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The Embodiment of Freedom: An integral approach to optimal health and personal transformation (Part 5: The Technology of Alienation)

[See parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of the series]

It is important not to mistake the distinction between alienation and authenticity as a condemnation of the particular techniques that have supported the success and progress of a scientifically and technologically driven modern world. These techniques are, in-and-of-themselves, of neutral value. It’s the ways in which we integrate various techniques into our lives (the technology) that can either lead us either toward disconnection and diminished awareness or into levels of greater conscious connection and deeper self awareness, and these ways of responding to the challenges of life are shaped very early.

Beginning with the ways parents hold and touch their children, infants are learning how “to be” physically in the world. As they learn to mimic adults’ behavior, children are further educated on how to move and how not to move. Despite the potential for differences in this early upbringing, most young children are energetic, highly mobile, flexible, and authentically expressive beings. As children enter school, however, these tendencies are actively shaped like never before. As most of us have been schooled, children are typically made to sit in rigid desks for long periods of time. They must learn to ignore their natural inclinations as to how to move their bodies physically and express themselves verbally, expressing themselves only when some authority deems it acceptable and only in ways that are deemed acceptable. A child’s experience of fatigue, hunger, and excitement are brought into alignment with the pre-determined structure of the school day. Even during set periods for “free” expression, children are taught the “right way” to do everything, from throwing a ball to drawing a picture. Since kids’ developing sense of self-esteem is so wedded to the positive reinforcement they get for doing things “right,” expressing oneself in idiosyncratic ways is often met with discouragement from authority and ridicule from peers.

While peer groups exert relentless pressure to conform to the status quo, in the classroom bad grades are meted out to those who fail to do things “correctly,” and sometimes even physical punishment awaits those who allow their restlessness and bodily tensions to sneak out into their behavior. This training prepares children for life after school, where the organic rhythms of the body are regulated to fit the needs of the typical work situation. Food is eaten during a set lunch hour, one goes to the bathroom during scheduled breaks, and the range of overall body movement conforms to the prescribed limits of the given work setting. Johnson, in his book Body, summarizes this whole pattern of body-shaping as follows:

From infancy through old age we are taught to conform our bodies to external shapes. We learn to perform physical activities in specifically prescribed ways. We are rewarded for keeping quiet and controlling our bodily impulses. The implied meaning of these recurrent nonverbal messages is consistent with the explicit teachings: our bodies, with their feelings, impulses, and perceptions, are not to be trusted, and must be subjected to external controls to keep them from leading us astray. They must be trained to support the status quo.

The technology of alienation encourages individuals to exist in a state of continual repression, a dissociated state which truncates one’s depth of awareness as well as one’s range of responsiveness. This state of disembodiment manifests not only in a diminished and deadened sense of self, but also necessarily disembodies one’s relationships to others. Since we experience all situations in our lives with, through, and as bodily beings, to be dulled to our own bodily senses and feelings is to be dulled to the feelingful aspects of any relationship or situation we find ourselves in.

The dimension of consciousness that an alienated individual loses touch with is what humanistic psychologist Sidney Jourard called “somatic perception.” Jourard pointed out that people respond to all situations on a bodily-felt level, and that by perceiving subtle changes in the state of one’s bodily being, one can sense when a situation either enhances or diminishes the quality of one’s life. It’s on this embodied level that a little girl can tell which of the smiling adults in a room actually doesn’t like her; that we just “know” something is troubling a loved one, no matter how hard they try to hide it; that we simply get good or bad “vibes” about a particular situation. As a person loses the capacity to discern how situations affect him or her as an embodied being, it becomes all too easy to continue ways of living and relating that are not in one’s best interests. As Jourard put it:

When we repress the experience of our bodies, we not only reduce our experience of being alive, but, in order to protect ourselves from threatening pleasure and pain, we actually create circumstances by which we become stupid, that is, uninformed, in a peculiar, somatic way.

Thus, to the degree one lacks embodiment, one is ignorant of how to live situations in an authentic way.

As Johnson reminds us, authenticity is a word of Greek origin that originally meant “to do something oneself, to have a sense that one’s actions and feelings are one’s own.” When a person has a well-developed capacity for somatic perception, one is better suited to be one’s own authority on how to live in growth enhancing ways. This “sensual authority,” as Johnson calls it, comes directly from one’s sense of embodiment, and is precisely what is stripped away via the technology of alienation. When access to somatic perception is dulled, people progressively lose the necessary depth of awareness to possess a clear sense of how to be and what to do in life. As Johnson describes it:

The technology of alienation accustoms us to sense a void between ‘I’ and my flesh, and between ‘I’ and ‘you’. Because we are led to feel that we are not in immediate contact with the palpable world, we sense that we need experts who understand that world enough to tell us what to do.

