Bamboo Newsletter #34

Superpowered: The 5 Superpowers Your Were Born With That No One Told You About or How to Use Them

I hope you are enjoying the holidays. The above is my beautiful White Christmas Day surprise. This is the backyard in Toronto. The picture cannot capture the amazing energy that emanated and delighted my inner child, who was at one with nature.

My speed reading continues to pay dividends. I started and finished The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben McIntyre on boxing day in 6.5 hours. This after watching The Good Sheppard. My eyes were tired today, so I found an audio copy of Joe Vitale’s Zero Limits, which reviews the Ho’oponopono forgiveness practice and was half-way through today via 2X speed. I am still amazed at how spending 21 days for 30 minutes can give you an extra 2 months of your life every year.

Zero Limits is about returning you to the natural state using the phrases: “I am sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you,” while taking extreme 100% responsibility for what is showing up in your life.

Today, I am reviewing my 2020 Book of the Year. Superpowered is about going back to your natural state to reclaim the powers you were born with. The work of self-development for those of us who have “some” (of all that you want, but not everything you want) is to revert back towards our natural selves. Both Ho’oponopono and Superpowered are ways to help us back to the beauty of ourselves, someone at one with nature and the universe.

The 5 Superpowers Your Were Born With That No One Told You About or How to Use Them: (Part I)

Superpowered: Transform Anxiety into Courage by Renee Jain and Dr. Shefali Tsabary is my 2020 Book of the Year and one which I believe everyone must-read, not only to help parent your children but also to help re-parent yourself.  As the book says,

“…if you’re human (again, pretty sure that’s true), then you have a special set of powers that can supercharge you through life and help you fight stress, worry, and pressure.  The problem? No one told you that you had these powers or how to use them….Every single one of us came into this world fully charged with five incredible superpowers.”

This is Part I of the summary of the book Superpowered.  I met both authors on an Optimize.me Coach call.  This is where I learned the LALA technique for handling emotions.  This is my go-to technique for daily emotional stability.  I then bought their book Superpowered.

More Than Just About Anxiety 

The title is so misleading because it is so much more than about anxiety.  It is really about what they call your superpowers (I relate these to what I call the core networks and core beliefs), the childhood core wounds, and their adaptive behaviors.  This is what I will review in Part I, this article. 

In Part II (to be published soon), I will review the book portions on how to deal with adaptive behaviors such as anxiety and iced, and ultimately how to heal your core wounds and how to reactivate your superpowers (core beliefs and core networks). 

This is the only book I have read that explains the categories of “powers” we have, core wounds, and the resulting adaptive behaviors so simple and understandable.  While the book itself is targeted to teenagers and younger, and the language and words used are those for teenagers and children, I love the book because it makes these very powerful concepts simple to understand.

The book is broken up into 3 parts: first, it outlines the superpowers; second, the adaptive behaviors and how to deal with them; third, how to restore your superpowers with practice strengths.  Each of the 3 parts, has 5 sub-sections, one for each superpower and the relevant information pertaining to that part.

However, for the review, In Part I, I will lay out each superpower, discuss what it is, and the adaptive behavior.  In Part II, we will discuss how to cope with it, and then how to restore the superpower.

The 5 Superpowers

1) Present

Awareness. Being an explorer, being able to express your feelings, and being curious and amazed about the world. Climbed trees, watched flowers that bore a 5 on Oct 5, and ran and played and napped when tired.

2) Original

I am enough. You were able to be yourself and didn’t care what other people thought. You wore mismatched loud multicolored shirts, all brown one day, then all blue the next, and you sang at the top of your lungs even if you were off-key (yes, that was me when I was little--literally. LOL)

3) Whole

You love yourself.  I am loved and loveable.  You have a sense of self-worth.  You have character strengths that make you be you.

4) Energized

You love life.  You are motivated. You have love to have fun and adventure.  You sprung out of bed and was roaring to go. Your curiosity was your motivation and source for entertainment.

5) Resilience

You learned how to walk, but falling down and getting up, over and over again.  With no fear of failure.  You learned to ride your bike, brush your teeth, put on your clothes, learned to use a spoon, then a fork, and how to drink from the glass. You never gave up until you mastered it.

Then you Got Zapped by the Shoulds

This is the real beauty of the book.  It shows you how you lost these superpowers and what adaptive behaviors you created to take their place.

So first, you have these great superpowers, and then you lose them, and they get replaced by an adaptive behaviour.  So we mostly forget our superpower because for the rest of our lives we have an adaptive behavior that we think is who we really are, but in fact, we are not.  We are our true selves when we have our superpowers.  

