Reactivity eats up our freedom.
It turns us into easily-manipulated, unconscious anger-balls.
It breaks the flow and continuity of life, of being able to work and experience things jointly with others.
It’s a cry and demand for attention and understanding.
It makes it all about the person who is reacting, which makes sense because, at its root, reactivity is a protective mechanism triggered when someone feels threatened.
One of the ways you can tell a man is susceptible to reactive states is when they’re daydreaming or frequently become lost in thought. The cascade of events that leads to someone becoming lost in thought can be triggered by something that stirs memories of past reactive states.
Coming up with a response to the situation might feel untenable at the moment, so men decide instead to check out of the conversation—or even leave entirely—to do or think about something else. They either check out and get lost within their own thoughts, or they grasp around for a more pleasurable distraction, like checking the sports scores.
The problem is, these reactive states sabotage our autonomy and independence. And for a lot of men, this is a persistent inner form of self-sabotage. When we are reactive, there’s a subsequent loss of freedom that is felt throughout the multiple strands of our lives.
We want our perspectives to be affirmed by others
The lowest part of ourselves, which Freud called the id, feeds off of having its viewpoint affirmed and reinforced. This is the primitive and instinctual part of self that contains our sexual and aggressive drives and hidden memories.
The id is actually rooted very deep in the body, so you’re not consciously thinking when you’re reacting. As a matter of fact, you lose actual intelligence during the state of reactivity. You aren’t able to see the whole picture, and you’re being painted into a corner and forced to make decisions with the smallest part of your brain. Survival instincts are all that matter.
Identifying your reactive patterns
You might suffer from a pattern of reactivity if you find yourself getting angry at social media, or if you’re short-tempered with your partner, or if you become spacey, daydreaming, or numb when confronted with overwhelming feelings.
Essentially, you’re suffering from reactivity if you’re repeating patterns from the past, if you’re finding more and more that you’re turning to substances seeking escape, or if you have an inability to stay present with yourself and find your own way instead of being pulled along by the momentum of the masses surrounding you.
For those of us who identify as men, this is like an unexpected gut-punch to our core desire for freedom. People get riled up when they feel their freedom is being threatened.
Reactivity can feel good sometimes
Now, this might seem counter-intuitive based on what I’ve outlined above, but men often experience a power surge from being energized to fight against something, which shifts our feelings of being threatened and weak into wanting to push back, wanting to defend ourselves and our ideals.
There’s so much vagueness and uncertainty in the world that it’s easy to crave the clarity of outrage, and it feels good to have something to fight for. As a result, we often seek to be in a rolling state of reactivity.
Reactivity as a protective mechanism
At their core, reactive bodily responses like a spike of adrenaline running through your body or your heart beating faster are all mechanisms of grasping and clinging in an attempt to find safety. It’s simple animal responsiveness to the environment. The protector aspect of masculinity comes up when we are threatened in this way, which is a positive survival reflex if you’re faced with literal survival issues.
Reactivity is not always a positive thing, though; in fact, rarely are we in situations that truly necessitate survival-mode action.
If you think about our sports, most of them are about staking out our territory and claiming it as ours, through staving off the other team or gaining ground on a field. This feeling happens naturally to masculine human beings, which is why it’s a common theme throughout almost all of our sports.
It’s easier to default to reactivity than to feel other emotions. It’s actually clarifying for many masculine beings to go to the default of being outraged because anger is one of the most powerful clarifying emotions. It simplifies the complexity of conflicting emotions and provides clarity of action.
No one likes to just sit in uncertainty forever. We want to get out of this sensation of emotion and everything swirling inside us. The way our bodies are designed is that it wants to take that energy and move it into action. Often, we like to construct mental frames or beliefs that help us channel and tame this inner beast of emotion that we don’t understand.
The root level of the deepest tantra happens within the very sense of self.
