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The Embodiment of Freedom, Part Two

From the traditional scientific viewpoint, people are observable, manipulable objects. Traditional doctors study people’s bodies; traditional psychologists study people’s minds. From the somatic viewpoint, people are more than just bodies understandable and approachable on a bio-physical level, and minds understandable and approachable on a psycho-social level. We are equally self-sensing, self-moving, self-aware, self-expressing, self-responsible subjects–we are somas. Somas who not only are shaped by their relations with the environment and other people in observable ways, but who also profoundly affect their own state of functioning through subjective beliefs, expectations, and through the power of their own self-awareness. Hanna and Wilber would agree that the first-person perspective discloses unique data, complimenting the third-person view of the human being, making it possible to move toward an integral understanding that recognizes the whole human.

Experientially-oriented therapy and somatic education are two distinct approaches with a common goal: to help people to move from an inefficient, unfulfilling, unhealthy mode of functioning to one of increased efficiency, fulfillment and health. That is to say, both approaches aim for transformation of the whole-person. On the surface, it appears each addresses separate levels of human experience, somatics being about improving people’s bodily functioning while therapy works to better psychological functioning. While the terms bodily and psychological do indeed refer to qualitatively distinct modes of experience, they are quite inseparable at both the structural and functional levels. As Hanna noted, all human experience–whether perceived as thinking, feeling, tasting, seeing or jumping–is a reflection of the functioning of the entire human soma, which is coordinated by the processes of the central nervous system.

As we discussed, from an objective vantage point, all our perceptions of self and world are routed through our brains via sensory nerves, while all our movements in the world and inside ourselves flow out from our brain down the spine via motor nerves. We saw how, through intelligent use one’s self-sensing abilities, a state of sensory-motor amnesia in a given area could be reversed by somatic learning. The implications that this understanding has for the field of psychology become evident when we consider the various qualities of psychological experience in their rootedness to this very same sensorimotor system. In fact, psychological modes of expression, such as thinking, verbalizing, and imagining, can all be understood in terms of the somatic process of movement, while the psychological constructs of self-consciousness and self-awareness can be understood in terms of the somatic process of self-sensing.

At first blush, such an understanding might appear reductionistic, but as we consider this perspective in light of both scientific (third-person) and somatic (first-person) data, we’ll see how such an understanding can only add to the psychological view and vice versa. If one understands that all self-expression manifests as the autonomous movement of living bodies (somas), then many of the characteristic problems plaguing contemporary society–typical forms of stress, fatigue, back pain, depression, anxiety—can be seen as the result of individuals’ diminished capacity for movement. This is easy to see when we’re looking at so-called physical problems, like back pain, but things get a little slippery when we consider mental processes, like thinking.

Integrating first and third person perspectives, Hanna [in his groundbreaking book Somatics] noted several studies investigating the relationship between thinking and motor activity. Edmund Jacobson, who developed the clinical procedure called progressive relaxation, conducted research that showed: 1) when subjects engaged in abstract thinking, speech muscles were predominantly activated, and 2) all mental activity decreased to the degree that muscle tension decreased. In another study, researchers found that subjects were ineffective in mentally focusing on anything while all their muscles were paralyzed (by a curare-type drug that did not cause any lapse of consciousness).

Roland Davis found that when subjects worked out multiplication problems “in their head,” the muscles of the subject’s dominant hand moved as if he or she were writing. Working with a subject who reported auditory hallucinations, F.J. McGuigan found that, using electrodes placed about the subject’s speech muscles, there was a subtle, ongoing movement in these muscles beginning precisely when the subject reported hearing the voices (as if the subject were actually speaking to himself!). These and many other scientific studies suggest an undeniable connection between mental activity that is perceived as being “in our minds,” and motor activity going on “in our bodies.” Neurophysiologist Roger W. Sperry has gone as far as to conclude that the entire output of the human thinking mechanism goes into the motor system, so that when people think, they are activating motor neurons [Hanna, Somatics].