Alienated from our embodied experience of self and world, we give doctors authority over our bodies, psychologists authority over our minds, outside mediators authority over our interpersonal disputes, governments authority over our environmental policies and actions, and religious leaders authority over our spirits. The shift from alienation to authenticity requires that individuals develop their impoverished self-sensing capacities and that they learn to check the dictates of outside authorities against this growing base of awareness.

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Focusing

The Buddhist magazine Tricyle recently posted an interesting article by David Rome called Focusing and Meditating, which explores the Focusing technique (developed by Eugene Gendlin in a psychotherapeutic context) and how it relates to the contemplative practice of Buddhist meditation. Rome describes Focusing as

bringing gentle, mindful awareness to a subtle level of bodily experiencing known as the “felt sense.” Felt senses, which lie somewhere between physical sensations and emotional feelings, represent a distinct kind of experience.

A long-time meditator, Rome describes how Focusing can be a complimentary contemplative practice. Whereas meditation cultivates an awareness and acceptance of experience “as it is” in any given moment, Focusing involves directly engaging specific issues and problems in life and discovering uniquely appropriate solutions. Although I myself have practiced both meditation and Focusing, I haven’t thought much about how the two methods relate to one another, and I found Rome’s perspective on this to be fascinating. For those interested in more about Focusing, below are some notes of my own:

Eugene Gendlin developed the Focusing technique at the University of Chicago, where he and his colleagues conducted research in which they found that the single most important factor in psychotherapy affecting positive outcome was the client’s ability to contact and work with his or her bodily-felt sense. It was not enough, argued Gendlin, to have a rational understanding of one’s psychological issues. Many clients with exquisite theoretical and conceptual psychological understandings often continue to remain stuck in the same stultifying patterns. According to this line of research, the key to healing lies in developing one’s awareness of the bodily-felt dimensions of experience.

Gendlin was a colleague of Carl Rogers, one of the founders of Humanistic Psychology. Rogers had long suggested that an attentiveness toward bodily-felt dimensions of experiencing was a key element of successful psychotherapy. What Gendlin did was develop this suggestion into a concrete methodology that has since been successfully taught to many people, both in and outside of a therapy setting. Gendlin’s perspective is founded on the notion that, in all situations and at any given time, there is an ongoing psychophysiological flow of experiencing that can be attended to in such a way as to concretely transform the way we live a particular situation. Not simply sensations of the “body”, this felt-sense is holistic, in that it implicitly contains one’s sense of the “whole thing” of a particular situation, including what one has learned conceptually. As Gendlin puts it (in his book Focusing):

The felt-sense is in the body, yet it has meanings. It has all the meanings one is already living with because one lives in situations with one’s body. A felt-sense is body and mind before they are split apart.

In other words, the felt-sense is of the integrated bodymind. It is experienced as both sensual and meaningful. To get a flavor of the felt-sense, let’s look at the familiar “tip of the tongue” experience. You know the name of that movie starring your favorite actor, but you just can’t access that knowledge at the moment. There’s absolutely no doubt that the knowledge is within you somewhere — it’s right on the tip of your tongue. Although you can’t name the movie, you can sense what the name is in an unclear way. This hazy place that feels meaningful yet not fully known is a felt-sense. It is sensed in the body as a vital, sensual flow of experiencing that contains meanings in an implicit way. When the implicit meaning is revealed, there is an unmistakable shift in the way we relate to the given concern, a shift that is experienced as a feeling or inner bodily movement that releases the sought after knowledge. This can also be described as an “a-ha” experience.

This felt-shift or sense of a-ha is also an experience on the level of the integrated bodymind — not just a sensation in our “bodies” nor merely an idea or concept popping up in our “minds”. Other familiar examples of the shifting felt-sense include having someone else successfully complete a sentence for us while we struggle to find the right word, and the “I know I forgot something but I just can’t figure out what it is” scenario. In each of these situations, meaningful knowledge is arrived at only when there is the right “fit” between a particular concept and one’s bodily-felt experience of the situation. If you are experiencing the felt-sense that you forgot to bring something (which turns out to be your camera) to the airport, then only a conceptual scheme having to do with your camera comes with the release of the felt-shift. Even if, while rifling through your memory, you realize that you also forgot your tooth-brush, you can “just tell” that your sense of concern had to do with something else, since the tooth-brush revelation brought no shift in the felt-sense. These familiar examples of the felt-sense are illustrative, in a very basic way, of the level of inquiry that characterizes Gendlin’s technique of experiential Focusing.

