Anatomy of Reactivity

A tangled knot

Reactivity is something that happens in the body-mind.

In the buddhist-adjacent non-duality world, there can be negativity around words like "self", "I", "you". It seems silly, but there are some legitimate reasons for this. Using such words assumes something with an inherent existence. Using the term "body-mind" instead emphasizes that what is typically referred to as an "self" is better understood to be a process – of thinking, feeling, perceiving, etc. This shift of context is useful for the work of unbinding, to encourage the shifts of perception that lead to freedom.

Buddhism describes six sense doors: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, and cognizing. The senses can be activated in response to external or internal changes. The problematic sense doors here are feeling and cognizing.

Feeling is the felt sense of the body. Also the feeling of contraction that is part of reactivity. Cognizing refers to thinking, in this context the thoughts that accompany reactivity. When reactivity arises, feeling and thinking tend to get tangled with each other, proliferate with each other, ignite each other.

You think of an argument you had yesterday. Feeling arises. Fists clench. Words you wish you said arise. The body mind is pulled here, pulled there.

The body comes with a fight, flight, freeze, fawn response built into it. The proliferation of thought that arises with the body's reaction can be just as painful. The words drive more contraction. It dialogues with itself, eggs itself on, and thinks what it has to say is very very important.

And then it gets even more complicated: guilt and shame arise, for having these thoughts:
“Others must not know what I'm thinking.”
“Why am I like this?”

At the level of texture, not content: some activation comes up in the body-mind. Another activation comes up immediately and suppresses it. It feels like how the word sounds — it presses down on you, there is a vague or not so vague feeling of suffocation that then arises.

Down that way is madness. This is a complex, a tangled knot. The whole world is tangled. What a mess.

One translation of nibanna is no-forest. Freedom comes from non-proliferation. Feeling arises and falls. Thinking arises and falls. Cleanly, without remainder, without proliferation, without getting tangled up.

This is an excerpt from my upcoming mini-book Reactivity: What It Is and How to Change It, available soon on Amazon or via PDF.

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