Hanna put it this way: “thinking is movement–actual movement of the living body.” He further noted that whenever we sense anything, what we are sensing is movement of some form. We often speak of being emotionally moved by an experience to communicate that we’re feeling or sensing some emotion. However, when one makes themselves as hard as stone through intense contractedness, one becomes to that degree immovable in terms of emotional experience. Since emotions are a variety of psychological experience with such clear ties to bodily-felt sensations, it is relatively easy to understand how one’s psychological awareness of an emotion is really not other than one’s bodily sense of that emotion. In other words, the knowledge or awareness that “I am angry” is possible only to the extent that I feel or sense certain changes in my bodily experience–perhaps an increase in heartbeat, the hairs of my neck standing on end, muscle areas clenching. Likewise, the bodily movements associated with that sense can be understood as an expression of that sense/awareness. Pissed off, I might express myself with a frown and clenched fists; or I might be moved to scream or pound my fists on something (hopefully not someone). And as we have seen, to suppress emotional expression is to dull our capacity to sense or to be aware of our feelings. So, in terms of emotionality, we can see how sensori-motor association is essentially the same thing as awareness-expression association.

The point of all this is to support the following notion: many of the physical as well as psychological problems characteristic of contemporary society will continue to be poorly understood and ineffectively approached until the somatic foundations of human experience are taken more fully into account. This somatic/experiential perspective, which has been outlined above, is a point of view which takes into account both third-person and first-person data, and thus has much to offer the traditional paradigm of human health, which relies rather exclusively on a third-person perspective.

At the core of this somatic/experiential understanding are the somatic processes of self-movement and self-sensing. The idea here is that many of the diseases plaguing modern people are best understood not as psychological disorders where our minds are out of whack, nor as physical problems of bodies falling apart; rather, we are faced with functional disorders that are the result of people’s diminished capacity to sense the state of their own somatic functioning and subsequent inability/unwillingness to move from that embodied awareness. Hanna sums it up nicely:

In functional disorders, what is required is not the exchange of words with the “mind,” nor is it the exchange of chemicals and substances with the “body.” The requirement is a change in the living system’s awareness of its own functioning. The somatic system needs more information of itself and more efficient control. In sum, the distorted human soma needs new sensory information and new motor control. [Somatics]

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The Embodiment of Freedom

At some point it occurred to me that my whole point of view, my basic mode of experiencing life, would shift during certain moments from a dissociated, half-alive, going through the motions type thing, to a wakeful, clear-minded, energized state of pure awesomeness. Basically, I became fascinated by my peak experiences. There seemed to be a quality about them that was not dependent on content or context. In other words I felt like the same process was happening regardless of what I was doing. I got the funny feeling that I was peaking or “peeking” into the same place, or entering the same state of consciousness, whether I was hitting a groove on the guitar, entering “the zone” on the athletic field, writing a poem or a song, having great sex, communing with nature on a hike, or getting showered with insight during meditation.

My master’s thesis was really nothing more than a sustained inquiry into this process of personal transformation, which I defined as a shift in one’s basic mode of experiencing toward greater vitality, awareness and expressiveness. I found that various theorists and practitioners understood transformation in different ways, but I also noticed a common thread between the approaches that moved me the most. Psychologists interested in transformation talked about the movement from unconsciousness to consciousness; the spiritual folks spoke of the journey from ignorance to awareness or enlightenment; creative thinkers were interested in moving from inside to outside “the box”; somatic practitioners worked toward refinement of sensitivity and an expanded range of movement.

It was the somatic perspective, I thought, that could ground an integral, multilevel understanding of the transformative process. I was searching for some basic principles of transformation with which I could generate a unique set of practices, in a sense building an Integral Health regimen from the ground up. I appreciated the maps of others, but I yearned to wander from the well-worn paths, to know the joy of making my own way through the wilderness. I also felt that the somatic perspective, especially as understood by Thomas Hanna, had the potential to radically transform our understanding of both psychological health and spiritual growth. I couldn’t shake the feeling that if these loftier endeavors were plugged into an understanding of somatic education, they would become far more efficacious paths, less prone to pitfalls.

Hanna rejected the distinction between psychological and physical problems, instead using the term “functional problem” to describe limitations of the unified organism in its capacity for both self-sensing and self-expression. Central nervous system functioning is fundamental to all behavior and experience, according to Hanna. Ken Wilber would agree with this, although he would point out that psychological and spiritual levels of being are more “significant.” In any event, from a somatic viewpoint, there’s no separation of psychological from physical health, and the majority of the typical “mental” and “physical” diseases of our society are learned as people adapt to a culture that supports dissociation and alienation.

