Seeing Between the Dominoes: Finding Space in Emotional Reactivity

Earlier this month, a friend Kristina Centenari and I started teaching an eight-week meditation and breathwork workshop. Since we are both training for fall marathons, we designed it for other runners, hoping to give them the tools that we’ve found most helpful in our own running practices, from a mix of Eastern wisdom and performance psychology.

One of the core ideas we’ve come back to in the first few classes is training the ability to respond rather than react — to extend the space between a stimulus, be it external (phenomena) or internal (feeling), and the resulting action we take.

Which is probably why many of the ideas or frameworks that have been knocking around in my brain this month — the “seeds” that I started this newsletter to share — have been circling ideas related to meditation, psychological flexibility, and emotional regulation.

I’ve found them interesting to noodle on. I hope you do too.

Use Relative & Absolute Truth to See Between (and Beyond) the Dominoes

In his book Already Free, the psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher Bruce Tift provides a useful metaphor to explain emotional reactivity. He compares the chain reaction that leads from stimulus to sensation to emotion to thought to action to falling dominoes. One knocks into the other so quickly that it appears to be continuous.

This happened to me just the other day. I was biking through New York City and had stopped at a red light. When the stoplight turned green, the car behind me honked, scaring the absolute bejeezus out of me, so I turned around and said something… colorful.

It happened so fast that my subjective experience can best be summed up as car honk (stimulus) —> me yelling (action). In reality, it was more like, car honk (stimulus) —> cortisol spikes/heart jumps (sensation) —> scary/bad/negative (emotion) —> “ahhhh, what the f***!” (thought) —> me yelling (action).

Tift’s ultimate point is that we can interrupt this chain reaction in the same way we can disrupt a cascade of falling dominoes: with space. Certainly not in every case. (Nor would we want that. If you’re on a hike and stumble upon a bear, probably best to move from stimulus to action as quickly as possible.) But in enough cases that it’s worth trying to build in a buffer.

Easy to say. Very hard to do. Right? So how do I (try to) do it?

I’ve been trying to keep this top of mind by using an idea from Buddhism called the doctrine of two truths. What it says is that there are two realities unfolding in existence simultaneously: there’s the “relative truth” of conventional reality, which encompasses all conditioned phenomena—in other words, everything you experience—and then there’s the “absolute truth” of ultimate reality, which is beyond comprehension and is what came before and what will come after existence. (For instance, the concept of “my car” is a relative truth. It exists, I own it, and I can use it to get from point A to point B. But the absolute truth is that its existence is ultimately impermanent because at one point it did not exist and at some future point it will return to nonexistence.)

So to bring it back to Tift’s metaphor, the relative truth is the immediate reality in front of me, the falling dominoes of emotional reactivity or the interpretations I’m running in my mind (that guy honked at me, what a jerk), and then there’s the absolute truth of the larger reality in between and beyond the dominoes which is that the emotional reactivity will pass, that it doesn’t really matter on a grand scale, and that I don’t always have the full story (maybe the guy in the car was in a hurry because he had a sick kid in the back). This isn’t to deny my experience or negate feelings.1 It’s just a shorthand to remind myself to “zoom out” when I notice I’m becoming contracted, or stuck in a flood of dominoes.

As Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche says in his wonderful book In Love With the World, “Acknowledge the wave, stay with the ocean.”

Confidence = Belief AND Faith

I’ve been thinking more and more about the complex relationship between being and doing. I imagine this has at least something to do with the workshop I mentioned above, which combines running (an activity I associate with “doing”) and meditation (which, despite being an activity I do, I think of as more of a “being”).

Here’s where I’ve shaken out: doing leads to belief, being leads to faith, and someone who wants to have unshakable confidence would benefit from having both.

Let me explain.

“Confidence comes from evidence.” Have you heard that one before? In whatever you’re doing, if you put in the reps and you get the experience, you start to more strongly believe in your ability. In this way, doing leads to belief in oneself. That self-belief is the engine that can get you to the starting line of any performance (be it a 100-meter dash, or an important presentation at work) feeling strong.

But beliefs are inherently provisional. (Even our most fundamental ones: We believed the earth was at the center of the universe for 1500 years, remember?) Therefore, resting all confidence on belief is ultimately fragile. What happens when we encounter a situation where the evidence is insufficient, or is unlike anything we’ve ever done before?

This is where faith can be useful. Faith is an orientation that welcomes the unknown. Instead of trying to prove something about the world, it is a trust in one’s ability to remain balanced no matter what one finds in the future. And whereas belief comes from doing, I think of faith as rooted in a way of being. It’s a mindset that fosters psychological flexibility, resilience, and emotional regulation.

It seems to me that the combination of belief and faith creates an approach to performance that is subtly but powerfully different from someone who only has belief: the latter will step into an activity with the sense of having something to prove (because belief requires proof), whereas the former will step into it with the faith that no matter what happens or what the result will be, they will be okay. This is not to say that they don’t care about the outcome, but that their self-worth and internal stability is not dependent upon it.

One approach is zero-sum and conclusive (“let me show I’m the best”) and one is positive-sum and open-ended (“let me see how good I can be”). Belief tries to concretize or solidify reality, whereas the combination of belief and faith allows for full-fledged participation in life’s forever unfolding questions.

As the poet and philosopher David Whyte writes in Consolations II, “Belief stops being merely belief and becomes real presence when the unknown is kept alive, where what is living in my belief is kept alive by the way I keep testing that belief in the real world and in the unknown world that awaits me.”

“1000 excuses, but not one single reason.”

I recently saw a video of sports psychologist Bill Beswick where he shares this mantra while talking about the importance of showing up: you might have 1000 reasons why you don’t want to put in the work, but none of them are a good reason for avoiding it. (Of course, this type of thinking has its limits: sometimes there are legitimate reasons for not doing the work—burnout, injury, exhaustion—but I appreciate the sentiment of the mantra when applied appropriately.)

It’s not that the athletes he has worked with at the elite level always want to put in the work, but they don’t let their feelings get in the way of what they’re supposed to do. It reminds me of that famous quote from the artist Georgia O’Keefe: “I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life—and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”

This is at the heart of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which is often used to treat people with anxiety and mood disorders, as well as a chronic pain. It’s built on the idea that you accept what you’re feeling, but you commit to taking meaningful action based on your values.

Bruce Tift’s book Already Free is helpful again here. He talks about meeting difficult moments with unconditional immediacy, unconditional embodiment, and unconditional kindness, which basically just means addressing difficult feelings (which often accompany the “1000 reasons”) with these three questions:

1. What’s present right now?

2. Where do I feel it in my body?

3. Can I meet it with kindness?

If I can meet it with kindness, I am usually much better positioned to take the next best step or values-based action.

That’s all for now. I’ll be back to drop more seeds soon.

Have a great week!