Expanding Your Brain Capacity for Peace Like a Yogi
Friday, September 6th, 2019Michelle LaBrosse, CCPM, PMP, PMI-ACP, RYT
I’ve been thinking a lot about thinking lately as I jump into the foray of teaching skills to become more peaceful as a people. Expanding our capacities for peace is very much about the capabilities of our mind. For example, in the Peace Leader Academy Taming Your Triggers class, it takes a desire to even go into the realm of being triggered to develop the capacity not to be triggered. For many people, they have created all types of ways to avoid being triggered, as it’s such an uncomfortable emotional experience.
In Michael Singer’s book “The Untethered Soul” he talks about the “thorn” that we put layers and layers upon to protect our selves from its sharp edges. Our triggers are our thorns. Yet it is the “protecting” layers that keep us limited by our limitations.
I’ve been watching in fascination as people are attacking the presidential candidate Marianne Williamson about her “praying” for hurricane victims. What I’m seeing in their snarky comments are the protective layering from people traumatized by religiosity over the years. Having been there myself, I can hardly blame them. However, I also realize it’s a trigger that if tamed, could expand their capacity for being peaceful way beyond their current state. After all, the most important person to realize the value of an expanded capacity for peace is yourself. This is why we made the “Taming Your Triggers” ten-hour online class the first one in the Peace Maker Program. Taming your triggers expands your brain’s capacity for peace.
And this gets me to the purpose of this blog post – Expanding Your Brain Capacity for Peace Like a Yogi. In yoga teacher training, I learned several key concepts when creating a yoga class. One is to gradually ramp people into the class’ “peak pose.” This is the pose that takes special warm-up and capability to achieve. The other is that while the goal of yoga may seem to stretch beyond what we’re currently capable of doing, the real purpose is to only stretch far enough to find your true resting place of comfort and ease.
The challenge with doing this with your brain, is you’re only going to go as far as you’ll allow yourself to deal with your triggers. You’ll stay locked into a small world of comfort and ease to make sure that your triggers are not going to be tripped. For those trying to get people into a “peak pose” of expanded consciousness, we have to adjust what that “peak pose” can be.
Just like in teaching yoga, you must be able to offer your students levels of difficulty of poses. As not everyone comes to class at the same capability level based on a number of factors – body type, depth of their practice, challenges of the day, etc. In helping people expand their brain capacity, my fellow blogger Luna Clair and I yesterday came up with three levels of brain expansion capability.
- Conventional Wisdom – this is the level that most people have seen or heard and can buy into with minimal trigger tripping or triggers that are surface enough to easily work through.
- Mostly Mavericks – this level of people like being charged and see it for the catalyzing energy it does offer. They are the “bring” it folks who want more.
- Meta Humans – at this level these folks want to go way out there to expand the realms of their consciousness and mind power. They’ll dive into the depths of what holds them back drinking whatever Koolaid is required to get past their self-created limitations. We call these folks “seekers.”
There are levels in between these three – but for our purposes, we’re going to frame our work in these blogs to these three levels of exploration. Just like a good yoga class, we want to be able to stretch people to their edges so they can expand their place of comfort and ease – at whatever level they join us.