Last week I encouraged a Sunday spiritual practice of recognizing, naming, and appreciating the Good. Of course spiritual practice is not bound to Sunday tradition, but it is strengthened by consistency and routine, in whatever rhythm fits your life. Today, I want to add another element to expand an awareness of Good, our capacity to change perspective. Change of perspective can be subtle or dramatic and comes more easily to some than others. Ironically, too rigid a practice can settle-in and actually resist the further insight that comes from shifting perspective.
Earlier this is week I received a notice of a research study published recently in BMC (BioMed Central. DOI: 10.1186/s12916-024-03569-8) The article inspired me to consider the intricacy of our human capacity to view events from different angles, and the complexity of the way our minds draw conclusions that re-enforce--or challenge--our habitual interpretations of life events. Perspective and interpretation feed our default view of Life. The workings of our intellect and logic, as well as intuition and faith, give name and shape, and ultimately meaning, to our days. Yet, perception is not solely choice. Much of our brain circuitry seemingly operates on it's own. How do we change perspective?
This research project looked at the human skill of mental rotation as a possible way to lower post-traumatic distress. The research was part of a future goal to develop tools to prevent and decrease early symptoms of PTSD. This controlled study followed 164 health care professionals who were experiencing disturbing, intrusive memories with involuntary images of traumatic events during the COVID-19 pandemic. It involved a one-time-only instruction: researchers selected a visual image that "triggered" the participants memories, and then taught them to shift their awareness from the trigger to an unrelated, imagery-based, visuospatial task. The task was to play the computer game Tetris for 20 minutes. The game requires "mental rotation", our ability to imagine what something would look like if it were rotated to a different position and could be seen from a different angle. The successful player mentally rotates each upcoming digital block so that it can be strategically placed to complete lines of blocks. The theory here is that activation of mental rotation competes with the cognitive mechanism of intrusive memory, and thereby reduces and/or prevents disturbing memory images. Participants recorded any intrusive episodes of memory-images daily, for up to 6 months. Analysis showed remarkable decrease of traumatic image intrusion, with only the 1 training session.
This research pinpoints a specific path of healing of the mind's intrusive and disruptive reminders of trauma, by shifting awareness to mental rotation that "sees" the possibility of a change of perspective to complete the game "puzzle". The fascinating aspect to me is the seemingly unrelated activities. The puzzle game apparently "blocks" the disruptive memory. This is not an isolated phenomena, because the gaming industry has produced other types of digital therapy for other disorders, including PTSD, ADHD, as well as games that boost mental acuity in aging. They all re-enforce, in one way or another, changes of perspective--seeing Life from a different point of view, different from the confines of our personal concerns and consciousness.
In a spiritual process of discovering Life as an unfolding Good, sooner or later, we open the door of personal perception and it expands beyond the ideas we have been faithfully (or fearfully) rehearsing. To me, this snippet of research is a reminder of the power of re-arrangement, that we often resist. Re-arrangement inevitably provokes our perspective. Whether it is an unexpected rearrangement of our schedule, or of our "things", our relationships, our ideas and feeling states, or our physical bodies--consider it may be a call to a change of perspective, a healing, a fresh expansion of Good. (Susan Nettleton)
for perspective poetry:
https://allpoetry.com/.../11611734-The-Changing-Light-by... https://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/.../Mydailyactiv/index.html https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%253Fdate...