So, if we want to ground our understanding of transformation in the living body, we can start with the most fundamental aspect of the central nervous system–the division between sensory and motor processes. Our perceptions of the world outside our bodies, as well as our perceptions of our internal bodily states, come into the brain via sensory nerves. And every action we express, every movement we make in the world and inside our selves flows out from our brain and down through the spine by way of motor nerves. This structural division is functionally integrated within a single neural system, the brain integrating the incoming sensory information with outgoing commands to the motor system.

The continual interplay of sensory information and motor guidance is referred to in contemporary neuroscience as a feed back system which operates in loops. As Hanna describes it, “the sensory nerves ‘feedback’ information to the motor nerves, whose response ‘loops back’ with the movement commands along the motor nerves. As movement takes place, the motor nerves ‘feedback’ new information to the sensory nerves.” Acknowledging that there are indeed physical and psychological problems that are the result of structural deformity and/or physiological imbalance, Hanna argues that many of the health problems afflicting people today are not about bodies or minds breaking down, but about individuals who have lost conscious control of their somatic functions. These functional problems are ones in which the person suffers from a loss of memory: the memory of what it feels like to move in certain ways, and the memory of how to go about moving in certain ways. This type of memory loss is what Hanna calls sensory-motor amnesia, a state of diminished self-awareness that is quite reversible–that is to say, a state that can be transformed.

Sensory-motor amnesia involves a dual loss of both conscious control of a particular area of motor action and conscious sensing of that motor action. As the human organism adapts to repeated stressful conditions, whether resulting from cultural conditioning or from uncontrived environmental circumstances (like extreme ecological conditions or biophysical trauma), there is a loss of conscious voluntary control of specific somatic functions. For example, faced with the stress of ridicule and/or punishment for crying or screaming out in public, the sad or angry child will contract certain motor areas of the soma (i.e., muscles) in an effort to hold back their authentic response. Crying or yelling out simply cannot happen when the corresponding muscle systems are held motionless, because crying and yelling are the movements of those motor areas. As this stressful response of contraction is activated again and again in similar situations, the response eventually becomes habituated and the child loses awareness of it (i.e., the muscle contractions can no longer be consciously sensed) and control of it (i.e., the child cannot voluntarily relax the contractions). The child has been successfully conditioned not to emote in public.

This innate tendency of human beings to develop automatic, unconscious responses in the face of stressful stimuli (i.e. the process of conditioning) was well documented by researchers such as Pavlov and Skinner. Hanna describes the loss of conscious volitional control as sensori-motor amnesia so as to emphasize two essential facts: 1) habituated, involuntary responses, like all somatic processes, are a reflection of sensori-motor functioning, and 2) what becomes unconscious, forgotten, or unlearned, can become conscious again, remembered, and re-learned. Thus, sensori-motor amnesia can be reversed by somatic learning.

Somatic learning is a process that results in the expansion of an organism’s range of volitional consciousness. This process takes advantage of the feedback/loop nature of the sensori-motor system and is described by Hanna in the following way:

“If one focuses one’s awareness on an unconscious, forgotten area of the soma, one can begin to perceive a minimal sensation that is just sufficient to direct a minimal movement, and this, in turn, gives new sensory feedback of that area which, again, gives a new clarity of movement, etc. This sensory feedback associates with adjacent sensory neurons, further clarifying the synergy that is possible with the associated motor neurons. This makes the next motor effort inclusive of a wider range of associated voluntary neurons, thus broadening and enhancing the motor action and, thereby, further enhancing the sensory feedback. This back-and-forth motor procedure gradually ‘wedges’ the amnesic area back into the range of volitional control: the unknown becomes known and the forgotten becomes relearned.”

So it is that a diminished state of self-awareness and a diminished range of conscious responsiveness can expand and transform at the basic level of sensor-motor functioning. Our emotionally inhibited child, now an adult, can learn to pay focused and sustained attention to subtle sensations in the forgotten contracted muscle areas and thereby recover in awareness the sense of being perpetually held back and fatigued. With this awareness that “I’m contracting my muscles” and “I’m holding myself back,” comes the realization that one can now begin to relax those inhibitions.

Although I’ve chosen to illustrate this transformative process with what would normally be considered a “psychological” example–the emotionally inhibited person–, the practice of somatic education (as typified by Hanna’s work and Feldenkrais’s Functional Integration) is normally applied to what are thought of more as “physical” problems. Middle-aged to older adults with gross-level range of motion restrictions or distortions, often the result of trauma or injury, are more typically the clients of somatic therapies. Many people who seek out and engage in somatic practices are primarily looking to feel better and healthier on a physical level, not especially considering the implications the work has for whole-person growth and healing.

