“When you bring your attention back to the senses, to the felt experience of the present moment, you are disconnecting from the default neural circuits that will fuel your energy toward “not enough” and help down shift you to “plenty” or “yes, simply enough”.” – J Zehr
What drives our anxious mind? One of the keys can be found in our “default circuits” or the neural circuits — the thoughts and feelings — that incessantly run as the semi-conscious backgrounds of our inner lives.
These default circuits are “wired” into our inner lives by repetition and experience and resemble a mental virus we pick up from our culture or family. Our default circuits are like the little man behind the curtain running the great and powerful Oz. They might run the show, but they are fueled by implicit memories: unconscious or barely conscious fears, lusts, hostilities, passions, cravings, repulsions and the like.
In myth and fairy tales, our default circuits show up as the bad guys, the evil ones, the spirits and energies that will seduce or bully us off track, deep into the woods, and then abandon us or eat us alive.
Default circuits can keep us in a mysterious trance, and one of the key trances we all share is the one of “not enough”. Continue reading →