Your Body Remembers What Your Mind Forgot

I'm Josh. This is our Tuesday class. Every Monday through Friday at 8 a.m. in the morning, Kathy does her daily pause morning meditation. It's great. It's online. And it's on the Dharma Punks. with an xnyc.com website. So it's a great way to start the day. And yeah, if you ever want to reach me for any reason, dpxnyc at gmail. I'm very respondent to people asking for resources. My work is in counseling. So for some reason, if you want to meet with me, sometimes I can make that work as well.

Anyway, that's it tonight. A really central topic that pretty much covers, I think, one of the most profound insights. Psychology since Freud. One of the most useful insights to understand ourselves. One of the most helpful insights to understanding why therapy and counseling.

uh works and it just unlocks in so many ways the mysteries of our mind so i hope that something in this talk will feel relevant worthy of you schlepping out today The big idea is that our emotions are basically memories or a time machine, and that they're very often not about what they seem to be. The body as the principal vehicle for the foundational expression of emotion can drag us back to times.

in our life in the past where we felt terrified rejected obsessed and enraged or shamed and recreate those feelings in the present this isn't a flaw

It's actually how the brain works. The brain loads in in every situation in our life through a process known as neural reinstatement. The brain... recreates state it was in in situations in the past that most resemble this one. So if you've never been to Dharmathons and you walked in and you got to You looked around, your brain went back to a state where you were previously in a spiritual gathering.

or previously in a gathering where you didn't know what to do, or previously in a Buddhist setting. So your brain, the way we can make sense of the present. is because our brain doesn't take in everything for the first time. That would be what's called neurally expensive. We run out of the resources that keep our brain functioning. The brain to preserve resources.

And to help us prepare and respond to the present, it basically returns to situations or states of firing it was in the past. And those states allow us to make sense and tell us how to respond. to what's going on right now. So once we understand this, it's much easier and we're much more equipped. to relate to panic attacks, anxiety, sudden plummets and depression, feelings of being overwhelmed, because we realize that very often these states...

have very little to do with what's actually happening right now in our lives. And once we can unpack this and begin the process of understanding where these emotions originate from or what... they were created by, it gives us a process that's very clear to treating anxiety, panic, depression.

sudden bouts of loneliness, feelings of rejection, and so forth. So emotionally wounding and frightening events do something very interesting. To the brain. When we're in a trauma or when we're suddenly surprised by the loss of somebody we love or somebody breaks up with us suddenly or. We find out distressing news. The part of the brain that records what's called explicit memories, and those are the memories you can recall and know that they are based on past events.

that region called the hippocampus is shut down because it has a lot of cortisol receptors. And during threatening events, the brain... is flooded, as is the body, with cortisol. It's the stress response hormone. But it shuts down the very region of our brain that turns life experiences into a story we can recall a future.

But the hippocampus is not the only thing that builds memories. There's another region of the brain that is always active, no matter what's going on, no matter how much stress we're under. And it's called the amygdala. You probably have heard that word somewhere in your past. The amygdala is basically the pure survival... recording an alarm system in your midbrain. It's a region that lets you know that you're in the presence of a threat.

something really surprising and shocking has happened. It's the region in your brain that lets you know that while you're under a great deal of stress, there's something in your past that... made you feel good. So it's a kind of an alarm system that goes off and it's always working. And the release of norepinephrine and these... Chemicals supercharge what's called implicit memories. Implicit memories you can't remember. You don't know where they stem from. They're not tagged.

in a way that you know oh that was about my childhood or that was about the time in my past I got excluded from a group of people in high school that I wanted to befriend but they They basically ostracized me. Implicit memory is largely organized by the right hemisphere of your brain. You don't need to know all this. But if you do care, and explicit memories are far more left to frame. They involve the narrative part of your brain. So, as I said, memory works through reinstatements.