Focusing can be looked at as a process of being with one’s felt experience as it unfolds in relation to an issue, problem, or a situation. Most situations, of course, are not nearly as clear-cut as the above, everyday scenarios. When something is on the tip of our tongues, we already know a lot about the particular type of knowledge we’re looking for — perhaps a movie title or someone’s name. When the concern, issue, or situation is more complex, the associated felt-sense is experienced as much more unclear, fuzzy, and unrecognizable. However, while the felt-sense is always initially experienced as unclear and unknown, it is also always distinct, in that it feels ripe with potential meanings in relation to a particular situation or concern. I can choose to focus on any aspect of my experiencing — my mother, my job, this blog post, my physical health — that is potentially meaningful for me, and each associated felt-sense will feel uniquely unclear initially.

In the context of personal transformation, where one’s intent is to change the way one lives in relation to some aspect of experience, the first step of the focusing process is to bring attention to the bodily-felt experience of a particular concern, identifying the felt-sense as the somewhat hazy, hard to discern global sense that surrounds it. As one stays focused on this unclear sense, one can become more and more clear about what it is they’re feeling, allowing various shades of meaning to emerge by the skillful use of open ended questions. (David Rome summarizes some specific steps to Focusing HERE.)

In Focusing, intellectual analysis of feelings and immediate mental answers to questions are identified and gently turned away in favor of responses which are experienced as emerging from the felt-sense itself. For instance, I can ask myself “is there anything keeping me from being happy and full of life right now?”, and then immediately try to mentally answer the question with things that I rationally already identify as problem areas of my life. I might say to myself, “I hate my boss, I’m not getting enough sex, and I’m fighting a cold”. This question-answer session, however, is not Focusing. This manner of questioning is, in a way, rhetorical — the response consisting of things I already know. Nothing new is discovered, there is no felt-shift to indicate a movement or change on the level of bodymind. In Focusing, one asks a question of themselves and then attends to the unclear yet distinct bodily-felt sense that feels meaningful in relation to that question. One asks and then waits for a response to bubble up from the felt-sense, focusing on it until some aspect of it becomes clear. To my question as to what might be blocking full-living, images having to do with my mother might unexpectedly come up. As I say the words “it may have something to do with Mom”, a unmistakable shift in the felt sense — the sense of a-ha — would indicate that I might benefit from focusing further on whatever issues might be related to my mother. Further open-ended questions, such as “What is it about my Mom that feels unresolved?”, or “Exactly what am I am feeling, right now, in relation to Mom?”, might allow the feeling of stuckness or blockedness to loosen its grip on me and rest at a place of greater resolution.

The bodily felt shift in response to an open ended question is the concrete experience of bodymind connection that is the hallmark of experientially-oriented approaches to psychotherapy. Thoughts and concepts are continually checked against the felt sense in the process of Focusing, giving the focuser access to a wider store of wisdom than the thinking mind alone.

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Book review: Tell Me How You Feel About That, by J. Larry Vaughan

I remember the first time I observed Larry Vaughan lead a group therapy session. We were both working at a psychiatric treatment center for adolescents, a place we affectionately referred to as the “Island of Misfit Toys.” As the new guy on staff, my role was to take care of as much paperwork and annoying administrative tasks as possible, so that Larry and the other seasoned pros could focus on what they do best — help these kids deal with their problems. Larry was going over a little assignment he had given the kids earlier in the week. They were asked to write the entire story of their lives in exactly 28 words. One at a time each kid would read their stories and, for the most part, they would stick to surface stuff, like where they were born and where they went to school. Larry crumpled up the first few of these and tossed them in the trash can next to him. Eventually the kids got the picture. Larry was looking for something deep, something from the heart. All but one of the remaining kids crumpled up their own stories and tossed them into the trash, realizing their half-hearted efforts weren’t going to cut it in this group. They were about ready to head back to their rooms to give the assignment another shot when a 12 year old girl — the youngest of the group and the only one not to toss her story — asked if she could share her 28 words. I don’t remember what the words were, but I do remember the lump in my throat and the tears welling in my eyes. Larry just nodded his head, and maybe cracked a smile. By the end of the evening I would hear many more 28 Word Life Stories that came straight from the heart, not a word wasted.

For the next three and a half years I would have the great privilege of observing Larry’s masterful therapy work at least one evening per week. It was like going to graduate school for free, and I consider my time on the Island of Misfit Toys to be one of the most profound learning experiences of my life. When I heard Larry had written a book, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. It’s a collection of short essays and personal stories called Tell Me How You Feel About That: Things I think I know about therapy and life, and it’s an absolute gem. Here’s what he has to say after describing the “28 Word Life Story” assignment:

There are rooms hidden deep inside you. Rooms that you have long since kept locked and dark. It takes an ingrown eye to find this place. And more than a few sheets of paper.

