Reprogramming Your Central Nervous System

Here’s basically how your brain works.  Let’s say your six-year old daughter is trying to learn how to catch a baseball.  The approaching ball triggers a series of neurons to fire off, creating a response in the brain and in the body.  At first, the response patterns are relatively varied, creating an uncoordinated set of movements, but you’re a persistent parent and continue to practice with her.  Repeated exposure to the stimulus of the approaching ball allow the brain to associate certain sets of neurological reactions with positive outcomes (i.e. a catch) and others with negative outcomes (i.e. a bonk in the head).  Over time the brain uses a series of chemical inhibitors and exciters to stack the deck of reaction.  The inhibitors make those neurological sequences that cause bad outcomes less likely to occur and the exciters increase the probability of sequences that cause positive outcomes.  Think of it as ‘burning in’ the response.  This is basically why practice makes perfect…your mind learns to recognize and be comfortable with a certain stimulus and quickly fire off the appropriate response.  By the time your daughter is 11, you can throw the ball to her and her hands go up before she even realizes what’s happening.

The trouble is that not all the reactions that get burned in are so useful.  Our brains are just as efficient at burning in reactions of anger, or jealousy, or withdrawal, or cravings.  The same reactive mechanism that causes your daughter’s hands to reach up and snag the ball can cause her to shut down or lash out in the face of confrontation.  It’s all in the programming.

If yoga was a cure-all for psychological problems, I’d be lending money to Bill Gates by now.  It isn’t.  It is, however, a pretty effective tool in re-training the mind.  Let’s take anger.  Thich Nhat Hanh wrote a book called Anger, and in it he says (I’m paraphrasing here) that there’s no such thing as “getting anger out of your system”.  He says that expressing anger is like exercising your anger muscles.  The reaction only gets stronger.  Brain science bears this out.  If you react to a traffic jam with anger and frustration, you strengthen that pathway – and make yourself more likely to react that way again next time.

In yoga, we create a safe setting and begin to program in alternative reactions.  Little by little, experience by experience, we inhibit the reaction we don’t want and support the one we do.  So let’s continue with the example of anger.  You wouldn’t believe the daggers that get stared at me in class when I ask for yet another challenging pose, yet another ten seconds of effort.  People get really mad sometimes.  The great thing about class is that you have control over the situation.  Unlike a traffic jam, you can always just come out of the pose, and you won’t be late since we’re not going anywhere anyway.  Instead of coming out, though, what if you took the opportunity to work with the anger?  Oftentimes, your body is doing just fine.  It’s your mind chattering at you, riling you all up.  What if instead of following the cycle of anger/blame/anger, you ran a different program? 

So here we are, standing on one very tired leg.  It’s shaking a little bit and we cannot believe the nerve of this jerk teacher who put us back here in this pose.  I mean, we just frickin did this pose ten minutes ago, and it was hard then.  What’s the point?  To show how cool the teacher is that we can’t do this?  Is this some kind of an ego trip or something?  Do you feel that?  Now let’s practice yoga.  Draw a breath, deep and slow, and let’s check in with the leg itself.  It’s wobbly, and tired.  Is there another set of muscles that we can call on to help?  Engage the belly the butt?  Can we shift a little of the load off of the quadriceps and into the calf by pushing down into the ball of our foot?  Can we release the shoulders down the back to quick wasting energy into unnecessary places?  Can we balance just a little straighter to take some pressure off of the stabilizer muscles?  Can I turn down the blaming and shrieking and obsessive chatter of my brain and turn my awareness to the sensation in my body?

Maybe we’re really just past the edge, pushing too hard, holding too long because the person next to us is still in it.  Maybe we’re risking injury.  Any good yoga teacher I’ve ever met would tell you to come out of the pose right then and there.  But more often than not, that’s not the issue.  And so we practice.  We practice getting comfortable with the raging of your emotional mind.  We practice using breath, and awareness, and visualization to soothe and cultivate equanimity.  We practice interrupting the feedback loop that lets a wobbly leg, or a traffic jam, turn into the end of the world.  With practice, we get better at it and as we get better at it, we want to practice.  Before long, we begin to take the practice off our mat and out into our everyday lives.  Each time we react to a stimulus with calm, we reinforce that reaction and the brain chemistry starts to work in our favor.