When an implicit memory is laid down and we remember it in the present, we don't realize that it's about a past event. It's simply firing in us and suddenly we feel anxious. Suddenly we feel angry. Suddenly we feel overwhelmed or confused. Suddenly we feel like... obsessed with something. And this is simply because one of three factors is present. Either the

Original experiences were formed in childhood. Now, why is that? The first three or four years of life, your hippocampus is simply not working. So all of the memories you think you have before age five, they're not real. You're basically remembering. something that was shown to you subsequently. So if you have a memory of being two years old and seeing your older brother getting a gift and you felt left out.

That's not what you're remembering. You're remembering a photograph or a story that your mother told you or that your brother told you. Your brain creates an image to represent an experience. that that happened in the past. If you want to learn about this more, there's a famous psychologist, Elizabeth Loftus, who talks about how early memories are just basically constructed by the brain.

Another kind of memory that we can't leave is amygdala traces but no hippocampus is when there's an entire pattern of events. And no event... reaches that level of excitation, but it also doesn't leave specific memories. So if we go through a pattern of experiences in high school, where we feel shunned by others or lonely or where we feel bullied, those experiences, even though the specific events won't be recalled, they can leave.

these emotional memories in their way. And then, of course, the big one that we all know about is traumas. During a trauma, there's so much threat present that the hippocampus goes offline. The big point is that implicit memories feel like they're happening about events in the present. And prominent psychologists in the field of and cognitive neuroscience like Marsha K. Johnson and Endel Tolvig and Dan Shachner, author Shimomura.

Joseph Ledoux, Kathleen McDermott, they've all shown this again and again and again, that implicit memories lack what's called source awareness. What is source awareness? It's that sense that you know something you're remembering is about a past event. So implicit emotional memories, we don't have that sense in us. Oh, this is about the time my... Father was unavailable in my childhood, and I felt anxious waiting for his return, but I didn't know when it would happen.

Or this is about the time where my older brother was sick and I didn't get the attention that I wanted from my parents. Or this is about the time where... That period where I felt my English teacher was always suggesting that I wasn't smart because I couldn't make sense of the reading. The feelings emerge, but we have no clue that they're about past events. They feel like they're about events in the present.

So, for example, I wrote down some examples. I knew I wouldn't be able to in the present. If a friend takes too long to respond to a text, we can feel abandonment. And that abandonment can feel really disproportionate. But whenever, as they say in therapy, the emotion feels too strong for the event, you know, the saying that comes...

Exactly right. If it's hysterical, it's historical. If you have an emotional response that's disproportionate to what's actually going on around you, it means that it's an implicit emotional memory that's not about... what's happening in the present. The present is just a trigger that's close enough to that experience in the past that you're now feeling the past in the present. You're feeling

Your body is in the state it was in that past event. I'll give you an example courtesy of the great Joseph Ludu, who's the head of the Emotions Lab at NYU, and probably the world's. most renowned neuropsychologist on fear and anxiety. He actually wrote the book, The Anxious Mind. So Ledoux said, imagine a couple going through a breakup. It's very disturbing and upsetting. And they're at a pizza restaurant and they're looking down despondently at a red sheckered vinyl tablecloth.

while half-eaten slices of pizza are strewn around the table and they're miserable. And then he says, it is entirely likely I'm quoting Ledoux, it's entirely likely that 10 years later, if one of that couple is back at an Italian restaurant that has the same checkered table clogged. and maybe similar music playing, they would be expected to suddenly feel a mood plummet that's severe. And they would be very likely to blame it.

on what's happening in their life in the present not knowing that's really about an event from 10 years earlier. That's the thing about emotional memories, they have absolutely no time stamp on them, but the amygdala is a region of the brain that is always active. It's always active from birth, no matter how severe somebody in old age might have dementia, the amygdala is still working.

