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DR JOHN DEMARTINI - Updated 2 years ago
I'm going to make a statement that may surprise you: What if the emotional reactions you experience in your life were feedback mechanisms to let you know you’re likely not being fully mindful nor seeing the complete picture perceptually.
Whenever you see only one side of any situation, you’re likely to be reacting instead of acting, and biased instead of objective and neutral.
Let me take a step back and explain this in more detail.
If you are like most individuals, you have probably experienced a moment in your life where you felt that you were reactive, perhaps overly so. I know that I certainly have.
In these instances, your perceptions of the external world were likely to have been skewed, subjectively biased, imbalanced, and initiated a heightened reaction of seeking or avoiding.
Here’s why.
If you perceive something with any of your senses or combination of your senses, that an individual or situation has more advantages than disadvantages, more positives than negatives, more ups than downs, and more pleasures than pains, you can activate a parasympathetically-associated response of an impulse to seek it, as if it's prey that you want to metaphorically consume and eat.
In other words, your body automatically initiates a cascading acceleration of dopamine and adrenaline in order to seek it, to capture it.
You also tend to skew it with a subjective bias by having a false positive on the positives and a false negative on the negatives, a subjective confirmation bias on the positives, and a subjective disconfirmation bias on the negatives.
As such, your skewed perceptions distort your reality and often cause an emotional reaction of seeking it and wanting to consume it as if it were prey.
Anything that you perceive that supports your unique set or hierarchy of values, way more than challenges them, is automatically registered in the lower subcortical areas of your brain (also known as the amygdala) as prey.
That subjective bias tends to activate the amygdala and cause the seeking of pleasure and consuming.
You may have experienced this when you were infatuated with somebody in the early stages of a relationship.
You may have had an impulse to pursue and do everything you could to catch your prey.
You may then have later found out that your perceptions of this individual were not neutral and objective, but instead that you were unconscious of the downsides that were actually there but that you were unable or unwilling to see because you were subjectively biased.
As a result, you likely had an emotional reaction and were ungoverned and impulsive in your reactive behavior.
On the other side of the subjective bias pole, so to speak, is where you feel a subconscious desire to withdraw from, resent, despise or dislike an individual, event or situation.
In those instances, you will likely perceive more drawbacks than benefits and be conscious of the downsides, and unconscious of the upsides.
As such, you will tend to have a confirmation bias on the downsides, a disconfirmation bias on the upsides, a false positive on the downsides, and a false negative on the upsides.
As such, what you have is an instinct AWAY from instead of an impulse TOWARDS.
Again, you will have an emotion that puts energy into motion to help you get away from that which you’re trying to avoid.
Those are emotional reactions primarily because of imbalanced perceptions of your reality.
Anytime you have an imbalanced perception, you will either to seek or avoid, have an impulse towards or instinct away from. This is due to you having a subjective bias of your reality, and you are not seeing the whole.
As such, you not completely mindful but instead you a in a sense partly mindless, like an animal that is reacting and in rest or digest seeking mode or fight-or-flight avoiding mode in an effort to survive – largely because of these subjective biases.
While those primitive fight-or-flight reactions might be necessary and valuable when you’re in the wild and in danger of being eaten by a predator, 99% of your life is not an emergency situation of needing to survive. Yet the majority of individuals tend to live in this state.
These subjective biases, the distortions that cause emotional reactions, are subcortically driven responses based on your perceptions that then result in these heightened emotional reactions. They’re valuable for survival, but not for thrival.
They are not the path of mastery, but the path of survival and sometimes futility. If you look carefully, you may become conscious that you keep running into anything you try to avoid.
I often say that life is like a magnet – there are always two sides. If you try to split a magnet in half, you will be left with two smaller magnets – each with a positive and a negative pole.
In other words, there’s no such thing as a one-sided individual, event or situation. There's a downside to that which you are seeking, and an upside to that which you're trying to avoid.
One example I like to use is that of prey without predator, which would likely become gluttonous, overweight and unfit. As such, it would become an even more likely target for a predator.
The same principle applies in your life. The more you're addicted to the support (prey), the more you attract challenge (predator); the more you're addicted to praise, the more you attract criticism; and the more you're addicted to protection, the more you attract aggression.
So, nature has these pairs of opposites. If you try to avoid that which is unavoidable, the other pole of the magnet, it keeps surfacing. It's like the shadow chasing you in Jungian psychology.
So I'm not here to promote a one-sided world or a lopsided perception that most often results in emotional reactions. Instead, as I mentioned earlier, I truly believe that the emotional reactions you have in life are feedback mechanisms to let you know that you’re likely not seeing both sides of the magnet. Instead, you’re likely to be subjectively biased and reacting from your amygdala in the lower subcortical area of your brain.
To put it another way, your emotional reactions are feedback responses to help guide you back to authenticity, if you know how to interpret that feedback wisely.
As opposed to many individuals who perceive that getting rid of the challenge, the fight-or-flight reactions and the predator is going to help you become more balanced, neutral, objective, resilient, inspired and vitalized, it is equally as wise to balance both the supportive and the challenging perceptual sides.
Your resilience, adaptability, and physiological homeostasis requires a perfect balance of the two branches of your autonomic nervous system involving support and challenge, seek and avoid, pleasure and pain.
In fact, maximum growth and development occur at the border of those two.
