Recently, I've been trying to figure out where EBT fits on the spiritual spectrum. There's nothing like using the method when in dire straights to do that, and life afforded me that experience.
Out of the blue, I had a major health scare last week that suspended me between the two worlds of the living and, well, the not living. The Cycle Tool seemed to team with spiritual energy during that time – and even now.
It wasn't that spiraling up delivered one lightning bolt of rapture but that the heaven vs. hell aspect seemed embedded in the process. It was as if the Spiritual was telling me that a little hellishness is just the ticket needed to secure little slices of heaven here and there throughout the day.
The first wave: the unlocking moment
Spiraling up begins with the blessing of being asked to complain about what is bothering us. That, in and of itself, suggests the goodness of life. Someone or something actually cares about our inner life experience and wants to hear all about it – or at least five sentences of the story.
Yet, stating the situation and digging down into the muck of it is a little depressing. Zeroing in on what bothers us the most at least turns us away from the potential droning on about our problems – a little reprieve. Next, the fires of hell start beckoning as we express anger ("the Anger Procedure"), not getting relief from our own fury until we push out one rip-roaring anger burst, letting it rip and releasing control that the dastardly circuit that made us miserably unlocks. There, before us, is a heavenly moment right then and there.
The second wave: facing reality with emotional sobriety
Next comes sadness – the tender, sweet, homeostatic sadness, a continuation of the heavenly. Next up is facing the fear, and at this point, the use of the first chunk of lead-ins has peeled away the irrational fears and presented us with reality.
That will scare anyone, perhaps enough to surrender to asking the Spiritual for help or contemplating what otherwise hidden flaw in us caused a tad of hell to enter our life. We are alone in facing it, but even with a good swipe of expressing fear under our belt, a subtle yearning for the Spiritual to save us opens the door to emotional evolution. A surge of transcendence can arrive on our doorstep, hence the second wave of spirituality in the spiral up.
The third wave: moving forward in rapture
The last wave of turning hell into heaven in daily life begins with the 3 Questions: Who am I? What challenge am I facing? And who do I want to be in facing it? These questions are so lofty that this mini-procedure is reserved for Spiral Up#3 Deep Work.
These questions enable us to dig down into the unconscious memory system and pluck from it the best of who we are as we launch the Take Action Tool. We figure out what we expect from ourselves in going forward, but the process comes to a halt with a fork in the road at asking, What is the essential pain? One pathway reeks of sin and surrender to temptation, and that's rather terrifying. However, given the overall goodness of life, that hellish moment seems heaven-sent.
The prefrontal cortex is so thoroughly cleared of cortisol that it can accept essential pain with dignity and grace. When we state our higher-order reward for following through, dopamine and endorphins surge. Rapture definitely flows through us.
Becoming sensitive to the three waves
Those three waves embedded in the Cycle Tool give us enough stress to unlock circuits and enough joy to rewire them. What's more, focusing on them in the normal daily task of spiraling up 10 times affords us a deepening of the Spiritual, which still feels grounded in the realities of daily life.
Where EBT fits on the Spiritual spectrum is debatable, but observing that a neuroscience-based method could yield three waves of hellish moments followed by bliss seems like a much-needed gift that trounces the mundane nature of life and transports us to awareness of its glory.
To assess how helpful EBT is in deepening your awareness of life's grace, beauty, and mystery, try noticing each of the three waves as you use the Cycle Tool. If you are like me and find that these small awakenings bring you closer to the divine, then consider thinking of EBT as yet another pathway through which heavenly joys flow. One can't have too many of those.