The psychological implications of “body work,” although increasing evident and acknowledged, seem to be less than adequately understood. The example of the emotionally inhibited person hints at how an understanding of sensori-motor function can contribute greatly to psychological perspectives of personal transformation and vice versa. An integral viewpoint promises a deeper understanding of how various transformative practices can be utilized in a complimentary fashion to most effectively support an individual’s capacities for self-regulation, health and growth. This integral understanding also allows for the articulation of basic principles that can be applied to any number of experiences and life situations, principles that anyone can use to create their own unique practices and approaches to personal transformation.

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The Spiritual Atheist: Sam Harris’s “Experiments in Consciousness”

There are so many terms in the English language that fall flat from the weight of excessive baggage and unfortunate associations, but we’re especially hampered when discussing what theologian Paul Tillich called our “ultimate concern”—namely religion/spirituality. You see I’ve already blown it, putting the words together like that with a slash. Of the two, I prefer the word “religion”, because of its etymological elegance [re (again) + ligare (bind, connect) = “to reconnect”]. “Spirituality” evokes images of ghosts and New Age bookstores, and to me sounds a bit wishy-washy and disembodied. But then again, in terms of common usage (and practice), “religion” hardly seems connected at all to the cultivation of rarefied states of being.

For my money, the best adjective we have available when talking about experiences of the farthest reaches of human consciousness is not religious, spiritual, or mystical, but rather transpersonal—a term probably first used by William James, but nonetheless later associated with the likes of Abraham Maslow and Carl Jung. Unfortunately, Maslow’s bold vision of establishing a fully rational yet visionary branch of psychology to explore what he called peak experiences has, in my opinion, failed to live up to its promise. As in the human potential movement in general, once the originators and visionaries of humanistic and transpersonal psychology (Maslow, Rogers, Jung, et al) passed away, those who took the baton lost their grip and fumbled it. Perhaps they’ve gone too far in their commitment to define themselves as “outside the mainstream”, but whatever the case, the field has come to embrace too many fuzzy-minded New Age theories and practices, making it hard for a hyper-rational guy like me to stand behind it. But that’s another blog post.

Ironically, one of the people who I think is doing the best job of articulating a rational approach to transpersonal experience is the “New Atheist” Sam Harris. Harris has appeared so often in the media since his book The End of Faith came out in 2005, it’s easy to form an opinion about him without having actually read this signature work of his. But those who have read it will have noticed his strong affirmation of transpersonal experience in the book’s final chapter (Experiments in Consciousness). What I appreciate most about Harris’s approach is the way he demystifies spiritual experience by talking about in terms of attention and well-being:

“At the core of every religion lies an undeniable claim about the human condition; it is possible to have one’s experience of the world radically transformed. Although we generally live within the limits imposed by our ordinary uses of attention—we wake, we work, we eat, we watch television, we converse with others, we sleep, we dream—most of us know, however dimly, that extraordinary experiences are possible.”

So the distinction between our everyday personal experiences and the more extraordinary, deep, trans-personal experiences (experiences most of us have at least glimpsed and that give us the feeling of being connected to something greater than or beyond or transcendent to the confines of our personal egos) is simply a matter of how we use our attention. As Jon Kabat-Zinn has done in his work with mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), Harris articulates the essence of spiritual practice (namely Buddhist-style meditation, which Harris has studied and practiced for many years) in universal, common-sense terms, stripped of religious and traditional associations:

“[Meditation] merely requires that a person pay extraordinarily close attention to his moment-by-moment experience of the world. There is nothing irrational about doing this. In fact, it constitutes the only rational basis for making detailed claims about the nature of our subjectivity. Through meditation, a person can come to observe the flow of his experience with remarkable clarity, and this sometimes results in a variety of insights that people tend to find both intellectually credible and personally transformative.”

While Harris makes it clear that experimenting with different methods of modifying our habitual uses of attention is very much a worthwhile endeavor, he takes pains to stress that such a project does not, in principle, need to have anything to do with either religious or New Age belief systems:

“The history of human spirituality is the history of our attempts to explore and modify the deliverances of consciousness through methods like fasting, chanting, sensory deprivation, prayer, meditation, and the use of psychotropic plants. There is no question that experiments of this sort can be conducted in a rational manner. Indeed, they are some of our only means of determining to what extent the human condition can be deliberately transformed. Such an enterprise becomes irrational only when people begin making claims about the world that cannot be supported by empirical evidence.”