Like the stories that stay out of his trash can, Larry wastes not a word as he reflects on his life and life’s work. He writes in a smooth, conversational style that is totally unencumbered by pretense. Simple, straightforward prose that is also amazingly good writing. Whether or not you’re an aspiring therapist, you will find yourself at turns nodding your head, smiling, tearing up, and laughing out loud. On a personal level, Larry offers us the best of himself in this book. He’s explored many a deep, dark room — in his own life and while guiding others. Using his considerable gifts as a communicator, he’s sharing his most profound discoveries. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t relate to, connect with, and/or feel moved by something in each of these intimate reflections.

For those of us who are in the helping professions or aspire to be, this book is simply a “must-read”, because it gives us what text books and/or graduate school, in and of themselves, could never deliver — that intangible, messy, mysterious, in-context, human element of therapy that makes it (at least) as much an art form as it is an application of learned technique. The dynamics of human relationships are notoriously hard to pin down. Understanding them and working with them to help others (and ourselves) requires an attitude of openminded, open-hearted curiosity — an attitude that Larry embodies in his work and in this book. This is what I appreciate most about Tell Me How You Feel About That: It’s not merely about the value of deep, authentic, from-the-heart self-exploration and expression — it is also a living, breathing example of it.

This is also what I appreciate most about Larry. Check out his book. You’ll love it!

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The Embodiment of Freedom: An integral approach to optimal health and personal transformation (Part 4: Repression & socialization)

The habitual, unconscious, hegemonic, “hammer” approach of the dissociated bodymind is reinforced in at least two ways: through fearful repression and through socialization. First, let’s look at how sensual alienation is rooted in the individual’s tendencies to repress and deny certain experiences.

Although fulfilling peak experiences are the fruit of the integrated bodymind, they are not the only variety. Intense experiences of the lived-body can often be of intense fear, hurt, and other “bad stuff.” Human beings, equipped as we are with our fine-tuned conceptual capacities, will understandably draw on those capacities in response to pain or fear that is experienced as threatening or overwhelming in some way. When a fully embodied life gets too frightening, or hurts too much, a person can put some safe distance between themselves and their experience by centering awareness on conceptual processes. In this way, the basic I-it stance of sensual alienation rests partly on a habituated repressive response to pain and fear. It’s interesting to note that, ultimately, bodymind dissociation may be rooted in that most pervasive of fears — the fear of death.

In other words, to fundamentally identify with the body is to confront one’s own mortality. Whereas the biological world of the lived body is one of continual flux and flow, of continual birth, death, decay and renewal, the world of thought gives the illusion of persistence and permanence. The concept “me,” for instance, is persistent and basically stable over time. “Me” today is the same “me” as I was ten years ago, and will presumably be the same “me” ten years from now. Yet the actual me-in-the-flesh is born, continually changes throughout life on all levels, and eventually dies. Thoroughly wrapped up in and identified with the stable self-concept “me,” I can bask in the illusion that I’ve stepped off the train of continual change, the train ride that will eventually reduce “my” body to something along the lines of fertilizer or worm-food. Thus, it’s the sheer gravity of imminent death that may, at least partly, underly people’s tendency to dissociate from the world of the lived body.

Psychologically, a threat to any value that an individual holds essential to his or her existence as a self — be it a threat to physical life, the love of a cherished person, economic status, athletic prowess — can trigger a repressive response. If one identifies with being an active caretaker, for instance, then having kids “leave the nest” can feel overwhelmingly threatening to one’s sense of self. Repression in this scenario might range from an out-right denial that one’s kids are growing up, to an unyielding stance of treating one’s adult children as if they were still little kids. The main point is that human beings, when we feel that our fundamental sense of self is threatened in some way, can turn our attention away from whatever aspects of our immediate situation elicit fear or anxiety. Although the initial response of repression can often be a creative use of one’s capacities to get through the rough times of life, the habitual tendency toward dissociation and self-alienation leaves our bodymind in a continual state of contraction across situations, creating a condition of perpetual distress. We have noted how this distress is rooted in the individual’s own repressive capacities; now we can move to a discussion of how the tendency to be habitually dissociated is reinforced by the processes of socialization.

Although on an individual level, a person may tend to distance oneself from sensual levels of experience in response to a directly perceived threat of some kind, one typically moves toward a habituated stance of sensual alienation in response to a cultural situation that continually encourages and demands dissociation. From the time of Plato right up through the Cartesian foundations of modern science, the notion that the human being is fundamentally divided into mind and body, spirit and flesh, has been so basic to the Western worldview that, like water to a fish, it is largely taken for granted. Of course, few intelligent and sensitive people are likely to profess explicit views and philosophies that support a strict separation of mental and bodily-felt realms of experience. In fact, many are perhaps inclined to claim that their lives are unaffected by such “metaphysical” concerns — “I feel like I’m plenty embodied, thank you very much.” Nonetheless, the doctrine of mind-body dualism shapes people’s experience because it is inexorably tied to our social institutions, which were indeed founded on views of reality that did, explicitly or implicitly, embrace the separation of objective thinking from subjective feeling. Cultural institutions are usually slow to change, so regardless of the current shift in outlook, most Westerners continue to be born into and bred on a world of sharp dualisms. These dualisms can insidiously convince us of the unreliability of our own perceptions, encouraging a dependency on the judgments of publicly designated “experts.” The result is a belief system that encourages conformity and is designed to maintain the status quo. These doctrines are anchored into people’s living bodies via a myriad of implicit teachings — a nonverbal system of indoctrination that trains people to instinctively look outside their directly felt experience for direction. A teacher of mine, Don Hanlon Johnson, calls this entire project — i.e. the many ways in which we learn to integrate these beliefs and techniques of dissociation into our lives — the “technology of alienation.”