However, we walk around with these adaptive behaviors.  The book talks about the fact that we get “zapped” when we are kids and instead of being present in the now, we start worrying about the things we did in the past or worrying about things we did in the future.

Zapped By Shoulded 

The book indicates that the zapping occurred after we were “shoulded” by those around us. 

• ·       You should be happy. 

• ·       You should get good grades. 

• ·       You should sit up straight. 

• ·       You should be quiet. 

• ·       You shouldn’t speak with your mouth full. 

• ·       You should try harder. 

• ·       You should study more. 

• ·       You should be more like your sister. 

• ·       You shouldn’t be so shy.

I believe the zapping occurred due to limiting beliefs we took on about ourselves, emotional trauma, and just being overwhelmed by bad parenting. 

However, before we discuss more about zapping, I think it is important to understand the adaptive behaviors.  The words are amazingly descriptive to understand the adaptive behavior.

Zapped: From Present to What-iffing.

When you are present, you are in the here and now and experiencing life joyfully.  You are reading your book, you are dancing to the music, you are one with nature, you are in the flow of writing, painting, creating.  As a child, you stopped being present and your thoughts began to “time-travel”. 

“Your mind wandered into the past—worrying about things you’d said or done days ago, or even weeks, before.  Or your mind wandered into the future—worrying about things that hadn’t happened yet, or might never even happen!....What-iffing creates so much stress and pain because it makes us forget where we are and makes us afraid of where we aren’t.” 

Today, you may still be what-iffing.  What if I said the wrong thing to my boss yesterday? What if I don’t get a good job review?  What if my presentation doesn’t go well?  What if I don’t make the right decisions for my son’s school?

Zapped: From Original to Camouflaged

When you are an Original, you do what you want to do without the worry of others’ approvals or scared of people’s thoughts.  As my son Alexander said in his recent newsletter Kaizen Newsletter Ch. 77, you embrace your weird.  As he noted, it is his love of anime, interest in philosophy, past of playing competitive TCGs, and his appreciation of sports analytics that makes him unique and different.  As he noted, “So be proud of who you are, share what you love with confidence, and most importantly, embrace your weird.”  

However, as kids, we start to change parts of us to feel like fitting in.  You begin to Camouflage.  And while hiding your true feelings didn’t feel good, you learned how to rationalize that pain.

My son Nicholas recounts his story of cutting his hair like Justin Beiber just so he could fit in with the French Canadians at his school when he was younger (His YouTube 100 day challenge: Going from Disliking Haircuts to Loving Them. SP 083).

One day you are you, and then the next day, you are trying to be someone else, just to fit in.  What other people thought about you, mattered more than what you thought about yourself.  “And when you change yourself to get other’s approval, it’s really hard to ever feel good about yourself.” 

You essentially started to develop the belief, that “I am not good enough”.  I am not enough to be who I am.  Something is wrong with me in some way.  As Marisa Peer’s says, “I am not enough” may be the single biggest “dis ease” in psychology.  She has made a career out of just teaching people how to say “I am enough” via affirmations. 

While I don’t think it is necessarily that easy, it is certainly a start.  It is certainly important to understand that “I am enough” or I am an Original is an important core belief. 

And when we compromise this belief, when we create an adaptive behavior by camouflaging, then we are not being our true selves and we begin to hide ourselves.  I discuss more about core beliefs. Here. (The 4 Core Beliefs Your Need to Live an Extraordinary Life and How to Improve Them).

Zapped: From Whole to Cocooned

You love yourself.  It’s one of the core beliefs.  I am loving and lovable.  I also have added to my own beliefs in the last three weeks, “I am amazing, just the way I am.”  My belief outfit, is Bruno Mars, singing “You are amazing, just the way you are.”  This just happens to also be one of my favorite songs that I like to send to Angela in a what’s app text. I just sent the video (here) to her just now.

However, as a child, we grew up with people judging things like grades and trophies. “They didn’t seem to care about what you loved to do, as much they cared about how good you were at doing it.  Slowly the worry, the doubt, and the anxiety began to creep in….you started to feel like who you were depended on what you did.  Instead of feeling confident in who you were, you felt like you weren’t good enough….All of this made you feel vulnerable, hurt your confidence, and damaged your belief in yourself, until you began to protect your image.  You began to Cocoon yourself and stopped taking chances, in order to avoid being criticized.  When you’re Whole, everything you need is inside you.  When you Cocoon yourself, no one sees the beauty on the inside.”