So there you have it. One of the “Four Horsemen” (along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett) of the so-called New Atheist movement spent the final chapter of his religion-trashing opus validating spiritual—er I mean transpersonal—experience! In fact, the book’s concluding paragraph, from which the title was extracted, could have been written by Maslow himself. Well, except for maybe the final sentence:

“While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it. Clearly, it must be possible to bring reason, spirituality, and ethics together in our thinking about the world. This would be the beginning of a rational approach to our deepest personal concerns. It would also be the end of faith.”

I’m looking forward to reading Harris’s latest work, The Moral Landscape, as it promises to flesh out his vision of an appropriately 21st century pursuit of global well-being. Now that’s a project I have no trouble standing behind.

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Charles Tart & Shinzen Young: Progress in Meditation?

Dr. Charles T. TartShinzen YoungEarlier this week one of my former professors, Charles Tart (affectionately known as Charley), shared a fascinating exchange on his blog between himself and meditation teacher Shinzen Young. Charley presented Shinzen with an issue that’s coming up in his meditation practice:

“The problem. A feeling of having reached a plateau, where my meditation and mindfulness practice is OK, I’m glad I can be more mindful and will continue to practice it intermittently, but it’s not a Big Deal, it doesn’t directly motivate me to want to put in a lot of time…”

I can totally relate to this, having spent the past fifteen years or so practicing meditation intermittently, whenever the spirit moves me, so to speak (which could mean every day, or a couple of times a week, or a few times a month). While I know there might be benefits to doing some sort of formal sitting practice everyday, when it comes down to it I’m just not motivated to take more time away from the many other things that bring me joy and satisfaction. As Charley puts it:

“At the end of a session I’m usually glad I did it, it’s mildly satisfying – but so is a good cup of coffee, a nice walk, writing a paper, etc. That is, I’m not getting direct feelings that there’s some special satisfaction from meditating, so I’m not motivated to meditate much more.”

Shinzen’s response was really interesting, and is worth quoting in full:

“I think part of the problem is from Buddhism itself. Most Buddhist literature gives one the impression that the path is supposed to involve some big spiritual orgasm that happens suddenly and changes one forever. The reason that Buddhist teachers (including myself ) talk about the path in this way is that occasionally something like that does actually happen. When it does, it’s quite dramatic. However, it’s been my experience that for most people who practice meditation, it doesn’t happen that way. Rather the changes are gradual, so gradual that people acclimatize to them and don’t really realize how much they’ve changed.
The other problem is that the changes are not necessarily best measured by insights that occur, but rather in most cases best measured by the amount of suffering that a person would have gone through but didn’t go through because of the path. But since that measure is both hypothetical and a measure of absence, it’s difficult for most people to realize how HUGE it really is.
So I would say don’t worry if you’re not getting epiphanies. Your practice as you describe it is just fine.”

The idea that progress can often be both hypothetical and a measure of absence is something that’s occurred to me lately in the context of my physical exercise routine. I was just telling my wife how I’m somewhat disappointed in how little I’ve seemed to gain from this past month or so of really disciplined exercising. Based on how my body responded to exercise when I was younger, I figured that by now I’d be seeing some difference in the way I look with my shirt off, at the very least. But that middle-aged-looking flab that’s crept into my midsection is still hanging on, and perhaps even making gains. My wife reminded me that, had I not been exercising so much lately, perhaps I’d be even more flabby! For some reason this “hypothetical, measure of absence” type of progress is not very inspiring! At least it’s not as motivating as the kind of good ol’ positive results you can see in the mirror.

As Charley brings up, meditation is a little tricker, because there’s this “promise” that if you keep up a disciplined practice for long enough, you just might get rewarded with the ultimate prize of spiritual enlightenment. Of course, you also might not get enlightened no matter how much you practice, or you might be meditating in a less-than-ideal way for years before catching yourself, or you might get suddenly enlightened without having to practice much at all. It’s almost as if too many secrets have been let out of the bag when it comes to spiritual practices. For instance, how can one earnestly pursue a Zen koan when one already knows, from reading Alan Watts or whatever, that one only really “gets” the answer after giving up trying? Knowing the punch line in advance robs you of the genuine belly laugh. It’s like knowing for certain that you’ve just taken a placebo. It’s probably not going to work its magic.

