Lower your Head, Flare your Nostrils, and Stroke your Hooves on the Ground 🦌

There’s a lot of fear out there right now.

Maybe you’ve noticed.

The thing about fear though, is that we feel it in all sorts of situations, not just when we perceive a threat to our health or safety. We might feel it in anticipation of a confrontation with an angry boss. Or when we feel compelled to share an opinion in public. Or at the prospect of throwing a kid’s birthday party that won’t suck in the middle of winter in the middle of a pandemic. 🎉 ❄️ 😷 🤷‍♂️

For some of us, these sorts of fear-inducing situations generate a lot of behavior that might not serve our best interests. Just thinking about whatever is stressing us out can drive us to pound a bag of potato chips. Or disappear into the TV. Or hit the bong. Or maybe it’s more like we hit the bong then disappear into the TV while we pound a bag of potato chips.

Or maybe we engage in perfectionism, endlessly attending to the minutiae of some project, moving commas again and again, trying to control for every eventuality in the hopes that we’ll get some assurance about the outcome of our endeavors.

Or maybe we turn against ourselves. Tell ourselves we are piles of shit, that we are wasting our lives, that we don’t get anything right. Or maybe we lash out at our loved ones, our friends, our kids.

That energy, afterall, has to go somewhere.

But what if there was another way? What if we could develop the ability to stop avoiding and move directly into the confrontation.

“Whoa,” you say. “That doesn’t sound very yogic. What about Ahimsa, non harming? What about Santosha, the practice of contentment? What you’re saying sounds downright aggressive.”

Aggression, however, isn’t necessarily opposed to any of these values. As the philosopher Ken Wilber reminds us, “The etymology of aggression is ‘to move toward.’ Aggression itself is not bad or unhealthy. Aggression is not the same as hostility.”¹

He uses a great example from nature to illustrate: “…if a stag is on its way to a salt lick, and there is a bramble-bush blocking its way, it will lower its head, flare its nostrils, stroke its hooves on the ground, and aggressively charge the bush, knocking it out of the way. The stag isn’t mad at the bush, it doesn’t hate the bush; it is simply mobilizing energy to remove a blockage.”¹

Now I know that got you fired up. Me, too, but let’s take a moment here to remember that I’m not suggesting you headbutt your boss in the face, or that you loudly ridicule your friend’s husband at the church picnic for his unconscious bigotry, or decide that you are going to throw your kid a forty-person birthday bash in your living room where you spend your life savings to hire Katy Perry for fifteen minutes. No masks required!

Don’t do that. Don’t do any of that.

But if we are going to escape the limiting gravity of the small-self system and level-up our habits, priorities, and worldview–in other words, undergo the kind of transformation that a practice like yoga promises–we are going to need to summon great energy and find skillful ways to face up to our fears and aversions.

Forturnately for us, we are hardwired to do just that.

According to Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, when we move forward in the the face of adversity, it stimulates the release of the neuromodulator dopamine, which “suppresses the activity of the fear centers in the brain”² and rewards us with a good feeling–a shot of energy, excitement, and the sense that we are on the right path. Furthermore, engaging the neural circuitry in this way “changes the structure of those circuits so that we’re more likely to engage in that behavior again. In part because it’s desirable, but in part because the circuit itself gets wired up in a way that it’s more likely to get triggered in the future.”

Huberman calls it, “the courage circuit.”

And the great thing is, you don’t have to start with the biggest, most frightening challenge you’d like to take on. You can start small and train up these circuits. If you can set your sights on limited, immediate goals that you know you can accomplish–it could be something trivial like waking up fifteen minutes earlier or making a cup of coffee or just taking five breaths in downward-facing dog at the beginning of your day–your brain will begin “coupling the neural circuits for focus with goal-directed behavior with the neural circuits for energy and agitation.”

In other words, engaging in regular, predictable, tractable practices (ideally first thing in the day when you want the dopamine system to be on the rise or at other times when you start to feel stressed) and then taking a moment to register that you’ve accomplished what you set out to do, can help you build energy towards taking on other more stressful challenges.

And if you don’t learn do this? According to Huberman, your brain will go searching for dopamine in other places, urging you to scroll through Instagram gathering “likes” or buzz around your house accomplishing tasks willy nilly, and you won’t create this coupling effect, which will leave you feeling discombobulated or maybe even strangely overworked before lunch. As Huberman points out, “we are always moving forward, but the question is, are we moving towards a focused, meaningful goal?”

But you don’t have to take Huberman’s word (or mine, for that matter). You can give it a try for yourself. Tonight before you go to bed, pick one or two small things that you are going to do in the morning, a few easy “wins.” It could be that you are going to go outside for a short walk. Or finish an email you’ve been putting off. Or maybe even do a short yoga practice before breakfast (some form of exercise amplifies the effects described above).

Whatever you set out to do, see if you can pick something that moves you, even if it’s only incrementally, in the direction of your longer-term aims. After you’ve accomplished it, even if it doesn’t go perfectly, allow yourself a moment to register that you did it. I bet if you can do this for a week, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results (and intrigued by the possibilities).

And a special note for the parents out there, especially those with small kids at home: you might have to figure out creative ways to chunk your efforts. For example, I built up, little by little, the habit of getting up early to do my asana, pranayama, and meditation practice before the kids get out of bed, but that doesn’t leave much time for writing, so I started working in pockets when my two-year-old was taking baths, naps, or in those rare moments where she was safely and contentedly occupied, like now.

Actually, I better go check on her.

Thanks for stopping by. As a reminder, I’m currently teaching a live virtual vinyasa class on Thursdays at 8 am central through Ahimsa Yoga Studios (you can always find my current schedule on my class page as well as links to recorded classes on YouTube.)

Another way to stay current with my class offerings and other yoga content is to subscribe to get the blog posts by email. 👇

✌️ ❤️ 🕉 💪 🙏

1. Wilber, Ken; The Religion of Tomorrow; p. 259; Boulder, Co.; Shambhala Publications, Inc.; 2017
2. I pulled these Huberman quotes from various YouTube videos. I was careful to transcribe what he said correctly, but not careful about keeping track of which quote came from which video, and it’s not worth tracking them all down according my duration-path-outcome analysis. Let me know if I misquoted (or misrepresented) anything you find here. If you’re interested in hearing more about how to use neuroscientific principles to optimize your sleep and other life practices, check out the Huberman Lab Podcast.