Don’t worry if your job is small,
And your rewards are few.
Remember that the mighty oak,
Was once a nut like you.
Anonymous
The thing about writing a blog during these tumultuous times –about these tumultuous times – is that by the time it’s done and, as the saying goes, in the can? It is done and should be chucked across the room and into the waste can! Three points!
What I finished last night and planned to post this morning fails to mention that 45 was diagnosed with coronavirus.
Unless you’re currently living atop Mt. Everest, you know by now the US president* has IT, so let’s connect the dots: he’s the 45thpresident, hence the moniker 45. Perhaps, like me, you’re really tired of hearing his name? Barack Obama, explaining why he and Michelle stopped naming him way back, prior to his election even, was quoted this way in an article for The Atlantic: “He seems to do a good job mentioning his own name. So, I figure, you know, I will let him do his advertising for him(self).”
The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah, delights in calling him 45. Noah is from South Africa where 4-5 is slang for penis. If the shoe fits . . . but journalist Graydon Carter did describe “he-who-shall-not-be-named” (what my sister-in-law calls him) years ago as a “short-fingered vulgarian”. Lol.
Anyhoo, this blog is about nuts and if you happened to watch the “sh*tshow” (CNN’s Dana Bash called it!) of a recent not-so-presidential debate AND are now coming to terms with pandemic-denying-lying-non-mask-wearing 45’s diagnosis, then you can feel pretty darn good about not being nuts like him.
The nuts I want to talk about? The ones inside our brain. For instance, there’s the amygdala, so named due to their almond shape. They’re actually amygdalae, as there’s two of them, sitting at the base of the brain, one on each hemisphere.
If you caught any of the sh*tshow, what you could say happened to 45 (and seems ongoing) was an “amygdala hijack”, described by verywellmind.com as “the fight-or-flight response that takes place when you are faced with a perceived threat”. Fear, anxiety, aggression and anger kick it off, releasing hormones that prepare the body to fight or run.
We’ve talked about this in the blog before, how if, like way back in the good ol’ days, a sabre-tooth tiger is stalking you, this system is superb for the preservation of life. In modern times though? Did 45 have someone to physically fight or run from? (Trevor Noah did suggest in his assessment of the sh*tshow perhaps they should have just duked it out.)
Regardless, minus a physical threat, 45 sweated buckets (maybe a sign of illness?), interrupted at least 128 times in 90 minutes (according to slate.com), raised his voice and generally looked and acted like someone under threat by a sabre-tooth tiger. Despite what you may think of him, I’m sure we’d all agree that Joe Biden is more loyal old blonde Lab than ferocious tiger, huh?
To use Biden’s phrasing, “here’s the deal”: while the almonds are great for saving us from threat, it’s unhealthy – for mind and body – to keep them constantly activated. You may recall times in your life when you’ve succumbed to an amygdala hijack and overreacted to a situation, then regretted it later. Don’t beat yourself up: the almonds are powerful, disabling the newer, more rational areas of the brain – the frontal lobes – that can talk you down. Two ways, according to healthline.com, you can raise your emotions from these base, powerful, negative ones?
- Reasoning. Engage the frontal lobes to think the situation through, review options, and choose a rational response.
- Meditation. Relax body and mind through meditation or deep breathing, altering the brain’s focus. (You may have noticed Biden doing this throughout the sh*tshow, lowering his head, closing his eyes, breathing.)
Also within our brain? There’s the pineal gland, so-named because it resembles a tiny pine cone (which, as you may or may not have considered, houses nuts). It sits toward the back of the brain, and if you’re familiar with Fibonacci’s constant – a mathematical sequence that repeats over and over in nature – you’ll be excited to learn that if you follow the golden ratio along the circumference of the brain, the spiral ends at the exact point of the pineal gland. Wow!
Seventeenth-century philosopher and scientist Rene Descarte called the pineal gland “the principal seat of the soul”. I’ve been reading Becoming Supernatural by Dr. Joe Dispenza, in which he denotes an entire chapter to this little nugget. It gets pretty complicated, but here it is in a nutshell, pun intended. Ha ha.
If you meditate well enough, pulling energy up from your lower chakras, or lower spine, and into the brain, specifically the pineal gland, which acts like an antenna? You can improve your health while also tapping into the unified field (quantum physics) to experience life beyond the senses, beyond the material. While that may sound crazy, Dr. Dispenza has studied this at length; he has the brain scans, case studies and personal experience to back it up.
As humans, I feel it is our responsibility on Earth to continuously grow, learn, expand. Current global events are so scary and unstable they threaten to pull us down, pull us apart. Don’t succumb! Resist. Keep rising up. Overpower the almonds by engaging your frontal lobes. Try to activate that wee pine cone planted deep within your brain. Trust in the divine unknown. Now more than ever, the world requires us to be mighty, like the oak.
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