Then again, maybe it’s good to drop all expectations when it comes to meditation. After all, it’s really about dropping into the present moment and learning to hang out there with attentiveness and curiosity. In that state of mind, one can allow whatever happens to happen, without resisting or grasping, and that’s its own reward.

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Erich Fromm interviewed by Mike Wallace, 1958

The Society for Humanistic Psychology blog posted the following video of Erich Fromm being interviewed by Mike Wallace in 1958. [A complete transcript of the interview can be accessed via the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin) website.] A couple of things stuck me as I watched this fascinating exchange. First, Fromm’s essential critique of modern society is as relevant today as it was fifty years ago. Second, I find it difficult to imagine any news program today featuring this kind of in-depth, philosophical discussion. We’ll see weeks of non-stop news coverage on say, the death of Michael Jackson, but when it comes to exchanging thoughtful perspectives on our most pressing societal problems, we’re offered little more than partisan sound-bites and propaganda disguised as journalism.

The program below is introduced as a “Special series discussing the problems of survival and freedom in America”. Mike Wallace begins by saying that his aim in talking with Fromm is to “try to measure the impact of our free society on us as individuals. Whether we’re as happy as we like to think we are, or as free to think and to feel.” Imagine Bill O’Reilly or Brian Williams or Katie Couric devoting an entire program to such questions! These kinds of questions are incredibly important, yet conspicuously absent from public discourse. In terms of Integral Health, it is simply impossible to understand individual health and happiness without understanding the way our individual lives are shaped by societal forces.

During the discussion, Fromm talks about the “marketing orientation” of the American citizenry of the 1950s: “Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality – or as one says sometimes, our ‘personality package’ – for something.” Fromm (I’m paraphrasing here) goes on to describe modern social relationships as shallow, with real intimacy being hidden by a superficial friendliness. He suggests that the average American is only genuinely concerned with private affairs, never losing sleep about the pressing societal problems which threaten our very existence. He says the average person prefers to leave such things to specialists in the government, talking about problems shown on the news with friends and coworkers, but with no more sense of urgency than one would talk about a car that needs repair. Fromm asserts that, despite our apparent preoccupation with it, true love remains a relatively rare phenomenon. He laments that it is all too common that the most important things we talk about on Sundays are the very things that we pay relatively little attention to in our everyday lives. Again, he’s talking about life in the 1950s, but it’s easy to be struck with how little things have changed, at least in many respects. Like when he says: “I think our danger is that we talk one thing, and we feel and act another thing. I mean, we talk about equality, about happiness, about freedom – and about the spiritual values of religion, and about God – and in our daily life, we act on principles which are different, and partly contradictory.”

Speaking of the “religious renaissance” he was seeing back then, Fromm describes it as “the greatest danger that true religious experience has ever been confronted with.” He goes on to say that man today, being concerned with production and consumption as ends in themselves, has very little energy and time to devote himself to the true religious experience, which Fromm defines (in response to Wallace) as “the capacity to feel deep love and oneness with others and nature.” Wallace also asks Fromm to define “happiness” and “democracy”. Regarding happiness, Fromm offers: “People today seem to define happiness as the experience of unlimited consumption. Happiness should be something which results from the creative, genuine, intense relatedness – awareness, responsiveness, to everything in life – to man, to nature.” Regarding democracy he says: “Democracy once meant an organizational society and a state, in which the individual citizen is – feels – responsible, and acts responsibly, and participates in decision-making. I think what democracy means today, in reality, is to a large extent, manipulated consent – not forced consent, manipulated consent -and manipulated more and more with the help of Madison Avenue.” Fromm adds, “We have a mass man, a mass bureaucracy, a manipulation of everyone to act smoothly but with an illusion that he follows his own decisions and opinions.”

Fromm gives Wallace–and the people watching this ABC News Special–a lot to chew on. Again, I think many of Fromm’s concerns and observations are just as relevant today as they were fifty years ago. Without further ado:



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Mindfulness training in elementary schools

Elisha Goldstein posted the following video on his Mindfulness and Psychotherapy blog. It’s very heartening for me to see this type of mindfulness training being offered to children at such a young age.

