February 10th, 2008Outside In
“It’s good to live your life inside-out — unless, of course, you want to change the life you live. Then, it is easier and faster to do it outside-in.”
~ the Wise Fool
Do you suffer from self-referral or object-referral? If this sounds like incoherent New Age gobbly-goo, it is. Even so, it’s worth losing your sleep over. Never mind the axis of weevil, question is: Where is your axis of reference? If it’s inside you, you’ll be hopelessly cheerful — no matter what’s shaking around you. If it’s outside you, you’ll be consistently miserable; better keep your bible or cigarette handy, whichever is convenient. Enlightenment then is simply about shifting your axis of reference from outside to the inside. In other words, it means living from the INSIDE-OUT instead of OUTSIDE-IN. (By the way, if you have self-referal it implies that you live in your body instead of your head.) While this piece of wisdom is worth raising a toast to every day, there are times when it is better to do the exact opposite — and live our lives OUTSIDE-IN. This means ignoring your wonderful internal compass and letting stuff on the outside guide you.
Ordinarily, we mortals get our hands slapped and ears tweaked for not listening to our bodies, which makes us “bad.” Just ask the folks of New York; it is easy for your brain to ignore your body in a fast-paced city. But there are times when we actually get rewarded for being “bad;” travel is one of those times.
It’s 4:30 AM. The city of Hyderabad in south India is asleep while I’m all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I feel like an owl in a den of larks. Which makes perfect sense because my body is still ticking on PST (Pacific Standard Time), not IST (Indian Standard Time). My body thinks it is 4:30 in the afternoon in Portland, Oregon. Well, all this would be accurate if it were true. It would be true had I listened to my body, which, this time around on this trip — I’ve decided NOT to. It’s taken me more than a day from the moment I left my door in Portland to the moment I arrived at my parents’ door in India. Total travel time from point to point? 32 hours. That’s enough to turn anyone into a cranky zombie. Not me; not this time around. I feel perky and chipper instead of feeling like a dusty old door mat. This is partly because I’m wired; I haven’t seen my folks in eight years. But the real reason is: I’ve found a way to beat jet lag. The same trip eight years ago had all but wiped me out and left me wilted for almost a week. This time around however it’s taken me less than a day to shift into the local swing of things. So what gives? Well, I had a paradigm shift, that’s what. Few days prior to my departure, I came upon a new and improved of understanding of circadian rhythms.
Let me dip into Circadian Rhythms for a moment:
Perhaps you’re someone who hates the watch and avoid wearing one. Or perhaps you’re like our president: Rumor has it that the only time Bush Jr. isn’t on time for a meeting is when he’s early; Accuse him of whatever you like, but you can’t ever accuse him of being late. Regardless, did you know you have a biological “clock” within you? Circadian is Latin for “around a day.” Circadian rhythms are regular changes in your mental and physical characteristics that happen during the course of a day. Most of our circadian rhythms are orchestrated by the body’s master clock. This clock, is nothing but a pair of pinhead-sized brain structures that between them contain about 20,000 neurons. It rests in your hypothalamus, just above the crossing of your optic nerves. Your master clock responds to light signals, which travels from the back of your eyes along the optic nerve. Signals from your master clock then travel to several brain regions, including your pineal gland, which responds by switching off production of melatonin (a hormone). The body’s level of melatonin usually increases after darkness, making you feel drowsy. Your master clock governs your bodily functions such as body temperature, hormone secretion, urine production, and changes in blood pressure — all synchronized to your sleep/wake cycle.
A few days before leaving for India I discovered that in addition to our master clock we have circadian clocks in our skin cells. So? Well, here’s why this is significant. The master clock cycle in our brain is actually longer than 24 hrs. If we were to lock ourselves in a dark room and never see daylight, our internal clock would soon fall out of sync with our planet’s master clock — the Sun. Sunrise to sunrise, as you know, takes 24 hrs. Lucky for us, our internal clock gets RESET every 24 hrs, thanks to sunlight. So the Sun resets our master clock each day just so we can stay in synch with it! Ingenious, don’t you think? I think so. Whether you’re a lark or an owl, there are two things that keeps you in sync with the world around you: Regular meals and regular sunlight. In other words, “Oh Lord, let there be light. And yes, don’t forget the food.”
Here’s why I was able to beat jet lag this time around when I couldn’t in the past: Although it’s good to eat when you’re hungry (and not otherwise), this is not true when you are traveling. When traveling across time zones, it’s better to eat your meals in synch with the local time, not your internal clock. Prior to waking up for breakfast on the flight into Amsterdam, I’d cat napped a few times, each time using small eye pillows to cut out all light and thus simulating nighttime darkness. We were served breakfast a couple of hours before our arrival around 6:00AM. But my body wasn’t buying it; my body insisted it was 10PM in Portland, Oregon. And my mind can’t stomach the idea of breakfast at 10PM. So rather than scarf it down mindlessly, I first psyched myself into a morning frame of mind. Then I looked out the windows and saw that sunlight was breaking gently on the distant horizon. (If it’s convincing enough your mind will buy anything.) Then I dug in. After breakfast, which was lackluster, I continued to look out the windows. As we approached Amsterdam, I watched the city wake up and let my eyes take in as much light as I could get. I was still drowsy when we landed. So I slept a few more hours in the airport lounge. As luck would have it, it was an unusually warm and sunny day in January for Amsterdam. So I went to the windows and bathed in the sunlight hungrily, like it was going out of style. Remember those circadian clocks in our skin cells? I was letting my skin soak up the light. I kept this food-and-light ritual going all the way to my destination, staying always in synch with the changes outside.
And that did it. No jet lag!
In the past, I was, how should I put it, a little top-heavy. I was driven more by a New Age ideology, which said that I should always go with my inner sense of time. Well, it didn’t work; my head-strong ideals were out-of-synch with my reality. This time around however, I chose to be more flexible. The implications of this are profound; the applications of an OUTSIDE-IN approach lie beyond just beating jet lag and are far reaching.
Here are three profound examples:
1) Don’t feel like smiling today? Don’t worry, just laugh. Try Laughter Yoga. Just laugh your ass off — for no reason at all. Watch it work its way to your insides. A smile on your face, even if it’s entirely fake but with good intentions, will result in a smile on the inside. Laughter medicine works OUTSIDE-IN. Check out your local laughter club.
2) So you’ve been working on yourself to attract the right mate? Good. But once you reached the familiar plateau, you’re better off getting into the next less-than-perfect relationship than keep holding out for the perfect one. You grow faster when you’re IN a relationship than out of it. ALL relationships are temples of transformation — and work their magic OUTSIDE-IN.
3) Want to change your thinking? Just change your home. Your home is an expression of your mind; contents of one will always be reflected in the other. You can work INSIDE-OUT and change your thoughts, and your home will change too. But trying to get a handle on our thoughts is trying to nail jello to the wall. Ancient tools of harmony such as Feng Shui and Vastu work OUTSIDE-IN: Just change you home and it will change your thinking.
Namaste, Sage
