Quiet Your Mind
{A Written Practice}
Quiet Your Mind
By working with, not against your body
Ilarion Merculieff, an Unangan elder from a tribe that has been living its traditional ways off the coast of Alaska for 10,000 years says that in the global west we conceptualize intelligence as something that arises from thinking, whereas in indigenous culture, they know that intelligence arises the moment thinking stops. If you spend a lot of time in nature, and disconnect from the frenzy of the modern world, you will observe your mind begin to unwind, begin to settle back into a more natural rhythm. Ilarion calls this an earth-based pace. Settling the mind in the living world, bringing attention to the senses, to the work of the hands, to bird language, to following tracks, gives the mind, which is a hunter, something useful to follow, which allows it to gradually settle and still. If we use the analogy of riding a bicycle for the motion of the mind, most modern people are moving pretty fast, and their minds are to some degree accustomed to this, and in some sort of relative balance at this speed. If you don’t realize how fast your mind is moving–with or without you–put your phone away for a day and notice how many times you pause to reach for it, simply automatically. The mind develops a momentum of its own. Like an internal combustion engine, it has an idle speed. Stepping into nature and beginning to attend to your senses and your surroundings is gradually slowing down the bike, or the engine, a little. Anybody who has tried to ride a bike in an urban setting, and come up to a stoplight and tried to balance without taking your feet off the pedals, knows how much effort it takes to stay balanced when you are no longer moving forward. This is somewhat analogous to what happens when we slow the mind down too quickly. All of a sudden it takes a great deal of effort to stay balanced. Some of our indigenous friends find the mindfulness movement problematic because they point out that sitting still is, for many modern people, often dissociative. Immobilized modern people (sitting on a meditation cushion) tend to space out because often our default neural platforms are already pretty dissociated, and because in the absence of sensory input, we tend to fall into this state pretty rapidly. There is a different kind of intelligence cultivated in indigenous and ancestral cultures that doesn’t locate awareness in the head, but in the body, that centers it in the heart, the belly, and the hands. If you are able to locate attention like this, the mind begins to still of its own accord, because you aren’t running energy through it. But the doorway to this kind of mindfulness isn’t necessarily via the meditation cushion. That’s the place you go after you’ve settled the mind. First, you need to slow the momentum.
If you practice mindfulness in the way it is often taught in the west, by immediately settling the body into stillness, you often spend a lot of time watching the circus of the mind, and confront the beginning meditator’s conundrum of attempting to extinguish the trick-candle of the mind: that candle they used to put on your birthday cake when you were a kid that would keep coming back to flame after you blew it out. For some people, this works. Part of the reason we developed the Restorative Practices model is that for many people, it doesn’t. To still the mind, we have to understand what is driving it. What is making the engine turn? Usually, what’s driving it isn’t in the mind, but in the body, in the form of something that we don’t want to feel.
I’m going to spend time unpacking this, because confusion here is creating a significant problem in the modern mindfulness movement: a mismatch between its potential and its actual utility, particularly for people of color and those whose social locations are not centered, and who therefore do not by default have the unearned privilege of safety in an unequal society. Attention is very powerful. Folks who have experienced trauma (almost all of us– see the expanded definition in the preface) are often doing a fair amount of work to keep our attention off of certain things. We are doing active work NOT to attend to parts of our experience. This ranges from folks who have experienced significant personal traumas that put their nervous systems into shutdown or dissociative states, where the neural platform itself down-regulates interoceptive awareness (moment-to-moment contact with the felt interior of the body: sensation, emotion, memory) to folks who are picking up subtle and accurate clues that they are not welcome to folks suffering the societal traumas of alienation from nature, and pushing away awareness of things like global warming, that, if they were to attend to seriously, would force them to change their behavior. Dissociation is, in part, a neurological refusal (inability/ unwillingness) to acknowledge and integrate certain aspects of our experience, either because we don’t have the skillful means of so doing, or because we refuse to try (often both.) It’s a deeply human tendency to turn away from that which scares us, rather than investigating it. The Polyvagal Theory maps out seven underlying neural platforms of behavior that shape and constrain our perception, interpretation, and actions in the world. At the most basic level, these platforms arise either from a felt sense of safety or one of threat. A central premise of this book is that modern society arises from disconnection–and that our collective baseline has drifted from connection (the traditional ancestral baseline of culture) to stress response. What this means is that most people in modern society are in some version of a threat response most of the time. These responses range from the sympathetic (fight or flight) to the dorsal vagal (shutdown, dissociation), and correlate with a predictable range of emotional states. The fight state with anger, aggression, and confrontation. The flight state with anxiety. The shutdown state with depression.
The important thing in working with attention is that in order to be useful, there must be a concordance between the neural platform the body is experiencing in the present moment, and the way that we are using attention. In order for this to happen, we have to understand how different neural platforms shape what we need at an embodied level. The simplest way to think about this is terms of paths back to safety. Defensive responses are all about getting us back to safety. What do I need to do, in a given moment, to get safe again? The fight platform is about asserting boundaries and defending my space, when it has been violated. The flight platform is about getting away from a threat. The shutdown platform is about pausing long enough to make sense of something overwhelming.
ASSESS, DOWN-REGULATE, CONNECT
This leads to a kind of sequence. We conceptualize it as assess, down-regulate, connect. The first thing, if we are going to quiet our minds, is to become aware of what our present moment neural platform is. If it is already safety and connection, we can proceed to traditional mindfulness practice, e.g., sitting still and inwardly oriented. If it is not–if it a defensive response–we need to identify which response it is and attend to that. See COMING OUT OF FREEZE, COMING OUT OF FIGHT, COMING OUT OF FLIGHT. Only once we’ve down-regulated defensive states do we engage in traditional inwardly-oriented mindfulness practices, the kind you generally see and hear taught in most mindfulness classes.
