Awareness of Our Bottom-Basement Mind

Affective Neuroscience developed by Jaak Panksepp in the 1990s deals with raw affective feelings and instinctual emotional responses deep inside our brains below the thinking-cap neocortex. Clinical psychologists rarely deal with these affective feelings and psychiatrists attempt to counter them with drugs. But a powerful tool is to recognize and understand the “low-minded ways.

Working in his lab with rats, Panksepp found seven primary-process emotional  systems built into the brain by evolution. We and all other mammals are born with these innate neural systems in our brains.

All seven primary affects converge on the periaqueductal gray (PAG) at the lower midbrain, atop the brain stem. Here, all the emotional action systems, especially negative affective systems with their powerful, affective charge, converge.

Jaak Panksepp discovered that the lower brain seems to be organized in such a way that one primal affective state prevails at any one time. He calls this monomania and it causes the upper thinking neocortex to follow the lower brain and to focus obsessively or ruminate on one thing at a time. Panksepp considers a goal of therapy to facilitate taking control of one’s passions by understanding the “low-minded” ways.

Too many therapists are untrained in biology, physiology, and neuroscience. Their training is a soft psychology. They have little training with the massive complexities of the underlying neuroanatomies and neurochemistries of mental illness. Few have training in Affective Neuroscience. Albeit, this is changing today, slowly.

But therapists untrained and worse, unaware of Affective Neuroscientist, keep emotionally traumatized clients prisoners of a talk therapy that cannot heal them. So I am writing this book for therapists, their clients, and emotionally traumatized people seeking guidance.

Panksepp divides emotional experiences into three basic categories: primary process, secondary process, and higher mental processes. Primary-process are the evolutionary “givens.” Secondary processes are built upon the primary processes and include conditioned responses like fear conditioning. Higher process conscious thought resides in the thin neocortex of the brain.

The first two categories of processing are unconscious to us. As Panksepp puts it, many of our basic emotional feelings emanate from “the basement of the mind.” Though unconscious, these bottom-basement emotional feelings have powerful psychological effects on the mind.

You cannot analyze these emotional feelings away. They mix with higher neocortical processes opening the flow of repetitive patterns of worry, rumination, and fixation on threat. In turn, these thought patterns act back on lower emotional feelings, feeding the monster and keeping the hellish fires roaring.

Awareness of SEEKING

We are always on the lookout for something that we might need or want, or something that might just interest us or satisfy our curiosity. Our SEEKING systems keep us in a state of engagement with the world. “Beginning at birth, it is “a goad without a goal.”

SEEKING urges are at the root of all emotional arousals. These urges charge and guide our search for resources. If SEEKING urges are too high or imbalanced this can cause a variety of addictive behaviors, delusional thinking, obsessive, paranoid tendencies, mania, and schizophrenia.

The SEEKING system arouses curiosity and creativity. But when the SEEKING system is underactive, dysregulated, or drained of resources it results in an empty, fatigued depression.

The SEEKING system is a biological entity that can be treated with drugs. Mild stimulation by opiates or natural endogenous opioids can gently stimulate this system, produce pleasurable and satisfying feelings, and inhibit various negative effects. But the first consideration in therapy should be regulating the SEEKING system without drugs since medications can create a dependency that leaves the underlying problem unresolved. 

For example, an underactive SEEKING system will lead to depression and despondency, so therapy should seek to stimulate the system. One way would be to counteract a low SEEKING system with PLAY. PLAY therapy is effective with children, but ways can be sought to incorporate it into therapy with adults.

I have virtually no relationships outside of my immediate family. It has been this way for most of my life. So I incorporate PLAY in the form of bibliotherapy. Research, reading, and writing provide me with a sense of Flow. This would not be PLAY for most people, but is a surrogate form that suffices for me, though it lacks interaction and laughter, and it is primarily cortical and so not one of the seven subcortical primary emotions. But when we are severely handicapped, we make do with what we have to work with.

But we all can work with each of the Attention Therapies

Ki Breathing Meditation

If you choose to start with only one of the Attention Therapies in this book, I might choose Ki Breathing Meditation because it affects both mind and body. It should be the easiest thing in the world because it is just about relaxed breathing. But attention is the hard part. To do Ki Breathing Meditation, you must harness your 45 bits of attention to keep coming back to your breathing. But if your mind is like mine, it can be an unbridled runaway machine.

