5 - Triggering, discernment, and grace

5 – Triggering, Discernment, and Grace

Sometimes we do the work to peel back the layers and that is enough. The accomplishment is coming to a new understanding about ourselves. Sometimes we must push a bit further and make some changes. How do we know when to go forward and when to stop?

It is a process of trial and error. We often must feel our way into the best response. In the West, we spend a lot of time in our heads, with our thoughts. We rely heavily on reason and logical thinking to help us sort through problems. It is a helpful and useful strategy in many ways. However, it is not the only tool, and it is not always the best tool.

One of the reasons that I was drawn to studying Acupuncture and Eastern Medicine is their belief that we are a unified organism – body, mind, and spirit. There is not the Cartesian Mind/Body distinction. The mind is integrated into the body and vice versa. Understanding and genuinely feeling that connection can be a great tool for helping us to make decisions about what is healthy or beneficial and what is not. This is the start of mindfulness, which we’ll also come to in a later post.

Yoga has been one of the most helpful practices for providing this “felt sense” of mind-body connection. I initially started doing yoga because it was good exercise. But I’ve stuck with it because it provides this feeling of “mindfulness in motion.” One of the key practices in yoga is coming to your “edge.” The “edge” is the place where a stretch stops feeling comfortable and starts to feel uncomfortable. The edge is your decision point – do I push myself and go farther or do I understand that this my limit and accept how far I can go today?

One good gauge is to notice if your breathing starts to speed up when you are at your edge. Paying attention to breath is an essential component of yoga. Ideally, your breath should be slow and steady throughout the practice. If you come to your edge, and you are breathing rapidly, you run the risk of triggering your fight or flight response. If you do that, you instinctively tighten your body- making it harder to stretch any further. If you keep pushing too hard, paradoxically, you won’t expand your practice because you will associate fight or flight with any future tightness you encounter.

The goal is to come to your edge, recognize it for what it is – the limit of what you can do today- and then play at that edge. Maybe you move a bit farther, maybe you back off a bit. Once you make that choice, then again notice how you feel – Can you move rest for a moment and then move a little deeper, or do you need to back off even more? Also recognize that your edge is a construct that exists purely in this moment. Your edge can move from day to day and week to week. Tomorrow you may be able to go deeper than today without much effort at all.

You don’t have to be a yoga practitioner to find this helpful. The principle of discernment is the same for working with our wounds and facing our fears. What is your “edge?” Is it time to address this problem? Can I dig a little deeper into it? Or is it just too painful and I need to back away?

I had planned to write a series of entries about the challenges during Arnold’s illness. But that prospect proved to be too much for me. As I mentioned before, opening that topic up was like grasping a live wire, and I’ve had to put it aside for now. I met my edge today. But I fully plan to return to it in the future.

We all know what it is like to be triggered. We can feel the panic in our bodies – the racing hearth, the gasping for breath. Sometimes we try to ignore it, sometimes we can get consumed by it. Paying attention to what your body is telling you is important. You have the fight or flight response for a reason. I’m certainly not advocating that you do this work solely to trigger yourself. That is counterproductive. Like in yoga, if you push too hard, you can end up contracting yourself and not expanding your practice. If a topic is too painful today, you can set it aside. But don’t just forget about it. It clearly needs to be addressed -- maybe at a time when you are better able to cope with it.

This is the discernment process. What can I work on today? What am I not ready to do yet? What do I need to come back to later? The grace comes in being able to move easily around your edge - recognizing what you can manage and what you can’t, when to push forward and when to pull back.

The grace will come, but it will take time and practice.

Up Next: “Doing the Work”