Turnaround

In the emotional economy of scarcity, certain emotional states are emergencies.

Innocent states of being become actual emergencies because of the ways we know how to respond to these intense emotions.

We respond to intense emotions with the emotional equivalent of lethal force. This is how emotional intensity causes damage—only via reaction.

With new responses, emotional intensity is not an emergency. It is yet another sacred state in which we experience being a body in the world.

In reactivity, emotional intensity triggers behaviors the behaver would say are "out of control."

There is neurological backing for this theory that the behavior is not "in control." Trauma routes certain stimuli straight to an enlarged amygdala via myelinated neural pathways, shortening the 4 seconds of conscious decision making into a .4 second reaction.

There is a world of difference between .4 seconds and 4 seconds. It's so much more time, especially for the supercomputer that is the human nervous system.

I cannot honestly say what it was, of the million things I did, that allowed me to claim responsiveness with a system highly tuned to rageful reactivity.

I only know I threw EVERYTHING I had behind that mission, when I understood that it was mine and nobody could help me with it.

Authors helped me with it. Strategies helped me with it.

But in the end I was alone with me and whatever information I'd provided to myself, in those moments of intense emotion when everything in my system said "REACT!"

I remember praying. A lot. "God please help me shut up. God please fill my heart with love. God please help me keep listening." Also, my mother was dead at 49, time felt precious.

I rooted deep into the ground, into gravity, into my lower body and the commitment to utter STILLNESS when the command came to react.

I had a daily meditation and yoga practice. I put attention on my body regularly.

I had mostly claimed this when I began training for hours in some of the most dysregulating circumstances possible, holding constant observations on incarcerated teens throwing adult sized tantrums, banging on the steel door one foot from my face, insulting me every way they knew how.

I don't know what of it "worked," I just know that I own my standards for my behavior now.

I can calm the impulse to make the sharp intake of breath sound in the car. It is not a bypass overcoming the expression but a true relaxation of that impulse, a decision to trust where I was trained to fear.

It’s a choice I chose to become capable of making.

I can see the option to allow a trigger, and keep my seat in empowerment.

There is not a circumstance where I will yell at or blame another human being. There is a slower thing, a rooted thing, a full knowing that I CHOOSE how I behave in every moment.

It's a 180 from the rage monster I used to be, exploding over every little thing on or around the ones I loved.

I cannot believe that I am the only one capable of this turnaround. I refuse to believe that.

I know others who have claimed their own standards for their behavior from deep impulses to reactivity.

I know that what it really takes is dedication, devotion, a deep embodied commitment to the here and now I am curating with my loved ones, this one and only moment we get to be together.

I can experience an intense emotion and that doesn't mean a bad time for my loved ones. It does not derail the experience that we are able to have, it is integrated as part of the experience we are having.

This is what it means to not have a problem when I have a big emotion. I feel it, I own it, I bring it with me, it is part of what is happening now, and what is happening now can only be sacred. Here it is. Not a problem to be solved, simply an experience I allow.

"Processing" these emotions plays a big role in the economy of scarcity, where only *some* of the emotions are allowed, where we rule and are ruled by our fear of the threat big or "bad" emotions represent, where we react impulsively, lash out and blame the ones we love when we have a big or "bad" emotion, validating their fear and shaping them to please us or else. Processing enables our tyranny to control the situation when it is we who feel an emotion too big and too bad to be allowed.

Emotions will happen.

We choose our behavior.

Trauma may influence the ground we stand on, in terms of how much control any of us currently have over our reactivity in emotional intensity, but this is only a greater call to responsibility, never an excuse.

If the trauma that happened to me is not ok, it is not ok for me to use it as a reason to perpetuate trauma.

If they should have done something different, it is I who must now show exactly what it means to do something different than what I was taught.

If I think they should do it, then I must know how easy it is. I am the one who knows how important it is, I can prove that it's possible by holding myself to that standard.

I decided.

I meditated.

I meditated not only on the cushion, I meditated on my own behavior, in the moment and in the meta, on my own judgments of how other people should behave and my own shitty reasons for giving myself leeway when I didn't hold myself to those same standards.

I followed every single judgment and projection home straight to me to inform how I behaved. The meditation is the wander and the return, the way my attention naturally wanders to judgments and projections of others and what they should do and how they should be, and the return I enact when I discover what those judgments I am making reveal about how I need to conduct myself in the world and in that relationship to maintain my own standard of integrity, behaving what I know.

I am the one.

My love, you are the one.

If you want to leave the economy of scarcity, it is down to you to claim responsiveness and responsibility anywhere you are reactive or making excuses and blaming others. It is down to you to own that the experience you have in any given moment is ALL YOURS, and that the way you manage that will influence who wants to be around you, will literally open or shut doors in your face.

The economy of Devotion is here and now. I devote to my experience, I manage it, I own it, I do not make it anyone's problem, I allow it and I shape it with the way I steward my body and my attention.

Whatever you think THEY should do, do it yourself to prove how easy it would be for them.

This is the way to abundance.