In our classes we almost never teach these traditional mindfulness practices with a group of strangers until several hours into the day. This is because when a diverse group comes together–people from different races, genders, backgrounds, professions–we don’t share a context, and safety isn’t assured. What we spend the first several hours doing, in our time together, is establishing a safe context. Significantly, we can never make someone else feel safe. This is because ultimately, the kind of safety that we are talking about, the embodied kind, arises within a person from the deepest most primal part of themselves as a neural assessment that in a particular moment they are actually safe. It isn’t a cognition, or an idea. It is a felt experience. For some of us, moments of safety are fleeting, if they exist at all. Part of what this means is that in a room full of humans who are different colors, ages, and genders, what each person needs in order to feel safe, at an embodied level, is different. Based on the realities of white supremacy and patriarchy in America, on the reality of unconscious bias, police brutality, and the evening news, for people of color walking into a room full of strangers it isn’t a good idea to sit still and close your eyes. As a white man, I can generally sit still in a public place and close my eyes, because white men in our society are so dangerous that messing with them (us) is a very bad idea. We are the institutional violence of the state, and we rapidly mobilize it in our defense. Yet a person of color with eyes closed is not in the same relationship to the apparatus of state violence: they are not protected. As our colleague community healer Wayne Clarke says, As a black man in America, I am the weapon. He is not afforded the safety to close his eyes. Nor is a woman. I invite you to really take this in, because the default instructions given to most people practicing mindfulness are exactly this. Come in, sit still, close your eyes. What this sets up for many people is a biological paradox. The deepest parts of myself who job it is to assess moment-to-moment safety require me to be scanning for danger. I need to really orient to the space I’m in–to look around. To notice the place, and the people. What are people like? What is their energy like? Their faces, their attitudes. Do they make eye contact with me? Do they seem friendly? Does it feel like they are seeing me? What is revealed by their body language, their voice tone? People who experience individual or social trauma become adept, as a survival skill, at assessing safety, moment-to-moment. To use a crude analogy, if I live in a forest with many bears, where I have to encounter them regularly, I need to become proficient in differentiating between the different states bears might be in. If I can’t avoid them, I have to know the tell-tale signs that a particular bear is dangerous in a particular moment, and another less so. Part of privilege is living in places without so many bears. In the forest of privilege, I see a bear, and I’m like, OH MY GOD, it’s a bear! I stay fifty feet away. Privilege is the license to be unaware of whether or not that particular bear, in this moment, is actually hungry for humans. Privilege means I don’t have to walk past that bear to get to school. I don’t have to sit next to that bear on the buss. I don’t have to stand in line behind that bear. If I have higher degrees of bear exposure, my survival depends on developing the skills to track the mood states and behavior of bears. To come into a mindfulness class, if I live around bears, and be told to close my eyes and sit still feels like a recipe for becoming lunch.
A polyvagally-informed, trauma-sensitive approach to mindfulness recognizes this. What we spend time doing initially, instead, is getting to know one another. We give eachother data about the bears. We made a list recently of the things we did in the first 30-minutes of our classes to support the neuroception of safety for participants. There were 49 things. These ranged from shaking hands with everyone who entered and seemed to want to receive a hand-shake, to acknowledging the reality of white supremacy. If you are reading this, and hearing that makes you uncomfortable, first of all you are white, and second of all, this is the area that you should focus on if you are serious about restorative practices work. Because what happens for people of color, when we name white supremacy, is that they are able to take a deeper breath. It gives back a tiny bit of the safety that has been brutally stripped away. In order to create safety, we have to be able to name what is actually in the room. And in the United States, that reality is in every room. Why are we so deeply uncomfortable in this country talking about race?
It is because most of us who are white do not know that we are white, we do not know what being white means, and we do not understand what props up whiteness. The truth is that this country is founded on land stolen from indigenous people, who were genocidally annihilated, and who we treat as historical relics. The economy of this country was built on the backs of enslaved Africans. The United States wasn’t established in a room in Virginia with a group of dignified men in white wigs writing documents with quill pens. This country was established to the music of wailing indigenous woman and children being murdered, to the rhythm of the overseer’s whip, the smell of terror. This is the spiritual inheritance of the United States, and it’s why white people here don’t know that we are white. Whiteness was created in the 1600s in Virginia to prevent class rebellion: to unite the European endentured servants with the wealthy elite, rather than the enslaved Africans with whom their interests were more naturally aligned.
This is, once again, the echoes of the origin story of the modern world. Go back before the ocean crossing and those same wailing indigenous women and children were European. We killed off our own indigenous people before we killed off others. But the cure for the pain is in the pain. It’s time we look in the mirror.
Related Practices:
See all kinds of meditation practices (Self-Compassion, Learn to Breathe), Meditation, Meditate in Nature), as well as down-regulation practices (Coming out of Freeze, Coming out of Fight, Coming out of Flight, 3 Steps: Assess, Down-Regulate, Connect), as well as Emotional Awareness practices (Emotional Yoga, Allow Yourself to Grieve, Feel Your Feelings), as well as Connecting to Nature practices (Gardening, Sit Spot, Touch the Ground, Watch the Sunrise). See Becoming a Real Human Being.Photography: | Licensed from Pexels.com, used with permission.