1 Soul Bound
1.2 Taking Control
1.2.2 An Awakening Epiphany
1.2.2.16 The hippie's guide to: thalamic reticular nuclei
11:05 am, Tuesday June 6, 2045
1 bell of first watch, Covday wax, 2nd day of the month of KrevinBelember, A2F1600
Nadine lay looking at the white plaster ceiling of her bedroom, as the padded sensors retreated back into her crown. What she wanted to do was have a long shower, curse out Bulgaria, spend an hour trying meditation and forget all about online wealth, fame and power. What she needed to do was get up, put the electronics away, and prepare lunch for her customers. Not for the first time, she wished reality had a pause button that would allow her to suspend the passage of time for everything outside her room.
No more masks? What kind of stupid idea was that she’d had? Masks were what let her survive, let her fit it. Still, a vow was a vow, and not only couldn’t she carry on the way she had been, she was determined not to carry on the path she’d been taking. She felt the fire of anger burning deep inside her. The fire was sometimes close to the surface and sometimes banked and smouldering, but it was always there. How could it not be, when there was so much injustice and unnecessary pain in the world?
Some people didn’t see it, didn’t want to see it. The people who did their best to convince themselves that the losers in life were sinners who deserved to suffer, perhaps because of deeds in past lives; that everything would mysteriously turn out to have been fair in the end - the best of all possible worlds. Or, worse, the people who convinced themselves they were superior, more deserving, and that survival of the fittest was more than just natural - it was the way things ought to be.
She levered herself slowly out of bed and put her crown away in its box.
Some people saw the problem, but felt it was too large. The people who looked after themselves and their kin, but who didn’t see what strangers did to each other as being a thing they could do anything about or a thing that should concern them, outrage them.
It was probably more comfortable to be able to do that, but she’d never got the hang of it. Sometimes her anger was helpful, fuelling her determination and helping her try harder than she thought possible. Sometimes it turned on her, burning her insides when she struggled to choke it back, making compromises and keeping her head down. If only there were a place she could be free of anger, free of injustice. But there wasn’t, and so she sang the Bosnian blues, the Sevdalinka - the music of heartbreak and sorrow.
She headed down the stairs.
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In the kitchen she saw her earrings had been stored neatly with her special drip cloth by the night staff. She put them on, and set about preparing food.
Nadine: {Hey, Heather. Any special requests for lunch?}
Heather: {Only a sandwich. I’m going to be pretty busy. Any suggestions on where I should set up my crafting stuff?}
Nadine: {Jasic has a barn in a dell on the slope above the village that nobody goes near. It has power, and I don’t think he’ll mind you using it, as long as you ask first.}
She hummed to herself as she mixed and chopped. Cooking was something she’d done with her mother while growing up, and they’d often spent hours singing to each other. Just thinking back to those times made her feel warm and relaxed; the kitchen was her me-time, her safety, her home.
Nadine: {Balthazar, I asked you to look for common themes in what people did to regain emotional control of themselves. Could the memories those activities bring back, the associations they have with how they learned the activities, have anything to do with it?}
Balthazar: [I’ve split the process into stages, though that isn’t a perfect model.]
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[The first stage is getting some mental distance. Often by physically moving out of the stressful situation and engaging in a different activity, but it can be done by visualising being elsewhere and doing something else. Going somewhere safe and familiar helps people step out of defence mode and relax. Sometimes people use physical relaxation techniques such as breathing or having a hot bath. Alternatively, people pick activities that get the part of their brain that was worrying doing something else instead, such as listening to music, being creative or doing something they’re good enough at to enter a ‘flow state’.]
[The second stage is to re-establish good boundaries, and your connections to the things that help you identify yourself. Remind yourself of who you are and what you can do. That it is ok to say “No.” and ok to ask for help, based upon realistic knowledge of your own worth. Some people visualise a tree rooted firmly in the ground, braced against the wind of other people’s uninformed opinions, unrealistic expectations and unfair demands.]
[The third stage is to put what happened into perspective, by using your distance to appraise it from different viewpoints. How much will it matter in ten year’s time? How much will it matter to people in other countries, with everything that’s going on in their lives? What would your most level-headed friend think was the most important aspect of what happened? What did the other people involved think their actions meant? Realistically, what does it actually mean for you, in practical terms? Are there any positive effects?]
[The final stage is acceptance. Rather than repressing the experience, accept that it did happen; accept your emotional response and own that response rather than feel ashamed of it, so you can process it. Decide what you want to learn from the experience, and how you’re going to remember it when you think back to it. “Name it and frame it”, so you can integrate it into your narrative of your own life, and move onto planning what you’re going to do next.]
The smells of cooking filled the air now the food was nearly ready to serve. She paused for a moment, just to breathe it in and appreciate it.
Nadine: {So memories would be relevant to your first and second stages? That’s going to complicate things. Did you come up with a recommendation?}
Balthazar: [An area of the brain called the thalamic reticular nucleus controls the frequency at which the neurons in the brain oscillate. The net effect of stage one is to move the brain over to a state where the frequency is primarily 10 Hz, or thereabouts. Because The Burrow requires use of a tiara, the meditation room could induce that directly.]
Nadine: {That doesn’t feel the right way to go. It won’t help people develop skills that will help them in arlife.}
Balthazar: [It may help people gain conscious control over the process if they can see a visual representation of where their frequencies currently are and where they need to be, so they can learn what actions move them in which direction. Scientists have also looked at the effect upon brain frequency of visual cues (such as flickering lights) and aural cues (such as feeding different pure tones to each ear, one 150 Hz the other 160 Hz, so the beat frequency is 10 Hz).]
Nadine: {Like someone standing between two Taiko drummers, watching sunlight passing through the moving leaves of a tree?}
Balthazar: [That might be an example. Outdoors meditation is popular. Tai chi is often used that way. Some nature-focused European traditions call this whole process “Grounding and Centering” and tie it into beliefs about magic energy. They often use scented herbs, chimes, chants, and other pieces of symbolism.]
Magic? Hmm.
Nadine: {Can the tiara pick up on progress through the other stages?}
Balthazar: [It is good at picking up on feelings and attitudes, such as confidence, acceptance and whether you are feeling objective or emotionally entangled about something. And to some extent it can distinguish what the target is, by which internal referent you are using, if it has a recent way to link the referent to something external, such as a question you are responding to or a sight you have just seen. Long internal monologues it is bad at, and memories or instincts you are not currently using are totally inaccessible.]
Nadine: {That should be sufficient. Your mentioning magic gives me an idea. What if we made training conscious control over it via feedback into a game? You face your problem across a forest glade; erect a magic bubble around yourself whose strength and colour is a measure of how sturdily you are grounded; shrink and weaken the problem with perspective-moves then finally devour it, leading to you growing and a cheesy victory tune. Well, ok, probably not that much like a 16-bit arcade game. That was just an example. We need ideas from more people and to test variants to find something popular. Anyway, I have to go serve lunch. Carry on thinking about it, talk with Robin and other Womble expert systems whose intentions and confidentiality we trust; see if you can give me some options.}
Balthazar: [Your requirements are precise as always. I feel the task may be better achieved if I start by improving my own capabilities. Is that ok?]
Nadine: {Make do with what you have, for now, and try to come up with something usable in the next two hours. I’ll ask Wellington about upgrades for you. Out.}
She left the kitchen.