With only 45 bits available to attend with, coming back to your breath without being judgmental is about all you can do. Once you latch onto a thought or feeling, you forget all about breathing, and then the focus is on coming back to the breath.

Ki Breathing packs a triple whammy physically, affecting O2, CO2, and the vagal nerve. The average person’s lung capacity is between three thousand to four thousand cubic centimeters, but the average person inhales five hundred to seven hundred cubic centimeters of air. We are starving every organ in the body of O2.

We lose most of the benefits of a full exhale with such shallow breathing. When we exhale fully, we stimulate the parasympathetic – the relax part of our nervous system. Shallow breathing does not get most of the CO2 from our body and CO2 stimulates the sympathetic -fight, flight, freeze autonomic nervous system.

When we inhale fully, we can fully exhale, stimulating the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic nervous system, calming us down and relieving stress.

If the interchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide takes place completely both in the lungs and the organs, the vitality of our body increases; we gain a strong body that refuses to accept disease. And even if we do become ill, we have the strength and life energy to recover quickly. If we practice Ki Breathing Meditation and breathe in a spiritually calm state, a state of mind and body unified, we will cultivate a healthy vigorous body and centered mind. Ki Breathing Meditation affects the body in all aspects, especially digestion and sleep. It even affects longevity.

Ki Breathing has affected my physical and mental life more than any therapy. I suffered from insomnia most of my life, but with Ki Breathing Meditation, I will fall back to sleep within ten minutes, and usually less than five minutes.

It lifts depression and anxiety well within fifteen to twenty minutes. I often can control compulsive snacking within minutes. It improves the ability and effectiveness of exercise.

Yet no medical doctor or therapist has even broached the topic of breathing. Back when I was an undergraduate student at Rutgers in Newark, a chiropractor told me I had very shallow breathing; that my breathing was hard to even detect.

After Ki Breathing for a few years, I had an ultrasound done on my chest for some reason unrelated to my lungs. My doctor assured me everything was normal but remarked on the remarkable size of my lungs.

Insight Meditation – Awareness without Entanglement

With Insight Meditation you diffusely allow into your awareness thoughts, feelings, urges, emotions, sensations, and desires, without entanglement. Just be aware, return to a focus, awareness of your breath, again and again.

Combining Insight Meditation and Ki Breathing Meditation you are involving mind and body. Download an Insight Meditation mp3 and give it a try. http://www.audiodharma.org I automatically Ki Breathe as soon as I put on an Insight Meditation mp3.

You fill your 45 bits of conscious attention with garbage in an instant. So KISS (Keep it simple stupid!). All you need to do is let the  garbage be there. Just don’t focus on it directly. Over and over return to focus on your breathing, deep, relaxed, and comfortably.

I began working with Attention Therapies in the later years of my life. Open Focus and Attention Training Therapy (ATT) are not perpetual sitting meditative practice sessions. Part of the initial learning involves meditative exercises. Then when you grasp the basics you deploy with them as a part of your day-to-day-arsenal.

You learn to use Open Focus and Attention-Training Therapy as you learned to ride a bicycle. Once you balance and take off on your own, these therapies are tools to enrich your everyday life.

The best way to learn Open-Focus is to go through the exercises in “The Open-Focus Brain.” Not only once through, but until you grasp the concept and can use it on your own. But if you are like me, this is the hard part. I don’t like practicing exercises. It was really difficult making time for this. I would do anything at all to avoid it. But finally, I realized how much the exercises helped. It was the same with Attention Training. 

With Autogenic Training exercises I went to a psychiatrist who dimmed the lights and read the instructions as I lay back and practiced. What a difference. I paid for the session and so had nothing else to do and no place else to go. This was one of the only times a therapist helped.

When you are home Ki Meditation Breathing can be an effective, healing, meditative practice. Out in the world, it is an active state of mindfulness. Relax, weight underside, weight down low in your abdomen, Ki flowing outward indefinitely.

If you have a fear of public speaking and are giving a talk, you move from an internal focus out among the audience and beyond. Distracting coughing, paper crumpling, cell phones ringing, texting, present opportunities to shift the focus of attention outward. You shift back and forth, from narrow to open, receptive, out communing among everyone and everything.

You never get there. We cannot solve many problems yet we can’t run away from them. Marriage, family, and work are hotbeds of irresolvable problems. Life is inherently difficult and painful. There are no answers to chronic problems. There is a process of discovery that is painfully slow, but there are no limits to our growth. It is about the journey, whatever point we are at this moment.