In the next installment I’ll explore this “technology of alienation” in more detail, and then point to ways that we can move away from this alienation toward levels of greater conscious connection and deeper self awareness.

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The Embodiment of Freedom: An integral approach to optimal health and personal transformation (Part 3: Bodymind dissociation)

The notion that a typical mature, well-adjusted person in our culture is alienated from or out of touch with their bodies may seem, at first blush, curious if not absurd. Most of us yelp out in pain when we stub our toes, enjoy the pleasure of making love, notice when we’re hungry, and are saddened by tragedy. Obviously, to say that one is relatively disembodied does not mean one is an anesthetized “floating head” bumping into things all the time. The issue is far more subtle and compelling, having to do with the quality of our relationships to self, others, and environment, and how our experience of those relationships is shaped by the processes of development and socialization. Disembodiment simply refers to a diminished capacity to be sensually aware and the subsequent inability to respond to life’s continual challenges from the fullness of such a sensually grounded awareness.

That human beings become increasing able to think as they mature into adulthood obviously endows the developing person with greater potential and possibility in life. Contrary to the popularized personal growth motto of “lose your mind and come back to your senses,” any holistic inquiry into personal health and healing realizes the value of cognitive development. But there is a difference between adding a layer of depth in human awareness (moving from a vibrant, feeling-centered being to a being who also has a well developed capacity to think — a “bodymind” if you will), and losing touch with basic levels of awareness (becoming a thinking-centered being who has lost much of their capacity to express themselves from a sensually-grounded awareness). The latter is a pathological state of affairs that, unfortunately, is built in to the very fabric of modern society, shaping the lives of individuals in ways that distort and deny the fullness of experience.

Phenomenologist Elizabeth Behnke calls the tendency to distance ourselves from our own bodily lives the “I-it structure of experience,” which often manifests in our culture as the unshakable sense that our perceiving selves are situated somewhere “in our heads.” From this I-it perspective, my legs are perceived as “down there” as opposed to me being “up here.” When I feel pain in my back or head I say that “it” hurts. My sense is that I have experiences or that experiences happen to me. An emotion, for instance, might be perceived as if it were some “thing” that was temporarily affecting me in some way.

This mode of bodily experiencing, undoubtedly the norm for most of us most of the time, has to do with our sense of identity or who we take ourselves to be. While bodily impulses and feelings may be perceived, they are experienced as outside of one’s essential identity. Philosopher Ken Wilber (in his book No Boundary) has described this way of experiencing as one in which an artificial boundary is perceived in regard to one’s total organism, such that the entire bodily-felt realm is projected outward as not-self. Thus, a typical Westerner is likely to claim that they are their mind while they simply have a body. In the mature, well-adjusted, normal adult, this bodymind fragmentation doesn’t mean that one would fail to notice being on fire. It does mean, however, that one operates from a “locus of identity” that is situated on the ego side of an ego-flesh perceptual boundary. An individual centered on the mind or egoic side of this boundary may be aware of bodily experience, but only as an object of awareness. As psychologist R.D. Laing (in his book The Divided Self) describes this “unembodied” self: “The body is felt more as one object among other objects in the world than as the core of the individual’s own being.” In this subtle yet telling way, mind and body are dissociated in awareness, and perception of self and world is thereby distorted to fit that dissociation.

It is fairly clear that this level of bodymind dissociation is considered normal and healthy in our culture. Many of us certainly live as if we were essentially minds at the helm of our bodies—keeping them healthy and satisfied for as long as we find ourselves in them. When we experience back pain, the typical response is to go to a specialist to get it fixed or adjusted, just as we do our cars. Anxiety, especially when not consciously linked to obvious circumstances, is often treated as a “thing,” a symptom to be vanquished by medication or positive thinking.

