Life delivers to us so much expansive joy – the beauty of nature, the capacity to sing, dance, laugh, and love, and having a brain with resiliency pathways that can take us from stress to joy anytime, anywhere.
That’s a lot to celebrate.
Yet the underbelly of those gifts is a tension that makes life thrilling. The tension may well be born out of the existential demand to grow. I look to the Cycle Tool in EBT for some hints about the nature of life, which gives us opportunities to live in optimal health both physically (in this world) and spiritually (in another world). What emerges from that process is that giving is a pathway to freedom.
Oddly, that does now appear so much in the first part of the Cycle Tool, which unlocks the allostatic circuit and turns self-damaging chemicals into self-healing chemicals, as well as revealing the message in the unconscious mind that is embedded in that egregious circuit. It appears in what we do AFTER processing our emotions and reaching a connected, homeostatic state. It is located in the second part of the Cycle Tool, specifically in the Take Action Tool, within the process of using three lead-ins.
1. Facing the essential pain
Once we identify what we expect of ourselves ( “I expect myself to do the best I can to . . .) and have fortified ourselves with some positive, powerful thoughts, we can sustain focused attention on the hard part, the reality of life we must accept in order to follow through.
Maybe it’s that I cannot change the past, or I am not in complete control, or I can’t always have it my way. There are hundreds of essential pains, but why do we choose to process life by accepting that, realizing, and feeling the pain of it coursing through our body until it flies away?
I have always thought of the willingness to accept the essential pain as based on the observation that the earned reward of doing so, such as Sanctuary, peace and power from within or say Intimacy, the experience of giving and recieving love are so immenely rewarding.
Perhaps there is another reason for our willingness to go into the fire of facing the hard part of life, its bare bones reality. It might well be the joy of choosing to be a person who is connected enough to our physical and spiritual realities that feeling the essential pain is intrinsically rewarding. It’s more like, “I face the realities without suffering because I am a person who does not dodge life. I am among those who see dealing with reality and seeing that path as edifying. By being a person who faces the essential pain head-on, asking that of ourselves, feels like a joy in and of itself.
The essential pain of the seventh circuit of emotional evolution in EBT is I must give. To honor that I can have joy, even my essence is joy, we must give at a deeper level, to the point it hurts, but at the very moment that hurting could turn into suffering, it goes POOF! It turns into joy.
2. Shooting for the Ultimate Reward: Freedom
Although all seven of the circuits of emotional evolution in EBT have both essential pains and earned reward, the most elevated of them is Freedom.
Imagine having freedom from despair, constraint, abandonment, or destruction. Those Survival Circuits that caused an emotional reflex to repeat whatever patterns took us on a broken holiday to a false high have been rewired. We don’t crave them anymore.
What happens when we fall in love with life as it is, not as we want it to be, giving up our gnawing desire to have it our way? A state in which we are not mired in overconsumption, disconnected emotions, and obsessive thoughts. Instead, we are living a life of joy and purpose.
3. Recognizing that We Have Overcome
The last of the three makes me laugh. Yes, we have accepted the essential pain of life with enough rigor and vigor that we have freedom, but I believe there is a special role of giving back to ourselves. It’s to use the last lead-in in the Cycle Tool, which is to say, “Hey everybody, I spiraled up. Collect Joy Point.”
Although celebrating that we have beaten back the stress chemical cascade of some old, miscellaneous memory that blocked our joy at the end of each use of the Cycle Tool is a special celebration, when members find their way to the last course, Freedom, and start seeing miracles everywhere, they feel grateful. They are grateful for the tools, their providers, their groupmates, and being a human who has been given a brain that can be played like a violin, bringing joy, health, and meaning to life.”
Yet, what about giving to ourselves and, with all humility, saying, “I did that. I rewired my own brain for joy, and the evidence of that is that I have freedom. I can enjoy life to the hilt, and be playful, exuberant, and loving, with freedom from common excesses and feeling really proud of myself!
I wired my own brain for jo,y and that’s the most glorious thing anyone can do!
have beaten back the stress chemical cascade of some old,