 

In the moment is the only place where we have control. The moment is the place we can practice. We undoubtedly forget to employ these therapies and the time and the place to get back on track is the present moment. 

Albert Ellis would say, “It is fucking hard, but it is never too fucking hard.” When we are knocked for a loop, we get up and start again. Over time we hit higher and higher points on the graph and we break through limits that are unimaginable in this present moment. Maybe in this present moment we are in a frigidly cold dip as in the Global Warming chart. It is hard to see progress from this dip in the curve.

Bibliotherapy

Bibliotherapy is a basic tool of Self-Renewal. I am constantly plugged into an mp3 book or podcast or researching award-winning literature. It is a way of getting into the heads of others with different beliefs and ways of seeing the world. And it is a form of meditation. While I listen I am transported into different lives and worlds. Some of this has a lasting effect on my outlook. But it is like all of the other Attention Therapies, the effect is over time, though sometimes–rarely–I am moved to change my thinking by one book.

It is helpful to analyze why you are feeling a certain way to learn how to cope. But analyzing often causes an additional layer of problems caused by ruminating. Rumination is often more damaging than the original problem and becomes the core problem. Bibliotherapy offers a way to gain insight into troubling feelings without immersing in rumination. You do this by self-distancing or taking a third person POV, that of the character in the novel, for example.

Each of us needs to find our source of flow. You don’t need to justify your life to others. Most people might think I don’t have much of a life. I only go out for shopping and walks. I spend no time on the phone and very little time on social media.

But I have a rich life of literature, nonfiction, research, and writing. Not enough hours in the day. Not enough years left in my life. So much to read and write and discover. So much to share with others.

The best literature on mp3s transports me to other lives, other ways of viewing this life, other ways of living, other worlds. Sometimes I listen to a book a week. When I come across a good book or podcast, it is like hitting the jackpot. Listening, researching, and writing is a kind of a meditative state I can’t achieve any other way.

Human beings are works in progress. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been. The one constant in our life is change. Dan Gilbert

We can all continue to be creative, productive, and grow. I am writing this at 82. The person I was five years back is not someone I think of as me. Yet five years back I was proud I had reached a peak and the same for the previous peak before that. I started as a violent monster and yet have an infinitely long journey. The journey is all we have. The end of the journey is dying.

Awareness Through Movement

Play and Flow overlap and so does dance that focuses on body, posture, and movement. When Roman Bacca returned from Marine deployment in Fallujah, Iraq, trauma did not enter the equation. He wanted to do everything he thought responsible people did. He got a really good job as a technical specialist at a storm-water company and bought a condo in Waterbury, Connecticut. He thought things were going well for about six months. And then his wife sat him down and said, “We gotta have a talk.”

She did not like what she was seeing. He was not the guy she knew before he went to Iraq. She said he was anxious, depressed, and angry. On the freeway, for example, if traffic got heavy he wanted to ram into other cars. In the train station, he would get anxious. To deal with this he made it a game to see how hard he could bump into somebody. He thought it was funny.

He thought she was going to tell him she was going to leave him. Instead, she asked him what is the one thing he would like to do in this world if he could. “I said, Start a dance company. And we did.”

“Military training is extremely powerful. It affects not only the body but the mind. In boot camp, you’re taught these repetitive movements. And it’s designed to train anyone how to kill. The problem with that is, after service, how do you make that part of the training disappear.

“With dance, we can transform our experiences and start to loosen that training and we can hopefully move on.”

Exit 12 incorporates dance workshops for veterans into its professional repertoire, hoping to use choreography to awaken veterans’ imaginations and promote healing from painful memories. Not only vets, it is for anyone suffering from trauma and PTSD.

“It was pretty powerful,” remembers Jenny Pacanowski, an Army veteran from Pennsylvania, who has attended Exit 12 workshops.

Pacanowski said she has severe PTSD from her time deployed as a convoy medic responding to medical emergencies on the front lines.

“I’ve done every therapy type that’s on earth right now,” she said. “But what I really appreciate about Baca’s approach is that it’s not another version of sitting and talking about your experiences.”

I haven’t the resources to travel to one of his workshops, but you can find out about it at:

https://exit12danceco.org/vaw-op

And watch his video:

https://exit12danceco.org/video

Awareness of the Comorbidity of Emotional Disorders

Don’t let a psychiatrist box you in. Most emotional disorder is not due to a single emotional system or a single chemical imbalance. Most people reflect the concept of “comorbidity with several emotional and chemical unbalances. That is essentially what comorbidity means, that more than one psychiatric syndrome occurs at the same time. Generalized categories such as depression are ambiguous. A more accurate comorbid description would need to address the affective emotional systems involved and the ways that their over or under-arousal contribute to the clinical symptoms.