The difference between the dissociated and embodied modes of experience may sound trivial in the abstract, but we’ve all experienced the contrast keenly in our daily lives. It is the difference between merely recognizing you are sad, and feeling that sadness in the full release of crying. It is the difference between merely believing you love someone, and actually being in love with that person, feeling the intensity of connection in the moment. Anyone who’s ever “lost themselves” in a sunset, or in a musical jam-session, or in the tender embrace of a loved one, can recognize this shift toward full-bodied perception. Actually, one’s “self” is not at all lost in this manner of experiencing. What’s lost is only one’s tendency to keep their attention confined to the thought-centered processes of the total psychophysical organism.

In contemporary society, our capacity to deeply enter into the sensual flow of experience is typically utilized less and less as we adapt to an increasingly mind-centered lifestyle, and it becomes atrophied and left poorly developed. This relative disembodiment places unnecessary limits on people’s personal health and growth. Thus, a person may recognize that they’re sad, anxious, or depressed, perceiving these feeling states well enough to talk about them in quite sophisticated ways, yet nonetheless remain stuck in the same familiar patterns. Consciously unable (and unconsciously unwilling) to engage personal issues in their sensual fullness, we necessarily struggle to get through and beyond the inner conflicts and issues that hold us back in life.

The I-it mode of experiencing is certainly not, in-and-of-itself, a bad thing. Problems can and do arise, however, when an I-it mode of perceiving and responding becomes so habituated that, without realizing it, human beings gradually lose their capacity to experience life in any other way. Instead of a mode of perceiving and responding consciously utilized in an appropriate situation, I-it objectivity becomes the unconscious way one approaches nearly all situations. As we shall see, the dis-identification with our sensual existence that characterizes the I-it mode of being, when operating in a habitual and unconscious fashion, can keep people stuck in unhealthy and unfulfilling ruts, distorting people’s experience in ways that interfere with the process of personal transformation. When you approach the world with only a hammer, so to speak, everything starts to look like a nail. And if this illusion becomes too convincing, things start to get all bent out of shape.

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The Embodiment of Freedom: An integral approach to optimal health and personal transformation (Part 2: Defining terms)

"Transformation" by Rick Hocker (Click photo to go to http://rickhocker.com)
As a student of psychology, both academically and in the broadest sense, I have surveyed a number of practices and fields of study that strive to help individuals become more fully themselves. These can generally be described as approaches to personal transformation — endeavors that work to provide a supportive context where individuals can learn to become more fully aware of their personal world of experience, and are encouraged to utilize that expanded awareness as a source of intelligent responsiveness and self-expression. What transforms in this process is the mode from which a person experiences self and world, such that the quality of one’s relations to self, others, and environment changes in enriching ways as one’s depth of awareness and range of responsiveness grows.

This process whereby people move from a relatively unhealthy, inefficient, unfulfilling mode of functioning toward one of increased livelihood, health, and growth potential, has been understood in many different ways. The approaches that have had the greatest impact on my own life are those that understand personal transformation in terms of embodiment. A variety of theorists and practitioners — representing such fields as psychotherapy, somatics, phenomenology, ecology, psychology, and mindfulness meditation — have contributed a wide range of overlapping, interpenetrating perspectives that recognize the transformative potential of developing one’s capacity to be aware of and consciously responsive from embodied modes of experiencing (by which I mean experiences of bodily sensations and feelings — i.e. somatic/kinesthetic/proprioceptive experience in general). These perspectives share a broad understanding of the transformative process, which can be generally stated as follows:

Human beings often remain stuck in relatively unfulfilling, unhealthy patterns or ways of living in large part due to a diminished state of basic self-awareness. Many individuals in this state are considerably diminished in their capacity to be aware of and respond from feelingful, sensual levels of experiencing . In order to move toward health, fullness of living, and actualization of potential, a person in this dissociated state must develop his or her existing self-sensing capacities and learn to authentically express him- or herself from this deeper, fuller sense of self.

This general view of personal transformation has been understood in at least the following ways: in terms of psychological processes (i.e. dissociation and integration), interpersonal dynamics, socio-cultural/political factors, people’s relations with the earthly environment, sensorimotor functioning, and spiritual realization. The following inquiry is offered as one of many possible integral approaches to optimal health and personal transformation. I use the term integral in a broad sense, understanding an integral approach to be any that brings multiple perspectives together in an effort to address the multiple dimensions of human life. In this sense, integral is more or less interchangeable with terms like integrative and holistic or any other term meant to convey “whole person” approaches to health and personal growth. Although integral is perhaps less familiar than the other terms mentioned, I use it simply as a matter of personal preference, no doubt owing to the influence of both Haridas Chaudhuri’s model of Integral Psychology (Chaudhuri was the founder of the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I studied for several years) and to Ken Wilber’s “four quadrant” integral theory, which I find to be quite useful in framing “big-picture” multidimensional perspectives.

