Things We Love - The Source
Dr Tara Swart's book "The Source" helps us identify how our brain connects us to our environment. Join us to dissect ways this book shines a light on tools and practices that can change how we interact with the world.
Have you ever really thought about where your personality comes from? How your reactions and emotions are developed, and why are you the way you are? This book review shares some ideas about how these things might come up for us. As we've written about Dr Tara before, this post will evaluate ways to utilize tools and resources to improve our experience in the world. Of course, the following suggestions are interpreted by our experience and what we have learned in the book. Want to read for yourself? You can get your copy here!
Top seven takeaways:
Ways our brain can help regulate emotion (thus better understand where it may come from in others).
Our neuropathways are pliable and capable of change. (Wait, what??)
Behavior change is not just about your actions, but your thoughts too. Say that again: behavior change is not just about your actions, but YOUR THOUGHTS and FOCUS too.
Overstimulation can limit your brain's ability to operate at optimal levels.
Those mood swings, yup! Your thoughts and neuropathways can adjust your mood.
Decisions, we all make them. Our brain function can impact our ability to make decisions.
Logic vs Emotion - it's no longer a battle.
Regulate emotion - Have you ever come away from a conversation or interaction and thought, " I have no idea where that came from!" We all have emotional responses to stimuli. That is normal. So, how do we train our responses? How are some people able to regulate emotion better than others? In chapter 6 Dr. Tara discusses the different emotional types (attachment vs survival). A visualization activity takes you through these experiences and asks you to focus on your physical responses. Your heart rate, your breathing, smells, sounds, etc. Next, you are prompted to compare the two and evaluate the difference. After going through this activity, I kept wondering how other people experience these emotions and how they are different from what I experience. How would these differences connect us? Immediately, I began to approach interpersonal interactions with more curiosity. I started to wonder why someone could respond a certain way. What could be happening in their brain that makes them react this way, and how does that resonate with me?
Can I change this? Dr. Tara touches on neuroplasticity and explains modern research, which is discovering more and more about how our brains change over time and with new stimuli. Not only does neuroplasticity play a role, but it also can impact our focus. Have you ever found yourself hyper-focused on an idea only to realize you missed another experience entirely because you were so focused on your original idea? Ever take a trip, and everything goes to shit on the way to your destination? Did it go wrong, or did your experience deviate from your original plan and you missed an opportunity to have a great experience because you were focused on the original idea you envisioned? Weddings are also a great social experiment or an example of this.
Behavior change, it's a thing! Do you have something you would like to improve or change? Sure, we all have parts of ourselves we want to be different. Candy is my husband's nemesis. My self-talk needed some work, and look where change led me. A blog!! So how does our mind fit into behavioral change? Dr. Tara discusses it in two ways. Behavior and your thoughts that guide your behavior. These are two separate things. We all have thoughts that race through our brains. That is constant, but do we listen or act on those thoughts? It depends.
Welcome Interoception, Dr. Tara describes it as "the lesser-known sense that helps us feel and understand what's going on inside our body." This can be shown by how we read cues from our physical body to address our mental and emotional needs. Or, our behavior could be guided by the fact that we are on autopilot unconsciously missing what our physical body is trying to tell us. An example of this is that coworker, yes the one you're thinking of, who is overworked and finally takes a vacation, then gets sick while on vacation. Or that time you decided to ignore an emotional pain, so you kept busy to focus on other things and that emotion blew up in other aspects of your life, likely an inconvenient and possibly even more intense way.
"Unlocking the connection between our body and mind may be challenging if you have taught yourself to override your body's signals to prioritize other things."
How does this impact our decision making? Behavior is a decision. I like to think behaviors are unconscious or consciously practiced habits. Think about your morning routine. Why do you do the things you do in the morning? What is motivating your decision to complete the behaviors you go through every morning? Say you've always done things that way. Is that a learned experience from your environment growing up? Or a result of something missing from your developmental environment? Why do people like coffee? Is it the taste? for some it's the feeling they get when consumed? The neuropathways that are stimulated when they drink it. for some, it's just what they do, right? Or is it? Dr. Tara assesses this in discussing how The Source has a hand in every action we take. Thanks to my reticular activating system, I never noticed it until I read her book. (You see what I did there?)
Growing up I always believed there were two types of people, artistic people and intelligent people. Dr. Tara explains how logic and emotion are actually interdependent and not independent of each other. She explains that "we should view the brain as a series of systems rather than specific sets of systems". She references connections within the brain that enable both creative and analytical thinking. Why does this matter? Decisions are basically made by using our ability to think through emotion and analyze our thoughts or memories to identify a reasonable choice that both serves our motivation and makes sense based on our internal data (or history) over time.
Meaning, most of our choices come from past experiences we have stored, and the emotion tied to those experiences. Now how does that help us connect? Because ultimately, we derive our unique experience from the same reality. Our brain simply determines what we are conscious or unconscious to. And based on what I continue to learn from Dr. Tara's book, we have the capability to adjust our conscious and unconscious thoughts. Thus, The Source.
Take that next step; you never know what you might find for yourself. Check out our website for additional resources or tools to connect with yourself or those you love.
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