Without a doubt, emotional intelligence and the broader mindfulness movement have done much to bring the value of self-awareness and contemplative practice into the mainstream, while demonstrating the generative effects of empathy and compassion. However, I believe we've only touched the surface of what we each have available to us to access the inherent qualities of our own awareness. There is far more to explore by way of the mind's expression of awareness and how we can familiarize ourselves with something that is always with us but we are rarely cognizant of. With this goal in mind, you'll be introduced to the Awareness Matrix, a framework that gives you a bird's-eye view of what you do and do not have the capacity to be consciously aware of relative to your MindBody functions—at least from a scientific point of view. You'll learn how self-awareness is simply one stance, one way of being aware among many invaluable ways in which we are already aware and can become even more so. The intrinsic qualities of our own minds are present whether our attention or awareness of them is or not. This is the jumping-off point for this book.
We will orient ourselves to the topic of habit change from a very personal and practical vantage point. The book addresses the importance of cultivating and training our attention to notice its own habitual patterns and to optimize and select for choices that contemplate and account for the interplay between our inner and outer habits and the conditions that give rise to them. You'll be asked to look at specific themes and clues within your own repertoire of mental habits, noticing how you consistently make sense of your own experience and the actions you take in response. Typically, we perceive disturbances to our peace of mind and sense of wellbeing occurring as a result of external events or circumstances. Even though we may perceive our emotions to be discrete, universal responses triggered in response to stimuli, we will learn from recent findings in neuroscience that this is only how things appear—likely owing to what we've been taught up to this point about what gives rise to our emotions and how we behave in response. It is more accurate to say that our brain proactively curates our perceptions and our emotions for us. However, becoming consciously aware of how we interpret and act on them relative to what our brain has predicted is where we have a say in the matter.
Irrespective of whether we perceive ourselves or our emotions as being triggered, or whether we operate on a more precise understanding of how we come to feel the way we do, we are each at the mercy of our brain's ongoing display and constantly evolving simulation of reality. When the salience or valence of our interoceptive sensations rise to a level at which we become cognizant of them, and our brain decides that they are important enough to assign them meaning, the output is our affect, which may or may not materialize into an instance of emotion we are consciously aware of. Despite what it may seem, we aren't at the whim of outside circumstances nearly as much as we are at the mercy of our own perception of these circumstances. As we'll learn more about relative to one of the 12 Self-Discoveries in particular, we are, in a very real sense, the common denominator of our own experience. Ultimately, we are the beneficiaries of what we think and how we feel, as are those whose lives we directly or inadvertently impact by how we make sense of and respond to what we think and how we feel. Therefore, it's up to us to find practical ways to work with our own perception of reality along with the mental models that shape and inform how we make sense of our experience.
La Chispa: The Spark to Our Affect
Throughout this book, you'll be invited to identify and reflect upon your own mental models and belief structures that influence how your brain subconsciously anticipates what you perceive as well as how you then make sense of its perceptions. What you then do with that information on a conscious basis makes all the difference. We'll use the MindBody Map and the 12 Self-Discoveries to unearth and discover the mental models we habitually use to create meaning. You'll be invited to notice what motivates and drives you, not only physiologically but psychologically. I refer to this pull or valence that magically draws us toward what holds salience and interest for us as “la chispa,” which is Spanish for spark or flame. La chispa speaks not only to what we need to function optimally at a physical level, but to what we need to thrive psychologically. In my own experience and in coaching people over the years, I've observed that we never have just one why. We're more complex than that. We tend to have many whys that evolve and morph over time and vary depending on which area of our lives we are focused on. In fact, our whys emerge relative to the context in which we find ourselves and as a result of what we expect and hope to have happen. But unless we do intentional work to uncover what's at stake for us in each of the key areas of our lives, we remain mostly unconscious of the role la chispa and our mental models play in the process. La chispa continues crackling and smoldering within us even when we ignore its presence; its flames rise up with a force we can no longer ignore in response to the messages our bodies are constantly sending us. La chispa does the picking for us as we move through our lives. So, until we make a point of uncovering its path and inner workings, it remains alive within us without us necessarily being aware of its influence.
La chispa gives us accessible language, a metaphor, to reference what we'd otherwise refer to in scientific terms as our affect and on a psychological level our motivators and drivers. Affect is thought to be a by-product or consequence of our interoceptive sensations. It is our experience of feeling, a precursor to an instance of emotion as well as the source of valence, either drawing us toward what we like and are attracted to or repelling us away from whatever we dislike and subsequently reject. Our affect acts as a kind of homeostatic oracle, taking a first pass at registering our interoceptive sensations and plotting what and how we feel somewhere along the spectrum of pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant, which our brain then acts upon. While not all affect registers at a level at which we are consciously aware of its presence, it guides our brain in its primary job of managing our “body budget,” a term Lisa Feldman Barrett uses in her work to describe the brain's primary job of regulating the body's metabolic resources, or source of energy—what I refer to in my work as our MindBody Map, or physiological and psychological wellbeing.
Affect and Ego: A Tale of Two Good Buddies
What neuroscience has not yet connected the dots on in this equation, as far as I have been able to discern, is the role of affect's sidekick “ego,” defined in this context as our pervasive and enduring sense of self, the psychological lynchpin of our fundamental drive for self-preservation and search for meaning. We each move through the world with a primal and mostly unconscious reliance upon our sense of self as the “owner” of this body and mind. It is thanks at least in part to the continual manifestation of affect that we have the impression of being a self in a body in which we have the capacity to feel and to make conscious and volitional choices. Moreover, it is owing to our capacity to be aware that our experience manifests and registers to begin with. Irrespective of whether our awareness is inseparable from consciousness, the capacity and continuity of which may persist or cease the moment our lease on this body is up, or whether consciousness is independent of or dependent on our physical form, we each have the undeniable experience of being aware and existing as a self in a body. I've not met a person yet who doesn't have the distinct impression they exist. From this perception of agency comes our instinct to find personal purpose and meaning, offering a psychological rationale and counterpart to our physical existence while at the same time playing the role of an inbuilt cheerleader, an ebullient advocate who knows just when to break out the pompoms and Let's Go Bananas routine when the wattage of our chispa for life wanes. Whether a construct or not, our sense of self is a pervasive