In my next post I will explore this inquiry’s primary assumption: that life (at least in the modern West) is indeed plagued with a tendency toward alienation and dissociation, an attitude that drives a wedge between the thinking and feeling dimensions of being human. This fragmentation of consciousness not only renders us strangers to ourselves in a deep sense, but it also distorts and deadens the quality of relationship that is possible interpersonally, and between people and the earthly environment. Then I’ll look at some ways of facilitating personal transformation that arose in response to this alienated psycho-social situation, focusing on a select few approaches within the fields of somatics and psychotherapy.

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The Embodiment of Freedom: An integral approach to optimal health and personal transformation (Part 1: Introduction to the inquiry)

A view of the Organ Mountains from my neighborhood in Las Cruces, NM
We’ve all had moments when we feel particularly full of life, especially present to whatever we’re engaged in — times when we’re simply more on, more there, more tuned in to life than usual. I was in my mid-twenties when I started to realize that these experiences of wakeful presence and intense vitality were becoming few and far between in my life, scattered here and there amidst the languid grind of everyday existence. The more I inquired, the more it became increasingly clear that I was also progressively losing touch with the sense of wonder and possibility that I had come to know as the deepest, most precious part of myself. As the prize of maturity stood waiting for me to grasp hold, I was paralyzed by the fear that somehow this growing sense of disconnection and diminished vitality was simply the terrible and inevitable cost to be paid, the price of admission into the world of adulthood. Before too long, however, I’d be graced with another wide-awake moment and, for a time anyway, I would feel certain that there was a better way forward, a way of becoming more connected and more fully alive instead of less so as we get older.

Abraham Maslow used the term “peak experiences” to describe these windows of full-living, and my initial question regarding them was three-fold: What is the nature of such experiences; why are they becoming so few and far between in my life; and can I learn to live in such a way as to have more of them?

Over the years this initial inquiry has become a sustained, passionate pursuit of personal truth that has always been, at heart, toward a deceptively simple end: to be as fully myself as often as I can be. Along the way I have discovered a few things that I hope others will find to be interesting and useful. I also hope that writing my way through the process — of where I’ve been, where I am, and what may lie ahead — might open new avenues of inquiry and new territory to explore as I continue on this journey.

My intention is to update this series of posts regularly — at least once a week. In the next installment I’ll define in detail what I mean by the terms “integral” and “personal transformation”, and I’ll also lay out a broad outline of some of the territory I hope to explore.

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Book Review: The Sustainable You, by John Loupos

The Sustainable You

It’s been over twenty years since Somatics pioneer Thomas Hanna published his seminal article titled Clinical Somatic Education—a concise outline of what he hoped would become “A new discipline in the field of health care”. A brilliant philosopher and gifted writer, Hanna applied his considerable genius toward improving the lives of others, not only through writing many books and articles, but also through developing a system of hands-on “bodywork” techniques (administered by a practitioner) and self-care exercises (done by the client at home) designed to improve a client’s sensory awareness and motor control. After fifteen years or so of working with clients, Hanna found that his system of Clinical Somatic Education (also called Hanna Somatic Education or HSE) was remarkably effective in resolving many of the aches, pains, and restrictions of movement people came to him with.

I’m not sure about the timeline exactly, but right around the time Hanna published his vision of HSE in 1990, he also (for the first time) began to train others to become HSE practitioners. During the course of this inaugural training, Hanna was tragically killed in an automobile accident. As with any school of thought stemming from a single, charismatic founder or leader, the Somatics movement lost a great deal of steam after Hanna’s death. In the two decades since, Hanna’s bold vision for a somatics-based mainstream health care discipline has not yet come to pass. There have, however, been heroic efforts put forward over the years by Hanna’s widow, Eleanor Criswell (through The Novato Institute for Somatic Research and Training), and several HSE students to preserve and carry forward Hanna’s work and legacy. Lawrence Gold, who trained with Hanna in 1990, has created Somatics.com, a site chock full of resources and fresh perspectives. Steve Aronstein, another certified HSE practitioner trained by Hanna’s “Wave One” students, went on to found Somatic Systems Institute in Northampton MA, the first organization to offer practitioner training outside of Novato, CA. And now we have John Loupos, trained in HSE at Somatic Systems Institute, who has just published The Sustainable You, a fantastic new book updating and expanding upon Hanna’s Clinical Somatic theory in light of recent research findings and the many scientific advances, particularly in neuroscience, we’ve seen in the years since Hanna’s death.