Mindful Schools, a community outreach program of Park Day School in Oakland, CA, seems to base their training on the principles of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR model (adapting it to the context of elementary school). According to the news story above, Park Day School (a private school) paid for the training to be offered to students at nearby Emerson Elementary School (a public school serving many economically disadvantaged kids). Ah, sweet hope! I would love to be involved in this kind of work one day.

Elisha Goldstein also did an interview with Susan Kaiser Greenland a few months back on the topic of teaching mindfulness meditation to children. This is a very positive trend as far as I’m concerned.

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Understanding addiction

It seems reasonable to assume that if you want to know about a given topic, a good place to start is by checking out what the leading experts in the field have to say about it. For instance, if you google the word “addiction,” you pretty quickly are led to HBO’s Addiction Project site, which contains loads of information backed by such heavy-weights as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). So what is addiction, according to the leading experts?

Addiction is a chronic relapsing brain disease. Brain imaging shows that addiction severely alters brain areas critical to decision-making, learning and memory, and behavior control, which may help to explain the compulsive and destructive behaviors of addiction.

Ah yes, the brain. The three pound hunk of tofu that is the ultimate source of all problems and all answers. (Deep, prolonged sigh.) Of course it’s true that any human behavior or experience can be understood in terms of neurobiology and brain states, and it’s also pretty clear that this understanding is valuable and worth pursuing. But it simply doesn’t follow—in theory or in practice—that therefore dysfunctional behaviors and experiences are neurobiological diseases. In our everyday lives, we take for granted that human life is complicated and plays out on many levels. And long before “neuroplasticity” became a buzz word, we already knew that what we do, how we use our attention, and how we relate to one another affects the quality of our lives (and the structure and function of our bodies/brains).

I worked on a chemical dependency unit in a psychiatric hospital for several years, and I’m fairly certain that most of the professional staff would accept information provided by NIDA (and most everything on the HBO site) uncritically, as I’m sure it fits seamlessly with what they learned in graduate school. But young people tend to question everything, and the patients I worked with were anywhere from 12 to 18 years old. Part of my job was to lead educational discussion groups with these kids several times a week. I also accompanied them to Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings several times a week. These kids constantly questioned staff members about all the contradictions they perceived between AA’s philosophy, the treatment center’s information packets, and their own life experiences. For the most part, the contradictions the kids brought up were crushed by the weight of authority, not cleared up by reasoned argument and explanation. I was quite often in the awkward position of covering for and/or attempting to recast the many misconceptions served up daily and repeatedly to patients, some of whom were desperate for accurate information. The kids (who were almost all cigarette smokers) would inevitably point out things like: “Nicotine is super addictive, right? Well, I personally know several people who quit smoking on their own, without any treatment centers or twelve step groups. So, why is everybody here telling me I can’t stop getting high on my own, that I’m powerless over the ‘disease of addiction’?”

As Stanton Peele (one of the few clear-thinking “leading experts” on addiction I’ve come across) has been pointing out for decades, addiction is and has always been politically and socially defined as much as it has been scientifically defined. Peele covers this ground thoroughly in his recent article The Fluid Concept of Smoking Addiction:

The neurobiological model of addiction is static. It is built on the difficulty – often stated as the near impossibility – of quitting or moderation. The model does not attempt to explain how (or, more accurately, why) people cease addictions – even though such cessation is more typical than not with every type drug. The neurobiological model really has nothing to say about why smokers quit (as a majority do), for example due to the pleading of a spouse or a child. In the terms of the model, cessation is unexpected, unexplained, unpredictable, and simply falls beyond its purview or boundaries.

I used an Integral Health framework to help my patients make sense of their substance abuse problems. In practice, our entire staff operated under the integral premise, i.e. that we must address every conceivable dimension of the patient’s life if we hope to make the most effective impact. Some patients, especially those who were heavy opiate users, were given (non-narcotic) drugs to deal with their withdrawal symptoms. Other than that, there was little about the treatment program that had anything to do with directly impacting brain chemistry. We helped patients become more aware of their thought patterns. We taught them healthy coping strategies to deal with the challenging situations and emotions that would inevitably continue to crop up in their lives. We brought their families in for counseling sessions. We contacted teachers, probation officers, judges—anyone who would be working with these kids once they were discharged back into their respective communities—and developed detailed aftercare plans. We covered all the bases, because we knew that substance abuse problems both develop and are potentially resolved in a multidimensional, bio-psycho-sociocultural context. Surely, most thoughtful people (including the folks at NIDA) know this to be true, and yet the “leading experts” continue to present their oversimplified, disingenuous “brain disease” model to the public (complete with brain scan images that often signify very little, and the obligatory lip-service footnote containing the term “biopsychosocial”). I confess, I’m not entirely sure why this is the case. I suspect it has something to do with how government and academic institutions secure their funds. The more influence the pharmaceutical industry has on research and policy processes, the more traction the brain disease model seems to get. And, of course, the public eats up (literally, in the case of pills) easy answers and quick-fix remedies that require as little life-style change and psychological work as possible.