When you have an imbalanced perception, the resultant emotionally reactive seeking or avoiding state that emerges is what the majority of individuals run their lives by.
But there’s another state of self-governance and self-mastery available for you.
The state of self-governance, where you act instead of react.
This is usually the point in my presentations or articles where I explain the concept of values in more detail.
Everybody has a set of priorities or set of values, things that are most to least important in their life. Almost like a ladder with your highest value being the top rung, and descending down into lower values on the lower rungs.
Whenever you’re doing something that is highest on your values, you are spontaneously inspired from within to act towards it. Mine is teaching. I love teaching. I love learning. So, I’m most likely researching and teaching throughout most every day. But if I had to go and do something like cooking or driving or something that wasn't high on my list of values, I'd likely procrastinate, hesitate and frustrate.
When you do something that is NOT high on your list of values and it is on the lower rungs of your values ladder, something interesting happens in your brain. Your blood, glucose, and oxygen go into your subcortical amygdala, the survival center, and make you more polarized, more subjectively biased, more erratic, more volatile, more emotional, and more vulnerable to the external world stimuli that can throw you off balance.
As a result, you tend to be externally driven and become a victim of history with a false attribution bias instead of working to master your life.
However, when you live by priority, you are most likely to become more objective, balanced, neutral, and mindfully aware that every event and experience has two sides.
As such, you’ll tend to liberate yourself from the emotional baggage and subjective biases, and get yourself on track with being objective and on a mission.
In this case, the blood, glucose, and oxygen go into the forebrain and activate the prefrontal cortex or your executive center. This higher and more advanced part of the brain has nerve fibers that go down into the amygdala to calm it down. In other words, it calms down the impulses and instincts, dampens the volatility, and stabilizes your life.
In this way, your executive center can govern your behaviors and allow you to strategically plan true objectives that you can see with your inspired vision so you can make things happen.
The wisest way I have found to learn to see both sides is by asking quality questions that bring your mind into balance, so you're objective, centered and neutral, instead of opinionated and reactive.
The most powerful questions you can ask, which I've outlined and put together in the Demartini Method that I present in the Breakthrough Experience, are the ones that allow you to perceive what you're unconscious of.
For example:
- If you infatuate with someone, you're conscious of the upsides and unconscious of the downsides and so it is then wise for you to ask, “What are the downsides?”
- If you are resentful of someone, you’re conscious of the downsides and unconscious of the upsides and so it is wise for you to ask, “What are the upsides?”
If you balance them both out, you're neither infatuated nor resentful but are instead objectively balanced and able to open your heart and experience a true and mindful state of unconditional love.
In that state, the executive center is able to calm the amygdala so you can be poised and present, and able to focus on what you are spontaneously inspired from within to do. The thing you would love to do as an undivided individual, not as a divided being with personas that you wear as a mask to fit into society.
When you’re actually inspired by what you do, are living by priority, delegating lower priority things, and are really engaged in what you're doing, you wake up the executive center and are more likely to be governed from within instead of reacting from without.
To Sum Up:
- The emotional reactions you have in life are feedback mechanisms to let you know that you’re not being mindful nor seeing the complete picture. Instead, you’re likely to be reacting instead of acting, and biased instead of objective and neutral.
- Your skewed perceptions distort your reality and often cause an emotional reaction of seeking it and wanting to consume it as prey, or avoiding it and wanting to escape it as if it was a predator.
- Emotional reactions occur primarily because of imbalanced perceptions of your reality.
- To put it another way, your emotional reactions are feedback responses to help guide you back to authenticity, if you know how to interpret that feedback wisely. They are letting you know when you have an imbalanced perception.
- As opposed to many individuals who believe that getting rid of or avoiding the challenge, the fight-or-flight reactions and the predator is going to somehow help them become more balanced, neutral, objective, resilient, inspired and vitalized. You actually require both the predator and prey in balance to be maximally fit.
- Your resilience, adaptability, and physiology require a perfect and simultaneous balance of the parasympathetic and sympathetic sides of the autonomics, the seek and avoid, pleasure and pain. In fact, maximum growth and development occurs at the border of those two.
- The moment you live by priority, become more objective, more balanced, more neutral, more mindfully aware that every event and experience has two sides, and the more you're consciously aware of both the supportive and the challenging nature, you liberate yourself from the emotional baggage and subjective biases, and get yourself on track with being on a mission.
- In this case, the blood, glucose, and oxygen go into the forebrain and activate your prefrontal cortex and executive center. This higher and more advanced part of the brain has nerve fibers that go down into the amygdala to calm it down. In other words, it calms down the impulses and instincts, dampens the volatility, and stabilizes your life. In this way, you are able to go on a mission, which is the center, the middle path as the Buddha says, instead of the polarities that are associated with ungoverned passion.
- The wisest way I have found to learn to see both sides of life and to balance your perceptions is by asking quality questions. In this way, you are more able to bring your mind into balance, so you're objective, centered and neutral, instead of opinionated, subjective and reactive.
- The most powerful questions you can ask, which I've outlined and put together in the Demartini Method that I present in the Breakthrough Experience, are the ones that allow you to see what you're unconscious of.
- When you’re actually inspired by what you do, are living by priority, delegating lower priority things, and are really engaged in what you're doing, you wake up the executive center and are more likely to be governed from within instead of reacting from without.
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