What is our sense of self? And why would that ever be threatened? This is one of the deepest spiritual truths or recognitions you can come to. If something is real and eternal, and if you believe in something that survives after death, then can that actually be threatened?
Everything changes if you’re resting as your deepest truth as consciousness. There’s a huge difference between sitting in reactivity and sitting in equanimity.
Notice the inner charge, the inner emotional state, that you would associate with events that can make you react. We feel deep within ourselves that someone must be held accountable for the screams we feel inside. So we move into action, and we believe at that moment that because of this huge surge of power inside of us, our reactive feelings effectively make our actions right.
What’s at stake?
When we allow ourselves to be taken over by our instinctive reactive patterns, we lose our long-term vision and capacity for intelligent analysis. Look at the mess we’re in right now regarding the climate or the current politics in the USA. All big ideas require long-term vision to enact, but when you’re reactive, you get sucked into only looking at the skirmish that’s directly in front of you.
We have a lot of models of wealth and power that are about someone having a big idea or coming up with a new system that changes the world. We want to be one of those people like Elon Musk, who can push forth and bring his vision of the world into reality because of his power. So we focus our resources on making short-term issues disappear, and we often miss the underlying causes and deeper solutions that could prevent this continuous skirmishing. It’s all rooted at the heart in emotional reactivity.
Reactivity makes you a follower and takes away your freedom of choice.
When in reactivity mode, you spend all your energy and resources on maintenance. You’re not moving forward, you’re just treading water. And underneath this feeling is the panic that you know you cannot tread water indefinitely or you will drown. This further accelerates the activation of your fight-flight-or-freeze response.
Each time you engage in conversations from a reactive place, you reactivate and strengthen your reactivity, pushing yourself further into this rut. You end up spending time justifying your positions rather than opening yourself up to the possibility of other opinions swaying you, or God forbid, of being wrong. This justification is indicative of your loss of power.
When you’re highly reactive, you give away your power to others. It’s like you have a button on your chest that becomes visible when you are reactive and dares others to push it. The button reads, in fine print, “to see me lose my mind, push here”. Then bingo. Someone does push it, and you instantly experience a loss of freedom and a loss of control over your thoughts, speech, emotions, and actions. It’s that point when we say, “hold my beer, watch this…” and we hand the reins over to our id, which is a much worse driver than your ego.
Reactivity makes you untrustable and less sexy to your intimate partners.
Reactivity is a physical manifestation of “grabbing the crazy stick,” which means you are the one demanding to be loved. Whoever grabs the crazy stick first is demanding and asking to be loved. They’re the ones who need to be heard. They’re the ones begging to be understood.
It’s nice to flex into either masculine or feminine perspectives, as an individual, for the sake of healthy relationships. But if you’re the one who’s asking to be loved most of the time, who’s always grabbing the crazy stick because you are so reactive, you are effectively taking the more feminine position of wanting to be seen and understood, relative to the calm, understanding listener that you seek. And in most intimate relationships, if you are a man, this can be very depolarizing.
How can we begin to solve this?
The answer to this question is: through deep internal yogic practice.
We can only learn to understand and control our reactivity by developing a real capacity to stabilize and effectively empty our minds. When we fall back into survival mode, there isn’t much room in our minds for interacting with others or the positive things that can come from an intimate relationship. Relaxing our mind into open receptivity creates space for relationships and relevant details of our present situation to penetrate our consciousness.
Developing awareness around reactivity and how it rises inside us holds clues to how you can develop life mastery. There is an innate, inner yoga of awareness itself that abides within the heart. This is the deepest yoga that I know of.
I teach this in my men’s programs and retreats; in fact, enrolment is open now for the 2022 advanced men’s program: Depth—Mining Your Masculine Core. Clarify and master your life purpose in the company of men who call forth the best in each other. The early registration discount ends on December 4.
Space is limited, so register early to ensure your spot and to get the discounted price!
Reach out and schedule a call to learn more: https://sunyata.info/contact.