So, although it may seem reasonable to rely on the opinions of leading experts in a given field, this doesn’t always hold true when it comes to the field of mental health. Integral and integrative understandings of addiction and other problems do exist, but they haven’t yet had the appeal and/or financial backing required to capture the imagination of either the leading experts or the general public.

On the bright side, I’m sure all this will change once I click the “Publish” button and everyone on the internet reads this blog post!

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Orgasm Inc.

It’s starting to become fashionable to call out the pharmaceutical industry for its corrupting influence on both the practice of health care and on the general public’s conception of what it means to be healthy. I, for one, think this ripping of Big Pharma is a good thing, a necessary thing, and a thing that’s been long overdue. As with our political system, the undue influence of corporate money is threatening not only the integrity of our health-related institutions (hospitals, university research centers, graduate school programs, etc.), but also the integrity of people’s bodies and psyches.

In an integral health model, moving toward optimal health is not possible without acknowledging, engaging with, and addressing all dimensions of our lives, including the dimension of social systems and institutions. And as long as corporate profit is the highest organizing principle of our health care institutions, our conceptions of health and well-being will be distorted accordingly, leading to interventions that can often cause more harm than good.

ORGASM INC., a new film by Liz Canner, “is a powerful look inside the medical industry and the marketing campaigns that are literally and figuratively reshaping our everyday lives around health, illness, desire — and that ultimate moment: orgasm.” Check out the trailer:

Orgasm Inc. Official Trailer from Astrea Media on Vimeo.

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Psychiatry’s sorry state

I just finished reading HEAD CASE: Can psychiatry be a science?, an excellent article by Louis Menand in the The New Yorker. The article makes clear what I’ve already come to realize over the last twenty years studying and working in the field of mental health — namely, that the field is a freakin’ mess. My field, the one referred to on those degrees I spent so much time and money on, is almost hopelessly mired in conflict-of-interest corruption, bad philosophy, and wrong-headed (although often well-intentioned) approaches to alleviating human suffering. The situation is almost hopeless I say, but despite the sorry state of the field, I continue to consider myself a psychologist at heart. And I’m getting tired of wallowing in the muck and mire of it all, tired of hearing myself whine about how stupid everyone must be not see things the way I see them.

So I’m making a concerted effort to be more constructive in my rantings and ravings instead of merely tearing into whatever pushes my buttons. I don’t want throw out the babies with the bath water, so to speak, because there’s usually some truth to be found in most perspectives. That’s the whole point of an integral approach to health, to weave together what’s useful so that problems can be approached more effectively.

The challenge though, is to figure out exactly which perspectives are appropriate or useful in what specific contexts, to articulate how various partial truths fit together into a comprehensive plan of action. I’m hoping to rise to that challenge in the coming weeks by diving deeper into this integral inquiry through engaging others’ perspectives, reflecting on my experiences, and writing about whatever struggles and insights come along the way.

I’ll sign off for today with what I think is the most interesting part of Menand’s piece, where he ventures into this integral territory with some provocative reflections:

Mental disorders sit at the intersection of three distinct fields. They are biological conditions, since they correspond to changes in the body. They are also psychological conditions, since they are experienced cognitively and emotionally—they are part of our conscious life. And they have moral significance, since they involve us in matters such as personal agency and responsibility, social norms and values, and character, and these all vary as cultures vary.

Many people today are infatuated with the biological determinants of things. They find compelling the idea that moods, tastes, preferences, and behaviors can be explained by genes, or by natural selection, or by brain amines (even though these explanations are almost always circular: if we do x, it must be because we have been selected to do x). People like to be able to say, I’m just an organism, and my depression is just a chemical thing, so, of the three ways of considering my condition, I choose the biological. People do say this. The question to ask them is, Who is the “I” that is making this choice? Is that your biology talking, too?