When you Cocoon yourself, you start to not like yourself and also think that no one else will like you.  This is often when we lose our inner child or stop loving ourselves.  When doing inner child work, I often find people’s inner child in closets, in rooms playing by themselves, under boxes, in deep holes. 

One of the critical skills in developing the Salience core brain network is learning how to love yourself again and also how to be self-compassionate with ourselves.  This is the foundation of how I found my inner loving world as I wrote here (Creating a Loving Inner World). I also believe forgiving yourself via Ho’oponopono is another good practice.

This is my Golden Buddha Radiating My Inner Loving World.

Zapped: From Energized to Fried

When you are in the flow you are energized.  You wake up, do your morning routine, and do the hardest thing for the day first (eat the frog).  You are working and before you know it, it’s time for lunch or dinner and you feel so exhilarated.  Work feels like play and play is play.

However, for many of us when we were young, we started to feel drained from the pressure of people telling us what to do, when to do it, and how to be.  We lost our curiosity.  We were overscheduled.  We were over-Everythinged. LOL.  Eventually, you just wanted to stay home and do nothing.  You were fried.

As adults, we experience this as burnout.  In a 2018 Gallup of 7500 workers,  23% experienced burnout all the time; while an additional 44% experienced burnout some of the times. Burnout contributes to diabetes, heart disease, GI issues, cholesterol, and even death.    

Zapped: from Resilience to Iced

When we were younger we were able to bounce back from challenges.  We got and fell down 10,000 times or so it felt before we learned to walk and instead of taking ginger steps, we ran at full speed after we learned to walk only a few steps and fell and got right up and did it again.

At some point, we got zapped as kids and we stopped trying.  We began to feel afraid to put our hands up in class, we were afraid to meet new people, or try out for teams.  We stopped wanting to try new things unless we were guaranteed 100% success.  And when we stop trying, we cannot grow and we become frozen as people.

As adults, we also can get iced.  We often get overwhelmed with stress.  Often we become traumatized from divorce, moving around often, fired from a job, or the death of someone.  We end up feeling hopeless and helpless. 

I wrote about my own recovery from hopelessness here (How I Discovered and Fixing My Biggest Self Sabotaging Belief—Kryptonite Padlocks).  If you are like me, you might be feeling and saying phrases like:

1. I give up.

2. It doesn’t matter what you do, why bother trying. Or just Why bother trying?

3. It’s not worth it, why bother trying. Or just, It’s not worth it.

I have found that many of us as adults experience this sense of hopelessness at some point in our lives.  When you are in this kind of grief or a sense of hopelessness, you can stay stuck in this trauma.  The trauma does not have to be PTSD. 

However, it has very similar effects on us as adults and until we are able to allow the trauma to move through its full experience (via Dr. Gabor Mate style or Dr. Levine style (the Body Knows the Score)), we are unable to move on with our lives and to live the life of our dreams.

Superpowered = Core Networks?

The whole notion of hopelessness and being Iced or Fried made me think about correlating these superpowers to the 5 core brain networks.  If you recall, the 5 main core networks are Awareness/Analytical, Imagination, Salience (the Love Network), Motivation, and Emotion. I wrote about this here. (How Are You Faring In Your Self-Development: The Self Development Wheel Measures Your Mind)  

What if being iced related to having the inability to use our emotional networks to be more psychologically flexible?  And this got me going down the road of correlating the Core Networks to the Superpowers.

• When we are Iced, we are no longer Resilient and we shut down the use of our Emotion networks. 

• When we are Fried, we are no longer Energized and we are shut down the Motivation network.

• When we are  Camouflaged, or not being Original, we are shutting down using our Imagination network. 

• When we are What-iffing, we are no longer Present, we are not using our Awareness network.

• When we are Cocooned, we are no longer Whole (Loving), we are not using our Salience network.

Gifts from the Universe

These superpowers probably correspond to some part of the brain.  These superpowers are our gifts from the universe, gifts we were born with and we really did lose them along the way.  Part of personal self-development is going back to restoring these gifts. 

It is why, for example, why techniques to reclaim the Inner Child is so powerful.  When we reclaim the Inner Child, we help to restore these gifts that the Inner Child had and can now access again.  This is all my theory, however, it just makes sense to me.

It is true that Resilience could be more related to, say, hopelessness, and having the Motivation network being shut down.  That is possible.  However, I think the important thing is to realize that there is a relationship of the shutting down of parts of our core networks when we become “zapped” and we lose one of our original superpowers.

