Thrive and Awaken® Tip

Survival Mode keeps us moving. We do, achieve, solve, anticipate, protect, and remain vigilant. Even when there is no immediate danger, the mind can keep searching for what needs to be fixed, accomplished, or avoided. Anger mobilizes us to act. Anxiety prepares us for what might happen next. We can spend much of our lives preparing for the next moment rather than fully experiencing this one.

Then something stops us.

A brilliant night sky. Sunlight filtering through a forest. A newborn child. Music that moves through your entire body. The incomprehensible vastness of the universe. For a moment, there may be nothing to accomplish, fix, understand, or become.

There is simply awe.

Research suggests that awe is different from many other uplifting emotions. It has been associated with reduced sympathetic activation and increased parasympathetic activity in some experimental settings. Awe has also been associated with lower levels of inflammatory markers and with a diminished preoccupation with the individual self.

Perhaps this helps explain why awe can feel so profoundly still.

Yet awe is not an empty stillness. It is alive. There can be wonder, amazement, mystery, connection, or visceral recognition that we are participating in something far greater than the stories occupying our minds.

Usually, moving from Survival Mode into Thriving involves becoming aware of our automatic reactions and consciously choosing how we want to respond. Awe can sometimes provide another doorway. It can interrupt the Survival Mode story so completely that, for a moment, there is nothing to work through. We simply become fully present.

In that moment, we may move directly into an experience of Awakening. The mind becomes quiet. The usual sense of self recedes. Awareness opens. We are no longer trying to manage life. We are experiencing it.

Perhaps that is the paradox of awe: absolute stillness that is vibrantly alive.