It is never offline. It is the core of the brain's survival alarm system. It never goes off. And the memories it encodes from painful events. Never dissipate. That's why when people have a return of repressed memories, which does happen at times, suddenly a flashbulb memory of an event.

that happened to them 30 years earlier that might have to do with a sudden attack or sexual abuse or some kind of distressing event returns. But because it's an amygdala memory... and not a hippocampal memory there's no story to it and at best all they get is this flash bulb image because that's all the amygdala can record are these like these very hazy sudden, sharp, very breathtakingly brief images that intrude at like, literally like a flashbulb going off. And

That's the most we can ever reclaim. I was just listening to a talk with a great neuroscientist, Christian Koch, and he was talking about that, that the most you can reclaim of a early life. event or of a traumatic event is these very brief flashes, but mostly you feel it in your body. Mostly you feel it as a sudden overwhelming sense of being unsafe.

So this explains, of course, why adult events can trigger huge disproportionate emotional reactions, because they're not about the president. They're about... very wounding events when we were younger. And let's face it, when we were younger, we had less resources, less agency, less ability to control our lives. So the memories that were formed when we were very young...

always feel overwhelming, always feel like there's nothing we can do, always feel like we're trapped or there's nothing that can be done about it. So someone... ghosts us after two dates. We can feel worthless, especially if early in life... We felt rejected by one of our caregivers at times. Someone touches us unexpectedly. We can re-experience the anger and rage stemming from an early childhood attack. that we endured or being bullied. A lonely holiday weekend can reignite a childhood

Our childhood coping strategies of binge eating, binge shopping, scrolling Netflix for hours and so forth. None of these reactions are actually about this moment in time. They're all... Simply using this moment in time is simply a little like a bait that activates an event from our past. Now, you might ask.

Is there anything in Buddhism about this? And the answer is resolutely yes. 2,500 years ago, the Buddha gave us a remarkably similar psychological map. He coined what is called Anasayas. Anasayas had no precedence before the Buddha came up with the term. And Anasayas are underlying tendencies that lie beneath. consciousness based on past events that suddenly erupt into our present and control how we act. How similar is that?

It's kind of creepy. The Buddha noted that sensual craving, anger, fear, self-doubts are states that overwhelm us, don't appear out of nowhere. They rise because... something in the conditions of our present triggered that. And even in the commentaries, the Buddhist commentaries noted that And the Saiyas are almost entirely operating beneath the level of awareness. But they do know in the Buddhist commentaries that when a current experience...

feels too big for what's actually happening. It means that an anusaya or an anusaya is present, something from our past.

a whale emerging from the depths, something from the depths has returned. The Buddha taught something fascinating with Anusayis. He said that he is To note when an Anusaya or something in the past or strong emotion is present, to note you're about the past. You're not about what's happening right now. You're a return. You're an anusaya. And when people reflect and say, the saying is called episako, ekipasiko, when you say, I see you, you're not what you appear to be.

You're not about what's happening right now. There's this sudden release of the power that it holds over us. Because suddenly now we realize, oh. This is not about my friend who forgot to text me back. This is not about the weird glance I got from my coworker. This is not about the strange kind of passive aggressive remark from a neighbor. This strong response in me is about something that I've already survived in the past. I'm here now. It's not about now, so I survived it.

A simple but profound question that I found in therapy can lead to this. I very often say to people when they describe a very strong emotion that I immediately know. isn't about the present. You know, it's about something that I noticed from their past. I asked people to simply close their eyes and I say without any thought, without any conceptual thought.

I'm going to ask you, when did you feel this way in the past? And go with the very first answer that comes to your mind. And because the fast circuits of the right hemisphere, which are the emotionally associative circuits, are the ones that come up with spontaneous, you know, intuitive responses. Almost invariably, I've yet to see one time in 20 years of counseling work where people didn't nail it.

