What dig-deep button do you push? When you find yourself stressed, overwhelmed, having too much to do, push to your limits, etc., what dig-deep button do you hit? Brené Brown, well-known research psychologist, claims there are two buttons we can push. The first dig-deep button is one that most people push, one that involves us just striving harder and harder but the treadmill we find ourselves on often never stops, at least not for long before we find ourselves on it again. However, Brown says there is a second dig-deep button we can push, one that takes us to a very different place. In this blog, I plan to explore what it means to push this other dig-deep button. At the promotional session of the group on Wholehearted Living that I, along with 4 other spiritual directors and psychospiritual therapists, facilitated last week, we explored these dig-deep buttons based on Brené Brown’s book, “The Gifts of Imperfection” (2010). Brown describes the dig-deep button as “a secret level of pushing through when we’re exhausted and overwhelmed, and when there’s too much to do and too little time for self-care” (Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, p. 3). To get a sense what it looks like and feels like to push this dig-deep button, we entered a group process where we shared, popcorn style, the signs that we are using this button. Everyone participated in this process including the five facilitators. Here is the list of what was shared:
Can you relate to that list? Most people can. In this list, we see quite plainly the down-side of always pushing this dig-deep button, but it makes you wonder. Why do we push this dig-deep button if it is so hard on us? We ask ourselves, as a group, a question similar to this, “Why is it so easy to push this dig-deep button?” Here are the responses we shared:
The other thing we noted was the many cultural beliefs and values that promote pushing this dig-deep button. As a group, we noted the following cultural messages:
Wow! You can begin to see why it is so easy to push our “dig deep” button. No wonder we do it so often. This begs a question. Does it have to be this way? Is there another way than pushing this “dig-deep” button? Brené Brown claims there is. From her research, she found that people who lived from a place of wholehearted living also dig deep…but they dig deep differently. Brown discovered that when these people dug deep, they connected to something beyond themselves. Brown developed the acrostic DIG to capture this way of digging deep. D -- Deliberate in their thoughts and behaviors through prayer, meditation, or simply setting their intentions. I -- through this practice of contemplation and becoming connected to Being, they were inspired to make new and different choices G -- Going – this inspiration led them to take action, to live into these choices. (Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, p. 4) So, what is different about this way of digging deep compared to the previous way? Here, we again turned to the group process to flush out what this means. Here is what we came up with:
Let me go a little beyond what we, as a group, unpack that night. For us to push this other dig-deep button, we have to first become aware of our compulsion to push our own dig-deep button. This is why the pause is so important for it begins to break the compulsion. Once we pause, it then becomes possible for us to become aware of the powerful impulse within us to push this dig-deep button. This new way of digging deeper involves us bringing as much prayerful awareness and presence to this impulse dynamic as we are able. As we bring awareness and presence to this impulse, we will eventually come to realize that there is “me” and there is this impulse within me to push this dig-deep button. This sense of me is often called the "witnessing I" or observing self within certain psychological frameworks. If we allow ourselves to experience this sense of me in all of its fullness, we become aware of our field of consciousness, what is often called the human soul. When we begin see this impulse to push the dig-deep button as not me, we come to see it as an egoic structure within our spacious soul. Every ego structure contains many beliefs, feelings, memories, roles, coping patterns, etc. that keep this psychic structure intact and active in your life. It is very easy for us to become attach to, identify with, and believe this psychic structure is us. This identification is why it is so easy to believe that we have no control or power over using this dig-deep button. In this new way of digging deep, we first practice the pause and bring awareness and presence to our impulse to dig-deep. This prayerful awareness will eventually cause us to separate ourselves from the egoic structure of our dig-deep button. When space in our soul opens up between our witnessing I and our dig-deep button, we are now in a place where God’s spirit can minister to us. We are in a place where we can listen to God and watch how God’s spirit interacts with this dig-deep button and with our life. Due to this space that has opened up, we are more free to set our intentions, to discern more clearly what to do, to reach out to others to help us with our tasks, etc. We are also now in a more open, spacious place where God’s spirit can minister to the various components our dig-deep ego structure. As we inquire into the beliefs of our deep-deep button, God’s spirit reveals new truths to us. As we explore the often-painful memories connected to our button in a prayerful way, these memories slowly transform. As we hold the often-painful emotions connected to our button, God’s spirit brings forth compassion and grace, and these feelings settle. As we inquire into our compulsive patterns, we slowly regain our freedom from the impulse to push our dig-deep button. This added psychospiritual context provides a better sense of what it means to push this other dig-deep button, and how this dig-deep button is so different from the compulsive dig-deep button. Brené Brown, in her book, The Gifts of Imperfections, outlines ten guideposts to whole-hearted living. Each of these guideposts are built on the reasons why we impulsively push our dig-deep button which are listed in the visual above.
In looking at each of these trigger points, Brown provides a guidepost or spiritual practice, one could say, that helps people pause and touch into the more life-giving way of digging deeper. This is what we will be exploring and practicing in the Wholehearted Living group this coming year. The Wholehearted group has its second meeting on Tues evening, October 13 at 7 pm on Zoom. That night we will explore the primary emotion that Brené Brown claims causes us to compulsively push our dig-deep button, namely the experience of shame. We will investigate how shame is so different than all the experiences that cause us to possess fullness of life. Then, in each the following sessions we will explore and practice one of Brown’s guideposts and discover how it helps us push that different dig-deep button which leads to wholehearted living. Questions to Ponder: 1. What does it look and feel like when you are pushing your impulsive dig-deep button? 2. What makes it so easy to push your dig-deep button? 3. What cultural messages did you learn that causes you to push your dig-deep button? 4. Brene Brown describes a second dig-deep button, one that is very different than our impulsive dig-deep button. When you have connected to this other way of digging deeply? What made this possible? How was that experience different from pushing your impulsive deep-dig button? The Wholehearted Living Group on Zoom is still open for new participants. To learn more, please click here and go to our web-page where you can register for the group.
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