transforming our habits and moving from unconscious reactions to conscious responses. Bring awareness to the stages of premovement (I prepare, I sense, I feel, I perceive, I reflect, I think) before they graduate into a full-blown movement sequence. In Buddhism they say "to cool and extinguish the glowing embers before they ignite into a consuming flame".

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I am a member of the Zenways sangha led by Zen master Daizan Skinner Roshi, and I teach meditation, mindfulness and yoga at the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

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What is an emotion?

I've recently finished reading a book by Peter Levine called "In An Unspoken Voice". It's a pretty amazing book – the result of a career of over 40 years in the field of stress and trauma, detailing his pioneering work into how trauma happens and the methods he's found to work with it. Coming out of these methods is the therapeutic body-awareness approach to healing trauma called Somatic Experiencing that's now available across the Western world. (If you're interested in this area, Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Keeps The Score" is also well-worth a read.)

Towards the end of "In An Unspoken Voice", Levine touches on the subject of emotions and embodiment, and that's what I wanted to pick out to talk about in this and the next blog post.

What is an emotion?

It's simple to ask, but very tricky to answer!

If your everyday practice is open to all your emotions, to all the people you meet, to all the situations you encounter, without closing down, trusting that you can do that - then that will take you are far as you can go.  And then you'll understand all the teachings that anyone has ever taught.

– Pema Chödrön

As Levine points out, Descartes claimed "I think therefore I am" and it seems many people might agree with him. With this in mind, when something provocative happens you might think that your brain recognises this provocation and produces an emotional response. Then the brain tells your body how to react in accordance with this emotion: maybe increase heart rate, breathing, tense muscles, etc. What do you think? Does this seem like the way it works in your experience?

At the turn of 19th century, experimental psychologist William James took a different approach and arrived at a different conclusion. Through introspection, he would attempt to infer the chain of events that led to an emotion being generated. Most of us might think that when we see something scary we get frightened, and then motivated by fear, we run. Through his studies, James concluded the opposite – that rather than running because we are afraid, we are afraid because we are running. We feel sad because we're crying, feel happy because we're smiling, etc. The emotion comes as a result of the (re)action.

James was remarkably ahead of his time, and the importance of his work is only just being appreciated now.

Emotion is an afterthought

Emotion doesn't originate in the brain – it's the brain's perception of the body's reaction that generates the emotion. As Levine puts it "it's almost as if the brain canvases the body to see how it's reacting in the moment" (or in reality, assesses all the information it's receiving about the sensations and state of the body) and calls that collection of sensations and actions an emotional state.

Emotions happen in the body – they are 'embodied' processes. Levine has a lot to say about embodiment – he defines it as "gaining, through the vehicle of awareness, the capacity to feel the ambient physical sensations of unfettered energy and aliveness as they pulse through our bodies." Gut feeling, precognition, and what we call intuition, then "emerges from the seamless joining of instinctual bodily reactions with thoughts, inner pictures and perceptions."

"Mu shin" calligraphy

No-mind, no emotions

This sounds remarkably Zen! In fact it sounds like the Zen idea of "no-mind" (mu-shin), which means being directly in touch with the experience of now (and acting from that place), without concepts, ideas or mental commentary getting in the way.

And as my teacher Daizan Roshi says, "when you're on the cutting edge of reality, there are no storylines or thoughts" – or indeed emotions. Emotions are simply our labels for patterns of specific thoughts, sensations, reflexes and actions. "Its only when we look back with hindsight," Daizan continues, "that we try to make sense of things and the story-lines come."

Or as Charlotte Joko Beck puts it in her book, "Behaviour is what we observe. We cannot observe experience. By the time we have an observation about an event it's past – and experience is never in the past. That's why the sutras say we can't touch it, see it, hear it, think about it – because the minute we attempt to do that, time and separation have been created. ... Who I am is simply experiencing itself, forever unknown. The moment I name it, is it gone."

When you're truly, directly experiencing that moment of feeling happy (i.e. on the cutting edge, as Daizan puts it), there are no thoughts about it. There's just... it.

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I am a member of the Zenways sangha led by Zen master Daizan Skinner Roshi, and I teach meditation, mindfulness and yoga at the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

I'd love to hear from you

Leave a comment below, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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