They simply say, oh, I don't think it's about this, but there was this time when I was five and my parents weren't around and I felt very lonely. And the one person I knew was my... babysitter and my babysitter brought over her boyfriend and they made fun of me and i'm sorry but if you're if you intuitively came up with that answer this

experience in your present had triggered what you felt right then, where you felt lonely, not seen, and the only person who wanted to see you suddenly was making fun of you. That's it. You nailed it. So if you feel crushed by a friend's offhanded remark. The first memory might be the older brother making fun of you. If you feel ashamed by someone saying something or giving you a passive...

aggressive remark, it might point to being mocked in middle school. If you become furious that your roommate didn't clean up, it might be Being the child in your family system that always had to be the responsible one, while the other sibling got all the attention for being the one who never had to live by the rules. If we feel terrified every time someone raises their voice, it's because it triggers being a child.

in a bedroom hearing their parents shouting or hearing neighbors shouting and feeling overwhelmed and unsafe. The good news is

I mentioned that whenever we're in the presence of a memory, the brain literally returns. It's called reinstatement. It fires. Literally, the cortical columns start firing. The neural associative neurons that take. that organized the memory from the hippocampus or the amygdala to the entorhinal to the cortical columns, all of those...

those circuits returned to a previous state and they're now firing like they did in that past experience. But the cool thing about that is that means we can actually begin to change those memories. It's called memory reconsolidation and it's been shown by numerous labs that every time you remember something, that memory is active in your brain. And it's at that very moment that you can re-encode that memory with new feelings. So, for example, if there was a really painful event in your past.

And it comes to mind. And you're in that state where you feel grief or shock or overwhelmed. If somebody reminds you to relax your breath, soften your belly. you know, breathe slower, close your eyes, that you're safe now. And your body goes into that state of being safe. Your brain now encodes that memory with that new information. So when it comes up again in the future, it's less intense. It's less frightening. It's less overwhelming. So you can literally change.

the painful events in your life. You can't forget them. They won't go away, but you can change the effective response that they activate in your body. And that is the biggest key.

to being able to live with painful events versus being overwhelmed and continuously traumatized by them. So again... The process is to rewrite a memory. We need to have what Bruce Eckert calls a mismatch. We have an old fear or anger or traumatic event that's... present in our right hemisphere we may not even know where it's from it doesn't matter you just know right now i'm furious and it doesn't really seem to be about that something that's really happening right now

If you can stay with that feeling, but bring to mind all the people that care about you, soften your body, extend your breath, literally allow your body to... release the tension in it, the next time that memory is triggered it's now not against a backdrop of feeling overwhelmed, terrified. It's now against a backdrop where there's a possibility that you feel less endangered, you feel safer, and you can be with it rather than be terrified by it.

So that's tonight's talk. I hope something in there was worth listening to. And now we're actually going to do a practice where we're going to put these ideas into, well, practice. Find a really comfortable seated position. Closing your eyes. And don't try to sit upright. Don't try to look like you're meditating. Don't try to do anything that you think is synonymous with a meditating posture or anything like that. Just sit in a position that feels comfortable and a position where...

You won't fall asleep. So long as you keep those two things going where you feel, I'm really comfortable right now, but I'm also not going to... drift off and you're going to close your eyes and you're going to into what's present in our immediate environment of the sounds in the room around us. The feeling of making contact with the chair and the ground. Becoming acquainted with how your body feels right now, does it feel relaxed or energized or unsettled or...

exhausted or kind of numb. And there's no wrong answer.

Just begin with pure non-judgmental awareness. one way I like to begin meditations is with paired muscle relaxation. So what we're going to do is we breathe in, we're going to squeeze and tighten all the muscles in our feet, our toes. are the arches, the heel, the top of the foot. And then when we breathe out, we're going to release the tension. We do this because over the course of weeks when we're busy, the brain, the region called the basal ganglia sends signals to the brain.

body saying be alert, be ready. Something important is happening, but in our sedentary lives, very often nothing actually happens. And so the muscles stay in a kind of clenched, tightened posture. That region of the brain... doesn't send stand down messages often. So our bodies just over the course of the week get progressively tenser and tenser. more contracted even though there's nothing that we really need to run from.

