Instead of waiting for Eureka moments, prep your mind and invite them in
So there it was again, an old pain coming back in full speed. Do you have one of these returning problems that come and visit you out of the blue like an old pal, except you want to smash the door right into him, saying, “No, you are not welcome here. I have given you enough attention. I’ve tried every psychological trick under the sun. I felt you. I observed you. I rethought, rebutted, reframed, understood, ignored, and made light of you. So: No! Get lost.” It’s not that poor manners ever worked for me. Quite the contrary. The more aggressively I tried to shut out my unwanted guest, the longer he ended up staying. He demanded attention, stating the obvious, “Resistance is futile”. There was nothing else to do but to deal with him, again and until further notice.
So there it was again, an old pain coming back in full speed. Do you have one of these returning problems that come and visit you out of the blue like an old pal, except you want to smash the door right into him, saying, “No, you are not welcome here. I have given you enough attention. I’ve tried every psychological trick under the sun. I felt you. I observed you. I rethought, rebutted, reframed, understood, ignored, and made light of you. So: No! Get lost.” It’s not that poor manners ever worked for me. Quite the contrary. The more aggressively I tried to shut out my unwanted guest, the longer he ended up staying. He demanded attention, stating the obvious, “Resistance is futile”. There was nothing else to do but to deal with him, again and until further notice.
I know I am not alone. One of my friends put it this way, “I cannot believe I am still feeling so jealous. I thought I had dealt with it successfully. How old do I have to be to get rid of it?” Zen Buddhists would answer that it doesn’t matter what comes up in our mind, but how we relate to it. Content is less relevant than the inner peace with which we greet it. Maybe some part of our suffering is here to stay. Most psychologists concur that some problems are too big to heal and can only be managed well. The only ones claiming 100% success are either too young to know better or too eager to sell their product.
Wonderful. I am sure you feel encouraged by this news. Bad stuff for ever.
Except. Besides appreciating the healing that undoubtedly does take place with the right attention, besides reaping the many benefits of accepting darkness as part of life, there are breakthroughs, sudden shifts in consciousness, split-second insights that can change our lives to the better and for good. Epiphanies do happen. When a solution suddenly emerges in our awareness that feels like a perfect fit, when we finally understand something deeply or can see it in a new light, the problem dissolves completely. These insights are accidents of the mind, something we seem to stumble in and are taken by.* Usual feelings of having done something to deserve the dissolve are not there. It seems to have happened to us, as a matter of chance or grace.
The question is: do we have any control over the process of deep insights or must we simply wait? In psychology, problems that rely upon understanding the true nature of a situation are known as insight problems. Their solutions are not obvious, in part because we often use top-down processing which is analyzing the situation based on previous knowledge. It causes us to get hooked on the familiar which may be irrelevant to solving the problem.
Researchers believe that we can train ourselves to become unstuck and look at a problem in a fresh way. For example, Kounios et al. believe that it’s the right preparation to a problem that determines if we can solve it or not, just as Louis Pasteur suggested,
“Chance favors only the prepared mind.”
One form of preparation is studying. Another is accessing “distinct brainstates,” which is what the researchers used in their study.** They used rather straightforward problems, such as presenting three words that the participants had to connect by finding one additional word, turning all three into compound words (e.g., apple turning pine, crab, sauce into pineapple, crabapple, applesauce). The study shows that neural activity in certain areas of the brain helped find the correct solutions. Somehow (and the “how” is not explained in this study), we need to get ourselves in an optimal state of mind for our Eureka moments.
It is also known that just walking away from a problem can facilitate “Aha!” experiences.* When we are tense, we tend to overuse our verbal, analytical mind (left hemisphere) while creativity is suppressed (right hemisphere). As you may have noticed, a word on the tip of your tongue comes to you when you relax your effort. Relaxation is a big ingredient to mind shifts.
So, what does this all mean to you and me? Let’s go back to my reoccurring pain which was really about somebody who is caring and present-minded one day and self-centered and shut-down the next. Upon hearing me out, a good friend of mine asked me a bunch of questions, one of them I had never pondered. She asked, “Is it possible for you to enjoy his company like a roller coaster ride which you know will end?” I was taken by surprise. Possibilities revealed themselves. Anticipating clearly the inevitable end, I might be able to let go of the greatest fun on earth, human connection. This was my epiphany. It was the last time I was visited by that particular pain.
Come to think of it now, these years of dealing with my old pal in so many ways were not lost years. Because of the complexity of the problem –I am sure you appreciate that I haven’t shared the whole story- understanding its true nature took time. Practicing Zen, I had also learned a great deal about letting go with meditation Indeed, I had thoroughly prepared myself until that point. Finally and right after relaxing my mind with a wonderful friend “hearing me out”, I was ready for a new question. I was ready for being changed in a split-second.
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