Loupos takes the reader through all the fundamentals of Hanna’s general theory of Somatics, making a compelling case that HSE is needed now more than ever, given the swelling numbers of aging baby boomers taxing an already overburdened and expensive health care system. Loupos situates Somatics within a modern health care context that has seen a growing acceptance of complimentary and alternative (CAM) approaches as well as numerous advances in neuroscience that lend support to Hanna’s approach in particular. Loupos also contributes some new and quite useful wrinkles to a general somatic theory, most notably his concept of an “archeology of insults”—i.e. the accumulation of stresses and their effects on the body over the course of a lifetime—and his perspective on how the effects of these insults can be reversed or minimized to improve neuromuscular functioning through the process of somatic education. Loupos also clearly lays out for us how improvements in sensory awareness and motor control (the fruits of HSE) can do what conventional approaches like drugs and surgery often cannot: directly and non-invasively address the root cause of many of the most common problems that people typically suffer from by the time they reach middle age. These problems (like aches, pains, restrictions of movement, decreased vitality, etc.) are often wrongly considered to be the result of structural degeneration or else part of a presumably inevitable decline that comes with getting older. This “myth of aging” has been keenly deconstructed by Hanna, and Loupos nicely expands upon the analysis here.

Loupos not only gives us information, fresh perspectives and reasons for hope as we get older, but he also invites us to experience the fruits of HSE for ourselves, leading the reader through a series of somatic movement patterns designed to refine awareness and control in some commonly restricted areas of the body. He also offers us his years of experience as both a martial arts instructor and a Somatics practitioner. I especially appreciate how Loupos weaves in personal reflections, philosophical speculations, and observations about life in general, always being careful and clear to distinguish between these lively flourishes of creative thinking and the more technical and research-based aspects of neurophysiology, kinesiology and anatomy that support the use of HSE as a uniquely efficacious system of health maintenance.

I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in integral approaches to health, and I can’t imagine anyone who couldn’t benefit from experiencing Hanna Somatic Education first-hand. Enjoy!

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Q & A with Sam Harris

As I continue to explore questions of human potential with an eye toward balancing open-minded inquiry and rigorous, evidence-based critical thinking, no one has been more inspiring to me in recent years than Sam Harris. Especially considering his recent focus on well-being in general and the value of transpersonal (i.e. “spiritual”) experience in particular, Harris has much to contribute to any discussion about Integral Health. While many deride Sam and his fellow “New Atheists” (like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens) for being basically arrogant dicks, few haters seem to appreciate the degree to which Harris has engaged both his critics and fans in thoughtful dialogue. I am continually amazed at how articulate and nuanced this guy can be when responding extemporaneously to questions and criticism. Case in point, check out this new video of Harris answering questions submitted by users on Reddit.com:

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Unwinding

I do a very idiosyncratic meditation practice of sorts that has evolved over many years — a little song and dance I call “unwinding.” Basically, I just lie on the floor, on my back, and do nothing. I inhibit any and all voluntary movements as I wait for anything that feels involuntary, any movement that feels as if it’s happening of its own accord. For the first several minutes I may only get a few twitches, but eventually, if I tune in enough, a whole series of movements will begin to emerge, and I follow them wherever they go, as long as the sense that it’s all “just happening” is driving the action. After a while, I might be bouncing all over the room, or end up on top of the refrigerator (this has actually happened!).

The sense I get during these movement meditations is that I’m literally unwinding various patterns of tension and inhibition, like the way a twisted rubber band will follow its way back to its slack form in precisely the reverse pattern with which it became twisted. At the end of this unwinding I feel incredibly clear and free, and I’m often showered with insights for hours.

Of course, it’s not always a super-intense experience, as the whole thing is about dropping into what’s actually going on in my body, not about trying to make something cool happen (although admittedly I’ve fallen into that trap many times). For whatever reason, I only do this practice every once in awhile, when I feel particularly compelled, which is usually when I’m particularly wound up. (Inconveniently, this has tended to be at like, three in the morning.) It’s only recently that I’ve explored this on a regular basis. That’s because it’s only recently that I’ve had the time to regularly indulge in such extended periods of purposeless. In so many ways, this “no job” period has been far more glorious than I imagined it would be. I know it won’t, can’t, and probably shouldn’t last forever, but I definitely can see myself getting in the habit of taking these extended “me retreats” more often in the future, should I continue to be so fortunate.

On the surface it might seem a bit self-indulgent to spend so much time navel-gazing, so to speak, but in my experience the benefits of such sustained inner focus usually extend far beyond my little Bob-o-sphere. Disconnection from my deepest intentions leads to disconnected experiences, disconnected actions, disconnected habits, disconnected relationships. Any investment I make in reconnection leads to, well… reconnection. It’s as simple as that. In short, the quality of my experiences–i.e. of my life–has always depended, in large measure anyway, on the quality of attention I’m able to bring to any given situation. Taking the time to truly unwind (as opposed to getting pleasantly distracted from being wound up) has consistently led to increased clarity of attention, refinement of sensitivity, deepening of self-awareness and, ultimately, a greater capacity for open-hearted communion with my fellow humans.

Or I’m just being self-indulgent. Either way, who doesn’t enjoy spending a quiet evening on top of the ol’ fridge?