The categories of the DSM-5 do not sufficiently address these issues. An example of this is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD is a complex condition involving several different emotional systems. In addition to chronically overactive manifestations of the FEAR and PANIC/GRIEF systems, PTSD is a state of terror that is often accompanied by RAGE.

Another example of comorbidity is depression. Depression is a comorbid mix of psychological pain, anxiety, angry irritability, as well as diminished urges to seek and pursue life interests. A diagnostic description would need to address the many emotional systems involved.

Fortunately, Attention Therapies help with most emotional disorders. For example, Ki Breathing affects the vagus nerve and stimulates the parasympathetic Autonomic Nervous System. The parasympathetic nervous system oversees a vast array of crucial bodily functions. including the digestive system. It is the focus of treatment for gastrointestinal disorders, refractory depression, mood and anxiety disorders, PTSD, and the list goes on.

The vagus nerve represents the main component of the parasympathetic nervous system, which oversees a vast array of crucial bodily functions. The vagus nerve carries an extensive range of signals from the digestive system and organs to the brain and vice versa. It establishes bidirectional connections between the brain and the gastrointestinal tract – “brain-gut axis” –  and sends information about the state of the inner organs to the brain via afferent fibers. This system regulates food intake and appetite so it is becoming increasingly important as a therapeutic target for gastrointestinal and psychiatric disorders.

Deep, slow relaxed diaphragmatic breathing stimulates the vagus nerve. So when I get an overwhelming compunction to snack, I tried Ki Breathing and found in a minute or so the compunction is subdued maybe seventy-five percent. I keep on Ki Breathing and with a little metacognitive/ cognitive therapy, I can usually overcome an otherwise irresistible snacking compulsion.

Toss the DSM-5

The DSM-5 reminds me of Photoshop. Each new update is based on the same basic underlying structure. This works for Photoshop, but not for the DSM-5. A couple of reasons we have been stuck with this outdated manual is that research grants are denied if they cut across D.S.M. disease categories. And on a clinical level, if psychiatrists want to get reimbursed by insurance companies, they had better conform rigidly to the categories of disease specified in the D.S.M.

I continue to bring attention to the field of Affective Neuroscience and the lifetime of work pursued by Jaak Panksepp. I feel Affective Neuroscience will become the basis for a completely revised DSM. I urge therapists to read and study Panksepp’s two books documenting a lifetime of research: “Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions,” and “The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions.”

Having unwanted subcortical affects –emotions– is discomfiting, even torturous. Sometimes these primary emotions wage an all-out war with higher brain cognitive thoughts and feelings. All psychiatric disorders are manifested at both levels. If one modifies affects, cognition will often follow, especially with effective counseling. Changing cognitions can also work, but not if the affect doesn’t follow suit. An awareness of the inner workings of free-floating emotional distress is solid knowledge. Researching emerging Affective Neuroscience has given me helpful, therapeutic insight.

A working knowledge of the primary-process states generated by the seven basic emotional systems is essential for clinical work with emotional disorders. If emotional problems are due to recent and specific life problems that have clear cognitive precipitants, then cognitive-behavioral counseling can be effective. Not with severe emotional disorders. Etiology extends sometimes back to infancy, so of course, few if any explicit memories remain, just imbalanced, wracked emotional states and their associated cognitive biases. 

Emotional Contagion

Other people’s emotional expressions affect our mental states triggering neural circuits in our brain. The mirror neuron system (MNS) is an interconnected network of cells in the brain that records the emotional displays of others and signals them as mirror displays in our brain.

If you are with someone bright and happy, your MNS records their facial expression, body language, vocal tone, and emotional state, and mirrors the same display in you. But people are not bright and happy all of the time. The MNS records and signals angry and depressed displays from others’ facial, vocal, movement, and emotional states deep into the neural core of your brain.

The process of emotional contagion is fast, unconscious, spontaneous, and automatic. When you smile at a baby, the baby smiles back. Stick out your tongue and the baby sticks its tongue back out at you. 

It happens continuously during a normal conversation. A rapport is built with an ongoing mirroring of facial expressions, speech patterns, and body language. A lack of mirroring results in a lack of rapport.

