#1 – Interoception: A Lead Domino in Mental Health and Spirituality?
In an interview earlier this month, Robert Falconer shared an insight on the critical role of “interoception” in mental health and spirituality.
In essence, this is the ability to sense your own internal subjective state.
The higher your interoceptive skills, the more connected you are to what’s happening inside, and the more you can tune into the signals your body is sending you.
Falconer suggests this is why some autistic people flap their hands.
Due to low interoception levels, they‘re unable to feel where their hands are.
So flapping serves as a mechanism for sending additional information to the nervous system to “locate” them.
Interestingly, poor interoceptive capacity also correlates with eating disorders, anxiety, and major depressive disorder.
Which got me thinking…
If so many mental health difficulties are linked with poor interoception — could the opposite also be true?
That the people who are most content, most actualised, and most spiritually alive in this life, may have high interoception?
I.e. an unusually deep connection and attunement to their inner body?
This seems plausible to me.
In the interview, Robert also shared that interoception exists on a continuum.
And that it’s a trainable skill.
So by proactively strengthening it, we can increase our resilience and capacity for flourishing in this life.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt anxious or neurotic when I’ve been deeply rooted in and felt grounded in my body.
However, I can almost guarantee I will be if I spend too long up in my head, lost in thought.
For me, this has been a good reminder to focus on strengthening this connection every day.
Especially when doing cognitively demanding work, to take breaks throughout and frequently get back into and fully “inhabit” my body, so what I’m creating is coming from the depth and groundedness of my whole system, rather than the flightiness of my thinking mind.
#2 – Eckhart Tolle on the Metaphorical Meaning of the Resurrection
When writing the above, I remembered an insight Eckhart Tolle shared in The Power of Now.
In a nutshell, it was that there may be a hidden, metaphorical truth underlying the Christian story of resurrection.
According to Tolle, it’s no coincidence that when Jesus ascended into heaven “he took his body with him”.
The story implies that spiritual awakening happens with and through the body — not by denying it — a truth which was as counter cultural then as it is now.
In this context, the following statements start to make sense:
“The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.” — Matthew 6:22
“The kingdom of God is within you.” — Luke 17:21
#3 – A Book Worth Reading
In Unhinged Habits, Jonathan Goodman debunks a “sacred cow” in personal development—the idea that the best way to make meaningful changes in our lives is via small, incremental improvements. This short post (593 words) unpacks the thinking behind Goodman’s “unhinged” approach, and how it can be applied to create big progress and lasting change.
#4 – Free Will Won’t, Victor Frankl, & Widening the Gap Between Stimulus and Response
A few years ago, I read Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari.
In the book, Harari uses an experiment from Benjamin Libet to argue against the existence of free will.
In the study, participants—who were hooked up to EEG to measure brain activity—were asked to perform a simple voluntary action (e.g. move their arm) at a moment of their choosing.
Using a fast moving clock, they reported the exact moment they became consciously aware of their intention to act.
The EEG results showed that brain activity changed approx. 300-500 milliseconds before participants reported consciously deciding to move.
Harari—and many others—have since used this to argue “free will is an illusion” and that we are simply acting out the impulses of the brain. After all, if the neural activity precedes the intention, then surely the idea of a conscious, decision making agent must be an illusion.
Interestingly, this was not Libet’s interpretation.
The main conclusion that Libet drew from his extensive research into this area isn’t exactly that we have free will.
It’s more that we have “free won’t”.
He discovered that there was a slight “window” between the moment when brain activity changed and the action that followed.
In this interval, the individual can veto or accept the brain’s impulse.
In other words, your brain is constantly bombarding you with subconscious and pre-conscious motives.
You don’t have any control over these. They just happen — sort of like the weather.
According to Libet, the most important thing is our relationship to these impulses.
If we simply act them out, then Harari and his colleagues are right.
But if you take seriously Victor Frankl’s insight that:
“There is a gap between stimulus and response. And in this gap we find our ability to choose our response. And in this response lies our growth and freedom.”
Then free will is better thought of as a capacity to be cultivated.
Rather than a binary either/or phenomenon.
The more we are able to “veto” the brain’s impulses and consciously widen the gap between stimulus and response, the more growth and freedom we will experience in this life.
#5 – Stephen Porges & The Intervening Variable
Linked with the above, I asked Dr. Stephen Porges for his thoughts on Frankl’s statement in an interview for our Holistic Psychotherapy Summit in 2022.
For the most part, he agreed, but added one important caveat.
There is an “intervening variable” at work here.
Something around which everything else revolves:
The nervous system.
The size of the “gap” between stimulus and response—and the degree of flexibility you have to choose our response—depends on the state of your nervous system.
If you’re in a calm, relaxed state, your capacity to choose an intentional, quality response increases significantly. But if your nervous system is in a state of stress, this ability diminishes.
Which shows that biology and spirituality are interdependent.
Growth in one area may help the other too.
Maybe this is pushing it…
But you might even go as far as to say that by learning to effectively regulate your nervous system, you are increasing your capacity for free will—or free “won’t”—as Libet puts it.
#6 – Relational Frame Theory & Disrupting Sequences of Suffering
Another theory (from another Steve) which has relevance for free will is Relational Frame Theory (RFT), developed by Professor Steven Hayes.
RFT suggests thoughts are like “nodes” that exist in relational networks in our minds.
So when you have one thought, not only is that particular set of neurons “activated”, but also the thoughts you most commonly associate with it.
For instance, if you think “Ireland”, it activates a kind of relational network which may contain all of the associations you have with the country,
E.g. Guinness, Dublin, leprechauns, green fields, rainy days, St Patrick, and so on.
So there’s sort of an “if-then” sequence that plays out internally:
“Think X thought, then think Y thought or perform Y action.”
The more this happens, the stronger the neural pathways between these nodes become.
As the saying goes:
What fires together, wires together.
Although most of us intuitively grasp this, it’s only dawned on me recently how significant this is for reducing unnecessary suffering and improving our quality of life.
This short post (2 min read) unpacks the idea in a little more depth and how it may help to explain how I was able to break the habit of overeating.
#7 – Documentary worth watching: Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie
This is exceptional.
It tells the story of Michael J. Fox—one of the world’s highest paid actors in the 80s and 90s, who starred in the Back to the Future Trilogy.
Although wildly successful, Michael spent his whole life running from himself.
In the movie, Fox shares that the reason most people go into acting in the first place is because they don’t know who they are and don’t have a strong sense of self.
So, for the “lucky few” who actually make it, the problem exacerbates, as they now spend the majority of their time pretending to be someone they’re not.
The movie documents his rise, but also his battles with addiction and his earth-shattering Parksinon’s diagnosis at the peak of his career in his late twenties.
For years, Michael hides the diagnosis—from himself and others—through a combination of masking, workaholism, and drinking.
However, as his health deteriorates, he finds he can no longer outrun it — nor himself.
So gradually, his struggles with Parkinson’s lead him back home to Centre.
Although he experiences great pain, he also finds peace too.
It’s a tale of acceptance and homecoming — a little bit like the story of the Prodigal Son.
As he puts it in the movie:
“The thing that I learned was that I couldn’t be still in my life. I couldn’t be present in my life. Until this thing happened to me that made me present in every moment in my life — because it was shaking me awake.”
