A Breaking-Free Moment!
When a colleague of mine at the university announced to our EBT group, "I broke my Food Circuit," I gasped.
At the time, I was steeped in the neuroscience of EBT and thinking about reconsolidating allostatic wires into homeostatic circuits.
However, the image of breaking free of any habit circuit or a cluster of wires that are left over from a traumatic experience or unresolved conflict stayed with me.
Sharing our Breaking-Free Moments
In our world, people share their angst at the world situation or their awe at the beauty of the blue sky on a particularly sunny day. Still, there is little attention paid in our society to the AMAZING feeling of BREAKING FREE from a wire that has been killing us through a thousand cuts, with chronic stress, or vaporizing a wire that triggered us into that harsh judgment, relationship quarrel gone south, or feeling out of control with alcohol, drugs, spending . . . the usual.
What if we glorified and shared our rapture about the experience of using our thinking brain and a very precise emotional process to obliterate wires that were blocking our joy and bringing us indigestion, headaches, anxiety, or unwanted appetites?
In the spirit of creating a new norm of sharing our Breaking-Free Moments, here is my latest:
A couple of weeks ago, a family situation that had been simmering for years erupted. The hurt of it all went right into my emotional brain, and I knew I was at risk of being an "emotional goner" for days, if not weeks, if I didn't EBT it. Out of respect for myself, not wanting to ruminate about it, toss and turn at night, and be rather grumpy or sullen with my husband, Walt, I did some pretty vigorous EBT.
Digging deeper with the new Bliss Factor
When I didn't "pop" to Brain State 1 within a reasonable time, I knew that whatever this situational stress was, it had wormed its way into activating a wire that would be a major step forward in my emotional and spiritual life if I could nail it. So I kept on cycling, this time using the new Bliss Factor, which takes the new expectation (transform statement) to a new level of rapture. That's important because the absolute value of the difference between the negative emotions from the old expectation and the positive ones from the new one shakes up the brain and demolishes the old circuit.
Using the new Bliss Factor made the difference. Granted, I used it at night, right before drifting off to sleep, the BEST time for rewiring (reconsolidation happens when we sleep), but when I awoke the next morning, I had the most bizarre sensation. I say sensation, because sensations are more primitive than emotions and arise more fully when the rewiring is quite deep.
The wire was gone—what just happened?
The first thing that came to my mind upon awakening was that I would start thinking about "the situation," yet I had no interest in thinking about it. As someone who enjoys ruminating, that was strange. Next, I started trying to generate thoughts about the situation. None appeared. It was as if this whole ball of trauma wires had vanished. There was this "hole of healing" in my brain. That pocket of emotional pus was gone.
At first, I was not happy about it. Figuring out problems and making myself a little miserable has its own rewards, but then I was in rapture. I had broken FREE of all that pathology. I had no judgments. I just felt love for the folks involved, for myself, for the spiritual, for life.
THAT is my Breaking-Free Moment . . . the sensations, the emotions and . . . what is still with me, which is AWE!!!