Resonating: question log

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Awareness of the resonance patterns driving our responses gives us information that will be useful if we want to alter our responses in ways that serve us.

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Lifetime resonances build on inherited ones. We inherit the capacity to easily recognize certain patterns (like the faces of humans and animals), and over our lives the patterns we encounter most often are reinforced, so that capacity deepens. Some patterns also arrive pre-weighted, resonating as scary (snake-shaped things) or attractive (the smell of fresh food). We build on those preset resonances, and may even learn to override them, for better or for worse. So the balance shifts toward lifetime patterns as we age, with the inherited layer still underneath.

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The ones that are truly important are felt by many of us as imperative, like protecting the young. The choices and prioritizations among them are often the core alignments and strictures that make a culture.

I believe that understanding these patterns and the structures that have led to them is important. When we understand how they impact us, and accept their presence within us, we will sense how to prioritize between them.

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Resonance is a measure of how strongly patterns are connected in our mind: the more two things resonate, the more likely a translation between them. Translation takes us from one representation to another. The resonance is the tunnel, the representations are the end points. Often, several tunnels lead out from the same place.

You can see which one we take when we ask ourselves a question. We send a request to ourselves: a pattern held open, with a gap where the answer goes. Of the candidate patterns that could fit, the one that gains enough power to hit a critical threshold first will surface. When several candidates are similarly resonant, what else is active in our nervous system at that moment can tip the outcome: ask someone to say 'silk' out loud five times, then ask them, 'What do cows drink?' Many people answer "milk" before catching themselves.

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It is challenging to delineate the two through introspection, because they blend together. (See RS's question above.) Telling them apart would require looking back across our own timeline and discerning where everything originated. This is challenging to do objectively, because our biases are built into the resonances themselves. There are clues, though: an instinctive response nearly everyone in our extended family shares, or one we have toward something we've never encountered, may well have roots that run deeper than our own lifetime.

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In my personal experience this is so. Breathwork, dancing, and yogic practices can help stuck emotions find release. Expressing aggression physically through martial arts allows people to channel it. You can also view it the other way around: emotions can act as beacons signaling to us internally when our system is desiring relief from a tension we are carrying.

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Yes, the lens is always blended. What we are exposed to becomes a part of us. We could choose to become hermits or monks, and even then our surroundings would affect us: our responses are always influenced by our environment.

Yet we are not just passively receiving resonance. For example: when we think about what we encounter after the fact, its patterns fire again alongside whatever we bring to mind with it, so we can selectively reinforce the connections that were made.

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I agree that it is. Our resonances are encoded in each of us physically, and they can also run between people. Our actions, expressed opinions and emotions may all resonate with another person witnessing them, activating patterns in them that began in us. Resonances happen across the internal/external axis as well as within us.

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There are many answers to that question. Here is one:

Within us, everything we can be aware of can connect to everything else through some rhythm. There are multiple paths to get from point A to point B. We can be unsure which path to take, weigh the options, and change our minds. Through awareness of our existing patterns of choosing and observing their impact on us, we can allow these changes to happen. That allowing is the seed of free will.

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That feels like a useful question to keep asking yourself. Knowing we can reconsider our resonances makes it easier to let ourselves do so. Living in the present means doing less autocomplete, paying closer attention to what is actually happening. That's harder when tired or scared.

I liked that you pointed out that some patterns come from preverbal times. These can be extra tenacious, because we cannot verbally counsel ourselves about alternative response pathways. The only way I know of re-laying those pathways is through direct experience of a different felt response. That means accepting two things at once in the present moment: the situation the preverbal self was responding to, and the way that self responded (for example: suppressing awareness of the situation). Holding both at once stretches what can exist within us. Challenging stuff. When we succeed, we are usually rewarded with more spacious, joyful lives.

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I like this a lot. I think you probably have answers to this yourself, but I'll share what comes up for me: many of us can benefit from paying closer attention to our in-the-moment feelings. By reinforcing awareness of those, my intuition is that we will naturally steer ourselves in accordance with our deeper values that apply across our past, present and future.

On inexplicable negative feelings: A challenge here is that we can only ever guess. The full network of resonances is too vast and complex for us to be fully aware of. Even if we come up with an explanation that appears true, it may be one of several. What we can be sure of is that there is a past version of us for whom the negative feeling was the appropriate one. Accepting all feelings as welcome and in some way true can be more effective in dissolving negativity than disowning it.

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It depends on the specific resonance and its impact on your life. In practice, patterns that resonated before are likely to be noticed again, and their resonance reinforced within us as a result. On the other hand, new patterns can alter the connections within us, so that old associations dim in favor of new ones. To some resonances we hold on as if our lives depend on them (like a dislike of a food that once made you sick). Others are easy to let go of as soon as we see evidence that throws their consistency in doubt (like learning we have misheard a song lyric).

Some resonances are strongly baked in, especially those tied to memories so painful that we find it difficult to accept that they happened. It also depends on whether we have access to evidence that the resonance ought to be altered. Until we convince ourselves that a danger from the past is no longer scary, we will struggle to make the update.

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Our brains are good at updating and learning. You can, and it's up to you. Pavlov's dogs learned a pairing without choosing it, and we can build pairings on purpose. See MM's question above.

More on this to come in a future post.

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They express how you believe the world is shaped. The space your mind can move through is limited by the resonances you can access at any moment. In that sense, you are them.

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Yes. Memory being fickle is part of what makes this possible. You can try to deliberately reinforce a specific story. Whether it sticks depends, among other factors, on how well it fits with the existing resonances you already carry.

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I can't pretend to know the answer, and you see this far more closely than I do. My intuition here is that it is possible - perhaps even during a normal, otherwise internally loving, life - for parts of stories to become a part of us that are only safe for us to hold as long as certain supporting certainties remain in place. Through use of a substance, we may access a reality in which something that had seemed certain is suddenly in doubt, or no longer true. Or a message that we might normally successfully suppress comes through. When that happens, the fear that follows can feed on itself. I'd love to hear how this matches what you see in your work.