So breathing in and tightening the muscles in the feet, pinching the toes, squinching, clenching, and then as you hold the breath, and then breathe out. It just released. Breathing in and tightening the muscles of your calves as tight as you can. Breathing in as full as you can, then holding it. And then very slowly release the out breath and release those muscles. Continuing with the thigh muscles. Breathing in, flinching. breathing out, releasing.

And now move through your body, up your body, next to the buttocks, and then the belly, and then the chest, and then the arms, and then finally the face at your own base. Don't push the outbreaths. Just release them as slowly as you can. And let every bit of tightness in the muscles be released.

So whenever you get to a place where you've completed prepared muscle relaxation, then we're going to... tries to find what's called an anchor. An anchor is a sensation in the present moment that you can return to whenever your mind begins to drift. away from the present. And so It could be the breath, the sensations of breathing in and breathing out. It can be the sounds of the room, the hum of the heating, vents. The sounds of just being in a room with others sitting quietly.

It can be an image you hold in your mind. It could be a phrase you repeat. May I be happy, peaceful, and free of stress, suffering. May all beings. Be happy, peaceful, free of stress and suffering. Whatever your anchor is, sounds, breath, maybe just the sensations of your body shifting. An image of a friend or a place that makes you feel safe. A phrase you repeat. Use this as the anchor to your attention. So when you start to drift.

Just bring your awareness back to it. And we'll sit here for five minutes, quietly. And if your mind drifts away... That's fine. The beauty in the practice is not just always staying present. It's awakening when we awaken from a thought. And we return to what's happening here and now. It's a small version of liberation, of awakening. Next few minutes, just let your bodies be in charge and let it find a way of breathing and sitting.

holding itself, it feels most comfortable. Sometimes for me, I have to remember to drop my shoulders. unfurrow my brow or release the micro-muscles around the eyes. I always have to soften my belly, which means let it go as round. Unconstrained. Letting the buttocks release and sink into the cushion of the chair. Just be as indulgent as you can with your body having a moment to really find everything it needs right now to feel comfortable.

So, bring to mind a recent or an event, recent enough that you can recall the situation. where you felt your response or your reaction might have been very strong. Your emotions felt so... intense that it surprised you or surprised someone you trust who's normally not dismissive about emotions. It could be a recent event or it could be a pattern of situations where you find yourself easily on edge.

unsafe, angered, unsettled, sad, even though Your rational mind can really find nothing obvious in the present. is an obvious culprit. Any Anything along these lines will be perfectly fine for this practice. So return in your mind if you can, or just repeat in your mind the situation. and see if you can repeat it or visualize it in your mind with enough detail that you start to feel a little bit of the emotion. the strong emotion, grief, fear, anger, loneliness, whatever it was, or being.

addictive part of your brain that suddenly felt it needed to consume. See, in other words, if you can reinstate what it feels like to be triggered.

And before we reconsolidate this memory, just ask, maybe it'll work, maybe you'll struggle, but just ask, when have I felt this way? In my past, what from my past reminds me of this feeling? And don't think about it. Just go with whatever is the first memory. or events that you know occurred in Chava, whatever comes to mind, just know. Maybe I'm actually feeling these unresolved events.

Even if nothing comes to mind at this point, if the feeling is still there, if you can conjure that feeling of being... Emotionally activated. That feeling of being unsafe in some manner.

While it's present, just once again return your body to the safest, calmest, most easeful state you were in previously. Shoulders dropped. The belly soft. The exhalations long. It is possible to have a relaxed expression on your face. softening the muscles around the eyes and the forehead, dropping the shoulders. This is the process. While the memory is active, bring new information in. You're now safe. You're now unencumbered. Integrating these new feelings into that old, unsafe...

Burdened, lonely, overwhelms feelings. Thanks for your practice and for listening to the talk. The hard work is done.