The Shutting Down of My Core Networks

This is really the essence of everything which I have learned over the last 2 years.  The core networks of mine were undeveloped or parts were really shut down.  

My salience network was shut down.  I didn’t know how to love myself, I didn’t know how to have self-compassion for myself.  I didn’t know how to forgive myself. 

My emotional networks were shut down.  I remember distinctly when I couldn’t even cry for years and celebrated the day I forced myself to cry.  I have worked on my emotional systems via RIM and I still am in the process of writing about what I learned there. 

My ability to be present left me.  I was always in my head, calculating and projecting and what-iffing.  So I was not aware of my thoughts or emotions.

I hardly used my imagination for creating things.  I had developed my analytical network so much, I was able to survive in the world with that network operating and my motivation network.  However, when my motivation network got shutdown via hopelessness, I was left with only my analytical network operating.  This was not enough to get me through life and my life collapsed.

Reactivating the Core Networks—My SuperPowers

Through a variety of programs, I was able to reactivate the networks. 

Awareness Network or being Present got reactivated via Canfield and his 100% Responsibility via E + R = O.  I also learned by observing my thoughts and behaviors to be more positive.  I wrote about this here. (Once You Take 100% Responsibility for the Words and Pictures in Your Mind, Your Life will Never Be the Same.)   

My imagination network was opened up by learning to set objectives and use creative visualization.  However, it really opened up fully with RIM and Clear Beliefs in practicing with the imaginal realm.   

I learned how to reactivate the salience network by learning how to have self-love. (which I referred to above) and self-compassion (I wrote about this here.  If you are a mammal, you will choose self-compassion over self-criticism).

My motivation network was reopened with RIM when I unlocked the padlocks as described above in the section on Hopelessness.

My emotions were opened up with the entire RIM Process and to become emotionally aware and speak with the unconscious process.

The Subconscious Process Still In Control

However, while the networks were activated, until I dealt with the reasons why they were shut down in the first place, I still had the networks operating as if they had the brakes on.

The original limiting beliefs that had shut down the networks were pushing in one direction, while I had learned to resuscitate these core networks as an adult, and this was pushing in the direction I wanted to go.  However, it was still a tug of war.  One direction wanted to move forward, my limiting beliefs were pulling me in the opposite direction.

Fortunately, I had become aware of the effects of the subconscious mind in operating my life. (see here.  The Missing Link For Most People to  Improve Their Lives)  So it was important to work on the subconscious level to release the breaks.

Self-Identity, Beliefs, and Values

In a recent article, Beliefs: The Difference that Makes All the Difference (click here), I wrote about why it was necessary to not only create new beliefs but also necessary to get rid of old beliefs.  Your future self-identity is changed by your future goals.  Based on your future goals, you create the type of person who becomes the person who can create these goals. 

How you operate, i.e., your values and your beliefs determine the person who you will become.  Please click on the above article and read these concepts because they are important in understanding why you want to do the next steps.

Often, in childhood, we have not only shut down the core networks and take on adaptive behaviors, we also take on beliefs and values that will shape our self-identity. 

So in order to change from our current selves to our future selves, the person who can obtain our dreams, desires, and hopes, we need to change the beliefs of our current selves to the beliefs of our future selves. 

However, too often, we change only our future beliefs and still leave the old beliefs.  This creates conflict in our selves.  One side pushing forward and the other side moving in the opposite direction as dictated by the past.

Resolution of Our Past

In order to resolve this push and pull within ourselves, it is easiest done when we go back and resolve the issue that occurred in childhood that shut down our core networks and gave us the new adaptive behaviors. 

At the same time, we are resolving the issue, we can consciously find the limiting belief (e.g. I am a failure), discreate it, and replace it with a new empowering belief.

The resolving of the issues that shut down the core network and the belief do not need to resolve at the same time.  However, it is important for you to be aware that the two items i.e. reactivation of the core network and discreate the old belief and replacing it with a new one, need to happen.  It is quite possible that affirmations and doing new behaviors and habits will “override” the old limiting belief.  However, it’s easier not to drive with the brakes on the car.

We will discuss more about restoring the superpowers in Part II of our review.

Action Items:

1.       Look through these 5 Superpowers and Identify if you lost any or some of your superpowers.  

2.       Think about the adaptive behaviors you may have created.

3.       How has the loss of the superpower and the adaptive behavior affected your entire life from the point it was created until today?