House: A Framework for Holding it Together. Part 1 of 3
A process for remaining intact amidst all that comes at us
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
Every morning, we wake up and set about our day. In the hours to come we will experience a continuous stream of pressures testing our in-the-moment soundness of mind and body. For example:
Minimal pressure: You
’re walking down the street and come to a crosswalk. Car after car blows right through the well-marked crosswalk without giving you a thought. You feel a spark of indignation. It’s a mild disturbance, a momentary ruffling of feathers. You’re still solid.
Moderate pressure: You
’re walking down the street. It
’s early morning and peaceful. You
’ve got the street to yourself. Then a garbage truck joins you, emptying each garbage can with the precise cadence required to keep your pace. You feel a flash of displeasure and the slow burn of moderate resentment. The load on your framework has started to build.
Major pressure: You
’re walking down the street. You
’re enjoying yourself with no reason to anticipate trouble when your phone rings. It
’s a friend, very angry. There are accusations: you have put them in a terrible position and caused them much distress by some insensitivity you committed the evening before. Alarm bells are going off and your heart is racing as you scramble to understand what is going on. As your mind darts wildly around it's hard to hold it together and maintain coherence with all that is coming at you. You feel yourself start to fragment.
From mild disturbance to major upset, the pressure of the oppositional forces of our daily experiences push against our structural integrity. As with a house, if the accumulated load is too much, we start to crack a little or a lot. And much like the cornerstones of a house give it strength, the integrity of our own internal cornerstones determine how well we are able to hold it together.
With a little ongoing TLC, a house and its surrounding property does an excellent job of providing us a good home -- a place of shelter, sanctuary and backdrop for the playing out of life. The same is true for our own personal structure of mind and body. With a process and a little ongoing TLC, our flesh and blood property can be there for us, holding us up, even when life gets messy and threatens to bring us to our knees. That’s what is on offer here: a process for keeping it together.
Process
In this framework, our structural integrity is comprised of two elements:
- The four cornerstones of our makeup: Body, Intellect, Emotion, and Spirit
- The protective boundary of a well-defined property line
Here is the whole premise of this framework: When we recognize how our cornerstones relate to each other and the whole, they can be productively leveraged to
tether us together. When our property line is well-supported, we have a safe space to see clearly and think straight.
The Four Cornerstones of Coherence – Body, Intellect, Emotion, Spirit
When we get thrown out of whack, it
’s because on some level:
- Our Intellect is not helping to anchor our Emotions with thoughts that are steadying,
- Our Body has not been recruited to regulate our system through breathing and grounding, and
- Our Spirit -- that part of us that has access to awe, to a sense of vastness or interconnection, and to a sense of one’s own meaning and purpose in the world -- is completely lost in the upheaval.
You know what it feels like to get triggered and spin out? That’s what we’re talking about. Until our parts are unified in their mission, we
’ve lost a certain level of coherence, a certain level of order and togetherness. The longer we stay in that space of incoherence or fragmentation, the less our life is what we would want it to be and the more unhappy/unsettled/desperate we feel.
Step 1 -- Unifying our Parts
We can think of our parts — intellect, mind, body, emotion and spirit — as being loosely associated with a different quadrant of our brain, two in the front and two in the back.* Emotion and body are in the older, back part of the brain where processes are automated and unconscious. Intellect and spirit are in the new, front part of the brain where there is awareness and self-determination.
Knowing each cornerstone has a location in the brain and that when we are coming undone it’s because our cornerstones have lost their unifying connection with each other makes the process of pulling them back together pretty simple, conceptually. In the first level of the process, re-connecting our parts simply involves touching base with each one, a circuit that begins with your Body, crosses up and over to your Intellect, drops down to your Emotion and crosses back over and up to your Spirit.
The flow of the circuit looks like this in a figure eight formation, starting with your body:
Just visualizing running that simple circuit in your mind brings these parts back into some level of relationship with each other. You have crossed hemispheres, getting the right to work with the left, the back to work with the front. You know where all your pieces are and at least you are able to see and feel the nature of activity going on in each quadrant as you make the rounds. This counts for a lot. You may be activated but at least everything is accounted for and contained and in relationship. You are no longer as fragmented because you at least know where all your parts are.
Next week we’ll add on Step 2. For now, it will do a lot just to think about your parts – Body, Intellect, Emotion and Spirit – as having their own place of residence in a quadrant of your brain. Touch base with them as often as you can.
To structural integrity,
Elizabeth Clayton
Healthy Life EAP Wellness Specialist
The process outlined below comes from a book I am writing (of the same title) about how to remain intact amidst all that comes at us -- be it wanted or unwanted -- over the course of a day, a week, a month, a lifetime.
*Harvard-trained neuroscientist, Indiana University School of Medicine faculty member and author Jill Bolte Taylor identifies the different functions of each quadrant of the brain in her books
My Stroke of Insight and
Whole Brain Living which informed how I assigned each cornerstone their quadrant.