196: Brain in Neutral

There is a tale of a man whose wife leaves him. When she leaves he says goodbye and gets on with his life. Then the wife decides to come back and he says hello and gets on with his life. Here or there he is unaffected by the comings and goings of life around him. He is not depressed at the departure or elated at the arrival, as far as he is concerned she is there and then she isn’t.

Wouldn’t it be grand if we could put our brains into neutral like this? To see life’s events as without meaning just something that is happening around us. Imagine what it would be like to hear someone speak and not interpret the words as being anything other than a message being conveyed to us, even if we don’t like it. What would it be like to  view life from neutral, just like that feeling when you arrive home at night and put the car in the garage? Neutral, arriving.

We all have our emotional fall back positions though. Some of us are worriers, ( she hasn’t phoned yet, must have been in a terrible accident). Some of us tend towards panic, ( the phone is ringing it’s going to be x , what shall I do, I don’t know what to do). Some of us angry ( finally, they rang well I’m going to give them a piece of my mind, nearly had me worried sick). We naturally fall back to our neurological glitches and  out of neutral when the going gets tough.

When I teach yoga people will come up to me and comment, that was lovely, slow, hard, just what I needed, etc. It has taken me a long time of teaching to realise that the classes aren’t really any of these things but the students are. Maybe it felt hard if you were tired or maybe it was just what you needed if you were stressed. The class is what it is, the class is neutral.

Practice for today: It is fine to feel what you feel and recognise and accept all the parts of you whether they be anger, joy, worry. Today try to work at neutralising your emotional fall back position. Instead of stepping into anger, greif, worry etc say to yourself’ brain in neutral now’ They are all just words, actions and deeds, nothing more nothing less.