You have little control over the merciless brain messages and mirror neurons reflecting the fear and anger of others. You need to be aware of the mirroring mechanism reflecting the positive and negative feelings and emotions of others. You can choose to avoid people who broadcast negative vibes and hang out with positive people. But you might be minus family, job, and friends. And it might mean rejecting anyone down and out and needing a little help from a friend.

Recognize that the uncomfortable emotions and feelings are generated by a mirror neuron system (MNS) in your brain in the same way that the Narrator module generates stories. The highly uncomfortable feelings I’m experiencing are caused by the MNS in my brain. When I am around someone projecting negative feelings, my MNS automatically mirrors their negative feelings. These uncomfortable feelings and emotions set off by my MNS reflect the way someone else is feeling or behaving.

You can’t change someone else from feeling, or behaving, or believing. Focus on breathing. Accept the reflected feelings without claiming ownership and without blaming the owner of the negative feelings for passing them on. Try not to enter into an irresolvable, reactive loop.

No Time For Rumination

Mindful meditation shifts the focus from rumination and clinging to irresolvable problems to a focus on Ki Breathing Meditation, Open Focus, Attention Training, Insight Meditation, etc. Stop clinging to irresolvable problems. Stop challenging thoughts, feelings, emotions, and urges. 

The mp3s you download from the Insight Meditation Center offer sessions in focusing and attending in virtually every aspect of life and serve as a rich source of therapeutic insight as you meditate.

There is never time to ruminate when you practice Attention Therapies. Each time distracting thoughts pull you away, come back to Breathing Meditation. Focus on posture. Don’t push thoughts, emotions, and feelings away. When you try not to think of the white elephant, that is what pops into your mind.

A focus on Ki Breathing Meditation, Insight Meditation, Open-Focus, Attention Training Therapy (ATT), and Metacognitive Therapy (MTC) leaves no space in your 45 bits of consciousness for rumination. Spend your tiny slice of consciousness on healing attention strategies in place of harmful rumination on thoughts, feelings, emotions. and irresolvable problems.

Belief

Thirty percent or more of healing is due to the placebo effect, but deniers experience a nocebo effect. Their denial creates the nocebo. Doctors consider the placebo effect in terms of double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials. Instead of incorporating the placebo, if the placebo is as or more effective than the treatment, out goes the treatment along with the placebo.

How do you turn on the placebo effect to help heal the mind and body? It is as simple as believing, expecting, having faith, and acting. Yet if you try to believe, expect the best, and have faith, the result may be disastrous. It is like trying to fall asleep. You call upon a placebo and you get the nocebo. The placebo paradox.

Actions must be effective to foster belief, expectation, and faith. If action is ineffective, belief, expectation, and faith are degraded. Ki Meditation, Cognitive Therapy (CT), Open-Focus, Metacognitive Therapy (MCT), and Attention Training Therapy (ATT) presented here are therapies proven effective. You can believe and have faith in them by understanding how they work. Find a balance of therapies that work for you. Include the body as a part of the process.

Whatever your religious beliefs, prayer is an affirmation and meditation on your beliefs, faith, and expectations. If it is possible for you to include prayer as a part of your daily routine, you are affirming and expressing belief and faith that you expect it to happen, countering the placebo paradox.

Self-Help Books Don’t Help

If you do a read-through and put the book away, nothing much will happen. If you read a hundred books in this way, I’m not sure much will change. I wrote this book, yet each time I read through I realize something I could be doing. On a minute to minute basis, I forget the simple act of posture. I am always amazed at the effect of simply adjusting posture. Stooped over I am an old geezer. The simple act of adjusting posture leverages a significant change in both mood and outlook.

Ki Breathing Meditation leverages all results. But I forget and need to remind myself moment to moment. Our attention is so limited leaving no room to ruminate, to rehash garbage.

Total Self-Renewal

I am sharing everything that took me from violent spouse-abusing Mr. Hyde to more peaceful Dr. Jekyll. My change was as dramatic as that.

Every day I make sure I am aware of where I came from and the strengths it took to get to where I am. Every night lying comfortably in bed, I am thankful I am not in prison. I don’t know how I possibly avoided a long prison or death sentence. I am thankful I did not commit murder.

Pray for self-acceptance. I pray to accept I am different, even very different. I pray to accept what others think and how they react and respond.

Please let me know if I have helped you or if I can help in any way. I am in my eighties and will respond as long as I am here and able. 

And kindly review this book on Amazon.